The Here and Now

by Brashares, Ann

  Can’t I keep anything I love?

  I watch the water for a long time when Ethan, beloved, appears next to me. I’ve dried my eyes by then.

  “You got up early,” he says accusingly. “I don’t like waking up and not feeling you there.” He laughs at himself. “Sorry. I got used to you.”

  I stand up and boldly put my arms around him. It’s not really so bold—I mostly don’t want him to see my face. “I did get up early,” I say. “I wanted you to sleep.”

  He kisses me on the neck and behind my ear and then, in open rebellion, on my mouth. “Have I mentioned,” he says a little breathlessly, “that I don’t feel a bit sick? That I’ve never felt better in my life?”

  I smile. I want to look happy.

  “Just saying.”

  Everything is breaking my heart.

  “They’ve got an all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet this morning. You want to go?” He says it like we’ve won a prize.

  “Yes, okay,” I say. I am still afraid of what his eyes will find on my face.

  He is so enthusiastic over the buffet it makes my heart hurt. He helps himself to four giant waffles, two doughnuts, a bowl of granola, a cup of yogurt, a side plate of sausage and bacon, a tall glass of milk and a glass of orange juice.

  “Henny, they have these little chocolate éclairs,” he shouts to me joyously across the restaurant.

  I put an éclair and a few pieces of fruit on my plate, knowing it will be a struggle to eat any of it.

  We have most of the place to ourselves. We sit at a table for two by the window from which you can see the ocean. The water is especially bright, the color of mint mouthwash.

  “This is our day,” Ethan says between bites of waffle.

  Last night I was excited to take on our day. Now my heart is plunging.

  “We should take off after breakfast and get close to Teaneck by early afternoon.” He spears a sausage. “And during our downtime, I’m going to teach you Hearts.”

  “We’ve got to have our priorities,” I say.

  “We do. Because once you’ve got Hearts down, you’re set.”

  “And then I’ll be a proper early-twenty-first-century girl?” I ask. I feel like crying. I don’t want to be set.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “But there’s got to be something else you can teach me. You can’t be done with me yet.”

  He stops chewing for a moment and looks at me carefully. “Are you kidding? Not even close. There are plenty of things I am going to teach you.”

  I watch him eat nearly all of the all-you-can-eat buffet, most of it with a dot of syrup on his chin, and I make a vow to myself.

  I will not let him die. No matter what it takes. I don’t care about any version of the future besides the one I am making, where Ethan is not going to die because I am not going to let him.

  SEVENTEEN

  Ethan watches the road and I watch Ethan. I’m scared to take my eyes off him. He turns his head briefly to glance at me.

  “You okay?”

  Should I tell him? I twist my fingers together. Maybe I should, but I can’t. Putting the words into the air would give them a degree of reality I won’t allow. As it is, it’s an idea that exists only between me and a tiny line of print in a soon-to-be-inaccurate newspaper. Nobody else needs to know.

  And anyway, what if knowing it made Ethan feel fatalistic and hopeless? Or what if he tried so vigorously to make it not come true that it came true in spite of him?

  No, I can’t say the words. Since I am the only one who knows them and I love him to the point of agony, I will be his guardian today.

  I force myself to stop staring at him. Now my excellent eyes are ticking along the exits of the Garden State Parkway, seeing strange poetry in the place names: Manahawkin, Forked River, Island Heights, Pleasant Plains, Asbury Park, Neptune. Something occurs to me.

  “Can you turn off?” I say.

  “At this exit?”

  “Yes.”

  “Here?”

  I am reading all the signs I can find. “Yes, I think it’s here.”

  Ethan turns. “What’s here?”

  I am spinning in my seat, one way and then the other. “I recognize some of the names. It looks different, though.”

  “Okay.” Ethan pulls up to an intersection. “Which way?”

  I study the signs. I try to think. “Left. Maybe.”

  “Left maybe it is.”

  “Keep going,” I say.

  He drives for a mile or so, and I have this memory. “Turn right here.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now keep going.” I am up on my knees in the seat. “Right there. Do you see that?”

  “The school?”

  “Yes. Can you stop?”

  Ethan pulls up and parks in front. It’s Saturday, so it’s empty.

  “I can’t believe it,” I say in a low voice, getting out of the car.

  Ethan follows me across the grass to the top of a little hill where you can see the playground spreading from the back of the school.

  “Do you know what this is?”

  “I really don’t.”

  “This was the local elementary school where we lived. Before, I mean. Before we emigrated.”

  Ethan’s eyes open wide. “Really? Right here?”

  “I’m almost sure.” Blossoming trees dot the schoolyard, and the sunshine is soft on our heads. The memories associated with the school are unnerving, but the place itself feels oddly comforting. It gives a sense of continuity to my life that I almost never feel.

  I realize I want to stay here. Because what bad thing could happen to Ethan here? We could sit on the grass all day and watch the clouds and the birds. There’d be no danger of highway accidents or murders gone awry. I could keep my arms around him until the day is over.

  “Did you go to this school?” he asks, holding my hand.

  “No. I would have. I wanted to. It got shut down right before I would have started kindergarten. They said temporarily, but it never reopened.” Down goes the bucket again, into the long-abandoned memory well. I surprise myself with what comes up.

  Ethan has his curious but careful look. “Where did you go to school?”

  “I didn’t. We were homeschooled. My dad took it very seriously. You tease me about my superbrain. It was just my dad being a teacher with nowhere else to teach and us kids not being allowed outside.”

  “Your dad was a great teacher.”

  I nod. “He was. But still I wanted to go to this school so bad. I read all these books where kids went to school. I was always pretending.”

  “What year did they close it?”

  “The first real plague year was ’87. There were rumblings of the epidemic for years, but they kept beating it back and containing it. It wasn’t until mosquitoes started spreading it that hell broke loose.”

  “2087.”

  “Yes. I think they closed it during the second one in ’91.”

  “So you were … five, about?”

  “Yeah.”

  He lifts his eyebrows as he considers this. “You know, you’re kind of young for me.”

  I laugh. “And you’re older than my grandmother.”

  “You were born around here?”

  “Not far.”

  “It was still the US by then?”

  “Yes. I am not an illegal alien. Not in that way.”

  “So the country was still going, at least.”

  “Yes. Not going well.”

  He looks sad.

  “Nor was any other one, really,” I say. “Not that that’s a big consolation.”

  “And when did you leave?”

  “We left in 2098 and arrived in 2010.”

  “Why then?”

  “Why 2098? I guess that was the first moment they figured out the technology to make the time path work so we could get out. My dad used to tell me about how all through the late twenty seventies and eighties there was a race to find another place to go. By then most everybo
dy knew the planet was becoming uninhabitable pretty quickly.”

  “I guess at a certain point, nobody can deny it anymore.”

  “A few scientists held out for a really long time, and they had a lot of eager followers—whether out of optimism or cynicism I’m not sure—but they came to look ridiculous as the problems got worse and worse.”

  I listen to myself talk, almost as if it’s a separate Prenna carrying on this conversation. On some level, I think I understand what separate-Prenna is doing. If she keeps talking, maybe Ethan won’t notice we aren’t getting any closer to Teaneck, New Jersey.

  So separate-Prenna forges on. “Some doctors and scientists were trying to fix the problems, but most knew it was too late for that; they were just trying to figure out a way to escape. There were plans to colonize the moon, Mars, a space station. There were big ambitious plans, but not enough time. People were dying. The only colonization scheme that worked was the simplest—colonizing the past.”

  “How many times was the path used?”

  “Until a couple of days ago, I would have said once. But it had to have been used again for my father to have gotten here.”

  “To 2010.”

  “Yes. I can’t even imagine what the world was like by the time he left.”

  “Maybe there were other times too.”

  I shiver. “There’s the legend of Traveler One. Not that anybody believes it.”

  “Who’s Traveler One?”

  “Every one of us has a number, from our chief counselor, Traveler Two, to my mother to me—Traveler 971, by the way—to Ashley Myers, the youngest, Traveler 996. Traveler One supposedly used the path first and learned the ways of time. He was like our Moses. He handed down the twelve rules.”

  “And then they retired his number.”

  “Right.”

  “So that means he’s around here somewhere.”

  “If he exists and everybody comes out in 2010, then he must be.”

  “I could have seen him in the woods too.”

  “I doubt it, though. I suspect he’s what you politely call a ‘metaphor.’ They invented him to give legitimacy to the rules. So it wouldn’t seem like they were just making shit up.”

  We walk around to the back of the school to the little playground. I played there only a few times before it was dismantled. They didn’t want to be tempting kids outside.

  “You know what surprises me most?” I say as we each sit down on a swing.

  “What?”

  “That everybody knows.”

  Ethan kicks at the dirt under his swing. “What do you mean?”

  “Everybody here knows what’s going to happen. Before we came here, I imagined that people in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries must have been ignorant of what they were doing to the world, because how else could they have kept on doing it? But they do know. They don’t know exactly how it will unfold, but they know a lot.”

  “We do know, don’t we?”

  “People from the twenty eighties look back on this period now and the one just ahead as the golden age of science. As the golden age of a lot of things, actually. You can’t imagine the nostalgia for this exact time. The science was good enough to predict a century ahead what was going to happen. And it’s not just a handful of scientists who know, it’s everybody. I read about it, hear about it, see it on the news practically every day. There couldn’t be any more warning.”

  “Not everybody ignores it.”

  “No, that’s true. But people here have strange ideas about what to do to help. There is Earth Day and all kinds of green products that make people feel good—as though organic cotton sheets and hemp socks are going to do the trick. But nobody does the hard things. Not if it costs them anything. Nobody calls for any real sacrifices. Politicians aren’t very brave. I mean, eventually they will demand sacrifices—they’ll have to, there will be no choice—but by then it will be too late.”

  He looks distraught. “So that’s what happens.”

  “That’s what happens.”

  He is quiet for a long time. “And your leaders know all this and aren’t doing anything about it?”

  “The opposite. They’re making sure nobody does. You read my father’s letter. When we got here, they acted like they were the Founding Fathers of the USA or something, bold and innovative. I believed it at first, but it wasn’t true. Everything they did was for secrecy and manipulation—they created birth certificates, passports, credit reports, family histories. Even old family photos. They tried to block out memories of our old life, but it didn’t really work. Except for the trip itself and a day or two afterward, I remember almost everything. And then they tried to retrain us for our lives here, packing a whole childhood’s worth of adaptation into a couple of years. They were thorough, but they still missed a few things.” I chew on my bottom lip. “Like teaching us card games, for instance.”

  Ethan smiles at me and I smile back. He pumps his legs to get his swing going, and I pump mine. I think I would like to stay here on these swings together until midnight, possibly until the end of my life.

  “And they missed a very big thing, which was freedom. We had secrets to keep and scripts to follow, but no freedom at all. I don’t think Benjamin Franklin would have approved of that.”

  “No. Not much.”

  “It’s possible there might have been a little more idealism at first, but when they found how comfortable and safe and nice it is here, I think whatever they had of it was lost. They turned us into parasites. They rely on the future too much to want to change it.”

  “Even though …”

  “Even though.” I shrug. “For a long time I wanted to trust them. The community was my whole world—many of them I like and some I love. They all go along with what the leaders say, or at least they try. But I can’t anymore. They are as complacent, shortsighted and selfish as everybody else. And a lot more corrupt.”

  “God, that’s depressing.”

  “But the thing is, no one really believes in the future, do they? It’s like believing in your own death. You can’t do it. Nobody can. Not even us, who have seen it with our eyes.”

  Of course my mind pulls up the tiny, hateful line of print in tomorrow’s paper. Another death I don’t, can’t, won’t believe.

  He is quiet for a moment. “Does your mother still trust them?”

  “She doesn’t go against them, I can say that much. I don’t know if that’s out of consent or fear.”

  “Do you think she knew about your father?”

  “I don’t think so.” I close my eyes. “I’d really rather tell myself she didn’t.” I run my finger along the rusted chain. “My mother went through a lot, you know. They say suffering makes you stronger and wiser, but I’m worried that more often it makes you weaker and more scared. She wants us to be safe for another hour, another day. That’s what she cares about.”

  “That’s a sad thought. That’s probably what most people care about,” Ethan says.

  I stare at him and I want to cry. I realize how true it is. I’m weak and scared too. Because of that line of print in the newspaper, that’s what I care about too.

  “But you are different, because you know how much that hour costs,” he says solemnly. “And now I am different too. We know what happens if we do nothing.”

  I wipe my nose on my sleeve. I want to be different. But now I am afraid.

  He times our swings to catch my hand and holds it until we are swinging in unison. You get the feeling nobody ever denied him a playground.

  He expertly stops the swinging and pulls me up before I can get my balance. He is dragging me purposefully back in the direction of the car. “Until today,” he says. “That is what today is all about.”

  And I know he’s right. We have to keep going.

  “Wasn’t there anything cool? Wasn’t there anything great?” Ethan asks me somewhere between Asbury Park and Freehold.

  I want to give him everything he wants, tell him every
thing he ever wanted to know. He’s stifled his curiosity for a long time. I just wish the news were better.

  He casts a look at me. “You don’t have to tell me now. No hurry. I plan to be asking you questions for the next seventy to eighty years.”

  What an ache that gives me. I can barely swallow down the feeling. “I heard about some cool things,” I say, trying to loosen up my throat for the words to come through. “I saw a few of them, but mostly they weren’t working so well by the time I was born. Computing technology by the late teens and early twenties was totally released from boxes and screens, keyboards and mice. Images could be almost anywhere, on screens thin as paper or soft as a curtain or just projected into the air in front of you. You manipulated information and images directly with your hands, your eyes, even your mind in some cases.”

  Ethan nods keenly, happily. “You can see all that coming,” he says.

  “One cool thing was this app that makes you disappear. I never really saw one work, but I read about them in stories written in the twenties and thirties. I think they are perfecting the technology now—where sensors read the contours of your body as you move and project the background onto you so you blend in seamlessly with your surroundings.”

  “I’ve read about that,” Ethan says. He glances at me again. “It’s funny to hear you talk about the future as the past. Or strange, anyway.”

  “I know it is. I always have a hard time with tense.”

  “So what else?”

  “Well, there was a lot of R and D money and scientific genius spent on pills and simple surgeries to let people eat as much as they wanted without getting fat. And there were big advances in plastic surgery technology, so people could shape their bodies exactly how they wanted and look super young, even when they were, like, seventy. I think it got to be pretty creepy, to tell you the truth.”

  Ethan’s face is sober. “What a waste. And meanwhile the world is falling apart.”

  “Almost all of that craziness petered out by the end of the forties. And it’s really ironic, because the serious food shortages started in the fifties, and for the majority of people even in this country, being fat was no longer an option.”