The Bellbottom Incident

by Neve Maslakovic

  As we picked ourselves up off the linoleum, he added in Dr. Little’s direction, “Though you, at least, look like you might be a grad student.”

  Dr. Little swatted at the knees of his jeans, which had acquired a layer of dust in the closet. “I’m not a student—I already have my PhD.” I sent him a look. What was he doing? I’m sure it was quite a strange and thrilling sensation to meet an older, more famous colleague at a time when that colleague had been no more than a newbie, but still.

  “Physics?” Xavier inquired.

  “No, computer science and engineering.”

  “Ah. Well, then you and your friends are in the wrong place,” Xavier said, his tone and words reminiscent of what Dr. Little might have used himself in similar circumstances. He nodded toward the door and gave his attention back to the papers.

  Abigail moved closer and tapped him on the shoulder. “We are looking for a girl.”

  “In the janitor closet? Besides, who isn’t?”

  “No, you misunderstand me. A girl has gone missing.”

  Xavier put the pen down and studied the three of us for a moment. “A student?”

  “No, she’s…a visitor to campus,” I explained. “It’s a long story.”

  This was all quite strange. How could we be having this in-depth conversation with the young Xavier Mooney? What, had he developed selective amnesia and forgotten to mention it to us back at the lab?

  “I’m Julia,” I introduced myself, still feeling quite odd about the whole thing. “I’m not a student either, nor is Abigail here—or, well, actually she is…”

  “Not a student, huh, Julia? Are you single?”

  “What?”

  He looked me up and down and I almost said, Dr. Mooney, are you feeling all right?

  “Do you have a picture of this girl you’re looking for? I could show it around, ask if anyone has seen her,” he offered, sounding as if he was only doing so to impress me. Great. He and Isobel would not end up together for the aforementioned reason, but he would, in a few years, fall in love with a young linguistics graduate student, Helen Presnik, who was now a good friend of mine and a senior professor in her own right.

  I decided it would help matters if I thought of the man in front of me as the young and upcoming academic Xave and not as the older and mellower Dr. Mooney. After all, the Dr. Mooney I knew was quite different; he played his musical instruments at office parties and was kind to everyone who came by his lab, whether it was a newly arrived freshman or Chancellor Jane Evans herself.

  I attempted to give a physical description of Sabina. “We don’t have a picture, I’m afraid, but she’s just about my height, with dark hair and eyes, strong shoulders, sandals, and a dress the color of wheat. She’s possibly wearing a white lab coat,” I added.

  Not just any white lab coat, but the very one hanging on the back of his chair, I was startled to see. It looked crisply white and new.

  I felt it was important to mention one more thing. “She is, uh, mature for her age.” Sabina had experienced a growth spurt over the summer, but that wasn’t it. While she was thirteen, she wasn’t a modern thirteen but rather like Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, only without the Romeo. Kids stayed kids longer nowadays. Sabina’s peers in 2012 were middle-class high schoolers whose biggest worries were what their friends were saying about them on Facebook and how to fudge the book reports they had no interest in writing. Sabina had already worked two jobs. Her family had been preparing to marry her off to a shopkeeper’s apprentice when the volcano disaster had struck. In some ways she was more of an adult than Abigail and I were. I concluded my verbal snapshot of Sabina by saying, “She’s from Italy, so her grasp of English is a bit sketchy.”

  Abigail seemed to come to some sort of snap decision. She reached into her coat pocket, but carefully, as if she expected her hand to be pulled up short by an obstruction. It wasn’t.

  There were a lot of things about this scenario I had trouble wrapping my head around. One, I still couldn’t believe we were talking to the twentysomething Xavier Mooney. Two, I couldn’t believe that Abigail was about to show him her smartphone, a small, sleek twenty-first-century device that was bound to look straight out of Star Trek to him. But most of all, I couldn’t believe that History was letting her do it.

  But it was…and it did. Abigail methodically thumbed through the phone’s photos (some of which no doubt showed Xavier himself) until she found a close-up of Sabina. She stuck the phone under Xave’s nose.

  Xave had been watching the proceedings wide-eyed. His feet now hit the floor. He got stood up and took the device.

  Abigail had taken the picture at Sabina’s birthday party, on the back porch of the house, with Celer lounging by the girl’s feet in the warm sunshine. The paper hat on Sabina’s head, which I had made, said Happy 13th Birthday (again!), which was an in-joke. We had jumped from August of 79 AD to May of 2012, and it had seemed simpler to double celebrate her mid-July birthday than to have her lose almost a full year.

  “Haven’t seen her,” Xave said of the picture. He was clearly more interested in the phone itself. Turning it over in his hand, he asked, “What is it?”

  “A smartphone,” Abigail said.

  “A smart phone?” A look of curiosity and something close to satisfaction spread across his young face. “Hotdog! I knew it—our Time Machine idea will work. You’re from the future!”

  8

  Abigail and Dr. Little had moved to one side of the room and launched into a whispered argument about the possible ramifications of what had just transpired. I heard Abigail say, “But Professor, if there were any ramifications on future events, I wouldn’t have been able to show him the cell phone at all, right?”

  “True, but that is not how we do things, haphazardly and without forethought. I object strongly. In the future I’ll expect you to—”

  “It worked, didn’t it?”

  “Yes, but that’s hardly the only consideration, is it?”

  Meanwhile the other professor (I couldn’t help but think of him that way, even in his much younger incarnation) was still turning Abigail’s phone over and over in his hand. “Where is the antenna? And the keys to work it? Does it sense thoughts somehow?” he mused.

  It very definitely was not the moment to explain about touch-screen technology or the concept of a band antenna wrapped around the edge of a phone. When Abigail and Dr. Little rejoined us, Xave gave the phone a last look of wonder before handing it back to Abigail. “Have you really come to look for a girl? Because if you’re here to try and prevent some future apocalypse, I’m ready to help. Tell me. I can handle it. What will it be? Nuclear war? Have the Soviets invaded us? Or is it some kind of global epidemic? Swine flu? The Philadelphia thing with the Legionnaires? That new hemorrhagic fever near the Ebola River?” Something seemed to occur to him and he went stiff, as if at military attention, and squared his shoulders. “It’s us, isn’t it? Gabriel, Lewis, and me. We are going to damage spacetime with our experiments, and you’re here to fix things by killing us before we have the chance. That’s it, isn’t it? All right, I understand if it must be done…”

  Dr. Little held up a hand. “Whoa. No to all of that. We really are just here to look for—that is to say, on the track of…” His face scrunched up as he tried to speak through History’s latest blockage and trailed off.

  Apparently Xave was not to know Sabina’s real name yet. “Call her Sally,” I suggested.

  “Thank you, Julia. Yes, we’re here to look for, er, Sally. She spent at least one night in the restroom in the student cafeteria, probably two,” Dr. Little said. “That’s all we know.”

  We would seriously need to sit down with Dr. Mooney—the future one—and have a conversation about this when we got home. Why had he never mentioned meeting us in 1976? An unsettling thought flew across my mind. Had the present-day Dr. Mooney known what Sabina’s fate would be…and elected not to say anything, not even a reassuring You’ll find her, because we wouldn’t? Maybe somet
hing awful happened and he wanted to tell us but couldn’t, since the events were locked in—we had to jump to 1976 and go through with the whole thing, as it was part of his past and had already taken place.

  Xave’s eyes followed Abigail’s movements as she slid the phone back into the pocket of her jeans. “I have so many questions for you.”

  “We can’t answer them,” Dr. Little replied curtly.

  “I’m going to guess based on that smart phone that you are not from this century. How far into the future are you from? The year 2000, just at the turn of the millennium? Or later? 2025? 2050? Any takers? Ballpark? And does everyone in the future wear those five-toed slip-ons?” Xave asked of Dr. Little’s shoes.

  “As I said, we can’t answer your questions,” Dr. Little repeated.

  “Not even who’s going to win the election next week? Gabe and I have a bet riding on it. A dollar each.”

  We didn’t bother replying to his attempt at levity.

  “I guess I’ll just have to wait to find out who wins—I’m voting for Carter. I’d like to see a peanut farmer in the White House. All right, then. If I’m not to know what’s going on or why you’re really here, so be it.” He gave a small shrug of acceptance. It was very much like Dr. Mooney to take an unexpected event like three time travelers stepping out from a janitor closet and into his office in his stride. He added, “Hey, can I at least tell Gabe about this?”

  “Best not to,” I said. “Sorry we can’t say more, but we do need your help.”

  He sat back down at his desk. “To find this Sally?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’ll ask around and see if anyone has seen her.”

  “It might be worth checking at the dorm that’s in the middle of the Science Quad,” I suggested. Abigail had already gone inside, of course, but she hadn’t checked every room. It was possible someone had taken Sabina in.

  Xave’s head flicked up at my suggestion. “You mean St. Olaf’s? Why there?”

  The correct answer to that was because St. Olaf’s Hall was the site of STEWie’s future home. We had already revealed too much about the future. I said, “Sally has a particular reason for going there.”

  “A particular reason? Boy, you are being mysterious, aren’t you? Well, that’s easy enough in any case—St. Olaf’s is where I live. Can that little device spit out the photo of her, like a Polaroid? No? All right. Let me finish grading these papers—I need to get them back to the students by tomorrow, but all the math errors are just depressing me…Where was I? Yes, let me finish these, and then I’ll ask around. Where can I find you?”

  “By the Open Book,” Dr. Little said as we headed for the door.

  “I’ll need some time. How about we meet up at five thirty, say?”

  “Five thirty it is,” I said.

  “Catch you on the flip side.”

  I checked my watch. It was half past four, so we still had a good hour before meeting up with Xave. We had been poking our heads into various classrooms and residences and checking behind buildings. Just as we were about to go into the covered tennis courts, having strolled through the athletics pool facilities without attracting much attention, something occurred to me and I stopped.

  “Hold on,” I said.

  Dr. Little and Abigail halted their step and turned to face me inquisitively.

  “The house. My house, I mean.” My bungalow wasn’t my bungalow yet, or even my parents’, but I should have thought of looking there at once.

  We set a course for Elm Street, which was a fifteen-minute walk from campus in the direction the sun was heading in its setting arc. Crossing a three-way intersection that in the twenty-first century had a traffic light but only stops signs here, we left the hubbub of campus behind and entered the neighborhood I’d grown up in. The cars parked along the residential streets paid tribute to the decade, but otherwise it all looked the same as it did when Sabina and I had walked Wanda earlier today home-time. Ranch-style houses and compact bungalows occupied small, carefully tended yards. Pumpkins, scarecrows, and other Halloween decorations lined the front porches, and kids played outside on the low-traffic streets, waiting impatiently for dusk to arrive. We could hear them swapping costume ideas—the familiar ghosts and pirates, cowboys and princesses. The adults were also outside, raking the orange and red leaves, washing cars in driveways, gardening in the crisp fall day.

  We turned onto Elm Street, which accommodated about half a dozen houses on each side and dead-ended in a small park. Mine was the third house on the right, with the front facing south. Even though I knew it would be there, I felt a stab of surprise at seeing the house. Instead of its home-time dusty blue with white trim, it was painted a hideous brown color.

  “Eeek,” Abigail said from beside me.

  We strolled by the house, then looped around for a second look. The family occupying it—twin boys and their mother—was engaged in a window decoration project. They were taping up homemade paper skeletons. Their small dog yapped at us from the front yard. I assumed it was this family that would build the mother-in-law addition in the back for a relative in need of housing, because the addition wasn’t there yet. Other details jumped out at me on the second pass: the weeping willow that would one day shade the front of the house, now scrawny and only head-high; the kids’ matching bicycles carelessly left on the lawn; the mailbox across the street, freshly painted white.

  “It’s weird how much the house looks the same, except for that hideous brown, of course,” Abigail said as we reached the corner and stopped under the sign that said Elm Street in one direction and Cottonwood Way in the other.

  Dr. Little shook his head. “There’s no sign of Sabina here. We should head back to see if Mooney has any news for us.”

  I held up a hand. “Hold on for a moment. I have an idea.”

  I turned back toward the house—there was no sidewalk, not then and not in the present, just neatly trimmed yards meeting asphalt—and took the stone path to the bungalow’s front door. The mother, who was juggling tape in one hand and a drooping paper skeleton in the other, looked up at my approach. “Thank you, but we don’t need any magazines. Or vacuum cleaners. Or encyclopedias.”

  “What? No, I’m not selling anything.”

  “And we already have a church.”

  “Not that either. I just—I wanted to ask if a girl stopped by your house sometime between mid-day Friday and today. She would have been a few years older than your kids, a teen.”

  She paused in the act of taping, and the skeleton’s paper head drooped further. “I don’t think so, but I’ll ask. Mikey, Jimmy,” she called out, “has a girl been by?”

  The two kids, who were now wrestling a large pumpkin into place on the small front porch, called back with an indifferent “No, Mom,” delivered in chorus. They were by the kitchen window, a square one that had always stuck and was impossible to open. It was half-open now, giving me a glimpse of the small fridge and kitchen cabinets inside. The wallpaper behind the cabinets was a medley of teapots—beige, pink, and white teapots. That wallpaper would become a family project for my parents and me—one Christmas vacation when I was in middle school, we had rolled up our sleeves and tackled it, peeling and scraping off each cutesy teapot segment over the course of a few days. At the end, we had painted the kitchen a cheery yellow.

  The woman looked at me kindly. “Is she a runaway?”

  “Not exactly. Just…lost.”

  “Do you want to leave a phone number in case she does stop by?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, good luck finding her, honey.” She resumed taping the skeleton.

  I turned to leave. Emotions flooded me, memories of my own family taping up Halloween and Easter and Christmas decorations in those very same windows. My parents now lived in Florida, where they were in charge of a community of retirees not much older than themselves, but this was 1976. And in 1976 Mom and Dad were at St. Sunniva University, seniors embarking on a key year in their lives tha
t would end in marriage and my birth—not in that order. I had been so worried about Sabina that I’d forgotten that I might run into them, even though it had been my main purpose in volunteering for Dr. Little’s run in the first place.

  We left the house behind us and headed back to meet Xave, crossing from the quiet suburban streets back onto the vibrant and busy campus. It dawned on me that it was highly unlikely that I would run into my parents. Even in 1976, the school probably had a body of at least a couple thousand students. Still, I couldn’t help but keep an eye out for two special people in my life once we passed the first of the signs directing visitors to campus parking lots and various departmental buildings.

  My musings had slowed me down—Dr. Little and Abigail were ahead of me, having already crossed the three-way stop sign intersection, and I picked up my pace. Or tried to…

  Instead I ran smack into one of History’s invisible walls, right at the curb, at the exact spot Dr. Little and Abigail had just passed before crossing to the other side of the street. It was like there was a fourth stop sign just for me. I watched as a bright red, two-door convertible with a young man at the wheel rounded the corner at a speed far exceeding the posted limit of thirty-five miles per hour. The driver ran the stop sign, as if he had taken the turn many times before and couldn’t be bothered to heed the rules anymore. Had I stepped out onto the street, the car would have mowed me down.

  I watched as the convertible sped away, the driver’s shoulder-length blond hair buffeted by the wind. Then I was free. The whole thing had lasted maybe thirty seconds. I hurried across the road to catch up with Dr. Little and Abigail.

  “There you are, Julia,” Abigail said. She had clearly missed the whole incident.

  “Sorry, I got time-stuck. Which was better than being struck by the car that just ran the stop sign.”