An Ocean of Minutes

by Thea Lim

  “What’s an inquiree? A person being inquired about?”

  “No, a person who inquired about you. Wait.” He leaned over the table and looked. “I guess that’s the wrong word. But the form means someone was looking for you.”

  “When?” She grabbed the sheet. Happiness called from far, far away.

  “See, it’s at the top: September 6, 1995.”

  “They told him I’d be late? They told him I was coming in 1998?”

  “That information would likely be restricted. The statute of restrictions expired only when your boss requisitioned you. Do you know when that happened?”

  “He said April this year.”

  “So until April of this year, that information would have been confidential. But as of ’95, they would have at least informed him you didn’t arrive yet.”

  In order to take to heart this good news, Polly had to let everything else that had happened become piercingly real. So her face didn’t change.

  “Is there anything else? Did he make the search in person?” She turned the paper over. She brushed her palms across the unmarked back, feeling for anything—invisible characters, something worked into the grain. She wanted to touch what he had touched.

  “I don’t know. They forgot to write down his address. Didn’t forget to collect his fee though.”

  She turned back to the front. There was an empty space where they should have written the street where he lived.

  “Is this the last time he looked for me?”

  “Inconclusive. This is the only search in your file, but like I said, that thing was a mess. They don’t keep these records well. He could have searched since April and it’s just not in the file. He could be on his way right now. He knows where you are. Or where you aren’t, ha ha.”

  There is an irreversible intimacy to tears, and so until now Polly had prevented herself from crying in front of airport officials, her boss, the border agents, her neighbors, and Norberto, as they gave her one piece of terrible news after another. But she had not been prepared for this kindness.

  She could have tensed her knees and held her breath and clenched her teeth to keep her feelings under. But her jaw was strained from keeping shut so long, and she was receiving a signal from land, of safe harbor. Tears coursed down her cheeks, her eyelids overrun as soon as they emptied. The sobs shook her body and she didn’t try to hold still.

  Norberto did not ignore her. He did not try to distract her. He did not try to talk her feeling away. He sat with her quietly and he held the truth that she was in pain. All the trapped air in her chest condensed into water and trickled away.

  * * *

  People might say, Seventeen years—that’s craziness! He can’t still be waiting for you. From a completely objective standpoint, the odds were poor. But in that secret, covered place, below breastbone and sinew and pumping ventricles, Polly always knew he was coming. And now the actual surrendered to the imagined: Frank was trying to find her. He was here, not only in the past, that distant place, but in the present.

  This gave her unbounded confidence.

  “I need help,” she told Baird.

  “With the tufted ottomans?”

  “Oh. No. It’s something personal.” She should have worked out the exact words and their order before she started talking. “I’m wondering if there’s something you might need.”

  “What do you mean?” He didn’t look up from his work. He was using a loupe to examine the seams of a seat covered in figured velvet.

  “I need a favor. So maybe there’s something I could do for you, to make it equal.”

  Without getting up from his stool, he took small, staccato sidesteps until he was facing her. He put away his loupe. “Go on,” he said.

  “My cousin is coming to meet me, but the place we chose back in ’81, it’s restricted. Journeymen can’t go there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It used to be a hotel, but now it’s the Twenty-Fifth Street Port. If they see me there, they’ll think I’m trying to stow away, and they’ll arrest me.”

  “Why did you choose that place?”

  “It was a landmark. We thought it would stay the same.”

  Baird laughed, a cawing, triumphant sound. “Best laid plans, eh?”

  Polly was seized by the terrifying urge to smack him.

  “So you want me to go to the port and wait for your cousin. When is this happening?”

  “This Saturday.”

  “Interesting.”

  She kept quiet. She would not let even a breath out, for fear of tipping this in a bad direction.

  “There is something I need,” Baird said.

  Polly nodded.

  “It’s a little unorthodox.”

  “All right.”

  “I left something somewhere. But it’s mine. But I can’t take it back without looking . . . stingy. Can you get it for me?”

  “What is it?”

  “An envelope.”

  “What’s in the envelope?”

  “A book. Nothing illegal.”

  “How come you can’t get it?”

  He didn’t say anything. He chewed his cheek.

  She wanted it to be an innocent reason. Things can sound illicit without being so; the rules are unfair, as she was just learning. She supplied him with one.

  “Is it something you gave someone accidentally? And you can’t take it back without it being awkward?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes.” He clapped his hands. “What time is the rendezvous on Saturday?”

  “You might have to wait for a while. Maybe you could go in the afternoon.”

  “And stay until . . . ?”

  “The evening? Until it gets dark?”

  “Right. You didn’t know your schedule for this Saturday, when you made these plans in . . .”

  “1981.”

  “Lord—1981?”

  She didn’t want to hear Baird say how Frank was probably dead, like he had the day they met. She squeezed her jaw between thumb and forefinger. She could trace the shape of the teeth pressed against her flesh.

  But Baird said, “How exciting. It’s like An Affair to Remember, but with cousins.” He giggled.

  Polly was no fool. Donna would say, If it seems too good to be true, it is. Baird was trying to butter her up. But Polly could do the same.

  “Your timing is impeccable,” Baird said. “My envelope is in the site office, but for a week only.”

  “But how will I get it?”

  “On Saturday there will be no one there. You just have to slip in, grab the package, and slip out.”

  If it seemed too risky, she could turn back. She could time it so that he would’ve already left for the beach.

  “Deal?” He stuck out his hand.

  “Deal,” she said, and shook.

  * * *

  After lunch on Saturday, Baird said, “Well, you better get going.”

  “Where?”

  “The plan. It was your idea!”

  “Are you leaving now?” she asked.

  But he was in the middle of refinishing a rocking chair.

  “No, I’ll go as soon as you return with my envelope.”

  She strained to keep her expression neutral. What could she say? How do I know that once I return you’ll keep your word? She couldn’t say that, and unmask the ill will between them.

  “But that will push everything back. You won’t get back until after the last shuttle. If I wait until you return, I won’t be able to get home.”

  “I thought I was to wait until nightfall anyhow. I’ll come to your place.”

  He continued his work, nonchalant. She was defenseless in the face of such uncaring. He would win this. Her only refuge was her belief that most people, most of the time, were decent, even him.

  “I’ll go now.”

  “Good. The office will probably be empty. The envelope is made of cotton. It’s mustard yellow. You can’t miss it. It’s in a basket of files, on top of the cupboard.
I saw it there yesterday.”

  “How will I get in?”

  “Climb through a window. You’re small. You can fit.”

  “What if somebody sees me?”

  “Well, don’t get seen,” he hissed. He armed her with a bucket of cleaning supplies, with rags and a jar of vinegar water to use as “camouflage,” and sent her out the door.

  The office was in the back corner of the hotel. Its door faced a utility road and a tossing green sea of kudzu-coated neighborhoods. There was no one around. But how could she know a guard wouldn’t appear in time to see her legs sticking out the window? She couldn’t just stand here either; there was no way to look like she belonged. She had scraped-back, scraggly hair and her cheap coveralls had already paled at the cuffs. It took no time to become an outsider.

  She got to the window. It opened horizontally. She pushed the lip. It did not budge; it was locked. A guard came round the corner. She put her hand on the doorknob and nodded at him. He slowed to study her. With no other choice, she turned the knob. The door opened; it was unlocked. It was only after she stepped into the office that she realized there were people inside.

  The man and woman looked nothing like the others who peopled the site, who were small and sun-worn, with cagey posture. The man’s back was squared to the heavens, his face emanating a wheat-field glow. The woman had clean hair and a white shirt—not beige or age-tinted yellow, but white.

  “Yes?” the woman said.

  “I’m just . . .” Polly said. The rest of the words were stuck in her throat. She felt the bucket tucked under her arm. “Garbage,” she said gratefully.

  “Could you wipe down the conference table?” the man said. “It’s sticky.”

  They went back to their conversation.

  “So, Harvey Hasty.”

  “Yes, Harvey Hasty.”

  “Harvey Hasty of Amarillo, Texas, TimeRaiser senior vice councillor, charged with exploiting the chronomigration machine to send contraband correspondence back to himself. Namely, the winning lottery numbers for last October’s Big Game draw.”

  Polly had nothing to clean the table with. If she made their table smell like vinegar, they’d remember her. She used a dry rag, miming cleaning while she looked around for the mustard envelope.

  “How did he get it past the censors?”

  “He hid it as a date. He got caught because there’s no fifteenth month. What a loser.”

  “Love it. Crazy.”

  “But that’s not the crazy part.”

  “What is?”

  “Well, there’s a legal conundrum as to how to proceed.”

  “Why?”

  “He hasn’t committed the crime yet.”

  She saw the envelope, yellow cloth between slices of paper files. She moved down to the end of the conference table to get closer.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s received the numbers, but we haven’t yet reached that point in the future when he sends the numbers back to himself.”

  She was inches away. But how could she pick it up without them seeing?

  “HA! Only in America, right? But can’t they make him say?”

  “Say what?”

  She wasn’t doing anything really wrong. She was only trying to straighten out an awkward confusion. If she was caught, Baird could explain. The worst would be embarrassment.

  “Can’t they make him say when he plans to commit his crime?”

  “No! They cannot! Do you know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because he himself does not know!”

  The woman screamed with glee and the man pounded the table and Polly dropped the envelope into her bucket. But the envelope was tall: it could be seen above the rim.

  “Did you hear about Genevieve Silver?”

  Yet she was invisible to them, because she was where she belonged, with the rags and bucket. If she could get to the door, they wouldn’t even notice she’d left.

  “She got into investing. She stockpiled potato plants.”

  Polly shoved the bucket under her arm.

  “How do you stockpile a plant?”

  “Well, exactly.”

  Polly shut the door behind her.

  Safety kept receding: it didn’t arrive, as she thought it would, when she returned to the laboring zone, where the hotel’s innards were exposed like a dollhouse, and workers stepped like storks from post to post, across an unpoured floor, sun hats under hard hats to keep skin from burning. She did not feel safe by the service entrance, nor did she feel safe in the stairwell or on the third floor. Only when the smoking envelope passed from her hands into Baird’s did she feel an interval of relief.

  He squeaked with joy. “I can’t believe you managed it,” he whispered. He peeked inside, then slapped the flap shut.

  Baird was transparent. All at once, it was glaring that whatever was in the envelope was not at the heart of a misunderstanding between friends.

  But Polly could not care. “Will you go now?” she said. She should have made a backup plan in case he said no, now that he had what he wanted.

  But he put on his straw hat. He tucked the mustard envelope inside a newspaper from June of ’75 and jammed it under his arm.

  Suddenly, Polly wasn’t ready. She should have come up with a story for Baird, to explain why he was on the beach, if anyone questioned him. She should have described Frank in more detail. She should have found a way to get to the beach herself.

  “If you keep flapping at me, I won’t go,” Baird said.

  She watched Baird from the window until he was nothing but a beige dot, and then the beige disappeared into the brown. Under the window the thick, hot wind whipped up swirls of dirt that danced each other across the broken courtyard.

  She had washed and combed her hair this morning, but the soap wasn’t very good and her hair was still flat with grease. She knew Frank would say she was crazy to worry, that he didn’t care, but she couldn’t stop patting her cheeks and her undecorated face. For a while, every time she heard a shout from the grounds or a door open somewhere, she would start, thinking it was him. The waiting was like ice on a stripped nerve.

  She got to work on a wicker throne for the Mauna Kea suite, one with a fist-sized hole in its seat. She found the roll of round reed that matched the chair and soaked a length in a bath of vinegar and water. When the reed was ready, Polly sat on the floor and immobilized the throne between her legs. Typically, she’d use a sawhorse, but she wanted comfort; the chair was something she could touch. She used a pair of diagonal cutters to remove the broken weavers. Despite their dilapidated condition, they were tough, cemented together by some unidentified substance. The chair struggled against her and beads of sweat clustered in her eyebrows, but she got the broken bits out. She rested her head against the scrollwork. Then she set to feeding the new reed into the gaps. But the reed wasn’t bending as it should; it wouldn’t allow itself to be fed smoothly into the spaces where it was needed. Hadn’t she soaked it long enough? She examined the reed. She looked at the chair. The reed was a quarter millimeter too wide. Normally, Polly was meticulous. But sitting in sickening silence while she waited for a new batch of reed to be ready was unthinkable. She forced the reed. She yanked it through with needle-nose pliers. And just when it seemed like things might rally, when she had the reed gripped and halfway fed, it snapped in her hands. Polly and the chair tipped over in opposite directions. The chair landed on its back, rocking helplessly on its rounded edges, its little wrapped legs in the air.

  She stood up. She found the right reed and put a length in the bath. She waited at the window. Before, she’d watched ships stop short where the waters surrendered their depths, and trawlers rush to receive their merchandise—like a giant trapped in a crevasse as tiny beasts flooded to strip its bones. This was before she knew that Frank would wait there. And still she didn’t see them coming.

  She took the last shuttle home. There was only an hour till Norberto locked the doors. She stayed on the
stoop, listening to the dust pooling in the wrecks, gazing at rooftops until the edges of the buildings blurred into night. She pictured Frank and Baird turning the corner, one small and one tall, and every time she looked and didn’t see them there, she imagined them again, like rewinding a video. If she replayed the image enough, it would stick to the piece of world containing that corner, and become real.

  Baird turned the corner. Polly waited for Frank to show behind him. She waited, and she waited, and she was still waiting, even after Baird had passed the whole block and was standing beside her.

  “You didn’t find him?”

  Baird shook his head.

  “Did you walk up and down the whole time or did you stay in one place?”

  “I found a good spot by the parking lot, where I could see all of the pier and the whole beach. There aren’t many people down there, just dockworkers. It wasn’t difficult to see everyone.”

  “Maybe he was there but you didn’t see him.”

  “Everyone had something to do. It’s a commercial site. No one was just hanging about, waiting.”

  There was nothing she could say. It was different when she didn’t know if he had come or not. But that search he had made, only a few years ago. Could Baird have missed him?

  “Now that I’ve done this for you, you won’t tell anyone about the book, right?”

  She didn’t know what he was talking about. “What book?”

  “This one.” He shifted so his jacket fell open to reveal the mustard envelope. “If you tell, you’re implicated too.”

  “I wouldn’t tell.”

  She didn’t want to talk about this. It mattered so little.

  “I’m sure he’ll show up eventually,” Baird said.

  “You are?”

  “Yes. Why not?”

  Still, Baird didn’t leave.

  “Do you want to see something?” He was opening the envelope. “But first!” He gave her a pair of white gloves. He removed a skinny hardcover book from the envelope. She tipped it so she could see its writing by the light of the lobby. The cover was gray and mottled, like the surface of the moon. A scrolling red ribbon carried the words The Herald 1953.