by Terri Favro
Kendal and I lay back on the round bed and held hands. I watched as the needle slid smoothly under my skin and found my vein. A tiny prick of fear, then I slid my arm inside my flight suit and zipped myself up.
Kendal turned his face toward me and smiled as Gabriel shot him up.
“Love you,” he said.
We didn’t even have time for a kiss.
* * *
I woke up tethered to a chair, staring through the dome of my helmet at the corona of the sun just starting to rise over the curvature of the Earth. Like dying and opening your eyes on God’s face. Skylab’s workshop was empty, bits and pieces of lab equipment floating around me. A caliper here, a scalpel there, petri dishes suspended in the air like tiny glass saucers. Alone in a space station in a dying orbit around the Earth, I was trembling with terror, excitement or both.
A few seconds later, as promised, Gabriel was beside me.
“Where’s Kendal?” My words echoed in my ears through the radio set inside my helmet. I could see half of Gabriel’s face reclining in the chair, one brown eye fixed on mine.
“He’s not coming. I kind of lied to you.”
I tried to throw myself at Gabriel, forgetting that I was tethered in place. My arms waved in slow-mo as I tried to throttle him.
“You fucking fucker, what have you done with Kendal?”
“Relax! He’s safe and sound on Earth, where he belongs, sleeping off the sedative I gave him so I could get him out of my flight suit. Only you and I were injected with the Quantum Nanothrusters.” He unclipped his tether, then mine, so that both of us floated in the weightlessness of the workshop.
I lifted my hand to try to wipe angry tears from my eyes, absent-mindedly smacking the front of my helmet. I wanted nothing more than to punch straight through Gabriel’s helmet into his Twistie face. He pulled me into his arms in a clumsy bear hug, the two of us floating together as I railed at him.
“Is this because of the one-night stand?” I shouted into my headset, my helmet clattering against his.
Gabriel winced as my voice bounced around his helmet. “The MIT boys strictly provisioned this trip for two people — you and me. It’s nothing personal, Debbie.”
“Nothing personal?” I took a swing at him but couldn’t connect. I grabbed one of the calipers floating around the workshop and tried flinging it at his head. Cocooned in my flight suit, I couldn’t throw with enough force. Gabriel nimbly pushed himself out of the trajectory of the lazily moving projectile.
“Calm yourself. We’ve got a job to do. Saving Earth. Remember?”
I looked at where Gabriel was pointing, toward the blue and white marble of Earth suspended in dark space. Kendal was down there, along with everyone else I loved.
“It was Kendal’s own fault. He was just so doggedly devoted to you,” Gabriel pointed out.
I kept crying and hurling myself at Gabriel. Finally, he caught me by my wrists. “Heads up. I’d love to continue discussing your love life, but we’re in a dying space station hurtling toward Earth. And we don’t have much time.”
I tried to wipe away the snot dripping from my nose and hit myself in the helmet again. I ran my tongue over my upper lip and said, “Okay, let’s do it. I’ll kill you later.”
Skylab, if you look at old NASA photographs taken by the astronauts who manned it — and they were all men, every one of them, until I turned up — looked a bit like a ship under sail. A windmill shape on top of the station was actually a massively powerful telescope.
The solar sail on Skylab had always been a problem. I remembered hearing about how it had been damaged when the space station was first sent into orbit on a Saturn V rocket originally built for the scrubbed Apollo 18 mission. Astronauts had been sent on an unplanned spacewalk to make their workshop habitable. With the heat shield broken, NASA had jerry-rigged a parasol; the astronauts had deployed it to lower the interior temperature of the workshop to a livable hundred degrees Fahrenheit. And now, Gabriel and I would do the same in order to reprogram the station for one last blast to push it further into space where it would float in permanent orbit with other dead satellites, including ones I had watched through my telescope from my own backyard. Vanguard. Sputnik. Telstar I and II. So many others. An armada of space junk floating high above Earth.
Life-support systems weren’t operational on the disabled space station. Not that it mattered. Most of our job would be done outside rather than in.
A spacewalk. Kendal had been so excited when he heard about that. I tried not to cry in my helmet as I prepared to enter the airlock. To work on the solar array and send Skylab deeper into space, away from Earth, Gabriel and I hand-railed our way to the solar sail.
We hung in nothingness two hundred and seventy nautical miles above the Earth, as if we were truly sailing in space. I clung to the handrail and looked, and looked, and looked at the continents of Earth, the hanging rubber ball of the moon, the precise pinpoints of light from the stars. Out here, they didn’t twinkle the way they did on Earth, but shone with a brilliant intensity.
“I made it, Kendal,” I whispered.
“We have a job to do, Debbie,” Gabriel reminded me. “I know it’s amazing but we don’t have time for sightseeing.” And with that, he opened the toolkit and took out a solenoid.
“Handy things when you’ve got a system to override,” said Gabriel. “Duff’s been working on souping up archaic twentieth-century technology for years. Now you know why.”
The work was easier than I expected, like fixing the sail on a boat while floating underwater. Or maybe it just seemed easy because I had spent a lifetime preparing in the rubber room, practising the procedure until it had become embedded in me. Muscle memory. Gabriel and I re-entered the airlock, then the main workshop to reprogram Skylab’s orbit. While we worked, he gave me an important safety tip: because I hadn’t previously existed in Earth Standard Time, I’d need to be careful to maintain the same body mass at all times, give or take a few ounces.
“Other people are just integrating with their bodies in the other continuum, but you have no vacuum to fill. So once you hop into E.S.T., better make sure you don’t gain or lose weight, or it could be bad for you.”
“Bad how?” I wanted to know.
“Bad as in parts of your body could start melting away.”
Gabriel also explained that we would return to the room in New York where we’d started. I expected to find Kendal there, asleep on the round velour bed, or groggy and mad as hell at missing the adventure of a lifetime, or maybe just sitting at the bar in Studio 54 nursing a Scotch. But he’d get over it. We would finish our honeymoon, go back to Canusa and live out the rest of our lives.
Getting shot back to my own time and place was tricky in zero G’s. Gabriel had to get creative with the sleeve of my flight suit. As we waited for it to take effect, I said, “Kendal’s going to be pissed when he hears I went on a spacewalk without him.”
Through the visor of his helmet, Gabriel’s eyes were lowered. Avoiding contact with mine. I didn’t like what I read there.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
Gabriel looked up. “I bullshitted you about Kendal,” he said.
My heart began to sprint. “What did you do? Tell me he’s still alive down there!”
“Oh, yes, yes, of course, what do you think I am?” Gabriel reassured me hastily. “It’s just that when I heard Kendal quoting the Silver Surfer, I knew he’d never give up on you. He’s the messianic type. A one-woman man. Full of his own importance. Wants to save the world. And he’s going to, once he’s safely in Earth Standard Time. Problem is, you’re the one who has to get him there. All he’d do is get in the way, trying to protect you. Not to mention, he’s too important in the world of tomorrow to be in on this caper. Kendal’s like a KerPlunk piece: pull him out of the game and everything around him collapses.”
My agitatio
n was increasing; I had a feeling this was all heading somewhere very, very bad. “Just get to the point.”
Gabriel stared at me through his visor. “After your time hop, he’ll have no idea you ever existed.”
I tried to seize him by the shoulders but my hands slid off his suit. “When we get back, you’re going to make him remember me again!”
I couldn’t see his face now, but I could hear his voice through my headset, telling me evenly, “Sorry, Debbie, but I won’t be going back. This was strictly a one-time deal, like the night we spent together.”
I swung myself around in the weightless cabin so I was looking directly into the visor of his helmet. “What?”
He grimaced. “Suicide mission. I’m an Exceptional, sweetheart. With no water to hydrate myself, I can’t hang onto this shape any longer. What’s one Exceptional, more or less, right? I won’t exist in a few seconds. By the way, I love you.”
And with that, I watched his smile collapse along with the rest of his head into a shower of spores inside his helmet.
I was alone, floating inside the dying space station. A tiny, frightened fish, trapped in the belly of a larger fish, about to be swallowed by the universe.
Through the flight deck window, an object loomed: a dull white sphere the size of a beach ball. I wept with wonder and terror when I recognized Telstar I, the communications satellite I’d followed by telescope from my backyard in Shipman’s Corners. Space junk now, the satellite was in perpetual deep orbit. As it silently collided with Skylab, the Plexiglas window before me shattered, floating like Mylar confetti in zero gravity.
Despite my helmet, I instinctively closed my eyes. When I opened them, I found myself tumbling blindly. I sensed that I was no longer inside the confines of the space station. But if I’d drifted through the broken window into the vastness of space, where was the debris of the collision, not to mention the stars and the Earth? I was in a black void so complete that I thought I had been buried alive. That was the moment I realized I was in a wormhole, burrowing through the dark matter that separated one continuum from another. I was no longer afraid. My mind had stretched far beyond feeling anything but awe.
Time bulged around me, rubbery and thick, thrumming with the tension my actions had created — I had deflected time’s arrow and sent it hurtling at the taut surface of history. Over my headset came a low groan like the sustained bass note of a million pipe organs as Atomic Mean Time ruptured and flatlined. Perhaps that sound was the collective screams of a billion-odd humans as they were sucked through the wormhole with me to unite with their alternate selves in Earth Standard Time. I don’t know if anyone experienced what I did on my first hop to 1971, when I woke up naked and shivering in the vineyard before I joined with my older self. I suspect some people might have noticed a brief bout of dizziness, perhaps a touch of motion sickness, as I tagged them into Earth Standard Time: too much sun, they’d tell themselves later. For the briefest possible time, all life on Earth was both dead and alive, until time started up again and history flowed smoothly on, catching all of us in its current.
Atomic Mean Time was no more.
* * *
I came to in the middle of the rubber room, still in my flight suit. The first thing I did was puke in my helmet: it was not unlike waking up from anaesthesia. My gold catsuit was neatly laid out on the velour bed, waiting for my return. Cleaning myself up at the bar sink, I became aware of something in my clenched hand: I opened it to see my Lady of Lourdes medal on its fine gold chain. All that was left of my life in Atomic Mean Time. Now I had to find out what had happened to my husband, my sister and my friend. Despite what Gabriel had told me, I was sure they would all be waiting for me in the nuke-free world of Earth Standard Time.
I didn’t believe that Kendal would not know me. Maybe he’d suffer from short-term amnesia, but certainly he would not forget me forever. How could he? There would be all the shreds of our life together. All those other friends and family, wondering where I was. Not to mention a joint bank account. Wedding gifts. Half-written thank you notes. As much as marriage wasn’t easy for me, I couldn’t cope with the idea of Kendal simply dropping out of my life. I leaned on him in the same way as my monthly prescription for Valium: to steady me, soothe my panic attacks and keep me from lapsing into anxiety and bulimia.
Narnia-like, the door had reappeared in the rubber wall. I stepped back into my catsuit, turned the knob and left the room.
A gale was blowing through the empty hallway, as if a large invisible window had opened. For a microsecond, the world went to greyscale. I reached out to steady myself against the wall but my hand touched only air. I was suspended in a void but should have been in free fall: nothing solid was holding up my feet. I was slipping out of the nook in time.
Time skipped like a scratched record. Repeat, repeat, repeat, jump ahead. I lost a few seconds, or maybe minutes, until the world snapped back into place, like an electrical grid coming back on after a power failure. I found myself once again in the heat of the dance floor of Studio 54 in the summer of 1979, the crowd surging against me as I pushed my way toward the entranceway. The catwalk was full of dancers — no sign of a man having fallen from it that evening. The railing had been repaired, if it had been broken at all. The red carpet had turned to purple. Modern chandeliers glittered overhead — had they looked like that when we came in? I didn’t think so.
Out on the street, the bouncer was not named Jimmy, but Marc, judging by the shouts of the women on the wrong side of the velvet rope — Marc, let me in and I’ll give you head in the bathroom!
I checked my watch. Two minutes to midnight — about the time we’d gone into the club. Despite what Gabriel promised, I had fallen back an hour. I suddenly became aware of an unfamiliar feeling: I felt unwell. My throat was sore. I was achy and a little nauseated, as if I was coming down with something. Thanks to the U-shot, I hadn’t felt this sick since my bout of tonsillitis when I was thirteen. I ached to be in bed, back in our hotel room.
I waited and waited. One a.m. turned to two, then three; no Kendal, no Bum Bum, no Linda. I hailed a cab to take me to the Excelsior, but the few dollars I had in my purse had disappeared, along with my ID and credit cards. When I told the cab driver that I had no money, he pulled over and abandoned me on the curb of Fifth Avenue, just outside Tiffany’s.
I felt like Audrey Hepburn, without the tiara.
By the time dawn broke in Earth Standard Time, I was curled up against the storefront with a fever of 104 Fahrenheit, according to the doctor who saw me that morning at Saint Clare’s Hospital in Hell’s Kitchen. The nice New York cops took me there. All of them talked just like Nonna Peppy.
six
Timesickness
July 12, 1979, E.S.T.
I burned up on a gurney in a noisy hallway while an intake nurse jotted my particulars on a clipboard.
“Please call my husband,” I croaked. “We’re from Canusa.”
She looked at me as if I was quite mad. “Where is Canusa?”
“North of the border,” I said.
“You mean Canada.” She didn’t even look up. “What’s your husband’s telephone number here in New York?”
“I don’t know. A hotel in the Village. The Excelsior.” A coughing fit stopped me from talking further. I could barely draw a breath. My chest felt as if it were being crushed by an elephant. “Please, give me something,” I managed to beg.
“The doctor has to see you first,” said the nurse, staring at her clipboard as she walked away. I was nothing special in this hall of suffering: two gurneys over from me, a woman in restraints was screaming that cockroaches were eating her face off.
Two hours later, my cough was competing with her terrified screams for the doctor’s attention. After a cursory examination, I was diagnosed with pneumonia and pleurisy in both lungs, complications of a type of viral infection that had been eradicated in Atomic Mean
Time thanks to the U-shot: influenza.
The intake nurse returned. “I looked up Hotel Excelsior. Number’s out of service. One of the orderlies said it’s been torn down for a condo development.”
Head lolling, I tried to focus on her indifferent face. Fighting to form coherent words, I managed, “Wha’ — ’s gone overnight?”
The nurse finally made eye contact with me: “They razed it six months ago. Your hubby isn’t there, honey.” Then she bustled away, her crepe-soled shoes kissing the linoleum.
* * *
I was in the charity ward at Saint Clare’s for six weeks. By the day of my discharge, I was still barely able to stand on my own. When I kept insisting that I had had the Universal Vaccine and was therefore immune to all known infections, I did a stint in the psych ward at a notorious hospital ironically named Bellevue, where a psychiatrist diagnosed me as possibly psychotic and suffering from shock — what we’d now call post-traumatic stress disorder. They administered electroshock therapy. I’d rather not talk about that.
Finally, a kind social worker made it her mission to find someone who knew me, who would look after me. She patiently took down the names I could remember of family and friends in New York and Shipman’s Corners. She called directory assistance, presenting me with a list of unfamiliar numbers that I dialled from a payphone in the hall, asking the operator to reverse the charges. None of them would accept my collect calls: not my cousins in Brooklyn, not Sandy Holub or Beatrice Kendal. No one knew who I was.
The social worker tried tracking down John Kendal in Shipman’s Corners and Toronto but the number of men with that name defeated her. I also tried every Linda Biondi and Pasquale Pesce in New York City. Nurse, construction worker, accountant, anthropology professor at Columbia. None of them was my sister or my friend.