The Here and Now

by Brashares, Ann

  “Because she destroyed the lives of good people, including my father. Because I am making the world a better place.”

  This is so extraordinary I almost fall over. There’s hint of irony in his voice, but a lot of sincerity too. It’s hard to listen to it, picturing Mona’s body torn apart on the floor of her office.

  “She’s a pivotal person, you know. Was. Will be. Would have been.” He coughs at the range of tenses. “She became chief engineer at my father’s energy company, and she turned around and gutted the place. She got the government regulators in there to tear it apart. She destroyed the company he built and put four and a half thousand of his good people out of work. My father hanged himself by his necktie in his office when he was fifty-five years old.”

  I can see the pain raw in his face. I feel the force driving his mission, horrible as it is.

  “And it doesn’t stop with that. The work she’s doing now destroys not just companies but entire industries in a matter of a few years: oil, gas, coal, the refineries, pipelines, tar shale and tar sands extraction, hydraulic fracturing. Do you know how many lives depend on those?”

  Watching him talk, I see that his eyes are alight, as though he didn’t just leave a woman dead in an office building a quarter of a mile away. I wonder if maybe the experiences he finds here aren’t quite real to him. Like the Monopoly-money version of life, where it doesn’t really matter how you spend it.

  “I met her when she was old, and by then she was a monster. Putting millions of people out of jobs, destroying the lifeblood of whole countries. Even her own people, the Egyptians. Not even a care. I am sorry to kill a young woman. Truly, I don’t like to do it. But it serves the greater good.”

  I can hear the cadence in his voice that is familiar to me and different from most people here. The softening of the “th” sound. He wasn’t trained out of it like we were. Sickening to recognize, he is one of us but not from the same place. He is talking about the future, I realize, but a different future from mine.

  “So you came back here to kill her?” Ethan asks evenly. “That’s why you came back?”

  “I am not the only one who wanted it.”

  “Did others come with you?”

  “No. I’m here alone.”

  Ethan squats down so he can look the man in the eye. “I want to tell you a story I learned recently from a man, a dear friend of mine. Are you ready to listen?”

  He grimaces like he’s not so ready to listen, but what choice does he have?

  “Sixty years from now, a sick, crazy old man is living in an institution not far from here,” Ethan begins. “He writes to my friend and begs him to come visit before he dies. My friend does and finds a raving, ranting lunatic trying to scratch out his own eyeballs. Nobody has listened to a word this man has said in twenty-five years, though he was once a hugely successful businessman. But my friend does listen, and this poor man pieces together an extraordinary story. He tells my friend he is a time traveler. His mind is gone—he’s lost all the dates and the places and names but one. He remembers this day: May 17, 2014. In fact, he is terrified he will forget it. He carves it on the walls, into the floor. He cuts it savagely into his own skin. He is haunted by this date, this number, because he says it was the day he destroyed the world. He said he did many thoughtless and reckless things in his travels, and he regrets all of them, but what he did on this day, he now understands was the critical stroke. And my friend understands that this man is sick in his heart and his head because of what he has done. Crazy as he is, the old man sees the crisis of the climate spreading, the disintegrating ice sheets and food shortages and massive starvation and anarchy. He recognizes there is no coming back from it. And he’s right, by the way, except that it’s far worse than he even knows. The blood plagues don’t sweep the world until several years after he is dead. He’s the only one who knows that the future he abandoned was a robust place compared to what he sees around him. Only he can compare the two, and he knows he is responsible for the devastation. There’s one thing this man says to my friend again and again. ‘Don’t let me do it. Please, help me. Kill me if you have to. Just don’t let me do it.’ ”

  Ethan stands up. He rubs his hands together. “You know, of course, that the sick, raving, self-mutilating bastard is you.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  We go to the police station to give statements that night. We keep it simple: Ethan’s an intern at the lab and a friend of Mona’s. We brought gifts for her birthday and got caught in the middle of the deadly shooting. Crime of passion? Well, maybe so. Ethan retrieved the gun, chased him down, and so on. I confess to throwing the gun. Ethan helps me draw a map so they can locate it. I explain I didn’t want any more killing. Needless to say, we leave out the stories about raving time travelers who destroy the planet.

  It’s late and we want to leave. The officers on duty look pretty eager to wrap it up themselves. They make an appointment for us to give more detailed statements to a detective the following afternoon.

  I am ready to burst by the time we get out of there. “That story you told Andrew Baltos. Did my father really tell you that?” I ask as we walk from the station to Ethan’s car.

  “No,” he says.

  I stop. “What?”

  “He told me a few pieces of it, you filled in some others, a bit of it I made up. But I didn’t put it all together until tonight in the woods when Baltos told us why he had done it. I didn’t know Baltos was a traveler until I got to the lab tonight, and it was all unfolding. I wish I had. Maybe then we could have succeeded rather than failed.”

  We walk past his car and keep going. I guess we both need to keep moving under the open sky for a while. We walk along dark empty sidewalks in silence, holding hands. It’s hard to absorb everything we’ve been through.

  I realize I just want to hold his hand until midnight comes to end this day. And that’s what we do. We end up finding another deserted playground and sitting on the top bars of a jungle gym when midnight passes. The clouds are thick. We can see the moon only sporadically.

  “Even though we knew, and even though we tried to stop it, it all happened anyway, just like the newspaper said.” Ethan sounds tired and defeated.

  “That’s not true. Not all of it,” I say.

  “Maybe the details are different. But the stuff that matters is the same.”

  I shake my head. “That’s not true either.” I tap my feet against the metal bar, wondering how to say it. “The newspaper said you were supposed to die.”

  He just looks at me. He doesn’t say anything.

  I take in two big lungfuls of air and let them out. I feel like every muscle in my body is knotted. “I discovered it early this morning, and I’ve been agonizing over it since.” I take the page folded up small out of my pocket and hand it to him. “I feel guilty, because I didn’t really come here tonight wanting to protect Mona Ghali. I wanted to protect you.”

  He studies it carefully, trying to make out the small words in the dim light cast by a playground lamp. “Holy shit.” Finally he nods. “Well, I’m glad that didn’t happen.”

  I actually laugh. It sounds sort of like a laugh, anyway. “Yeah, me too.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t tell me.”

  “Are you? I wasn’t sure.”

  “Yes, I am. However, if I was dead, I might feel differently.”

  Out of my mouth comes that laughlike sound again.

  He’s quiet for a minute. “So when you asked me what I wanted to do before I died, you weren’t kidding around?”

  I shake my head.

  “And still you didn’t give me what I wanted?” His outrage is a bit overdone.

  I shake my head repentantly. “There weren’t a lot of opportunities today, if you think back on it. Besides, I wasn’t going to let you die. It would have been a freebie.”

  He laughs. “I like freebies.”

  We fall into silence.

  “You know what else is good?” I say.

  �
��What?”

  “He didn’t get her research. I watched her upload everything onto that server you gave her. You have it now.”

  Ethan’s eyes open a bit wide. “That’s true. That’s very good. God, that’s a big responsibility. I’m going to go home and upload it to a dozen different places. I’m even going to print it all out on honest-to-God paper.”

  “Ben Kenobi would be proud.”

  Ethan looks happy with that.

  “You know what else is good?” I say.

  He smiles at me now. “What?”

  “He didn’t escape the country with some fake passport. He’s in the hospital and soon will be in police custody.”

  “Yes. I thought of that too. That is also very good.”

  The moon comes out from behind a cloud. It looks so close tonight. It gives us each a shadow on the pavement below.

  “How do you think it would have happened? I mean, without you here or your father?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” I say. “You were probably at the lab for some reason.” I shrug. “Without me, you’d have more time on your hands.”

  “True. And I’d need someone else to help me with my physics problems.”

  I snort. “Right.” I stretch out my fingers, studying their long shadows beneath us. “So you tried to help Mona Ghali, just like tonight. You somehow got in the way. Maybe you were just walking by and a bullet came through the window. Maybe you weren’t even in the building. Maybe Baltos was rushed and flustered, pulling out in his car after it happened, and he hit you a block away and never stopped. God, I don’t know.”

  He is nodding. “All possible.”

  “You know what I think?” I ask.

  “What?”

  “I think we broke it open. I really do. We’ve officially opened the gap between what the newspaper says and what is true. I think we’re going to get a new future now. It may not be perfect. It may even be worse. Though it’s hard to see how it could be worse with you in it. But I don’t need to read the newspaper tomorrow to know that the reality is going to be different.”

  Ethan puts his arm around my shoulders, and our two shadows become one nice blob. “Maybe we’ll find a traveler from this future who can tell us how it is,” he says.

  I look at the sky wistfully, hoping not. “Maybe nobody knows,” I say.

  We find an all-night diner in Tenafly and pick at eggs and toast under a harsh light. I think of Ethan’s all-he-could-eat buffet that morning. It’s been a really long day.

  It’s tough to fathom doing much in the way of sleeping, between the night we’ve had and the morning we are planning. We end up parking in the lot of a Best Buy. We hold on to each other in the backseat like we’re the only two people left.

  “Hey, Ethan?” How I love saying his name.

  “Yeah.”

  “I feel bad not giving you the thing you said you wanted if you knew you were going to die.”

  He laughs and holds me a little tighter. “As you should.”

  “So even though you’re not going to die, I think maybe we should do it anyway. Do you?”

  He laughs again. “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. I think you are right about the lies. I think the leaders just want to keep us away from happiness.”

  “Those are words straight to my heart, Henny.”

  “I mean, I’m not saying we should do it now. Not, like, this minute. It wouldn’t be right. But soon. We both need to go home and get our lives sorted out. But maybe Friday?” I know this is wishful thinking. I don’t know what kind of life I’m going back to, but I don’t care. I need something to hold on to. “We could meet somewhere remote and beautiful.”

  “Haverstraw Creek?”

  “Maybe. Yes. I’ll bring a picnic.”

  “Can we camp out all night?” He sounds excited. “I’ll bring a tent and two sleeping bags.” He pauses. “Maybe one sleeping bag.”

  “I don’t know about all night, but some of it. We’ll see.”

  He puts his head back down on the seat. He snuggles in a little closer. “How am I going to make it until Friday?” he asks before he falls asleep.

  I feel his body against mine, the little twitches as he goes over to sleep. It’s a matter of great trust, I think, to be able to fall asleep in a person’s arms.

  I smell the cloth upholstery under my head. I can’t say the car is all that comfortable, and it’s certainly not beautiful, but of all the places I’ve ever slept in my life, the back of Ethan’s neighbor’s car with Ethan is my favorite one.

  I call my mother in the early morning and ask her to meet us at Mr. Robert’s office at nine. It’s going to be a doozy.

  I tell her I’m okay. I hope she’s okay. I don’t want to talk more than that.

  On the way we pick up a newspaper. The New York Times dated Sunday, May 18, 2014. “Don’t we already have one of those?” Ethan jokes.

  We pass it back and forth a couple of times. Neither of us wants to look at it.

  Why? I don’t know. Ethan folds it up and puts it in his duffel bag. It seems to me it would be like reading the detailed autopsy report for someone you knew. It’s important that it’s there, maybe, in case you need it. But you don’t want to read it.

  TWENTY-TWO

  We knock on the door of Mr. Robert’s office at nine sharp. My mom is already there. I can’t describe the looks we get walking in.

  I introduce Ethan to my mom, though she’s met him before. She looks as though she’s been crying.

  “I’m sorry, Molly,” I say in a low voice to her. “I’m sorry for putting you through all this.”

  “And this is Mr. Robert,” I say to Ethan. Honestly, Mr. Robert looks like he is in the process of swallowing his tongue.

  “Robert. Just Robert,” he mutters. His throat is expanding like a bullfrog’s. He tugs at his collar. “It’s good to meet you, uh, Ethan,” he says. “And now I’d like to ask you to leave and let us talk to Prenna privately.”

  “I’d like to stay,” Ethan says. He doesn’t sound threatening or bratty. He sounds immovable.

  Mr. Robert is staring deadly eye beams at me. “Prenna.” He clears his throat. “I think the people who care most about you, like your mother and your friend Katherine Wand, would really appreciate it if you would be reasonable and speak to us privately.”

  I glance at my mother. I can’t read her face. At least she appears to be unharmed.

  “You’ve really made life difficult for them, and you’ll only make it worse,” he adds, sympathetic as can be.

  I am not putting up with his bullshit. For one thing, it just takes too long. “Let’s sit down,” I say, and Ethan and I do. “We are going to talk openly and honestly, the four of us, and it’s going to make you very uncomfortable. But hopefully, you’ll get used to it.”

  “Prenna.” It’s that warning tone I have gotten from Mr. Robert roughly one million times.

  “Let’s start with this,” I say. “Ethan knows who we are. No use keeping secrets at this point.”

  “Prenna.” More tongue swallowing from Mr. Robert. “You certainly want to be careful,” he hisses.

  I look at him. “No, I don’t.”

  “Prenna, are you sure—” My mother looks desperately ill at ease.

  “Ethan doesn’t know about us because I told him,” I continue. “Ethan knows because he was there at the river in April 2010 when we arrived here. He saw the strange atmosphere at the end of the time path. He saw me, though I have no memory of it. He gave me the New York Giants sweatshirt. Remember? That you gave me such a hard time about?”

  I stare at Mr. Robert. “Won’t you sit down?” I pick up the bowl of jelly beans from the table. “Jelly bean?”

  Neither of them says anything. I was sort of counting on this. Once I get going, Mr. Robert won’t want to risk saying anything in front of Ethan that might make it sound like he is accepting my premise. Any premise. And my mother will follow his lead. I think this is good because it will speed thi
ngs up.

  “But that’s not what I’m here to talk about,” I say. At last Mr. Robert sits in his interrogation chair and my mother follows, sitting around the corner of the sectional sofa. “I am here to tell you, Mr. Robert, that you have to leave me alone. You must let Katherine come home and leave her alone. You must leave my mother alone. Even if they don’t demand it, I do.”

  “Really. Is that so?” he sputters, red faced.

  “Yes, it is. I’m not afraid of you, and I’m not afraid of the rules. At least, I’m not afraid of breaking the rules that matter. The future you are clinging to—the place we came from—wasn’t created by the regular order of things. It was created by a traveler—the famous Traveler One. He does exist. We’ve met him. And he may or may not have handed down our rules, but if he did, it was only after he broke every single one of them.”

  Silence. My mother’s face has opened in surprise.

  “Ethan and I aren’t trying to disrupt the sequence of time; we’re trying to fix it.”

  “Prenna, how do you know this?”

  Mr. Robert glares at my mother for this, but I am so relieved.

  “A man named Andrew Baltos arrived here from an earlier point in the future. I don’t know exactly when or how, but I am certain of it. I also know his version of the future was different and a lot less dire than ours, and I believe the difference comes from the things he has done while he’s been here.”

  Mr. Robert looks truly astonished. I wonder if he or the other counselors know any of this.

  I try as simply and as clearly as I can to summarize everything that happened on May 17, 2014. I talk mostly to my mother, because I can feel that she is listening.

  “It’s the right thing to protect time’s natural sequence,” I say to them, to her. “We were right to try. But now that we know it’s been twisted and mistreated by a traveler like us, I think it’s right to try to fix it and contain the damage. We didn’t save Mona, but we saved her research and we’ve stopped Baltos, at least for the time.” I glance at Ethan. I don’t tell them about Ethan, and I leave Poppy’s part out too. It just seems too much for now. “I think we did enough to open things up. I think we’re on a different course. At least, I really hope we are. Even you have to agree, Mr. Robert, there’s no point in propping up a future that’s an absolute trauma, if we’re honest about it. We might as well just let go of it and work for a better one, you know?”