An Ocean of Minutes

by Thea Lim

  “What would you do if you were super-rich and you could time travel for fun?”

  “Where would you go?”

  “I’d rob a bank and get away to the future.”

  “Wouldn’t that just give them time to figure out you did the crime?”

  “I’d travel till Brooke Shields is legal.”

  “That’s now. You’re a perv and you can’t do math.”

  “I’d live forever.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you had money to just go forward and forward, you could still be alive in two hundred years. You could be a witness to the rest of time.”

  “But we wouldn’t know anybody there.”

  Just as the invention of air travel had made it easy to go, but no easier to leave, the invention of time travel made time easy to pass, but no easier to endure. The philosophers left before she finished her lunch and she had no more distraction. She had to stare at the sea and think about Donna.

  The day before she left 1981, she had called Donna to tell her she was going. Someone in the apartment complex had a working phone, and Polly paid for the call in sanitary napkins. The phone was in the kitchen, crusted in cooking grime. As she talked, she scrubbed the plastic with her thumb, the grease coming off in little black rolls. She preferred to remember the grease over what Donna said. Donna said, “You’re a strong girl, you’ll be all right.” Her tone was bright, cleansed of emotion. It was the last time they would hear each other’s voices, and instead of saying what she wanted to say, Donna had said what Polly wanted to hear.

  Back at the workshop, Baird was drunk. He had his back to her, but she could tell from his sagging posture, and because he was sitting in one of his green leather chairs from the Starlight Roof. He was turning the pages of a book and sighing wetly. She went back to sanding an altar table for the Shangri-La suite.

  Close to an hour later, he was asleep sitting up. The book fell out of his lap with a slap, and she saw that it wasn’t a hotel glossy. It was Elvis Presley’s yearbook.

  “You can’t have that here,” she shouted. “Are you nuts?”

  He almost fell out of the chair. He grabbed the book, plunging for it like she’d tried to snatch it.

  “Yes I can,” he said. His look of hatred fixed her in place.

  She was livid. He had put her in such pointless danger, but more than this, his vulgar daily performance of brokenheartedness became, in that instant, intolerable.

  “You did what you could for him. Move on.”

  It was insubordinate. She shouldn’t have said it.

  But he didn’t care. He staggered up, tottered, then righted himself against a chair rack.

  “No I didn’t,” he said.

  “What do you mean? You couldn’t save him.”

  “Why not? You think I didn’t have it in me?”

  “No. Because they wouldn’t admit you.”

  “What are you talking about, Nader?” He sat down and rested his elbow on a sawhorse. A whiny tone came into his voice, common to children and lushes.

  “You said they wouldn’t let you go for Leonard. Because you were two men? You told me that the first time we met.”

  “I never said that.” He laughed. “Who said that? That’s not true. TimeRaiser didn’t care. I could’ve been wearing a fruit tiara and they would’ve said, ‘Right this way, sir.’ It’s business.”

  Shock turned her rigid, like she was coated in glue.

  “But I didn’t save him! Because I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to, and that’s that. It’s just the kind of guy I am. I would’ve liked it better if Leonard had said so. Instead he said that he understood. Terrible! It was terrible.”

  She went back to work as if he hadn’t spoken at all, her whole body burning.

  He kept facing her. She could feel the weight of his need, as heavy as hands, beseeching her for reassurance, or at least for witness. But in a moment, all the sympathy she had made for him mutated into rage. She refused to turn her head.

  He stood up. Very deliberately, he made his way to the couch and he lay down.

  Why should she care what he’d done? It was even possible that what he’d actually done had been mangled by memory, what truly happened lost forever. Yet a seasick, tilting feeling persisted. If she had been at home, with her routines and the oven clock in Donna’s kitchen and Laverne & Shirley on at eight, it wouldn’t have mattered. But she had none of her old polestars by which to find her bearings. She knew no one here except for him, and she knew him not at all. What she had thought was a mirror was another room.

  Or what if she was just like him, left behind, trapped in another time, twisted and horrible?

  She couldn’t even look at him. When it came time for her to leave, she didn’t wake him up. She’d go in early tomorrow to make sure he hadn’t left the place in chaos.

  * * *

  But in the morning, a bus broke down and blocked the service road, and everyone had to be diverted, and she was late. She ran all the way from the bus stop to the workshop, hoping that she’d beat the review committee.

  Even before she reached the top, she heard their voices. It was the woman with the clean shirt and the man with the good posture from the office, who hadn’t seen her steal the yearbook.

  “If you can change the Committee of Adjustments meeting, we can go to Permissions earlier,” the woman was saying.

  “Got it. Done.”

  Polly stayed put halfway up the last flight of stairs. They had not seen her; she could still turn back. But she couldn’t skip work.

  Baird burst out from behind the plastic curtain.

  “Cassie, Michael, so nice to see you again!” He walked towards them, his arms outstretched, like a magician. “Come see the new mirrors I resilvered!”

  Polly ducked, unable to make a decision.

  “Polly! Come!” Baird shouted.

  “Is that your assistant?”

  “Indeed,” Baird said. “Ask and TimeRaiser will deliver!”

  There was nothing else she could do. She tried to enter naturally. She was afraid to make any moves, to swallow.

  But they looked right at her and did not react.

  Cassie said, “Well, let’s get a look at your logs.”

  Baird ignored the request. “Polly has a very interesting story. She’s from 1981.”

  She could see that he had tried to tame his hair with a wet comb, and for the moment it was lying submissively against his scalp.

  “How many years did you travel?” Michael said. “How old are you in actual time?”

  “In actual time?” Polly said.

  “Your actual-time age. What year were you born?”

  “1958.”

  “What’s that?” Cassie said.

  “The big four-oh this year!” Michael announced.

  “And you look like, what, twenty?”

  “I’m twenty-three,” Polly said.

  “No you’re not,” Michael said. “You’re forty!”

  “It always makes me giggle,” Cassie said. “TimeRaiser: miracle anti-aging solution. We should change our marketing strategy.”

  “She’s older than me,” Michael said, “and she looks like my daughter!”

  “But I’m not forty,” Polly said, but quietly.

  “So let’s see the workshop,” Cassie said. “We have to be getting on.”

  “She even has an old-fashioned name,” Baird said.

  “Polly. Polly,” Michael said. “Do you know that old children’s song? How does it go? You know the one.” Puzzlement crossed Michael’s face. Then he said, “ ‘Polly Put the Kettle On’! That’s it! How does it go again?”

  “It’s just that one line, repeated, I think.”

  “How does the tune go?” Baird said. “Sing it for us.”

  “I don’t think so,” Polly said.

  “But you must! It’s a lovely tune,” he said.

  By now she understood that he was stalling. She couldn’t think why.

  �
��It’s a lovely tune,” Baird said again, and she saw that it would be more awkward to continue to resist than to surrender.

  She opened her mouth and sang, in her thin, reedy voice, “Polly put the kettle on.”

  “That’s it?” Baird said.

  “Polly put the kettle on,” she sang again.

  Baird tapped the table like a conductor. Cassie showed a folder to Michael. Polly’s voice wavered.

  “Polly put the kettle on.”

  Cassie and Michael started discussing a slip of paper. Polly stopped singing. But Baird frowned and made angry gestures at her to continue.

  “And let’s have tea.”

  Baird applauded. “Encore,” he said. “Come on.”

  “Polly put the kettle—”

  “That’s fine,” Cassie said, and put out a restraining arm.

  “Great!” Baird shouted. “Let me show you the antique mirrors I resilvered.”

  Dank misery descended on Polly. Why had she gone along with that?

  Baird was showing the mirrors. “You’ll notice that, while the glass is now like new, I actually worked to preserve some of the bumps and bruises on the frame. They’re part of the life of the piece, you know, and we must respect that.”

  Polly had actually been the one to resilver them by herself.

  He toured them around the room—showing them the wee drawers in the gentleman’s valet, the swivel base of a papasan chair, a trestle of lamps from across the ages—speaking in a strange way, drawing out his vowels like an aristocrat. He explained in minute detail how to weave a lace cane seat, but at the end of it all, Cassie said again, “Now let’s take a look at your records.”

  “Okay, then,” Baird said. He turned to the curtain and Cassie and Michael followed. “Oh, you should wait here. The workshop is in disarray, a touch hazardous—don’t want you to trip.”

  “In that case we should take a look. You should be following workplace safety protocol,” Michael said.

  The workshop looked like Baird had started five projects at once. Cuttings of fabric slathered the floor, sawhorses were scattered in all directions, jars of varnish lay lidless. Polly could tell from the state of the couch he had slept there last night.

  “Oh, dear,” Michael said. “I’m going to have to go over the seventeen-point safety check.”

  “I’ll take a look at the log myself,” Cassie said.

  “Let me get it for you,” Baird said.

  “I see it there,” she said, crossing to the stand where he kept the records.

  Finally, Polly saw why he had been trying to delay them. The mustard-yellow envelope with the yearbook inside was lying with the logbooks.

  There was nothing Polly could do. If she lunged forward and plucked the yearbook out of the stack, Cassie would notice. Baird pretended to be drinking in Michael’s every word, but in his nervousness he kept unbuttoning the buttons on his front, his hair now drying into vertical fuzz. Polly leaned against a drafting table, windless. Neither could look away from Cassie, bent over the logs and a black spiral notepad she’d pulled out of her pocket, but nothing showed whether or not she’d seen the yearbook.

  Then it all came to an end. Cassie slapped her notepad shut.

  “These numbers are weeks behind target. In addition, there are disturbing discrepancies between the logs you’ve kept and the independent logs. We thought, with the addition of an assistant, that you’d be weeks ahead of where you are.”

  “Oh yes, well.” Baird rocked on the balls of his feet. “Sorry about that.”

  “We’ll need to have a meeting,” Michael said to Baird as Cassie put back the logs. “Wait for the memo.”

  Cassie straightened the logbook, lining up its spine with the other books on the stand. She reached out and fingered the yellow flap. The silence curdled. She turned to Michael. “What’s the plan for lunch?” she said. “Have you spoken to Susan?”

  Polly and Baird watched Cassie and Michael cross the courtyard.

  “It’s fine,” he said. “She didn’t see it.”

  “She touched it!”

  “Nonsense! She would’ve said something.” He sat down in a wicker throne and bit his thumb.

  “What if she’s just coming up with a plan?”

  “No, I know her. She would’ve confronted us right away.”

  But Polly could not get a hold of herself. What if she got arrested? She remembered Thibodeaux’s hand stripping her belly, and she started to cry.

  “Put a sock in it, Nader.”

  “What will happen next?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing. Go cool off.”

  She went to the sink to splash her face, but she could only put her face in her hands and weep.

  “Land sakes, Nader! What is wrong with you?”

  The weight of the stories she carried was too much, and her muscles buckled. She told him about Frank, who was not her cousin. She told him their plan to meet every Saturday in September, and how hard she had tried. Everything she wanted to happen, and what actually did.

  Baird sat up straighter. He was entirely engaged, leaning forward, his elbows perched on his knees.

  “Is he dead?” he said.

  “I don’t know. They said he’s in another country.”

  “But there’s still hope if he’s not dead. If he left the territory, there should be a record.”

  “Where? Where are there records? I’ve been asking and asking.” Though she had never quite asked Norberto if there were records of departure.

  “This is very interesting,” he said. He was buttoning and unbuttoning his front again.

  “It is?”

  “You should go to the Strand.”

  “The Strand?”

  “Red-light district. You live in the Moody building? It’s right around the corner. That’s part of its appeal. It’s not coastal. It’s inland, in the ghettos. Great cachet. Attractive to vacationers and Americans looking for a thrill.”

  “Why would I go there?”

  All this time, she had kept her sorrows from him, when in fact this kind of story gave him lurid pleasure.

  “It’s a type of liquidation station. Journeymen selling whatever they have, to draw currency from vacationers. There’s the flesh trade, and gambling, but also information. Some Journeymen, if they work in transportation, they have passenger manifests. Or hotel registers. You can pay to have a look at a specific register. If you know he left, say, in July of ’83, you can pay to see the pages of outgoing trips from the port of Galveston that month. Everyone is looking for someone. Do you want to go?”

  “Of course.”

  “We’ll go tonight! I’ll meet you there. Let’s say eight p.m.”

  “Does it cost a lot of money?”

  “To get in?”

  “No, to buy information.”

  “Of course it costs a lot of money. Are you crazy? It costs big money.”

  “But I don’t have money.”

  “Well, find some money, girlie! You can’t give up. That’s the problem with people these days. That’s why it’s ’98 and the country is still in the toilet. If I were you, I’d just hit the road to find him.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Can’t, or won’t?”

  “Can’t! I’m bonded!”

  “What?” Baird said. “What’s bonded?”

  * * *

  Polly got off the evening shuttle at Moody Plaza, but she didn’t go in. She walked north, following Baird’s directions. Two cars that had crashed into each other head-on about fifteen years ago still blocked an intersection. To their left, west, there lay the Strand, an avenue of old-timey buildings, tram tracks, and cobbled pavement, like the movie set for an old western with honky-tonk pianos. She had been here once before, in 1980. The street had been kept clean, no trees growing out of the sidewalk.

  She sat on the curb, next to a decapitated parking meter, in front of the cast-iron storefront where Baird had said to meet. A retail sign had survived the years of hardship: Col.
Bubbie’s Strand Surplus Senter. Its archways and windows were bricked over, save for one glass door, painted black, with lines of light passing between the frame and glass, glowing brighter now that it was getting dark.

  It must be about ten minutes past their meeting time. Polly was antsy. She got up. The street dead-ended at a massive art deco building rising out of the road, like a ship’s prow. Its sidewalk, steps, and awning were blanketed in black birds, all talking at once. She got too close. The edges of the crowd screamed in their high-pitched language. Polly fled north, to the ferry terminal. Little whirring bird heads still stared in her direction. She put more distance between herself and them. Here the city was interrupted by the sea. This sea was only a slight gray strip; another body of land sat across the water, less than a quarter mile away. But it was still the sea, in its glitter and its moves, and in the smell in the air like an old envelope, something left in a drawer and forgotten.

  In her heart, the past was not another time, but another place that still existed. It was just that she had taken a wrong turn. One day, she would figure it out and she would go back to the house where she had lived, and it would not be lost to the violence of time, the roof caved in. It would be just as she had left it, and she would look up at the front of the house, and see the light on in the bedroom window.

  She went back to Col. Bubbie’s, but Baird hadn’t shown. She still had forty minutes until Norberto locked the doors. She didn’t need Baird to go with her. All this time, the answer had been right here, minutes from where she lay her miserable head.

  Polly opened the door and stepped into a vestibule hung with soldiers’ helmets and canteens. A bouncer waited in the corner—a towering rectangular woman. Polly stared, unsure of what to say.

  “Coming in?” the bouncer said.

  “I don’t have . . .” Polly said, stopping at the noun because she didn’t know what she needed to get past. She wasn’t dressed right; she didn’t even own anything for a night on the town.

  “First time?”

  “No. Yes.”

  “First time is free,” the bouncer said, and parted a black curtain that hung behind her stool. “The bar is on the first floor, the entertainment is on two. Enjoy yourself.”