The Far Time Incident

by Neve Maslakovic

  “You’re forgetting, Julia,” the security chief said quietly.

  I didn’t know why he was speaking in a low voice since neither Secundus nor his mother or daughter spoke a word of English, but I lowered my voice, too. “What am I forgetting?”

  “The volcano.”

  I hadn’t forgotten.

  As we headed back toward the town gate, Nate carrying the clothes we had purchased for Helen and our two grad students, I asked Xavier, “Doesn’t it bother you that Secundus and Sabina and her grandmother will most likely perish in the eruption? We were able to interact with them so easily…and you have as well, for what—six months?”

  “Julia, you can’t let yourself get attached,” he said evenly.

  I didn’t believe him for a second. I struggled to find the right words. “Secundus—he looked straight into my eyes. I felt like he could see deep into my soul and read the secret about his town that we all carry.”

  “Because he said you were beautiful? You did seem to be fascinated by him, Julia.” This from Nate, on my left.

  “What? No, I’m sure he was only being polite.”

  “Deep into your soul, huh?” Nate certainly seemed to have forgotten that only yesterday he used to call me Ms. Olsen. His gait was off as he struggled to walk with his knees together and in the too-small sandals. “I didn’t feel like he could look deep into my soul.”

  “Stop it,” I said, irritated at his effort to make light of what I was saying. Was this his way of trying to make me feel better? I didn’t want to feel better. “I’m serious. It must bother you, Xavier. I know it does.”

  Xavier was staring straight ahead as he walked, his face expressionless above his salt-and-pepper beard. “Everyone I’ve ever met on my time-traveling runs was already dead, in a sense,” he finally said. “Just not at the time.”

  “True, but you could say that about anyone, even back home. Not dead yet.”

  He sighed and looked over at me. “I find it’s a little easier when you’re facing your own illness and mortality, but only just. If you must know, my plan had not been to go to Alexandria and escape the eruption. Forget what I said. I was going to secure my cache of notes and sketches, then share the town’s fate. I know it’s a bit dramatic, but I wasn’t thinking clearly. However—” He paused to formulate his words as we passed the flask fountain, which, unlike the theater-mask one, still seemed to be going strong. “I’ve come to believe that much of the town will evacuate in time. I haven’t had as much freedom of movement as I thought I would. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t encounter a crux person or a path that closes itself off to me. So when I’m able to interact with people easily, like Secundus and his family, I assume that they’ll die when the eruption comes. It’s a problem,” Xavier admitted. “I know very well that nothing I say or do in Secundus’s presence can alter his fate. He is either going to perish or he won’t.”

  As we walked through the town gate and onto the street of tombs, he quoted the poet and mathematician Omar Khayyam, in what might have been written as a motto for the Time Travel Engineering lab: “The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.” He went on, “Still, many a time I’ve wanted to tell Secundus to drop everything and leave town before it’s too late. That the fate of the store and the garum jars matters not in the least.”

  “And?” I asked.

  “I could never get the words out. Not because of History. It just—it seemed like I would be trying to play the role of one of their gods.”

  “Is there a chance that”—I paused to frame my words carefully, but they still didn’t come out as I intended—“the impact of Secundus’s life on history is so insignificant that we might be able to get him and his family out in time? Maybe he’s the opposite of a crux person,” I attempted to explain, thinking of that proud man with the deep eyes. I meant what I was saying with no disrespect. Not all of us were meant to move mountains and lead armies. Including me.

  “I don’t believe in that possibility for a second,” Xavier said sharply. “Either scientifically or philosophically. All people’s lives, no matter how ordinary, impact their loved ones, their neighbors, strangers passing through town… Think of all the people Secundus’s shop has fed, the garum varieties he’s flavored, the dinners he’s elevated with his sauces, the wisdom he’s imparted to his daughter, the dogs he’s taken on as pets. We can’t just pluck him out of the fabric of History as if nothing he’ll do between now and the eruption, and perhaps afterward, matters.”

  “Xavier,” I asked without thinking, “do you feel bad that you left St. Sunniva and your lab and all your friends?”

  Nate gave me a pointed look over the wicker basket, as if I had asked something inappropriate, but I thought bringing the issue out into the open might help Xavier. We had come to a stop just outside the Nigidii tomb.

  The professor had gone a deep red from the neck upward, either out of anger or embarrassment. I rather thought it was a combination of the two. “Yes, I feel bad that I left. I feel bad that I’m ill. I feel bad that Vesuvius will erupt. I feel bad that many people in this town will die. I feel bad that there’s nothing I can do to save them. By the way, Julia,” he added, shaking off his mood, “the dress is supposed to go down to your feet.”

  The dress was too long for unencumbered walking, so I’d hitched it up a bit by folding the material into the lower of the two belts, the one circling my waist. After the boots, the sandals were a delight for my blistered feet. “You mean because I’m wearing nail polish? Dusty rose is not a very bright color. I was hoping no one would notice.”

  “No, it’s just proper dress code for this era.”

  I decided to bring up something else. It had been impossible to miss as one walked along Pompeii’s streets. “Speaking of propriety, what’s with all the, uh—explicit imagery above doorways and on walls and fountains? The male genitalia with wings and bells and stuff?”

  “Those are for luck. Different times, different hang-ups,” he said as we entered the tomb.

  “We’re here. The Stabian Baths.”

  The six of us were standing at the crossroads of two of the town’s main arteries, next to the somewhat gaudy statue of a man in a short red cloak and white tunic holding a spear. “Marcus Holconius Rufus. Local bigwig. Never mind him. The women’s entrance is down that alley,” Xavier added. The baths took up the entire block, with various shops and eateries at their front. We had decided that cleanliness took precedence over a sit-down meal, though it was somewhat early in the day to be heading to the baths, Xavier said. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from communal facilities, but clearly anything would be better than our current situation.

  “The men’s side is closed for renovation,” Xavier explained, “so Chief Kirkland, Kamal, and I will go down to the Forum Baths. Here, you’ll need to give a tip as you go in. Do what others do and try to blend in.”

  “I’ve been on a few of these runs before,” Helen said. “As has Abigail.”

  “I was addressing Julia.”

  Back at the tomb I had asked him if he thought our group would draw undue attention to itself.

  “You mean because we have a spectrum of faces and skin tones among us—the ladies on the light side and Kamal and our campus security chief on the dark side?” Xavier had said, misinterpreting my meaning. I had merely thought that splitting up into smaller groups might make it easier for us to move about town.

  “Don’t like that term,” Nate had muttered.

  “Did you say something, Chief Kirkland?” Xavier asked.

  “Don’t like that term.”

  “Skin tone?”

  “The dark side. It makes it seem like I’m on the wrong side of the law and that rankles the law enforcement officer in me.”

  “I agree,” said Helen, possibly to spite Xavier. “After all, the word light denotes brightness, radiance, buoyancy. Dark, on the oth
er hand, is often used as a synonym for gloomy, sinister, evil, which really is not—”

  Xavier raised both hands in defeat. “All right, all right. What I was going to say is that skin color doesn’t determine social status here. Yes, there are numerous slaves in villas, on farms, in shops, some even owned by the town itself. But they come from all over the empire, and are in their position because of family circumstance, war, trade, piracy—Gauls are said to be good herdsmen, Britons excellent for physical labor, Greeks for teaching and secretarial positions, Egyptians for amorous purposes.”

  “Really?” said Kamal, straightening his posture and slicking his hair back.

  “Probably not in the way you think. If freed, like Faustilla and her sons were when their master died,” Xavier went on, “a former slave can run a business and own slaves himself. Not to mention that the town is full of merchants and sailors and traders from all over the Mediterranean. By the way,” he added, “I’ve put about the story that Julia is my niece, the security chief her husband, and that you two, Abigail and Kamal, are their children.”

  “I had them quite young apparently,” I commented. “In elementary school, in fact. I’m only—what?—seven or eight years older than Kamal.”

  “I’m maybe thirteen years older, so that’s a bit better,” said Nate.

  “And did you think to include me, Xavier?” Helen asked.

  “You’re the maiden aunt on Julia’s side of the family.”

  That ended that conversation.

  Helen wordlessly accepted a handful of coins from Xavier. The men continued downhill in the direction of the Forum Baths and we turned into a somewhat seedy-looking side street. The outer wall of the baths, which was painted reddish orange up to head height, had no windows for us to peek into. “This must be the entrance,” Helen said of a door that stood open. Moist air wafted out from within.

  We stepped inside and let our eyes adjust to the darkness. A long, narrow passageway led around a corner. We followed it to a room at whose door sat a remarkably old woman. Helen poured coins into the woman’s leathery hand and she handed us three towels from a table and muttered something listlessly. “Bathrooms through the changing room and out into the palaestra and to the right,” Helen translated. “We must stand out as being from out of town.”

  In the changing room, niches in the wall held folded piles of clothes below a vaulted, richly decorated ceiling. Two women stood by a bench, chatting as they disrobed. A squarish pool with stone sides took up the fourth wall, by the entrance. Lamps twinkled all around. We left our towels on a bench, then went through a door that looked like it had been put in as an afterthought, and through a colonnaded walkway into what Helen explained was the palaestra, a grassy area where men would be getting their exercise if their side of the baths was open.

  “In there, I think.” Helen pointed.

  The bathroom. Communal, but luckily empty. There was a large U-shaped bench of wood on stone, with regularly spaced, keyhole-shaped seats in it. In front, beyond where the feet would go when sitting down, water ran through the room in a shallow channel. There were sponges on sticks next to each of the holes. “Roman toilet paper,” Helen explained.

  Once we were back in the changing room, we wrapped ourselves in the towels, having left our clothes in a niche, and donned clogs with thick wooden soles, which stood stacked in one corner. The towels, to someone spoiled by twenty-first-century luxuries, were not what you might describe as soft or plush.

  Abigail glanced at the two women, who had moved over to the square pool, and whispered, “Helen, Julia.”

  “What is it, Abigail?” I whispered back. The other guests looked over as if they were surprised by our whispering. Apparently it wasn’t the thing to do.

  “I have a tattoo.”

  Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc2, decorated her right shoulder blade.

  The women were still staring and I gave them a frank stare back, and said to Abigail, in a normal tone, “Well, cover it with a towel.”

  We hung about a bit to let the two women go ahead of us, then, following their example, took a quick dip in the changing room pool—cold water—before stepping into the next, notably warmer room, where a masseuse and a hair plucker worked by lamplight, and finally into the hottest of the three rooms. This one had columned walls under a vaulted ceiling, a washbasin at one end, and a marble pool with steam rising from it at the other. Heat radiated from under hundreds of miniature floor tiles, explaining the need for the thick-soled clogs. The walls felt warm to the touch, too, as if a furnace in a nearby room was sending hot air circulating behind the walls and under the floor (the opposite of STEWie’s lab, it occurred to me). Above the birdbath-like washbasin, which was round and the size of a dining room table, was an opening in the ceiling. Sunlight streamed in and sparkled and danced on the water in the basin. Birds and garlands and other beautiful imagery decorated the walls.

  “I’ve been wondering if Jacob did it,” Abigail said as we lowered ourselves into the pool, having left our clogs and towels on the double steps that ran alongside it. The water was very warm—the ancient equivalent of a hot tub—and smelled vaguely of massage oil and perfume. The two women we had followed in were deeply engaged in conversation but they occasionally sent a stare in our direction. Abigail moved a bit, her back to the tub wall, so they would not be able to see her tattoo.

  “Are we doing something wrong?” I asked Helen after a few minutes of this.

  She shook her head, her silver hair wet from the shoulders down. “Not necessarily. Staring—people watching, if you will—is the norm in most cultures. To our modern sensibilities it might seem rude, but really it’s nothing of the sort. Just ignore them. Now, what were you saying about Jacob Jacobson, Abigail?”

  “Don’t get me wrong, Professor, I like Jacob a lot. His tweets can be quite funny, especially when he’s talking about his classmates. There was this story about a missing umbrella—never mind.” She went on, “But this is his first semester as a grad student. Kamal says Jacob is struggling in his classes, that he didn’t do too well in Ghost Zones in Time. Not only is he supposed to be studying hard in all his classes, he needs to find a research topic, right? Maybe he snapped after Kamal told him he had to redo the final project for Ghost Zones.”

  Helen considered this as a hair-plucker-induced shriek echoed in from next door. “Most students who decide they don’t like graduate studies simply leave after the first semester or two. The ones I worry about are those who stick around for years, flailing in their research, never managing to get any concrete results or publish anything.”

  I considered her words, leaning back against the side of the pool and feeling my sore leg muscles relax. Kamal, who was the teaching assistant for Ghost Zones, would, I thought, make a fine professor one day. Jacob and Abigail were at St. Sunniva on research assistantships. Would Abigail make a good professor one day? It was an odd question to consider while I was sharing a hot tub with her. But I rather thought so, even if she was still working on finding a place for herself in the world. And Dr. Rojas’s new ginger-haired student? “Jacob might be struggling,” I said, “but he seems committed to sticking around. I’m optimistic that he—”

  Splash. A wave of warm water hit me in the face. A portly woman with several chins and a mole above one nostril had plonked down into the pool, sending water onto the floor and effectively ending our conversation. I guessed she was well-off by (a) the size of her person, (b) the size of her earrings, and (c) the way the bath attendant (or slave) hovered nearby after helping her into the pool. She dismissed the attendant, ran her eyes over the two women we’d followed in, who did not look as well-off and hadn’t been offered help by the attendants, then turned to us as if she considered us to be the more interesting choice. Haughty eyes contemplated us above sagging breasts for a moment, then she said something in Latin. Helen answered in the hesitant speech of someone who was used to reading, but not speaking, a language. I heard the word Britannia. As they
chatted, Helen haltingly, the portly woman with gossipy interest, I noticed that she took pains to keep her head above the level of the water so as not to dampen her elaborately styled beehive or wash away the chalky powder that whitened her cheeks and whatever had been used to darken and extend her eyebrows. She reeked of rose-scented perfume; whether she and the other bathers wore copious amounts of perfume as a mark of vanity or to conceal body odor, I didn’t know, and it was probably better not to speculate.

  I closed my eyes and tilted my head back, enjoying the luxury and pushing away the suspicion that the water in the pool didn’t get changed much. The truth of the matter was that grad students were at the bottom rung of the hierarchy at St. Sunniva. This was true of most schools. The uninitiated often assumed that undergraduate students were at the bottom rung, but undergrads were the paying customers, or at least their parents were. And paying customers needed to be kept happy. Grad students worked for the school as teaching and research assistants—TAs and RAs—but weren’t really proper employees, and as such they weren’t entitled to the benefits that, say, a cataloger in the Coffey Library received. Then there was the fact that they had to learn to leave behind passive studying and test taking, which was what most of them had been taught in their school careers up to that point, and learn how to actively attack research problems and come up with new ideas, all while being poorly paid. Like Helen had said, a not insignificant number of grad students left after a year instead of sticking around to work on obtaining their PhDs. Who could blame them? Industry paid more and had better benefits.

  Still, all that was a far cry from sending people into a ghost zone. Besides, I rather suspected that Jacob Jacobson had found an outlet for graduate-school stress—his steady stream of tweets.

  Someone had bypassed the safety calibrations and sent us into a ghost zone, that much was certain. But this wasn’t just any ghost zone. Which brought up the question, I thought, sitting back up and feeling the water stream down my neck and shoulders, of how that person had known that Xavier Mooney had purposefully relocated to Pompeii.