An Ocean of Minutes

by Thea Lim

  She couldn’t explain what she did next. Polly flipped the photo over and folded it in half. And she tore it up. Then she pressed the shards between the pages of her travel handbook and put it all in a garbage can in the corner.

  Afterwards she tried to console herself by imagining that horror had distilled her down to her most animal self, who had no use for photos; she had been out of her mind. But the truth was that she had done it because Frank believed they needed props, aids to remember each other. He believed in the possibility of a future timeline in which she could forget him. This was intolerable.

  She would regret this always. It would sit like a bubble in her lungs. Even if the travel had wiped it blank, she would still wish she owned the piece of paper that had housed the outline of his face, with the ruts his writing made in the back, where he had written his message without signing his name.

  * * *

  When the pod unsealed and they climbed out of the time machine, the light struck them like a blunt force. Their skin was burning, their nostrils about to rupture, their eyeballs ready to burst. People were screaming and weeping and Polly heard her own voice, severed from her body, crying about her eyes. She was on a gurney. They tied a plastic bag around her neck so she would stop getting sick down her front and they put a strap around her chest just to measure her heartbeat, although it felt as if they were tying her down. A serene voice was speaking to no one in particular, and Polly caught the words “side effects” and “normal” and “subside,” but the voice soothed nobody. She kept trying to sit up to reassure herself she wasn’t restrained, until they cuffed her wrist to the bed. They forced her to drink a sweet gelatinous liquid and she threw up again. She was crying and apologizing and someone was holding her head.

  “Frank?” she asked. Everything in the terminal had been rebuilt on a petrifying scale, curved windows like tsunamis of glass, and she had to shut her eyes or she’d upset herself again.

  “Is Frank one of the nurses?” someone said.

  “I’m supposed to be at the airport. I have to get to the airport.”

  “You’re at the airport.”

  “Which airport?”

  “Houston Intercontinental Airport.”

  “Okay.” She relaxed against the restraints.

  A second later she grasped that this wasn’t everything she needed to know.

  “Hello? Hello?” she shouted.

  Nobody came.

  “What year is it? Is it nineteen ninety-three?” Polly couldn’t move her head; her skull was pinned down; she could only see the ceiling. It was not like her to be so visibly needy, all her insides on the outside. Even her own self was foreign.

  Someone in another bed, who was even more confused than she, said, “Nineteen eighty-one.”

  Polly tried again for someone in charge. “What year is it? Please?”

  Finally, an official replied, “It’s nineteen ninety—” then the last number was garbled.

  “It’s nineteen ninety-three?”

  “I said nineteen ninety—”

  “It’s nineteen ninety-three?” she mewed.

  The world started to revolve and she cried out until she realized someone was turning her gurney.

  “See for yourself,” the voice said.

  Now she was facing the exit. A digital clock in the ceiling said 5:17 p.m.

  “What is it?” she heard herself say.

  “It’ll show the date. You have to wait till it clicks over.”

  And then it clicked. Like a red neon portent, the clock pulsed September and 4 and the numbers 1 9 9 8.

  SEPTEMBER 1978

  * * *

  Polly lives in Buffalo and works as a secretary at a bookkeeping firm, on a side street off City Hall, in a neighborhood that used to be grand but has lost its identity. Around the corner, Frank works at a bar where the city grease on the windows acts like tinting and the carpet will smell forever. The crowd is an unusual mix of men with huge, craggy faces, and jolly fifty-something women who laugh together like ducks honking, and passersby in dinner jackets or construction wear or snug rock-band T-shirts who come once and never return. Polly likes to come here after work every day and drink a screwdriver, because there’s not one thread of commonality to make anyone feel left out.

  Two months ago Polly’s boyfriend moved out of their shared apartment, taking with him all of Polly’s furniture. This was more absurd and humiliating than if Chad had committed a generic betrayal, like sleeping with a friend. Polly had to move back in with her aunt Donna, who she’d lived with from age thirteen to eighteen, after her mother died in a car accident. Donna is a thirty-something travel agent who looks like a pipe cleaner: gangly, with a long face and close-cropped, dyed-black, bristly hair. All Donna has to say about Chad is that no one treats you bad unless you let them. “It’s only stuff,” Polly tells Donna. “This is a good thing.” “Now when faced with trouble, I can remember I survived this.” Eventually, Donna tells her that if she has nothing bad to say about Chad, she is not allowed to say anything at all.

  Polly has already gotten up twice to use the pay phone in the corner to call Chad’s last-known number. She keeps her finger on the edge of the switch hook so she can hang up right before the call goes to his answering machine. She doesn’t want to waste a quarter on nothing. Summer has turned into fall and she will never track him down, and she is calling only for the pleasure of annoying him. It is an empty pleasure.

  Polly sits down. Frank has taken away her drink, but she wasn’t finished, and she can’t afford a new one. He is before her, with a dish towel over his shoulder like an old-fashioned barkeep.

  “Another?”

  She shakes her head without looking up. A fat, disgusting tear is making its way down her nose. She hears his cords swish as he reaches for something. He holds out a napkin. She takes it, her chin still down, and before she can thank him, he is off to get someone else a bottle of Black Label.

  She waits before wiping her eyes. She does not want to be caught tending to her tears. She pretends to study the scalloping at the napkin’s edges. How much does it cost to put scalloped edges on every napkin? Such an act of beauty that goes mainly unseen.

  * * *

  Donna likes to remind Polly that she has to earn her keep by entertaining Donna. “You’re such a drag,” Donna says. “Go do something daring so I can live vicariously.”

  Polly prefers to stay home and drink home-brew wine and watch TV with Donna’s two massive cats, Chicken and Noodles.

  “What happened today?” Donna yells as a way of greeting when Polly comes home. “Gossip! If you don’t give me some gossip, you’re getting kicked to the curb!”

  “We did some training on the new in-house phone system. Everyone got new extensions. You’re gonna love hearing about this.”

  Later, Polly makes the mistake of telling Donna about Frank. “There’s a dishy bartender who works around the corner.”

  “And . . . ?”

  There isn’t really anything else to say. She edits the story. “Today I sneezed and he gave me a napkin.”

  “He. Likes. You. Quick, go back now. Where’s your coat?”

  “You’re not serious. I’m in my Ziggy pajamas.”

  It is also only the second commercial break during the Laverne & Shirley season premiere, which they’ve been awaiting for weeks.

  “You should go. You’ve been wanting to meet someone.”

  “I could go tomorrow.”

  “Maybe tomorrow he’ll meet the love of his life and you’ll have missed your chance. As soon as the credits go, take my car.”

  “If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be, whether I go out there or not.”

  “You have the worst attitude. No one has ever had a worse attitude than you.”

  At ten p.m. the bar is a backwards, smoky facsimile of its daytime self, even if it is a Wednesday night. The tables are littered with the gunk of drink, and the stools are crammed with bodies searching for a bewitching stranger to hold
between their knees. Frank is leaning against the bar with his face resting on his hand, talking to a woman in green everything. Polly opens the door to exit, but this makes the bell overhead tinkle, and Frank sees her.

  He waves to her and produces a screwdriver and places it on the bar. And then he winks. There’s a cherry in the drink, which must be a night thing. She had a book on her, but Donna confiscated it so that she wouldn’t look like a schoolmarm. She has nothing to do with her eyes. Around her, the bar screams with mirth.

  Polly likes to think of herself in a certain way—self-assured, nonchalant. But the glare of this nighttime world exposes her shyness, her inexperience. Her high school friends are already engaged to their high school boyfriends. Polly stares miserably at the cherry.

  He is just her size, the height she’d be if she were a man. He has strong shoulders and a sweet face, a sinking combination.

  Polly thinks, Stay or go, but quit feeling sorry for yourself. Her goal is to make herself immune to her surroundings, so she does not see how Frank looks around, pretending to scan the room but lighting too long on Polly, how Frank looks into the mirror over the bar, in order to see her face. This is how it begins, and she misses it. And so, when he places a matchbook in front of her, she looks at it confused, almost angry it seems, judging from her expression in that mirror over the bar. She puts the matches in her pocket and her money on the counter and she leaves. A few days later, she puts her hand in her jacket pocket, where she has forgotten the matchbook, maybe intentionally, and she is stupefied when she opens it and sees Frank’s name and number scribbled across the flap.

  * * *

  Frank suggests they go for a walk in Delaware Park. It is an endearing, old-fashioned suggestion, and Polly has to tell herself not to get her hopes up. When she arrives, he goes to hug her, and she is taken aback. Their bodies mismatch, one of his arms jammed awkwardly around her neck, while a six-pack of beer in a black plastic bag swings in his other hand, perilously near her ear. Why did he bring beer?

  “Heh,” he says. “Almost clocked you in the head.” They step through the archway and her stomach gives a nasty twist. Sometime after, when it is too late to mention, she thinks about how he said “clocked”—a funny word she can’t remember ever hearing him say again. She remembers too his hand was so busy with his shirt, which rode up his pale belly when he hugged her, and she realizes he must have been nervous. She didn’t know him well enough to read the signs.

  The beer and the crude noise it makes when he opens it has her reconsidering the whole date. It is not at all that she is against drinking; she is just against drinking inelegantly, in the park. But they walk and get to talking, and when they return to where they began, they take the loop again. He tells her he is an out-of-work historian. He’s working at the bar to help a family friend and he’s going to get his high school teaching credentials this fall. She admits that what she really wants to do is learn upholstery, as unexpected as it sounds, and she even tells him why. She has never told anyone before, but Frank asks. She wants to learn so that she can fix her mother’s love seat, moldering inside the discount locker where it’s lingered for years.

  They talk and talk, and she asks him how old he is, and it takes him a second to remember: he’s twenty-five. The more years I have, he says, the less I remember them, and isn’t that terrible? She thinks it’s such a nice thing to say. When it begins to rain, first they huddle under her puny umbrella, and then eventually he puts his arm around her, and the contact makes her voice crack. Gusts of rain heap up marshy piles of leaves, and the cars going by kick them down in streams of taillight red.

  Frank asks if she wants to come to his place to get out of the storm. It is across the street and around the corner. “It’s just up ahead,” he says after they have walked five blocks. “Just around this corner,” he says after another ten minutes. By the time he says, “It’s just the next street over,” the rain has stopped. The dark sky has cleared and it’s daytime again.

  “Do you still want to come in?” Frank asks, which makes Polly consider that the rain wasn’t just a cover to get her into his house, which means that now that the rain has stopped, he doesn’t want her to come in anymore, which means that she should decline.

  “I guess I’m okay,” she says, and his face falls. It’s embarrassing how clearly his feelings show, and they both know it, and he kicks his foot at a congregation of squirrels and pigeons pecking at something on the ground.

  The pigeons go up and the squirrels go out. But one hysterical squirrel makes the bad choice to go straight into the road. There is the gruesome thump of a Buick going by, fatally close to the curb, and Polly screams.

  The animal is making spooky moves, blinking its one milky eye and trying to get off the road, not grasping that its haunches have been flattened. In an awful turn, Frank laughs.

  “What should we do?” he says. He bends down to take a look and instantly steps back.

  “We have to put it out of its misery.”

  “We should call animal control.”

  “That will take too long. It’s suffering.”

  “Maybe another car will finish the job.”

  “Another car will just run over its feet again. Its head is too close to the curb.”

  “What do you want me to do?” He has sidled off, away from the gore, to almost out of earshot.

  “Stamp on its head.”

  Frank cringes, his entire face crinkling to a point at its center.

  “Do you have a quarter?” Polly asks.

  “Why?”

  “To buy a newspaper. There’s a box over there.”

  “Are you going to read him to death?”

  Polly drags a newspaper out of the box and opens it with a single, trim motion. She removes the first three pages and leaves the rest on top of the newspaper box. She takes the front pages and lays them over the animal delicately, like a sheet over the dead, mindful not to look in its heartsick eye.

  “Are you ready to do it?” she asks him.

  This is a defining moment. But Frank doesn’t say anything.

  “Fine. It’s only a squirrel,” she says.

  “Wait. This is his final hour. Should we say something?”

  Polly brings her heel down hard and fast, too fast for either her or the animal to ponder it.

  At first they keep walking, both a little stunned.

  “How were you able to do it?” Frank says after a while.

  “Don’t think about it. You think too much.”

  She doesn’t actually believe this. She doesn’t know why she says it. And then it just seems like the best thing to do is leave. There is a bus coming. She has no idea where it goes.

  “It’s getting late. I should catch this bus.”

  “Of course.” He jams his hands in his pockets and blows out his cheeks. “That’s not how I imagined I’d act in that situation.”

  “What did you imagine you’d do?”

  “I’d be you.”

  The bus comes and the bus goes.

  “You changed your mind?” he says.

  “When it got close, I saw it was the wrong one,” she lies.

  She thinks that he will say, Well, come on up to my place then, but instead he says, “If you have to go, let me drive you home.”

  He leads her to his car, pointing out his window near the top of a small apartment building on Colvin Avenue. She longs to go up there, but he’s unlocking the car. What could she say to change their direction that would also leave her pride intact?

  He puts Carly Simon on the stereo. They cross Delaware and they cross Elmwood, they cross under the train tracks as a freight train in multicolored rust rolls overhead. They are almost into Riverside now, and still she can’t think of anything to say. She thinks about saying she forgot something in the park, but then she can’t think up what to say she left behind. She can’t say her wallet, because then she’ll sound reckless. She can’t say sunglasses; it’s a cloudy day. She can’t say umbrella,
because it’s sitting at her feet. Maybe he wants her to say something. Maybe he is relying on her to husband their time together, as if, for some reason unbeknown to her, she is the only one who can. His eyes flick around, but that could just be safe driving; she could be misreading this too. Today’s record is poor.

  Then they are near her street and it’s too late. The hems of her sleeves and the knees of her tights are wet from the rain, and the cold sets in. Snot trickles down the inside of her nose and she tries to sniff genteelly.

  “I wish I still had that napkin you gave me,” she says.

  “What napkin?”

  “Never mind.”

  They are at a stop sign. He reaches into the backseat and brings out a plastic sleeve of those cocktail napkins with their scalloped edges. It’s the length of his arm. He drops it in her lap.

  “Stick with me and you’ll never run out of napkins again.”

  He reaches over the armrests and touches her on the leg. It’s just a small thing, a quick squeeze on the round of her knee, and then his hand goes back to the wheel. Something in the gesture is genuine, familial, like they have known each other a long time. She wishes that were true.

  He takes the corners with one hand on the wheel and the sun comes dusty through the windshield and the singer warbles as Frank squints to make out the street signs. He looks like a photograph. Polly wishes that time could just stop right here, and stay in this very moment, for good.

  Polly traveled an hour from Houston on the back bench of an old panel van. She couldn’t keep her eyes open, as much as she wanted to resist the nakedness of sleep. The bus driver had the heat on and the only window didn’t open. Her shirt was steeped in sweat.

  At the terminal, once she passed a whole hour without vomiting, they’d said that despite the lingering effects of travel, she had withstood the journey well and was cleared to go. She had not wanted to leave. “Someone is expecting to meet me here,” she said. She asked to be taken to the passenger pickup area, and she made a fool of herself, babbling details they had no use for, about how he’d expected her in 1993 but maybe he came every year? But there was no passenger pickup area. That was not the way the system worked: no one was allowed to remove Journeymen except TimeRaiser personnel, and only after they’d been photographed and printed. They did not explain this to her. They just kept saying, “Yes, all right,” as they guided her through cloth tunnels with flapping walls like the insides of a cocoon. She kept checking every head for Frank’s face, even after they loaded her onto the van: the blurred features of the men at the final guardhouse, the single maintenance worker in a dim pool of lamplight by a fence. The tendons in her hands were aching like she was clinging to a lifebuoy, and she couldn’t unball her fists. Their first plan had failed, by five years.