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From: "Bradley Stoke" <bradley_stoke@hushmail.com>
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Subject: {ASSM} Sliding Sideways  (Bradley Stoke) (MF)
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Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2006 19:10:01 -0400
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{ASSM} Sliding Sideways  (Bradley Stoke) (MF)

Title: Sliding Sideways
Author: Bradley Stoke
Short Summary: Quentin is sliding sideways through space
and time.


[This story has been previously published on Ruthie's Club
(www.ruthiesclub.com) where it was edited by Neil Anthony
and illustrated by Brett Empty.]



Story: Sliding Sideways (4,144 words)

Quentin is sliding sideways through space and time. This
allows him the liberty to do whatever he likes without
worrying about the consequences. What he really wants is
a soulmate in his strange life. When he meets Vivienne,
he hopes his desires have finally been realized.


For More : /~Bradley_Stoke




	Sliding Sideways
	================


"It's like I'm sliding sideways through time and space,"
Quentin explained.

 Vivienne nodded encouragingly.

 "You might have seen that movie Sliding Doors with
Gwyneth Paltrow," he continued. "Maybe, in this
continuum, it stars Renee Zellweger."

"I'm sure it was Uma Thurman."

"Whoever." Quentin took another sip from his beer.
"Sliding sideways, she was. Only for me, it's happening all
the time."

"All the time?" Vivienne asked, raising an eyebrow. "How
can that be?"

"It's like Stephen Hawkings explains. You know, that we
live in an infinity of parallel universes. Only that while most
people stay in one spacetime continuum all their lives, I'm
constantly sliding through all of them. I don't go backwards
and forwards in time. I just go forwards, but the universe
I'm in changes around me. And I've got no control of it any
more than most people have any choice about which
parallel universe they spend the whole of their lives in."

Quentin paused to assess Vivienne's reaction. Was she
humouring him? He often felt the urge to confess his
predicament. He knew that the Quentin who would live
with the confession was the Quentin whose body he was
currently occupying and who would, no doubt, be
thoroughly confused by the memory of this occasion.

Vivienne tapped her cigarette on the ashtray. "Go on," she
urged him.

"Are you sure?" Quentin asked.

Most women he spoke to on this matter would now ask
"What you on?" Or they would pretend not to have heard
anything. He was more anxious than he should be. Why
should he care what Vivienne thought about the Quentin
she had just met? Not all Quentins were especially kind to
him for the moment of his residency. He had several times
suffered venereal disease, war wounds, and an
uncomfortably generous waistline.

"Yes. It's fascinating," said Vivienne, puffing smoke from
her cigarette and running a long fingernail along the rim of
her wine glass.

"I've seen so many different worlds," Quentin continued.
"There are those where the Cold War persisted with the
Soviet Union under President Andropov until the present
day. There are those where President Kennedy was not
assassinated at Houston. There are those where the Sex
Pistols never existed. There's even one where some Arab
terrorists flew Boeing 747s into the World Trade Center."

Vivienne raised her eyebrows. "I can't believe that! It's like
imagining that Sir John Lennon never became the world's
best selling novelist."

"I've seen that. He was assassinated, in fact," Quentin
admitted. "I've even been in a universe where the richest
man in the world was that geek who runs Microsoft."

"I can't believe that either! How could IBM, Sun or Lotus
allow that to happen?"

"It's like everything since the time I was born in the early
1960s that could happen has happened. Everything before
then is the same in all the universes I've inhabited, but after
that it sort of diverges."

"No nuclear wars?"

"Not ones I've survived, though there was a small one in
the Middle East in the 1970s that led to universal
disarmament. It's amazing what difference a few radioactive
craters can make to a world!"

"I can imagine!" Vivienne said.

There was a curious sparkle in her eyes that suggested to
Quentin that she was genuinely fascinated. She showed
none of the amused scepticism that usually accompanied
the most sympathetic ears to his predicament. Was she
simply very good at hiding her real thoughts? Or was she
playing him along?

"I once decided to write an account of my life," Quentin
continued. "I had this 4GHz computer running this
operating system called Winix. It was fantastic! And this
was a few years back, whereas the best computers
hereabouts aren't a quarter as fast. Anyway, I wrote all day
and all night, while the wife I had, a pretty woman I've not
seen since, kept moaning about me staying up. Then I
thought I'd review what I'd written. And you know what?"

"What?" wondered Vivienne, raising her eyebrows in
apparent interest.

 "I didn't recognise what I read at the start of my account.
It was like someone else had written it with totally different
memories. It was then it occurred to me that there is a sort
of continuum of Quentins, just like me, also sliding
sideways through space and time. In fact, maybe everyone
has a host of selves like me, perhaps an infinity of them in
the infinity of parallel universes. And maybe people like me
are everywhere."

"Fascinating!" remarked Vivienne, stubbing out her
cigarette.

Quentin scrutinised Vivienne closely. Despite her apparent
encouragement, Quentin was still half-expecting a sarcastic
rejoinder. Did she really believe him? She was an attractive
woman, who carried around with her a self-assurance that
would normally manifest itself in contempt towards a man
like him, any man, who told a story that must seem
ridiculously far-fetched.

"You think I'm mad, don't you?" he asked her, as she
brushed her black shoulder length hair off the sharp
shoulders of her Giuseppe Marconi suit.

"Not at all," Vivienne said with a smile. "In fact, I think I
might be falling in love with you."

"Now, you are taking the piss!" remarked Quentin.

How likely was that? He wasn't a bad-looking bloke and
the Quentin he was now had reasonable dress sense with
well-groomed hair and an expensive Ben Jones leather
jacket. But no one had ever said that to him before after
such a short time. And certainly not after he had divulged
his most intimate truths.

Vivienne shook her head. "I'm not taking the piss, Quentin.
Although it's a bit of an exaggeration to say I'm in love as
such, you are just the man I've always wanted to meet. All
my life, in fact."

Quentin blushed. "I simply don't believe that..."

"You're right. You're not the only one 'sliding sideways'
through space and time, as you call it. It's my life as well,
you know, although I don't have a term for it. It's just I've
never met anyone the same as me in that way."

Quentin shook his head violently and squeezed his eyes
tight. When he opened them, Vivienne was still there.

"You mean you're like me? Every day you wake up and live
in a slightly different world, subtly changing and mutating?"

Vivienne nodded. She opened her cigarette packet and put
another Marlboro Gold Tip in her mouth.

"It's not always gradual. That's why I asked about nuclear
war. I spent a whole week in a kind of post-apocalyptic
world. It was horrible! I had to eat rats and wear a lead-
lined coat. That Ronald Reagan went just a little too far
with his threats against the Soviets in the Pakistani missile
crisis..."

"I remember that. It was touch and go, as far as I
remember."

"And then President Brezhnev, the senile git, called
Reagan's bluff and it was fireworks!  I wasn't there for the
crisis, but I was there several years later. The thing is it
happened suddenly. One moment I was living in this
student squat in Hackney, the next minute in some nuclear
wasteland. And when I came out of it, that was sudden as
well. I was walking through some woodland trying to avoid
some thuggish scavengers, and when I emerged at the end,
it was by a motorway, only instead of it being empty and
overgrown with mutant grass, there were cars driving along
it, just like there'd never been a nuclear war. As I guess
there never had been. I was fucking delighted, I can tell
you!"

Quentin shook his head again. "And I thought the Cuban
Crisis might have become the big one!" he exclaimed.

"I've never met anyone else who knows what it's like, not
so much living in a nuclear wasteland, but living each day in
a different world. I thought I was the only one."

"So did I!" admitted Quentin.

At last! After all these years, here was proof that there were
others who knew what he knew and lived the life he lived.

"So, how did you first discover things were like that?"
Quentin asked. "I was in my teens. There are so many
changes as you grow up, you don't realise that some are not
the kind of changes that happen to everyone. You know,
milk teeth falling out, your shape changing as you grow
older, puberty, all that stuff."

"I think it was in my teens, too."

"When I tried telling people they thought I was mad. I was
even taken to see a psychiatrist. But I discovered that
pretty soon after I told people, they forgot about it. Other
people, my parents, my friends, my teachers, didn't have the
same memories as me. Eventually, I realised that it was the
Quentin I'd been before and made the confessions who'd
have to live with the consequences of it, not me. It was like
I could start afresh every day. I discovered I could do
whatever I fucking liked and I'd never need worry about
living with more than the memory of it."

"Me too!" exclaimed Vivienne, drawing on her cigarette.
"It's so fucking liberating! In fact, I've several times done
things, just because I knew I could. I stripped naked in a
pub. Just because I could. I sucked a stranger's cock in
public because I knew I wouldn't suffer for it. I've had sex
with anyone I fancied."

Quentin raised his eyebrows. "Well..." he remarked, "I've
been a bit bolder than I might have been. Like I've been
tonight, you know, approaching an attractive woman like
you knowing that if you rejected me it'd be the Quentin I'm
inside now who'd live with the rejection. I've been
unfaithful to the several different wives and girlfriends I've
had, who, after all, I didn't really know very well and didn't
always like. I've often done things I can't claim to be proud
of. No Groundhog Day redemption for me, I'm afraid. But
I've never been as bold as you."

Vivienne shrugged. "I guess us spacetime travellers all have
different ways of coping with the freedom we've been
granted," she mused. "The Viviennes whose bodies I've
occupied have all been pretty different: all the different
ways I could have been, and, of course, somewhere in
space and time actually am. Some Viviennes I've been were
pretty tight-arsed and that's when I've probably been most
wicked. The current Vivienne's got a boyfriend who works
in the City, but she seems pretty free and easy. Which suits
me! None of that 'Christ, Viv! What's got into you?' that
I've heard so many times."

Quentin finished his glass of beer and pulled out a twenty
pound note, with its head of King Charles the Third on the
back, and waved it at the barmaid. "What do you want?"

"I'll have another glass of house dry white," Vivienne said.

"And I'll have another pint of Blackwell's. I've never heard
of that beer before this week, but it seems to be the most
popular round here."

"It's the little things that are most confusing," Vivienne
commented. "I was amazed to see that there's no Jubilee
Line here. And no one's ever heard of Madonna. She never
made it big in this world. And who'd believe that Colin
Powell would become President of the United States!"

The two of them threaded through the crowded bar to
some seats by the jukebox on which was playing a selection
of old pop songs, some familiar, some surreally different in
detail and some totally unfamiliar. Quentin studied Vivienne
with an approving eye as they sat down.

She was a little younger than him, probably in her mid to
late thirties. She was a woman who, being so slender and
assertively pretty now, must have been quite a head-turner
when she was younger. She crossed her long slender legs,
almost all her stockinged thigh on display under her
fashionably short skirt, and her blouse coquettishly
unbuttoned under her smart jacket.

Vivienne smiled. She flashed a healthy dental display behind
her wide reddened lips. She pulled out another cigarette
from her packet and lit it.

"I still can't believe it's true!" she said, unable to disguise
the excitement in her voice.

"So, where do you live and what do you do?" wondered
Quentin. A fairly obvious question really, but he knew the
answer wouldn't be so obvious.

"I can never be sure," Vivienne confessed. "When I woke
up this morning I was living in a semi on the other side of
town, but whether I still live there I don't know. The times
I've gone to where I thought was home only to find that the
keys don't fit in the door! And when I wake up, I'm never
sure where I'll be, who I'll have been sleeping with and
where I'm supposed to be working. I think I work as a
project manager for Pineapple Computers, but I didn't
bother going to work. What use would I be if I did? I don't
know anything about the job and I'd be useless at any
meeting. So, I just went to see a film, Martin Scorsese's
Lord of the Rings, and mooched about at Sunbucks."

"Same with me," Quentin replied. He lit a cigarette he took
from the half-empty packet of Benson & Hedges Gold Leaf
he found in his pocket. Had he started the evening smoking
that brand? "I think I'm recently separated from my wife,
who I don't recognise from the photographs on the
mantelpiece. I've no idea whether I still work at the brokers
I was supposed to be working for yesterday. It's really
stupid going to work. Once I was a Spanish teacher in
Exeter and I don't know a word of Spanish. And the
number of wives I've had!"

Vivienne smiled. "Sometimes the husband or lover I wake
up with is a real catch," she admitted. "It's like I've really
lucked out. Sometimes you can't believe the disgusting
lump of lard I've been sleeping next to. They really hate it
when they start groping me and I tell them to fuck off."

"The best I ever had," Quentin boasted, "was this model I
was married to. She was fantastic. I couldn't take my hands
off her, though I don't know how much she appreciated my
attention. I was some kind of techno musician, though I
didn't know what I was supposed to do with all the
technical equipment. My hair was halfway down my back. I
just wished I'd stayed like that for longer. One day I went
to sleep in an enormous bed with this gorgeous blonde and
woke up the following day a homeless drunkard in
Brighton. That was horrible!"

"I've thought about trying to escape from it all," Vivienne
said. She drew on her cigarette and sipped from her glass of
wine. "You know like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. I got
on this plane to Hawaii, fell asleep over the Pacific, and
woke up in my bed in Slough. Another time I was in a car
crash and lost consciousness with blood all over me. The
next thing I knew I woke up in a comfy bed with no bruises
or anything. That really shook me. Had I just died or
something?"

The two of them sighed.

Quentin looked around him at the other people in the bar.
He wasn't sure that the barmaid wore the same green
blouse when he entered the pub. And when had he acquired
that strange scar just above his thumb? There was so much
he knew nothing about the lives of the Quentins whose
bodies he drifted through. And Vivienne, didn't she have
slightly different coloured lipstick when he started talking
to her?

Life was so confusing. It might be wonderful, but it was
sometimes such an effort to relax when each day brought
new surprises and new revelations. He hoped he'd never
again have a repetition of that month in gaol for
manslaughter. Or the weeks shooting up heroin in that
derelict house in Manchester. Or that day in hospital with
his face ripped apart by shards of glass. Life could also be
intolerably hard.

"Do you want to come back to my apartment? It's
gorgeous. It faces onto the river and there's a lovely view
from the window."

"Beats Hounslow, that's for sure," agreed Vivienne. "Yeah!
Why not? Fuck it! Tomorrow I'll probably wake up in
Timbuktu."

Quentin laughed, but remembered only too well those
weeks when he found himself working as an aid worker in
the Sudan. It was difficult to be as irresponsible as he'd like
to be with so many people relying on him, but impossible
for him to perform the medical duties in which the Quentin
whose body he inhabited was proficient.

When Quentin opened the door to his apartment, with
Vivienne giggling behind him, he felt an anxiety he never
normally experienced when he took a woman home with
him. It wasn't just the anxiety that he'd find a wife or
girlfriend he'd never known before waiting impatiently for
him. Nor was it the fear that this encounter might not
resolve itself in a physical way. Vivienne's passionate kiss
under the shelter of the nearby Sainsbury Metro made clear
that her intentions were precisely the same as his. He had,
at last, after all these years, met someone who could be his
real soulmate. Someone, at last, who could truly understand
his deepest anxieties and concerns. Someone with whom,
already, he would like to spend the rest of his days.

He stretched his palms out to press against Vivienne's bared
breasts with tension that tingled like electricity through her
body. The disrobing had been easy. The act of embracing
her naked body was much more fraught. Would she
suddenly vanish as his hands made contact on a bosom still
firm and pert? Would she suddenly mutate, as had
happened before, into someone wholly different from the
one he'd accompanied through the Docklands streets: his
arm around her waist and his nose nuzzling her long brown
hair?

Contact was made. The docking was smooth. Their mouths
grappled together with passionate urgency. When he placed
his hand on her crotch, it was already dripping with a warm
moistness of desire that hastened his impatience to couple
with someone who might anchor his drifting through
universes of subtle mutation.

Someone, perhaps, who could share the jokes he often
wanted to share as he noticed details that hinted at the
larger changes in the world around him. One who would
remember, as he did, a world where Prime Minister Gordon
Brown didn't defect to the Liberal Democrats rather than
lose a term in office. One who remembered a world where
the Euro was accepted with amazing enthusiasm by the
British public. Or one who might also know a world where
the UK refused to join the European Community.

Their two bodies fell onto the bed, Vivienne's gasps of
passion and enthusiasm drowned out by his own. And when
they conjoined,?his penis entering her vagina with
energetic thrusts, each one savoured and relished as they
had rarely been before,?it was not just two bodies, but
two souls, that met in each upward thrust of her crotch, as
wild and unrestrained as any he could remember. It was
truly two people becoming one. As little as nothing
separated his hairy torso from her full bosom. Or his
slightly bulging stomach on her flat muscular one. Or his
stubbled chin grating against her smooth one.

The orgasms she voiced, which he reciprocated without
losing the will and vigour to continue, were full, throaty
and unfeigned. Fuck the neighbours. Quentin would never
confront their complaints about the passion they could hear
through the walls. This was it. This was the moment. This
was the zenith of his life.

When they parted, two bodies reluctant to accept any pause
in their lovemaking as anything other than brief respite, they
exchanged memories and observations of the different
worlds they had drifted through. The universe where the
Americans won the Vietnam War. The universe where the
Naturist Party won a seat in parliament (and the furore that
caused). The universe where Michael Jackson became a
militant black cleric and did remarkably well in the
Presidential elections.

But no amount of passion could last forever, and neither
Vivienne nor Quentin had the stamina of youth. They
eventually accepted defeat. More lovemaking was beyond
them. The two lay together on the huge double bed, sheets
pushed to one side, while below the window of Quentin's
apartment, a barge chugged along the River Thames, its
lights shining against the darkness of the double-glazed
glass.

It was to the sound of seagulls and tourist barges that
Quentin awoke many hours later, gratified to find Vivienne
still nestled beside him. He stared at the ceiling, his naked
body cuddled up close to Vivienne who was dozing
peacefully.

She was still here!

Now was the first day of the rest of his life, he mused,
reflecting on the threadbare observation, but in his case one
that promised to be rather more literally true. He smiled
appreciatively at Vivienne as her eyes opened and she
gazed at him through her long eyelashes.

"Still here?" he asked with a smile.

"Still here," she replied, "but not for long. I've got to get to
the office soon. It's a working day."

"Are you going to work then?" wondered Quentin.

"Well, of course. And you? Back to the City?"

Quentin wasn't sure how he should answer. He wasn't sure
where he worked exactly. "We'll see each other again,
won't we?" he asked hopefully.

"I guess so, although my husband won't like it, I'm sure."

"If, of course, it's the same husband as yesterday..."

Vivienne frowned. "You what?"

"I mean, you don't know who it might be today. It could be
anyone."

"Could it?" asked Vivienne, puzzled and leaning towards
him on her arm.

"Indeed," said Quentin, warming to the theme, "who knows
what world we've woken up in? For all we know, Elvis
Presley might be dead, Jack Straw might be Prime Minister
and there might be no Fox TV."

"What are you talking about?"

"I'm just saying we don't know how the universe might
have changed since yesterday."

"What you on!" Vivienne exclaimed, with a nervous laugh.
"I can't imagine any of those things happening. Have you
gone loopy?"

"No," laughed Quentin. "I was just speculating. You know,
the two of us sliding sideways through space and time..."

"'Sliding sideways'? What kind of metaphysical rubbish is
this? I'm not sure I do want to see you again if you spout
stuff like that."

Quentin panicked slightly, but he relished having his arm
around her. "Don't you remember our conversation
yesterday?"

"I guess so. Mostly about your job in the City, the money
you earn and how your wife doesn't understand you. But,
let's be honest, will we, you're not the first married man I've
heard go on like that..."

"No?" Quentin wondered. Was this the same Vivienne?

Then he heard a door slam shut. It was the one to his
apartment. Who could this be?

"Quentin, I'm home!" he heard a woman's cheerful voice
echo from the hallway. "They found an earlier flight from
Washington after all. You're not still in bed, are you?"

"What the fuck?" said Vivienne, echoing Quentin's own
thoughts. "You said your wife would no way be back."

The door to the bedroom opened and in the slow motion
prelude to the drama that followed, in which he was the
victim of a torrent of verbal abuse from both Vivienne and
a woman he didn't recognise but was his wife of many
years, he saw a neat figure silhouetted against the doorway.
She wore a smart business suit, was slim but much the same
age as Quentin, and her face was frozen in an expression of
unfeigned horror and disgust. And no wonder, at the sight
of her husband, naked and lying next to an equally naked
woman, who was slow, almost impertinently so, in covering
her breasts under the bed linen.

The two women attacked him, almost ganging up with each
other, though from opposite poles, in their condemnation of
his infidelity and stupidity. As Quentin sat there on the bed,
still naked, rocking with the depression that suddenly
engulfed him, it was not guilt that made him so miserable.
After all, this was not the first time that one wife or
girlfriend or other found him in bed with another woman.

The moment had passed.

The Vivienne he was with was no longer the soulmate for
whom he would have gladly abandoned his tall, elegant
wife. She was a woman who was as much a stranger to him
as the woman he had inadvertently cheated.




For More : /~Bradley_Stoke

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