Out of Time

by Deborah Truscott

  Days that slid by too quickly.

  I remember certain ordinary moments with perfect clarity. Small things, like the afternoon I washed strawberries at the kitchen sink and saw, from the corner of my eye, Robert’s hand angling toward the bowl. “Thief,” I said, marveling suddenly at how tan we had become, so tan our hands were brown with sun.

  And another moment: Robert on the deck, looking out to sea, his head turning at the sound of my footfall. I saw the breeze lift his hair, saw his smile, felt his lips on my throat, his hands at my back. I remember that I leaned against his chest, heart to heart. His hands lifted, touched me.

  Even now when I close my eyes I see him turn, see the breeze in his hair. His smile warms my heart. In my mind it all plays in slow motion, over and over.

  *****

  I awoke late that afternoon to the sound of a toilet flushing. And then it flushed again. Actually, I don’t think I noticed it much the first few times it flushed, but by the fourth or fifth time it got my attention.

  “Robert?” I called out.

  In answer, the toilet flushed once more.

  I sat up in bed and frowned. The next time the toilet flushed I followed the sound down the hall to the bathroom and peered in the opened door. The top of the toilet tank had been lifted off and propped against the wall. Meanwhile, Robert leaned over the open tank, one hand on the handle, the other inside the tank. He must have lifted the internal mechanism (or whatever) because the john flushed again without its handle being depressed.

  “Robert?”

  Startled, he looked up. “Kitty!” he called out happily. “Come see how this works.”

  “I know how it works.”

  “Nonsense. You never have the least idea how the gadgets of your century operate. Come, let me show you.”

  So I stood in the bathroom for nearly fifteen minutes while Robert explained to me the mysteries of flush toilets. I didn’t give a damn how toilets worked, but I discovered I liked very much having him explain it to me.

  “It would never cut off properly,” Robert said, and I remembered how we always had to jiggle the handle to stop the water running. “So I thought I’d see what I could do to fix it.”

  “Is it fixed?” I asked him dubiously.

  “Of course it’s fixed,” he said indignantly. “See?” And then he flushed it one more time, just to show me.

  I smiled as if he had given me the Hope Diamond. “Men are so easily entertained,” I told him.

  “Ungrateful woman,” he huffed, then cocked his head at me. “Do you realize,” he remarked suddenly, “we are still not provisioned.”

  He was referring to the grocery store, which we never got to. “We forgot, didn’t we?” I asked in some surprise.

  “We’ve been … distracted, Sweeting.” He smiled at me. “By a goodly number of things.”

  “I know a place in Buxton that serves good beef,” I said slowly. “If you promise not to talk about plumbing, we could try it.”

  Although I had avoided frequenting stores and restaurants so close to home during the past week (which was why we drove fifteen miles for a hamburger the day before), I was becoming less concerned about running into Lila’s friends. There were two reasons for this. One was that, according to Julie, Lila already suspected me of being involved with a man, and the other was that, starting Sunday, Robert would become my mother’s houseguest for an indefinite period of time. So when Robert promised not to talk about toilet tanks and cut-off valves, we threw caution to the wind and made the short drive to Sculley’s, where the illumination was too dark to see the decor and the steaks were served on sizzling platters.

  And, as far as we could tell, no one followed us.

  Robert may not have liked modern vegetables, but he was enthusiastic about modern meat, which, he said, was a good deal fresher and more tender than anything he was used to. I watched him as he happily devoured his Porterhouse, fork held tines down and forearms on the table European-style, and resisted the urge to tell him about all the carcinogenic hormones that lurked in twenty-first century beef.

  He looked up and saw me watching him. “Eat,” he said.

  “I am.”

  “Not much.”

  “Beef isn’t particularly good for you,” I said thinking of fat and chemicals.

  “Nonsense. England’s might was built on beef.”

  “Mutton,” I corrected him. “England’s might was built on—”

  Robert waved his fork impatiently, dismissing me. “How are we going to pay for this?” he asked. I understood that this was an academic question pertaining to commerce in the modern world.

  “Credit card,” I said. Suddenly, recalling my sorting operation earlier that day, I had a troubling thought. Did I put my card back in my wallet? I fumbled through my purse until I found it. In the process one of the children’s baby pictures, which I shamelessly keep in my wallet, slipped out of its plastic sleeve and landed on the table.

  Robert reached over and picked the picture up. “Sammy,” he said, offering an educated guess. Robert had seen numerous pictures of the children. Lila, as I might have mentioned, hung them by the dozens all over the cottage walls.

  “Yes,” I beamed. “He’s less than two days old there. You can already see that his hair is the color of mine. And he has my cheekbones, don’t you think?” I paused in happy reverie. “It’s actually a pretty good photo, considering he had just been circumcised.”

  “Circumcised?” Astounded, Robert raised his eyes from the picture to my face. “Why on earth was the child circumcised?”

  Uh-oh.

  “We haven’t discussed this, have we?” I said aloud.

  “No, Kathleen,” Robert said with deceptive calm. “I’m quite sure we haven’t. I think I would remember if we had.”

  “It should have been on our, um, curriculum, “ I said apologetically. “I mean, it’s probably something you should be aware of since most men your age are circumcised and, um, you’re, ah, not.”

  “You’re quite right, Kathleen,” Robert agreed, his voice rising. “I am not circumcised. How especially good of you to notice!”

  Even in the gloomy lighting I could see heads turn toward us with interest. “Shush,” I hissed. Beneath the table I launched my foot in the direction of Robert’s shin.

  For a moment we stared at each other. Then, in a great show of behaving reasonably, Robert rested his elbows on the table and laced his fingers under his chin. “Well, Kathleen,” he began quietly. “Perhaps you’d like to explain this intriguing little custom to me now, since we seemed to have overlooked it in the schoolroom.”

  “Of course,” I said formally. “I’d be happy to. Circumcision is simply the surgical removal of the—”

  “I know what it is, damn it. I simply fail to see why Christian people of British descent would chose to do this to their infant boys!”

  “For reasons of health.”

  “Health?”

  “Shush,” I said again, my foot making another swipe at his shin. I went on to explain that the procedure (for Christians, anyway) is strictly a medical one, that it was almost always performed on newborns, and that (theoretically) it was painless to the infant who cried, Cameron once assured me, not because of the procedure but because for some inexplicable reason babies hate to be unwrapped from their blankets and tied spread eagle on cold metal surgical tables.

  Gradually, Robert appeared a little less touchy and we no longer seemed to interest our fellow diners. “Is there any thing else we’ve left off our study guide?” he asked finally. His voice was so low I had to lean toward him to hear.

  “Thousands of things,” I purred.

  “Hmmm. I expect so. Things like … the origin of the universe.”

  This was not what I expected him to say.

  “In all our study of the physics of time,” he went on, “we missed that.”

  “Apparently you stumbled over it someplace.”

  “Newsweek,” he said, like he had been rea
ding the magazine all his life. “In an article about the expanding universe with its vast distances and billions of galaxies which you can see with giant telescopes aimed at the heavens. And the further you see into the universe, the further you see back in time. I thought that last bit was particularly interesting, considering my especial circumstances.”

  “Since you’ve read that article,” I ventured, “I imagine you know more about the subject than I do.”

  Robert looked at me carefully. “The article also said that a speck smaller than an atom may have given rise to all matter. To everything in the universe. To the universe itself.”

  I nodded. “I’ve heard that too,” I said.

  “I’ve learned so much since I came here,” he said slowly. “So many things I never imagined. But I know it’s only a tiny fraction of what mankind now knows, of things you take for granted. Sometimes I think it’s only…”

  “The tip of the iceberg?” I suggested.

  He smiled suddenly, his face brightening with interest. “How thrilling,” he said, reaching across the table for my hand, “to imagine how much there is to know. To explore. I simply cannot tell you.”

  He didn’t have to. Despite the mind-numbing explanations I was obliged to offer on everything from telecommunications to can openers, Robert made the mundane seem fresh and new and alive. Even the most ordinary thing — a bicycle, a pencil sharpener — was in his eyes a new toy, full of promise. And his fascination was infectious.

  “ ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio’, ” I said, pretty sure I was quoting Hamlet.

  “ ‘Than are dreamt of in your philosophy’, ” Robert quoted back at me. “And in the same scene, as I recall, there’s a line that goes, ‘The time is out of joint, oh cursed sprite, that I was ever born to set it right.’ How wonderfully, appropriate, don’t you think?”

  I smiled at him and in response I felt his fingers tighten gently around mine. Then he frowned, and I could almost see a new thought forming in his head.

  “Robert?”

  He turned my hand over, palm up, and uncurled my fingers, tilting them toward the single candle that stood in the center of our table so he could peer at their tips in the light of the flame.

  “Robert?” I asked again. It always worried me when he started doing stuff like this in public. If he was going to spout off on how remarkable fingertips were, I’d prefer he do it at home. That way, he wouldn’t feel obligated to explain to anyone that finger-ogling was an obscure African custom.

  “Remember what you told me about fingerprints?” Robert asked musingly.

  “Fingerprints?“ I repeated dubiously. “Yes, but what—”

  “Well, I was just thinking about that. About how fingerprints could trigger our trap door. Not fingerprints precisely, but some sort of individual “signature” that would fit like a key into a lock.” He looked up at me, then, his forehead creased. “Like the speed at which our molecules move.”

  “Excuse me?” His voice was low and thoughtful, but it wasn’t that I couldn’t hear him. It was that I couldn’t understand him.

  “Don’t molecules move at various speed?” he asked. “I seem to remember reading that at some point in the last few days.”

  I thought of ice and boiling water. Was the only difference between the two the speed of their molecules?

  “I think that’s right,” I said, but I felt compelled to add: “In some objects under some circumstances, anyway.”

  “But among humans … couldn’t my molecules move faster or slower than yours?”

  I’ve always heard that humans are ninety percent water, and water was the one item I was pretty sure had moving molecules.

  “It’s possible,” I told him. “Maybe. What’s your point?”

  “Do you remember,” he asked softly, still holding my hand in his, “when we were crawling around the garden shed looking for a way back? Do you remember how worried I was that you’d … fall through?”

  “You grabbed me and almost literally carried me out.”

  “Yes, I did, didn’t I? Well, I’m pretty sure I needn’t have worried. I don’t think the door would open for you. I think it only opens for me, that it “reads” something about me, something that serves as a key, whether it’s molecular speed or something else—”

  “But it didn’t open. Only that first time when you fell through to this side—”

  “Yes, I know that.” He shot me an impatient look. “It must require a special combination of events. A certain sequence of data, to put it in the jargon of your century, like a specific barometric pressure or the phase of the moon or maybe a precise alignment of planets that occurs for only fifteen minutes every other century. We’ll never know exactly what. But I am certain I’m the triggering element. I don’t think anyone else can fall through that door unless they follow me.”

  I looked at him, wide-eyed, thinking it makes sense, what he’s saying. And then Robert drew my fingers to his lips.

  “What I would have missed,” he said quietly, “had I tumbled back.”

  Chapter 34

  Before we left Sculley’s that night, we feasted on Mississippi Mud pie while Robert lamented our modern menu of sweets.

  “Everything is chocolate,” he said.

  I am a profound lover of chocolate. “What else is there?” I asked.

  “Ginger bread,” he said. “Custards, trifle, syllabub.”

  “Do they have chocolate in them?”

  “You need to broaden your epicurean horizons, Kathleen. There is more to life than chocolate.”

  We argued about this all the way home. By the time we went up to bed, Robert was making a regular culinary trip down memory lane. “And what about roast duck with fruit stuffing?” he asked plaintively. “I have yet to see that on a modern bill of fare—”

  “Menu—”

  “Or a nice saddle of lamb or mutton, or lamb pie with oysters, or Yorkshire pudding—”

  “You know, I can actually make Yorkshire pudding—”

  “Or perhaps a dish of beef…”

  Robert was in the middle of one of his tedious flaky Englishman acts, which, I regret to say, was not an act at all. “Or even,” he went on annoyingly, “roast suckling pig…”

  I turned off the light before he could get to steak and kidney pie and other revolting English delicacies. But it didn’t work. “Steak and kidney pie,” he recited in the darkness.

  “That, Robert, has survived the centuries for some obscure reason known only to Englishmen, but no self-respecting American will eat it.”

  He chuckled, and eventually we slipped into the kind of heavy sleep inspired by beef and Mississippi Mud. Or I did, at any rate, until I was awaken by Robert’s restless movements. For several moments he turned and twisted in his sleep, muttering indistinctly. I stroked his shoulder until he settled down and after awhile I went back to sleep myself.

  I don’t know how much time passed. But suddenly I sensed a violent thrust beside me, a kind of striking out, and I heard Robert shouting, “No!”

  My heart slammed into my chest and I shot out my hand, switching on the lamp by the bed. I was terrified at what I’d see (an axe murderer? CIA agents? the elusive doppelganger, perhaps?), but all I saw was Robert sitting up in bed, eyes wide and pupils very black.

  “What is it?” I hissed.

  “Kitty,” he said. There was relief in his voice, as if he hadn’t expected to see me there beside him, and he reached out to grasp my hand.

  “What was it?” I asked again.

  “A dream. That’s all, Sweeting. A dream.”

  My gut twisted and something cold settled around my heart. “A dream or a memory?” I asked him.

  “Ssh. A dream. ‘Tis nothing more.”

  I stared at him. “A memory,” I told him flatly.

  For a moment he didn’t answer. Then he eased back down against the pillows, drawing me with him. “Lie back down beside me, Kitty, and I will tell you.”

  I wa
ited, my head cradled in the hollow of his shoulder, and almost dozed.

  “This is the second time, or maybe the third, that a dream has triggered a memory,” Robert remarked conversationally, startling me into wakefulness.

  “Tell me the dream,” I said.

  “I don’t know if I can. A convoluted ride along a twisting road, I think. I kept dropping something, dismounting to pick it up and then dropping it again. Finally I realized it was a piece of paper, but I didn’t want to read it. And then I did.”

  “What did it say?”

  “That Bourgoyne had surrendered at Sarasota.”

  “Well, he did,” I said.

  “Of course he did. I know that. We heard about it a day or two before our ride out the Pike. But in my dream I was only at that moment reading the communiqué.”

  “That was when you cried out,” I told him.

  “Did I?” He shifted a bit to look at me. “Yes, I expect I did. It was a bitter loss.”

  “What did the dream make you remember?”

  “A letter. An actual letter that exists in fact. I carried it with me the day we met. I had it in the pocket of my coat, and then … at the wall … I took it out again.”

  Suddenly I was all interest. “I thought it was a map. When you dismounted and sat on the wall, it was a map you had in your hand, wasn’t it?”

  “I had thought it was. I wasn’t sure.”

  That was true. He recalled he was reading something, I remembered now, but the map was only a guess. “So it was a letter, then.”

  “ ’Twas why I was so downcast that day. Why I left Peter at the inn.”

  “Yes,” I nodded. “You said you were … preoccupied. Thoughtful. And Peter’s high spirits were annoying.” I waited a beat. “The letter upset you.”

  “I must have dropped it when I fell,” Robert mused. “It’s probably still there on my side of the trap door, drifting through the grass in the breeze, or trodden into the mud of the Pike.”

  “But what did it say? Was it some sort of communiqué like the one you dreamed about?”