The Here and Now

by Brashares, Ann

  “Not really, no.”

  “And you, my friend—you definitely do.”

  He locks the doors, and the car is dark and quiet. I see the condensation from our breath on the windows. I hear the cars zooming by on the Palisades Parkway. I have no reason to feel safe, but I do.

  I’m so close to Ethan, it’s hard to sleep. I hear him shifting and turning in the front seat. I listen to him breathe.

  After a long time of quiet nonsleeping I hear him get out of the front seat and open the door to the back. My heart lifts when he climbs in, though I know it shouldn’t. I sit up to make room.

  “No, no, lie down,” he says. “Is there room for me?”

  I squeeze over. He lies down next to me. I spread the blanket over the two of us.

  “I’m not really very good at sleeping sitting up.”

  I laugh.

  At first we lie like two sardines, back to back on the narrow seat. But soon Ethan turns over and I feel his arms come around me. I feel his heart beating against my back. “This is casual, right?” he says.

  “I don’t think it’s what they meant,” I say. He’s been this close before with no ill effects so far. “But I think it’s okay.”

  As I get drowsy his legs entwine with mine.

  “Hey, Prenna?” I feel him whispering into my neck.

  “Yeah?”

  “If it was okay for me to kiss you,” he whispers, “would you want me to?”

  I know I should lie. I should make this easier on both of us. But I’ve begun to tell the truth, and I am drunk on it. “The most of anything,” I whisper into the seat.

  “Me too.” I feel him kiss my shoulder blade before he lays his head down and goes to sleep.

  THIRTEEN

  We park in a lot in the Bronx and study the street map on his phone. Or he studies it. My eyes aren’t that good yet. We take a wrong turn before we get our bearings. The streets are rundown and deserted. Most buildings look uninhabited, judging from the broken windows. I don’t really fear the threats they’ve got here in this part of the twenty-first century, but still I am grateful not to be alone.

  It’s a cold morning and the wind is blowing Ethan’s T-shirt. He looks filthy and banged up from two nights creeping around a farm. And tired. But he’s jumping around on the sidewalk like a lunatic.

  “What are you doing?”

  “It’s just, I don’t know. I feel so healthy. Energetic.” He’s a little winded, but smiling broadly.

  I watch him jump a few more times. “Oh, you do, do you?” I think I know what he’s getting at.

  “Not sick at all in any way.”

  I stare at him suspiciously.

  He shrugs. “Just saying.”

  We find the address, a big square industrial building with a giant well-lit billboard on the roof advertising to cars whooshing by on the elevated expressway above us.

  At the desk is a bored-looking attendant with a laminated ID card hanging around his neck. His name is Miguel. He takes his headphones off.

  “Card?” he says.

  I hand it to him.

  “Can I see your key?”

  I hand him that too.

  “Compartment number?”

  I pause. I really don’t want to raise his suspicions. It’s enough that we’re filthy and groggy-looking teenagers showing up at seven in the morning. “Five one seven.” I try not to say it as a question.

  He checks his computer and pushes the digital pad toward me. “Sign here, please.”

  I sign illegibly, which is not worse than I usually sign on those things.

  “Elevator to five, two rights and a left,” he says. He leans back in his chair and puts his headphones back on.

  It’s an elevator big enough to drive a car into. I swipe the card to open the fifth floor so the button lights up. My hands are sweating and I can’t keep my feet still.

  “We shouldn’t spend more time here than we have to,” Ethan says as we stride along the concrete hallway. I know it’s on both our minds that we might not be the only ones who know about this place.

  I nod. There are a few thickly paned windows, through which the rushing lights of the cars on the expressway give a sickening strobelike effect.

  I am squinting, trying to keep my hand steady as I turn the key in the lock. The knob turns and I push the door open. I zip the key into my jacket pocket.

  Ethan feels along the wall for the light switch and turns on an overhead fluorescent light that sputters and blinks before it comes on.

  It’s a room about six feet wide and nine feet deep. There are rough plywood shelves covering two walls, and they are almost entirely empty. Along one middle shelf on one wall there are four file boxes and a red binder.

  I step in and Ethan follows. He takes a look behind him at the door. “Leave it open?”

  It would make me claustrophobic to close it. The hallway is deserted. “Yeah.”

  “Start here?” he asks, picking up the first box.

  I nod. I’m working my courage up to touch anything.

  “It’s a bunch of newspapers,” he says, and I wonder if I hear a trace of disappointment in his voice. Maybe he was hoping for some mind-blowing technology.

  “Not very … futuristic,” I say.

  “No. Do you mind if I look?”

  “Go ahead.”

  I put my fingers around the second box. I cajole myself a little to open it. It’s not just the fear of knowledge, but years of being brainwashed never to invade privacy or look where you aren’t supposed to look. Some emotions, like safety and trust, are tough for us to come by, and others, like guilt and suspicion, are right on tap all the time.

  The box is divided into several compartments, and one of them has my initials—my old initials—written in black marker. In the spirit of Ellis Island immigrants, none of us kept our old last names when we moved here.

  The first thing is a dry piece of paper with a crayon drawing of a family made crudely and childishly with stick legs and oval feet, large round-fingered hands and lollipop heads. There is a father with straight black hair and a beard, a mother with yellow hair holding an egg-shaped baby in blue, a big girl with dark hair like her father and gray-blue spots for eyes like her mother. She is holding hands with—or overlapping hands with—a little dark-haired boy.

  It takes a strange act of relaxation to connect this drawing to myself. To connect the memory of drawing it, which I do faintly have, to my hands, my eyes, my thoughts. I try to connect the little girl in that memory to the person I am now.

  Under it is a birthday card for my father, also made by the little girl in my memory—that being me. And another and another, the first one barely a scribble, and my name printed with oversized, uppercase letters, half of them backward, with shoes at the bottoms, as though I’d never written letters before. Me. My name. Writing a card to my father.

  I sit on the floor and pull the box into my lap. There are my earliest efforts at forming the alphabet and the numbers up to twenty, spelling tests administered by my dad, half a page describing my new baby brother, my first book report, on Misty of Chincoteague.

  There are essays I wrote on the creation of the Internet, the water crisis of 2044, the great blizzard of ’72, which dumped over four feet of snow along the Eastern Seaboard in a single night. I remember them more than read them. There is a grade at the top of each one. I begged my dad to give me grades so I could feel like the real students I read about in books, and not just a kid writing papers in her kitchen.

  There is the essay I began on the blood plague of ’87 but didn’t finish. The date under my name is 2095. I remember the excuse I made for abandoning it and also the true reason. The plague was coming back. It wasn’t history; it was hovering and buzzing outside our door. It was better to write essays about things that had ended, I decided, and it was starting to seem like the blood plagues had only just begun.

  Another section of the box has a lot of my mother’s stuff: folded college and medical school
diplomas, various certificates and awards. It is touching to me that my father saved it all. Her lab closed down in the late seventies, so there’s not much after that. I find a clipping from her college paper, and I wish I could see it better. I can only read the big type declaring her the winner of the intercollegiate debate competition. A debater! I find that pretty impossible to imagine. I look at the picture of her broad, confident smile. Are you really my mother? I want to ask that girl in the picture.

  I can’t look anymore. The memories in the box connect me more and more to the memories inside of me, each one tying me to my old self like another length of string. Each one is reminding me of my Poppy, who is slowly, painfully edging toward the old man dying in my lap.

  This is the past I was ordered to forget. It is here; it happened. It is part of me, what made me who I am.

  Just because it hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened. It has. It is real. I am real. I am not some fabrication, out of nothing and nowhere, floating through time. I had a real family. I belonged somewhere once.

  I hear the crumpling of paper behind me and I turn around. I bring myself back to this time, this room, this Ethan.

  “What do you see?” I ask.

  “This newspaper is from Tuesday.”

  I stand up and go over to him.

  “Not last Tuesday, but Tuesday coming up.”

  It is indeed a curled and yellowed edition of the New York Times, reporting on a day that hasn’t happened yet. I squint at the date. I know this particular Sunday. I’ve thought a lot about this Sunday. Because it is the day too late.

  “What about the other ones?” I see there’s a stack of them he’s piled neatly on the floor.

  He hands the Sunday one to me. “This was on top. It’s the one he obviously spent the most time on. It looks like it’s been pulled apart and read a lot, which makes sense.”

  I nod. I fold it and put it in the duffel bag Ethan brought in case we need to make a quick exit.

  “There’s maybe ten or so papers altogether. One from 2010 and each of the years up until now.” He shakes his head, and his eyes look slightly out of focus. “I didn’t realize they would keep going. Look.” He pulls out another pile from the shelf and carefully flips through them. “Two more from this month, another from late this year, one from next year, another from the year after that, and then …” He examines the last paper in the box. “Unbelievable. June 2021.”

  “That’s a late one,” I say, a little dizzy.

  “How long did they go?”

  I try to remember my history lessons. “I don’t think there was any news printed on paper after the early twenties,” I say.

  “Unbelievable,” he says again. “So they went purely digital after that?”

  “Basically, yes. But the whole delivery of news had changed out of the newspaper format by then.”

  “That’s why I am surprised to see all this paper,” Ethan says. “I mean, even right now newspaper is kind of antique. I’d figured he’d have everything saved on some insane kind of drive or memory device. How much easier it would be to transport and preserve it than paper.…”

  I am not so surprised. My father loved paper, even from before. “Think about it,” I say. “A paper is an object. An actual thing. It can’t be modified, overwritten, updated, refreshed, hacked or anything else. It is fragile, but it’s a snapshot of history that hasn’t been messed with. It’s one version of history we know happened.”

  Ethan nods. “I see what you mean.”

  “For now people are thrilled about everything digital, endless data farms, your own piece of the cloud and all that. Nobody has much respect for paper at the moment, but I think the excitement kind of dies down after a while,” I tell him. “As time goes on I think people, definitely my father, come back around to respect the power of actual things you can actually touch.”

  Ethan picks up next Sunday’s paper. “I’m almost scared to look at this. Do you know what it means?”

  “I think so.” I hear the rush of cars outside and feel a chill.

  “Do you know how much power this one piece of paper could give you?”

  “I do. Especially if it’s accurate.”

  “Why wouldn’t it be? You just said it was a snapshot of history.”

  “It is. But it’s one snapshot of one history.”

  Ethan’s face is uneasy. He knows where I’m going.

  “There’s a thing this paper shows us that’s more important than the stock quotes and the sports scores and the history of the day it was printed,” I say.

  “What’s that?”

  “How much we’ve changed things. Now that we’re here from the future, messing around, if a gap opens up between what’s happening in the world and what this newspaper says, we can see the impact we’ve made since it was printed.”

  “What do you make of this?” Ethan hands me the red folder.

  Inside the folder is a pile of loose sheets, each with a photo of a person; some printed information, mostly medical records; and a bunch of handwritten notes. On the top is a woman named Theresa Hunt. She was born in 1981. I’m having trouble reading the smaller print, but my eyes dart down to a note circled in red pen: Patient #1?

  The second is a boy, aged three, named Jason Hunt. I’m guessing he’s Theresa’s son. Patient #2? says the note.

  There are at least a dozen other sheets with similar kinds of information. They aren’t all numbered as patients, but each is clearly related to the same project. Are these people sick? Are they still alive? “I think he could be trying to create an early medical history of the plague. I’m not sure.” I flip to the last sheet of paper. “I didn’t think the blood plague got started quite this early, but it’s possible, I guess. Maybe there was some kind of precursor to it.” I know the disease mutated a bunch of times, getting worse with each one. In the beginning it was harder to transmit and by the end it was carried by mosquitoes. I’m not ready to get too deep into this with Ethan yet.

  I put the folder in the duffel bag to study when we have more time and my eyes are working better.

  I move on to the third of the file boxes. I open it and let out a breath.

  “What?” Ethan asks.

  “There’s money in here. Piles of cash. Mostly hundreds and fifties. I hope he wasn’t robbing banks.”

  “I doubt he was.”

  I check all the sections of the box and they contain the same. “God, there’s a lot.” I examine the dates on the money. Some of it is from 2008, 2009, up to the present. In another envelope the dates on the bills are from next year and the year after that. “He must have brought it back with him.”

  “I wonder how he collected all that. It looks like a lot. Was he rich?”

  I try to remember what I learned. “It’s not that. There was crazy inflation of US dollars in the fifties, I think. I remember my dad told me it cost two hundred and fifty dollars to ride the subway in 2056 and five hundred dollars to buy a doughnut.”

  “You’re kidding me. How much did it cost when you were a kid?”

  “I can’t really say. The US gave up on the dollar and made a new currency by the early sixties, and another one by the late sixties. Goldbacks was the name of the money we used when I was little. None of it kept its value, and anyway, by then you couldn’t buy a doughnut at any price. The old green dollars were mostly destroyed, I guess. But I remember seeing them around once in a while. I even remember burning them in the fireplace. They were useless otherwise.”

  Ethan is looking a little shell-shocked. “They are pretty useful around here.”

  “I know. That surprised me when we came here. It’s hard to have any respect for these pieces of paper we used to chuck into the fireplace.”

  “Your father must have salvaged these, knowing they would come in handy.”

  “You see what I mean about his devotion to paper?” I hand one of the piles to Ethan so he can see for himself.

  He calculates. “There’s got to
be a hundred thousand dollars in that box.”

  “I’ll put some in our bag to bring with us,” I say.

  “Make sure you pick a stack of bills that have already been printed.”

  I check the dates of the first stack and put it in our bag. “Never know when you might need”—I quickly try to calculate the clump of bills—“five thousand dollars.”

  He opens his eyes wide. “What are you going to do with the rest of it?”

  “Leave it for now, I guess. We’ve got more important stuff to think about.”

  I turn to the last box. I see thin, semitransparent black cards arranged in decks. They are instantly familiar to me and yet I haven’t seen them since we left. “You’ll like these better,” I say to Ethan.

  He comes over to examine them.

  “These are memory banks, one card for each month. Each deck is a year.” I pull one out. “I’m not sure what device could read them here. But if you could find one, you would see the future.”

  “What do you mean by ‘memory banks’?”

  “It starts soon, like in the next three years, if I’m remembering my history lessons right,” I tell him. “People start banking their memories. It’s very simple. You have the technology right now—everyone does who has a phone, basically. It’s the same principle the counselors use for our glasses. If you hold up your phone and keep the movie camera on for every waking hour, you can record everything you do and everything you see and everything you hear. Which would be dumb and cumbersome and you wouldn’t do it, but you get the idea.

  “The first gizmo people adopted in a big way was called iMemory, this tiny microphone-camera combo about the size of a pearl you could wear as an earring, on a necklace or really any place. After a while they got even tinier and people started getting them implanted in their earlobes. It automatically records everything you see and do in the course of a day, and it all uploads and stores automatically to your own spot on the data cloud. Most of it you ignore, of course, because it is dead boring. But say you lost your wallet or your keys or your phone and need to figure out where you put them. Say you wanted to prove that you really did take out the garbage or finish your math homework or that your sister hit you first, or whatever. With memory banking you can go to the tape and it’s easily searchable. You can search it by date, by hour, by keyword. You can retrace any part of your life you want.” I haven’t thought about iMemory in a long time. “Not that people do it much, but they like to know they can. In the beginning people used to say it was almost like being immortal, being able to hold on to your whole life like that.