by Thea Lim
The sun setting over his shoulder, the noise of the wind, the churr of the gravel, his brown hair curling into the folds of his ear. What she would give to forget that moment, to unremember that last chance to trace those inimitable ears and fit her face into his neck.
An agent processes her papers, disinterested in his primary role in the drama circling him. Everyone is given regulation clothing and slippers, all of it blue, and the travelers, now divided into women and men, remove their clothes in communal changing rooms, each person with eyes fixed firmly on the wall. When Polly pulls the limp blue material over her head, it tears under her armpit and the edge of her dingy bra is visible. She keeps her hand tucked into her armpit until she sees other women contending with far worse rips across the seats of their pants. There is no one to give them replacement sets of clothing, and when they arrive in the future, it will look as if the ’80s were even more destitute than they were. Polly throws away her home clothes in one of the many black bins down the middle of the room.
Something’s torn in her bra, and the underwire has broken through, rubbing the soft of her skin raw. She is preoccupied with trying to tame it discreetly through the hole in her armpit as she walks, when she hears shrieking and she sees women stopping just before the exit instead of going through. Polly sees the crying woman from the trolley, kneeling, the contents of her case spread around her, as if she has lost something dear. She is making thick, strangled sobs.
It is an unacceptable noise. It triggers an avalanche of dread that comes plunging over Polly, and her ears and airways fill with it, and for a second she is too heavy to move. The only way she can get out from under it is to narrow all her emotions into a fine point of rage. She wants to scream at the woman, Do you think you are the only one suffering here?
* * *
In another immense room with naked bulbs, the politeness has dissolved with the quiet. There are no signs saying what to do. Passengers make mobs in the corners of the room, along a row of desks, by a line of white bins filled with plastic-coated radiation-proof jackets. There are not enough jackets in the necessary sizes, and people are shouting and sniping at each other. Polly takes an extra-large because they are easy to reach. The bins with the smaller sizes are almost empty. Polly looks around with queasy confusion. She sees what did not register before. She is among the tallest in the room, and the palest. Almost everyone is small and black-haired. They are mostly women. They are not the same race as her. She doesn’t know what race they are. Maybe they are from Mexico. She suffers layers of clammy embarrassment. It’s impolite that she noticed their difference; it’s backwards, like something Frank’s mother would do. But now she’s somehow in the wrong place for her kind, like she’s wandered into the men’s room. Did she miss the sign that said this was the area for foreign nationals? Are they being streamed by language?
When she puts on her jacket, it gapes around the arm holes and at the middle no matter how much she cinches the straps, and she is afraid of what the radiation might do to her exposed areas. Passengers have oozed out of the lines so chaotically that the agents have left the desks, now patrolling the room like herders.
One grabs her papers and shouts, “Can’t you read? You’re O-1 not H-1. Get out of here. Over there!” The agent points. It’s an imprecise gesture that takes in the whole back end of the hall. Alarms are blaring. Polly goes back into the changing room. It is the only other exit aside from the distant gangway to the next phase. She’ll wait in the changing room until it seems safe to go out and find a kinder agent. She leans against one of the black bins of unpeopled clothes, filled with cotton and rayon and striped polyester, little pearly buttons, a tattered blouse that maybe once was a favorite. She looks away. She notices a small door she didn’t see before, one ignored by everyone else, marked O-1.
It opens into the first compact space Polly has seen, with wooden folding chairs and low chipboard walls and no ceiling. There is a potted plant in the corner and a reproduction of Van Gogh’s Café Terrace at Night hanging on one wall. There’s a clothes rack of plastic jackets, many in each size. The shouting from over the wall is muffled.
The only other person waiting in the room is a woman who looks like she could be anywhere between twenty-five and forty. The paper suit provides no cues. She has fine blond hair and a tiny tight mouth, and keen, angular posture that strains the seams of her shirt. She is staring straight ahead, cracking her knuckles one unlovely pop at a time.
The chafing from Polly’s bra has gotten worse. She twists to shift the protrusion creating a dint in her flesh, but whatever it is, it has snagged itself on her skin. Her neighbor has moved on from popping all her knuckles to drumming on her seat like the ticking of a watch, and the relief Polly felt when she entered the room is gone. The sense of foreboding crests. Though Polly is for private space and against mindless chatter, she thinks she has to speak. Then the woman looks at her, as if noticing her for the first time, and says, “What’s your special skill?”
“Pardon?”
“Your special skill? How did you get an O-1 visa?”
“I’m an upholsterer and a refinisher. I repair and restore old furniture.”
The woman laughs uproariously. Polly preferred the drumming.
“That is absolutely fascinating.”
“It is?”
“It’s fascinating that that’s what they’re after.”
“What do you do?”
She laughs again. “Acupuncturist. Isn’t that absurd?”
“What do you mean?”
The woman leans in, whispering. “Did you read the list of O-1 qualifying jobs in the guide? The first one: engineer. Fair enough. Makes sense. You need engineers to rebuild a country. And we’ve got architect, surveyor, that’s fine. Then there’s movie star and Grammy-winning musician. So that’s dumb but still, understandable for morale. But who else is on the list? Natural-medicine doctors, chiropractors, massage therapists, beekeepers. And now upholsterers? Do you have any idea what they mean to do with these people?”
“No.”
“Why don’t they want the kinds of skills people want today? Like scientists, doctors, scholars. Lawyers.”
“They already have those people. They need people to fill the jobs no one wants.”
“No,” she sneers. “The jobs no one wants are what the H-1 visas are for. Canning beans. Building bridges. But we’re O-1. Extraordinary-ability visa. But abilities for what? They don’t want lawyers. I’m a lawyer. I had to lie on my application. I had to say I knew acupuncture. I don’t know acupuncture. I don’t know massage. I’ve never massaged anyone in my life. Except erotically.” She laughs again, a high whine. “Aren’t you afraid this whole thing is a sex thing?”
“Excuse me?”
“Sex trafficking.” Her tiny mouth works furiously to get the words out. “Are we going to be sold as prostitutes?”
Polly fixes her eyes on the Van Gogh painting. The first time she ever laid eyes on it, in a guidance counselor’s office, she thought it was magic: the way the painting was like a window, as if you could walk right into the scene. Just by looking at it, you were somewhere else.
“You and I are more sexually appealing than those people out there,” the blonde says.
Polly’s seen the painting too many times. She can’t get the light in the painting to do what it used to.
“I worked my whole life. Sixty-hour weeks.” The woman dispenses with the whispering. “Sunk all my funds into a luxury condo, and then the pandemic struck.” She slaps her hand down on the folding chair next to her, and two things happen. The chair snaps shut and then it falls forward, its legs catching on the underside of the planter as it goes. The planter hits the floor and smashes, a loud, irreversible noise.
The woman stares at the pieces, appalled.
“Quick! Help me get it back the way it was.”
She jerks the chair out of the way and it scuttles across the floor and knocks into the coatrack. The woman starts kicking dirt madly
into the corner, under the furniture, and after a second Polly helps her. Polly is in a state now too, without knowing what retribution they are trying to escape. They are trying to be inconspicuous, but the woman can’t stop herself from emitting little yells of panic. On her hands and knees, she blunders into more chairs, and the chairs kick the walls, making knocking sounds, like someone looking for a hollow spot in a sealed room.
Security guards arrive, slow moving and unworried. The woman rushes at them. She’s shouting, “I still want to travel! I still want to travel!” but all they see is her charging. In a smear of motion, they half trip her and twist her around, then bind her wrists together.
“All right, all right,” they say to her.
“Can I still travel? But can I still travel?”
The guards don’t answer. They take her away. The inside door is opened by an official with a clipboard, in a sharply pleated military dress, cursing and grappling with the radio clipped to her front. When she hails someone on the other side, she says, “Female passenger, last name Bauer, O-1 status, has been transferred to Discharge. Eighty-six Bauer, please.” She addresses Polly. “Nader? This way.” She waves her through the door, into an even smaller room. This one does have a ceiling, with perforations for soundproofing. Obviously, Polly assures herself, this is a consideration for the travelers’ sake, for their privacy—not for concealing company crimes.
“I’m Colonel Simpson. I’m an army psychologist. I’m going to inspect your case and perform a physical and mental evaluation to ensure you’re travel ready. Should you decide not to travel, now’s the time to say so. If so, you’ll have to return any TimeRaiser payments made to you—advance pay or health benefits to friends or family members—plus a thirteen percent processing fee on these advance payments or health benefits. Are you ready?” She says this all so rapidly it’s difficult to catch each word. She pushes a box of Kleenex at Polly and nods at her dirty hands.
“I’ll be honest with you,” the psychologist says. “We’re having a bad day. That was the second meltdown in ten minutes, and an O-1 at that. At this rate we’re going to be sending only half our entrants through.”
The psychologist uses a blood pressure cuff, then a stethoscope. Polly’s heart is still speeding from the broken plant, and how easily the guards subdued that woman, like they were folding a piece of paper.
“If I fail the evaluation,” Polly says, “do I still have to pay the processing fee?”
“Yes. So don’t fail the evaluation.” She flips a page. “Full name, age, and birth date?”
“Polly Nader, twenty-three, June 12, 1958.”
“And you’re traveling to Galveston at September 4, 1993. Your ethnicity? Nader—what is that? Jewish?”
“I’m Caucasian.”
The psychologist peers at her. “What kind of Caucasian?” She puts her cheek on her fist and stares until Polly says, “My father was Arab.” She only left this out from habit. It’s complicated to explain, extraneous information that usually no one has time for. But now it must seem she’s hiding something.
“And your mother?”
“Caucasian.”
Polly’s windpipe clenches, but then the woman only says, “So you look white. Okay . . . let’s just keep things simple. I’ll put ‘Caucasian.’ Height and weight?”
“Five foot five, one hundred and twenty-five pounds.”
“Hair color and eye color: brown and brown.”
The psychologist opens Polly’s briefcase and uses a white spatula with blue felt on its tip to sift her papers. She’s cautious, like a person handling evidence, then Polly realizes she is just that. She finds Polly’s baseball cards.
“What’s this?” Rollie Fingers looks preposterously out of place.
“I thought they might be worth money in the future.”
There are two versions to this story. The truer version is that the cards are traveling with her because they belong to Frank; they have the synecdochical magic of a beloved’s beloveds. But she thinks the psychologist will be more likely to comprehend the official, pragmatic version.
This backfires.
“Then technically I should confiscate them.”
What Polly would like to do best is put her head between her knees. But that would be a sign of weakness, and it’s clear that here things go poorly for the soft.
“Aren’t there special considerations for me because I have an O-1 visa?”
Simpson regards her with drawn-together brows. Then she laughs.
“You know what? You keep the baseball cards. What does it matter, really? I don’t know where you’re going, you don’t know where you’re going. Makes the rules seem arbitrary, you know?” Simpson scribbles on a form, copying down the information on Polly’s visa. “I like your style. You’re a negotiator. My God, you should see the basket cases we’ve had today. Just now a woman had to be forcibly removed because she was refusing to leave her shoes behind. Her shoes! And there were all these old biddies around her saying, ‘Don’t worry, sweetheart, those shoes won’t even be in fashion in the future.’ It was comical, in a morbid way. And the shoes only had sentimental value. A gift from her mother. Touching, but we can’t invest in people who can’t even get through customs. I see you even travel light,” she says happily. “No photos.”
“They said photo paper would be damaged in travel.”
“Sure, but that doesn’t stop most travelers. Unless Rollie Fingers is your boyfriend.”
Polly shakes her head no, answering her question seriously, just in case.
Now that the woman is inclined towards her, Polly asks in a high, watchful voice, “Do a lot of people travel to get medical treatment for a friend or family member with the flu?”
“Isn’t that the draw? That or basic survival.”
“I was wondering if you knew what strategies are most successful? For meetups?”
“What’s a meetup?”
“When people try to find each other again? Once they arrive?”
“Oh, a meetup. I see. You know, I have no idea. No meetups have ever happened.”
“No one has ever been successfully reunited with someone they left behind?”
“Literally speaking. Chronologically. It’s never happened before. The first travelers aren’t scheduled to arrive for another twelve years. But I can give you a contact form. Would you like a contact form?”
“Yes. What’s a contact form?”
Simpson removes a sheet from the back of her clipboard.
“Write down the name and number of anyone you’d like to keep abreast of your changing travel plans. It’s in case of reroutements. In case your services are deemed more useful in a different time.”
“Reroutements? I thought that was just a rumor.”
Just like that, with the slightest lift of her voice, Polly lets slip her weak spot. Wariness slides into the psychologist’s expression. They can’t afford another basket case.
“Don’t you worry about that,” Simpson says. “I shouldn’t have mentioned it. You won’t be rerouted. It would say, if you were going to be. Somewhere in here, it would say.” She makes a show of riffling through Polly’s file. “Can you sign the statement now?”
“I don’t have a phone number for him yet. He’s on his way to the hospital now.”
“Which hospital?”
“St. Luke’s.”
“Great. Good.” The psychologist takes back the contact form and writes St. Luke’s. “Can you sign this statement now? It just says you agree to the terms. There’s others to get to.” The psychologist touches her bare wrist as if she is wearing a watch.
Polly finds herself pinching the pads of her fingers, one by one. Their Saturdays-in-September idea is suddenly sickening. It is like a plan a mother would make to keep from losing her children on a subway. It’s a plan able to withstand early closing doors and a snarl of stairways, not the ocean of minutes that twelve years holds. But uselessly her mind has gone blank. Strange, random thoughts wander into
the empty space. Is it dinnertime? She is entering a world where the notion of something as normal as dinnertime does not exist.
“Should you wish to break your contract now, I can set you up with a repayment plan for the associated costs plus the thirteen percent that you’ll owe us. Otherwise, I need you to sign this final statement saying you are prepared for travel.”
It was then that Polly began to experience a feeling of dislocation that did not leave her for many months. The pen in her hand and the paper on the table appeared far away, like she was watching them on a movie screen. I’ll see him in just a few hours, my time. This time tomorrow, he’ll be waiting for me. We can still have a baby. The happy weight in my arms.
She heard the psychologist say, “TimeRaiser is a good company. We’ll protect you. Today, or rather tomorrow, is the first day of the rest of your life. It’s a gift.”
On that movie screen, the hand drew ballpoint loops on the line: her own signature. That was almost the last thing she remembered of the whole trip. When she met other travelers in the future, she could not remember the sort of details they wanted to trade, because they were details that came after the paper was signed. Which gate did she leave from? Which class was the boat? Was she put in a lie-down seat or a sit-up one? Did she wear a radiation-protection apron or blanket? Shoptalk was a way to divvy up what they’d endured without actually talking about it.
She could not remember the recording, played right as she pitched into a many-year sleep. A tender voice told of Polly being past the point of return and hence authorized to hear the story of the future that was waiting, how the tiny but intrepid TimeRaiser—Texas born and bred!—had endeavored to prevent the pandemic by inventing time travel, and when that didn’t work, they did not relent, but tamed the flu by snatching carriers from right under its nose.
The last thing she remembered was this: when she was left alone in the last holding area, she finally located the snag in her bra. It was not the underwire. It was a photograph Frank had tucked into the padding pouch. It was of the two of them at New Year’s, confetti strands in their hair. Her aunt Donna had set the zoom too close and each of them had an ear missing. On the back, Frank had written, Something to remember us by.