The Power of Un

by Nancy Etchemendy

  “I know because the unner works. I’ve already lived these few seconds. I’m living them over again, right now, because I’ve already used the unner, and it works, cross my heart and hope to die. You’ve got to believe me.” I grabbed his sleeve, cocked an ear toward the tree, and held my breath, hoping to high heaven that I hadn’t accidentally done some little thing during the past thirty seconds that would keep the bird from singing this time.

  Too tweet dee tweet, sang the bird.

  After a beat or two of stunned silence, Ash wrinkled his nose and said, “How’d you do that?”

  “I didn’t do it. I mean, I didn’t make it happen. I just knew it was going to happen, because I’ve already lived it. Three times now, as a matter of fact.”

  He pressed his lips into a line, still not really convinced. I could see he was trying to decide whether I was telling the truth or just messing with him.

  “O.K.,” he said slowly. “Prove it. Tell me what’s going to happen next.”

  I sighed and closed my eyes, then opened them again. This was beginning to feel like pushing a car uphill. “I can’t,” I said. Which, unfortunately, was true. The thirty-five seconds I’d unned were over. I was living life just like everybody else again, uncertain what might happen in the next instant.

  A tide of angry red crept up Ash’s neck into his cheeks. “Oh, right,” he snapped. “You can’t? Pretty convenient, isn’t it? You know, this stinks, Gib. You tell me to trust you, then you jerk me around and lie to me. I don’t even know why. Is this your idea of fun? Because if it is, you sure picked a stupid time for it.”

  My heart thumped against my ribs. Who could blame Ash for reacting like this? My story would have seemed lame to anyone for whom time had been moving along in its usual orderly path. There was only one way to convince him.

  I held the unner out. “Here,” I said. “Take it. Try it yourself.”

  He glared at me. Heat flickered in his eyes like candle flames. I could see I’d hurt him, and it made me feel bad inside, even though I hadn’t meant to do it. After a long moment, he took the unner from my hand without a word.

  Only Ash knows what I did next in some chain of events that he later unned. From my point of view, it was all very simple, though surprising. Suddenly, Ash wasn’t mad anymore. He looked at me, grinning as if he’d just gotten the birthday present of his dreams. His hands shook as he clutched the unner.

  “It works! I can’t believe it! It works!”

  I whuffed out a gigantic sigh of relief. “What happened? Tell me!”

  Ash looked confused for a second or two, then smiled again and exclaimed, “Oh yeah! You don’t remember, because it hasn’t happened! Now I totally get it.” Then he told me how I’d given him the unner and shown him how to use it; how the two of us had decided how much time to punch in—nine seconds; how he’d hit the big red button, still convinced I was trying to make a fool out of him. Then the world seemed to stop. And when it started again, I was back in the middle of handing him the unner and saying, Here, take it. Try it yourself. That’s when he knew at last that I was telling the truth.

  One thing seemed clear. The only person who could remember what was undone was the person who punched the ORDER button. For everyone else, it was as if the unned time had simply never happened at all.

  Ash handed the unner back to me. “What now?” he said. “Are you going to do it? I mean, un everything that’s happened since … you know?”

  “Since just before the accident? Yeah. I don’t think there’s any other way to fix it.”

  Ash pushed air out softly between his lips. It was almost a whistle but not quite. “Scary,” he said.

  I nodded. “But then, so’s living with Roxy’s accident for the rest of my life.”

  Ash nodded in return. “Stinks,” he said. “A bad choice or a worse choice.”

  I stared at the unner in all its shabby glory. I thought about the wild-haired, limping old man. I thought about the smell of lightning, about how very weird time is and how little we really know about it.

  I’d never again be able to look at time as a straight line with an arrow at one end. What I saw instead was a maze more tangled than the roots of an ancient tree—a zillion possible wiggly paths taking off from every single thing I’d ever done in the past or might ever do in the future. I knew if I kept thinking about it I’d probably never be brave enough to use the unner again, and I might go crazy besides.

  I wondered why the old guy had gone to the trouble of finding me, Gib Finney, and giving me—of all the millions of people who messed up in any day, in any hour even—a chance to correct my mistake. Maybe in some mysterious way, Roxy’s accident was even more important than it felt. Which was just one more reason to follow my heart and use the unner, no matter how scary it seemed.

  So I said, “I guess it’s better than no choice at all.” And I got down to business. I found a twig, and I smoothed a spot on the ground where I could write with it. Then I began trying to figure out exactly how long ago the accident had happened.

  I’d forgotten to put on my watch when I got up, but Ash was wearing his. It was 9:15 A.M. Neither he nor I knew for sure what time it was when Roxy and the truck’s bumper had had their fateful meeting. But we knew we’d started for the carnival around 7:30.

  Ash ran his fingers through his hair absently and squatted down beside me so he could see my dirt scribbles. “I remember it was about 9:15 when the ambulance left the carnival,” he said.

  “So the accident happened between 7:30 and 9:15 last night,” I replied, chewing at the inside of my cheek. “If we said 8:30, would that be safe?”

  Ash squinted at nothing. “Eight might be safer.”

  “So how long has it been since 8:00 last night?” I felt a little panicky. I hate word problems, and this was the most awesome word problem of all time.

  “I dunno. Count backward?” said Ash, looking like he wasn’t too sure himself. “Let’s see, 8:15 A.M., 7:15 A.M….”

  “Wait,” I said. “Twelve hours ago would be 9:15 last night. So 8:15 would have been thirteen hours, and 8:00 would have been thirteen hours and fifteen minutes.”

  Suddenly we heard someone calling from the direction of the street. “Gi-i-i-b! Gib, where are you?” My mom!

  “Hurry up!” said Ash.

  I turned on the unner and pressed the HMODE button, but it didn’t light up. “What the! …” I cried. Nothing happened when I pressed any of the number keys.

  “Hurry!” Ash said again. “Try MMODE!”

  “All right, already!” Like I really needed him to remind me I didn’t have much time. It wasn’t helping me think.

  The MMODE light came on when I pressed it. But minutes … how many minutes had passed since the accident? Sixty minutes in an hour. I scratched rapidly in the dirt. Sixty times thirteen plus fifteen …

  “Gi-i-i-b!” came Mom’s voice again, closer this time.

  A trickle of sweat ran into my eyes. I blinked hard. What was six times three? I couldn’t remember. Sixty times thirteen, plus fifteen … My stick raised little poofs of dust as I worked. One thousand four hundred twenty-one? Could that be right? I wished I’d had time to check my work, then thought, Well, it’s not such a huge problem. If I make a mistake, I can just use the unner to do it over again. So I keyed in 1421, the largest number we’d tried yet.

  “Wish me luck,” I said to Ash.

  “That looks weird,” he said. “Is the math right?”

  But by the time he finished asking, I’d already hit ORDER. Just before the world slid away, I glimpsed the mangy mutt watching us from among the trees, its mouth in a crazy grin, its tail slapping the ground.

  8

  WADING THROUGH TIME

  All right. I admit it. Math isn’t my best subject. Everybody, including my teachers, keeps telling me I’d be great if I’d just be more careful. I understand all the ideas—I even think some of them are fun. It’s like math is the most complicated puzzle ever invented—full of p
atterns and surprises and strange little things to discover. All the same, my math grades aren’t so hot. I’m always getting the wrong answers because I forget to carry a one, or I get distracted and say eight times seven is forty-two instead of fifty-six. I’m even worse when I’m under pressure. And I was definitely under pressure.

  I kept my eyes closed after I punched the red button this time, waiting for the smell of popcorn and the noise of the rides before I opened them again. Imagine my shock when I heard coughs and rustling papers instead, as a man’s voice intoned, “You may dunk the skins in water, pour ammonia onto them from this bottle, expose them to heat and moving air from the blow-dryer, squeeze lemon juice onto them, or devise an experiment of your own. All right now, let’s get started.”

  I opened my eyes and found myself seated in the school science lab, staring at Mr. Maynard. I glanced to my right, and there was Lorraine Frogner at my elbow, scribbling stuff in a notebook as fast as she could. The sun was shining through the windows as bright as could be, and the clock on the wall said 9:34. I had on the T-shirt I’d worn Friday—olive green with a picture of a werewolf—and my watch, which I knew I’d left at home, was on my wrist. My hands were completely empty. The unner was nowhere to be seen.

  I patted the pockets of my jeans. Nothing. I scooted my stool back and peered under the lab table. Nothing there except my red backpack and Rainy’s turquoise one. I grabbed mine, tugged open the zipper, and began to rummage through it. I was breathing hard and starting to sweat. Where could the unner be? Something had gone terribly wrong.

  “I think we should do the lemon juice,” said Rainy. “I hate the way ammonia smells.” She laid down her pen and gave me a look. “Uh … is everything all right?”

  Before I could consider the consequences, I found myself blurting in an angry voice, “Do I look like everything’s all right?”

  Rainy leaned back and curled her lip. “Sheesh, I’m sorry I asked.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to make my heart slow down to something resembling normal speed. Panicking never helped anybody, I told myself. Think. What’s going on here?

  If I was back in science class, then I’d unned a lot more time than I’d planned. But how much more?

  “What’s one thousand four hundred twenty-one divided by sixty?” I asked. My tongue made sticky noises because my mouth was so dry.

  “Oh right, just off the top of my head?” said Rainy.

  I opened my eyes, looked hard at her, and said, “I’m serious.”

  She frowned, picked up her pen again, and scratched a few figures in the margin of her notebook. “Twenty-three, with a remainder of forty-one.”

  So that was it. Somehow I’d messed up the math and ended up unning twenty-three hours and forty-one minutes instead of the twelve or thirteen hours I’d expected. I was back in the middle of Friday morning, about to relive the worst day of my life in its entirety. Which explained why I didn’t have the unner. The moment in which I currently found myself had happened before Rainy would phone to say she was sick, before I would run into the woods, and before I would meet the old man. I didn’t have the unner because the old man wouldn’t be giving it to me until later that afternoon.

  I scratched absently at the tip of my nose, where I expected to feel the fresh scab from the scrape I’d gotten when I tripped and lost the unner in the woods. But my nose was completely smooth. The thought of knowing, among other things, that I was going to fall down and hurt myself later that day made me woozy.

  “Cripes,” I muttered, wishing I could lie down someplace. “Cripes!”

  “What is wrong with you?” asked Rainy.

  “Uh …” I said. “Uh …” A new thought had left me completely paralyzed: what if I accidentally said or did something different this time—something that changed the chain of events enough so the old man didn’t show up that afternoon? For all I knew, I’d already messed things up completely just by asking Rainy to do long division for me. I read a story once in which a time traveler accidentally changed the whole future just by killing a butterfly. But I didn’t want to change the whole future. I just wanted to save Roxy. And, if possible, I also wanted to get the unner again.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” I said, breathing carefully.

  “Huh,” said Rainy, unconvinced. “Whatever. So, shall we put some lemon juice on our potato skins?”

  “Lemon juice!” I yelped. “No! No! We can’t!”

  Rainy squinched her face up and stared at me as if I’d developed a rash of green spots.

  Hastily I added, “I mean, we can, but let’s not.” I strained to remember the exact words I’d used yesterday … or what felt like yesterday. “Everybody’s going to do lemon juice. Let’s do something original like put salt on ours.”

  “Salt?” Rainy frowned. “I dunno. Where would we get salt?”

  I pointed. “There’s a box on the shelf. I’ll go get it.” I stood up and walked across the room. Somehow I knew I was doing it exactly the way I’d done it the time before. I could feel a faint force, like a wheel wanting to stay in a groove or the pull of a magnet, that made doing the same things over again just a little easier than changing them. Maybe if I stopped thinking so hard and did what felt easiest, I’d be O.K.

  Sometimes you get a feeling, like everything that’s happening has happened before. Dad told me one time that there’s a French term for it; d$eAj$aG vu, which means “seen before.” Boy, did I ever have d$eAj$aG vu now. For the next little while, I let events take place by themselves. I felt almost as if I were hovering somewhere behind my own right shoulder, observing as things I knew would happen actually happened. First I watched myself convince Rainy the salt would be better than the lemon juice. Then I watched myself convince her we ought to spread the skins out instead of piling them up. Then I listened to myself with growing discomfort as I tried to talk her into salting them heavily instead of lightly.

  I knew what was coming. We were about to have a fight, and Rainy would end up pouring the whole box of salt in my lap. Then I thought if I changed one thing just a little bit, I might be able to avoid the anger and frustration of being called selfish in front of everybody—and having to clean up the salty mess from under the table. Would that be so bad?

  Part of me said yes, it would be bad. Possibly worse than bad. Immoral. What if there was some kind of Master Plan, and I messed it all up? Did I have the right to do something that might change the future of everybody else in the world? I’d be doing it entirely to make my own life easier, and I wasn’t asking anybody else what they wanted. It didn’t feel right.

  But a different part of me—the most persuasive part, as it turned out—thought it was a great idea not to relive this particularly embarrassing scene. So what if Rainy felt a little kinder toward me? I couldn’t see how that would change anything major in the long run. Not in a bad way, at least. After all, wasn’t this exactly the kind of thing the unner was meant for? If I wasn’t supposed to change anything, why had the old man given me the unner in the first place?

  So when the time came for me to say, “Come on. If it gets messy, I’ll clean it up,” I said something else instead. “O.K., no big deal. Put the salt on whatever way you want.”

  Rainy smiled and said, “O.K.”

  After that, everything was spookily different for a while, and I began to wonder if I’d made a gigantic mistake. True, Rainy and I didn’t fight. But that also meant we did things we hadn’t done before. Instead of crawling around under the table with the whisk broom and the dustpan, we actually finished our experiment and wrote up the results in our notebooks. And those results were boring, just as I’d originally feared—there wasn’t enough salt to draw the water out, so nothing much happened.

  Toward the end of the period, things started to get familiar again. The bell rang. We picked up our backpacks and headed down the hall to other classes. I met up with Ash, who had no idea the unner existed. We talked about our carnival plans and tried to make each other bump into walls as
we walked to gym.

  Things went exactly as they had before. I grinned and felt muscles in my arms and shoulders loosen that I hadn’t even realized were tight. I’d used the Power of Un to rescue myself from one of the worst parts of the day, and still I was in a chain of known events, and everything was going along just fine. Maybe time was like a pool of water: when you disturb it, ripples go out from the place you touched—strong in the center, but getting fainter and fainter, till finally you can’t see them anymore.

  I hoped I was right. But I couldn’t be sure. So I made a pact with myself not to change things carelessly. Making changes felt bad, like cheating. I also didn’t want to get lost and find myself in a future even worse than the one I knew was coming. It seemed strange to think such a thing, because after all, what could be worse than Roxy getting hit by a truck? But I could imagine worse possibilities: both of us getting hit by a truck, or Mom and Dad getting hit by a truck, or an earthquake, or our house burning down with all of us in it.

  The trouble is, as the hours passed and things continued to happen just as I remembered, I got kind of overconfident. All those awful scenarios faded into the background until they seemed so overblown and unlikely that I stopped worrying about them. Probably I’d already done a bunch of stuff differently without even realizing it, and so far there were no problems at all. How much could it hurt if I changed a few tiny things on purpose?

  When I went through the lunch line, I asked for macaroni and cheese, because I remembered that the potatoes and gravy had tasted putrid. It didn’t make one speck of difference that I could see, except that I liked my lunch better. Feeling pleased with myself, I gave in to temptation and made another small change later, on the playground. I stepped out of the way instead of getting whapped in the stomach by a stray dodge ball.

  Ash said, “Whoa! That was great! How’d you see it coming?”

  I grinned and said, “I dunno. Instinct, I guess.”

  Then things started to get weird. Instead of bouncing off my middle and scudding back toward the kid who threw it, the dodge ball sped toward an open gate.