An Ocean of Minutes

by Thea Lim

  By seven p.m. some of the Catholics began to pray the rosary, the burble of their voices going up and down in unison. Mary started a Carpenters singalong.

  At eight p.m. some had to go inside, to bathe before lights out. “We’ll be right back,” they said.

  At nine p.m. Polly leaned forward and put her hand on Cookie’s shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s still evening. Look. The sun hasn’t gone down yet.”

  Close to ten p.m. Mary was dozing against the container, snoring softly. Only two other women remained: sisters with their arms around each other, talking low. They had put in a search for their mother and were still waiting to hear back. Cookie hadn’t spoken in an hour.

  Polly’s eyes had adjusted to the dark, and the compound just caught the edge of the edge of the glow from the streetlamps on Harborside, but when she saw a figure, like an ounce of the darkness moving, she didn’t say anything. She didn’t trust herself. With every yard the figure gained, her heart jerked, as if he were her own.

  When he was about fifty yards away, she took Cookie’s hand. Cookie was staring at her feet, but at the touch she looked up. She squeezed Polly’s hand. The figure kept coming. She squeezed harder, and harder, until Polly’s fingers hurt. When the man reached their circle, Cookie made a noise, like a cry imploding, but she didn’t get up.

  “Ma,” Cookie’s son said. “It’s me.”

  Mary woke up and shrieked.

  The sisters came over and helped Cookie stand.

  Cookie held his elbows and stared. Polly had always imagined him as a boy, but of course he was a man, with strong arms and a big white smile.

  “When did you get so tall?” Cookie said.

  “I’ve always been this tall. You just forgot that I’m grown.”

  Cookie started to cry. She forgot how to breathe, inhaling when she should have been exhaling. Her son put his arms around her and she wept into his chest.

  “Everything’s good now, Ma,” he said.

  * * *

  Cookie and her son were going to get a house together in 2001, after their bonds were up, maybe in Texas City, where there was a settlement of ex-TimeRaiser workers. “You should come join us when you finish,” Cookie said. “You’re single now, right?”

  Polly had never told Cookie about Frank. It would be impossible now to explain. There was too much to say. All the things she’d done to get back to his singing in the car, his toes wriggling in the sand, his chuckles in his sleep.

  Polly mapped all the places she’d ever been. She picked the farthest point she knew from her mother’s house, from Donna’s house, from Frank’s house. Then she traced the route all the way home, picturing it first from above, then zooming in: the highway, the smokestacks, the headlights feelering the turns, the Mister Donut, the scarred street sign, the wiggly stone in the path, the knob in her hand, the smell of figs in the hall. She could see everything.

  On the twenty-first day, her foreman came to her station and told her to report to Head Office after work. She was afraid it might be some kind of trap, some test: if she ran, she’d be proven guilty. She went as fast as she could.

  Head Office was almost at the causeway to the mainland. It was a long, low building, alone in a lot they must pay H-1s to keep clear of weeds. It had been a post office once. She had visited it in 1980 to send a postcard to Donna.

  Inside, the long counter was still there, but first you had to give your name to a receptionist seated at a table at the front, and she gave you a ten-page form to fill out. Polly flipped through it. Last known address before time travel. Names of references. Blood type. Family medical history.

  “Excuse me,” Polly said. “Are you sure I need to fill this out? Do you know why I’m here?”

  “Everyone fills out the form, regardless of basis for inquiry.”

  “I’m not making an inquiry. I was asked to come here.”

  “Everyone fills out the form.”

  Polly filled out the form. It took fifteen minutes.

  “You left blank sections,” said the receptionist. “The form must be filled out in full.”

  Polly took it back and wrote nonsense in the fields for Paternal medical history and Guarantors of identity and Financial standing.

  When the receptionist was satisfied with her paperwork, she gave Polly a number. Then Polly had to wait, seated in a row of chairs with others like her, in dusty coveralls, leaning forward so sharply they were barely in their seats. There was no rhyme or reason to the numbers. They were not called in order. Everyone was afraid to fall asleep. She was still there when they pulled the entrance grille shut for the night.

  “Don’t worry,” the guard called. “If you’re in, you’re in.”

  When they finally called her number, she shuffled up to the counter and gave her name to a man behind a hard plastic divider.

  He took her ID and number and walked to the back. He opened a filing cabinet and flipped through, very slowly. A woman passed by and he struck up a conversation with her.

  None of this made any sense. This was not how they would apprehend a killer. But not knowing what this was made it somehow worse, and her legs began to shake.

  He finished with the filing cabinet and took an age to cross the carpet.

  “Well, congratulations, Mrs. Galván. There’s just the matter of the paperwork and then you’re on your way.”

  She didn’t say anything. She waited for him to divulge more information.

  “Hello?” He waved his hand in front of her face.

  “I’m sorry. On my way to what?”

  He frowned. “Let me look at your ID again.”

  He held her ID up to the light. He clipped it to his clipboard and dragged a finger from her ID to his papers.

  “Well, we’ve got the right girl. But you don’t know that your bond is over?”

  She shook her head.

  “This has gotta be a first.”

  It seemed safest not to speak.

  “Who is Norberto Galván? Your brother? Your husband?”

  “My husband.”

  “Mr. Galván paid off your last several months, plus the early termination fee. You’re a free agent.”

  She studied the papers in front of him, reading the figures upside down, making out her name and her ID number.

  “I have to get you to initial here and here and here and here. I have your salary payout. All expenses deducted leaves you with $213.81. Would you like that in cash or in your LifeFund?”

  She couldn’t see properly; the plastic glass between them was scratched. She couldn’t ask him if it was a mistake, because he might check and discover that it was a mistake.

  “You have the option of signing a contract for another year, to keep your same job. TimeRaiser is committed to retention and would be willing to give you a twenty-nine-cent raise—that’s per hour—should you sign up for another year. Are you interested?”

  Her hands were clinging to the counter, leaving porcelain tile dust on the Formica. The skin looked inflated below her right thumb where the burn on her palm wrapped around. She counted her fingers, and she counted them again. She said to herself, These are my hands and this is my body. This is me and I’ve carried me through.

  “You really should consider it. What we can also do, now that you no longer have to allocate income towards your passage, is sign you up for a savings plan. We have a great savings plan. I’ll put some information about it in your package. And here is some information on vacating your housing and how to find new housing. This is your unsigned contract for the next year. Take a look at it, please; you won’t get a better offer. And this . . . What’s this?”

  He opened a fat envelope and pulled out some folded papers.

  “Your husband left this for you. I guess he thinks we’re the postal service. Here you are.”

  It was a visa and a boat ticket to Buffalo, leaving the next evening.

  * * *

  “But why Buffalo?” Cookie wanted to know.

&nbs
p; “My missing person is there.”

  “Well I’ll be. Of course. You are a mysterious girl.”

  Polly wanted to give Cookie her wedding ring, but she couldn’t get it off her finger. While Cookie put some things in a shopping bag—a sweater, socks and underwear, some vegetables—Polly tugged and tugged, with no success.

  “Don’t worry. It doesn’t matter,” Cookie said.

  “But I have to give you something.”

  At the last moment, when she was supposed to have left for the terminal five minutes ago, Polly borrowed a cake of soap and rubbed it, dry, on her finger. She spat. She twisted and turned the ring, and finally it popped off.

  “There,” she laughed, teetering on tears.

  “But what am I going to do with this?”

  “Sell it, towards your house in Texas City.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Cookie said, but she smiled, delighted.

  They’d only had one or two true conversations, and if they’d met under different circumstances, they would never have been friends. But Polly hugged her deeply until Cookie said, “Time to go.”

  Polly headed off. She took Church Street for the last time. She passed the brewery and came to a lane to the highway, and then she followed its shoulder. The only thing worse than leaving without saying good-bye to Norberto was seeing him again.

  A bus passed her, spitting hot dust in her eyes. She caught up to it at the ferry terminal. Passengers bottlenecked at the entrance and she had to wait to get in. He had bought her a ticket on the cheapest shipping line, but she’d still have all her meals and a berth in a shared cabin. Some of the passengers, wealthy businessmen who must’ve missed the plusher sailings, were tugging at their shirt collars and rolling their eyes. But most passengers looked like Polly, dressed in their nicest wash-faded clothes, concentrating on the print on their tickets, anxious to smile when spoken to. She was a few doors over from where she’d sat on the curb and waited for Baird, that night on the Strand, a million years ago. The crowd gulped into the terminal, the door coming closer and closer. A child in line pointed out their boat to her mother, a red-and-blue passenger barge, long and low and cast to the precise width of the canal. The horn tooted. Polly was leaving Galveston and she’d never be back.

  She clutched the straps of her shopping bag so nothing would fall out, and ran with it slapping against her thigh down the Strand and around the corner, and there was Moody Plaza, like a dusty column of doom, and through the glass door, of course, Norberto was there. He was leaning against the counter, thumbing through a shoe box of index cards. When he saw her, he froze. His hair had been shorn and he looked gaunt, but had enough time passed for that to be possible?

  “Where did you get the money?” she said.

  “You’re supposed to be on that boat.”

  “Where did the money for my ticket come from?”

  “I sold the house.”

  “But how? To who?”

  “TimeRaiser.”

  “Did they give you enough money? To buy another place?”

  “No. But they gave enough for what I needed.”

  “But where will you live?”

  “I live here now. I rent a room.”

  “What about your stock? Where will you put it?”

  “I left it all in the house. They made me lower the price. They said it was going to be expensive to dispose of the contents. It’s okay. Don’t look like that. It’s all right.”

  “But your store. All your things.”

  “Stop this now. I don’t have another house to sell if you miss your boat.”

  She had to look to the left of his head. She couldn’t look at his face, or she saw it inches away and streaked with panic, his tears in her mouth and the blade of his arm crushing her throat.

  “I did the wrong thing.” He paused to gather himself. “I did the wrong thing and I had to make it right. That’s all there is to it.”

  “I thought I killed you,” she said.

  “Did you pack snacks? It’s a five-day journey.” He put a jar of beans in front of her. They kept the counter between them. They wouldn’t see each other again. Their course ended here, with no more chances to change it.

  Some tenants came in, fussing around the message board. She wanted it to unhappen. She wanted his face to go back to the face of a brother, of someone she’d loved. She fished around in her paper bag until she felt the hard edge of the baseball cards she’d carried so long. She put them on the counter.

  “You should take these. They could be worth something. You can still have a store. You can sell things like this. You can start again.”

  He stared down at the cards.

  “Please. For your nostalgia department.”

  He tucked the cards into his coveralls. He carefully zippered the pocket shut. He jabbed his knuckle into his eye and wetness streaked across his cheek.

  “I won’t forget you,” he said. He pushed the beans at her.

  She nodded, because she couldn’t speak.

  “Come on, now. You have to go.”

  Everybody went up on deck to wave good-bye to the city, and Polly followed them, not knowing what else to do. She thought she might see something—the headless palm tree that oversaw 4A1, Cookie waving, the window to her room in Moody Plaza, the new tenant within, even Baird in the back of a trishaw, haranguing the driver. But all of that was to the west, and the boat went east, and the island scurried away, uncaring. It became very small, until it was too far away to tell one thing from the other, just like that. She had wanted to leave for a lifetime, and now it was all gone too quick.

  She stayed on the deck, until the sun set and the wind rose and the first mate came to lock up for the night.

  Once something’s been done, it can’t be undone.

  DECEMBER 1980

  * * *

  It is the anniversary of my mother’s death and you are trying to cheer me up. I don’t even know why I’m crying in the kitchen in the middle of the night, when it’s been nearly ten years. I’m embarrassed that you’ve found me. You are very nice and that only makes me sadder.

  In the morning you try to convince me that what we really need to do is go to New Orleans. It’s that time between Christmas and New Year’s, and we still have a few days until our vacations end. You say it’s warm down there as a blizzard pummels its fists against the window and the wind screams to get in. In December? I ask. So you make Donna call meteorology, and she reports that it is sixty-eight degrees. We have no money, we can’t go to Hawaii, but we can go to New Orleans, and doesn’t that sound fun?

  We pack the car, running down the back steps with our arms full of potato chips and sun hats and pillows, like we have to get a move on before one of us remembers a reason why we simply cannot go. And then we are off, cutting a line across the country in your old Celica, and I am not sure we’ll make it in one piece. I do not know that this is the last time I will ever leave this house. This is where I became myself. I should have gone from room to room touching everything, seizing as much as my memory could hold: the flip clock on the oven, the accordion door always stuck in its track, the dust motes and how they twinkle when I open the blinds. But I don’t know.

  Somewhere in Indiana we see a semi with its cab on fire, smoke that looks dense enough to touch churning out of the windshield. Life goes on in its depressing way, even when we are happy. At any given moment, someone is being tortured or raped, I say, right now. What a lovely tidbit, you say, and put on the radio. They are reporting on the fallout from a lab accident at the CDC in Atlanta that occurred during a fire drill, but tests on a patient are inconclusive and doctors are hopeful. You change the channel and a soft-rock singer is warbling over plonking keys that he can’t unlove his lover, no, no, no. It’s sappy but it works. For the rest of my life I could just be on this road with you, and I’d be happy.

  As we go, we see the ground change from gray to green, and by the time we get to Nashville the air is so much softer. We stop for the night in a
motel with crusty carpets and gum stuck to the underside of the night table, but I go along with it. You slide your arm under my neck to pillow my head against the lumpy bed and you say, Oh, do I love you.

  The next day, the road again. We’ve been driving for ages, and as the sun is setting, you start saying that New Orleans is right around the corner. After you’ve been saying this for more than an hour—It should be here, I saw the sign—we finally stop at a lonesome gas station. A teenage attendant with an unreal accent tells us that we’re in Lake Charles, almost Texas, and we overshot New Orleans by three hours. You can’t believe it—you almost want to call the operator to confirm—and even the attendant tries to cheer you up, saying that a lot of people get confused at Slidell interchange. If it’s all the same to you, he says, we’re close to Galveston, which in his mind is a nicer vacation spot than New Orleans, a more appropriate place to take your pretty wife, and it’s only about an hour down the road. We know nothing about Galveston, save for the song. Why not? I say. We’re being spontaneous, aren’t we?

  The attendant lied. Galveston is at least two and a half hours from Lake Charles, plus all the stops at other gas stations to make sure, but finally, after midnight, we roll over that causeway and you say, How cool, just the sea, the stars, and us.

  We pass a hotel, an amazing monster, built right on the pier, the silty sea sloshing under its footing. Two forty-foot mermaids flank its logo, their nipples pointing the way to its name: Flagship Hotel.

  I’m turning the car around, you say, there’s no way we’re not staying there. Our room smells just a little like a wet dog. Everything is mauve.

  The next morning we walk around the Strand, this kooky, old-timey street, where we buy some taffy from a candy store with glass counters, even though neither of us likes taffy, because this is what people come here for. The curbs are three feet high and there are tracks in the street where you can take an antique trolley up and down the main drag, ringing its jolly bells. There’s hardly anyone around and I feel that all of this is here just for us.

  We ask our waitress what else there is to do in town. (You drove all the way from Buffalo, she says, just for Galveston?) You could take the ferry to the Bolivar Peninsula, she suggests. The beaches are nicer there and people say you can see dolphins on the way over, though I haven’t yet.