by Alan Zendell
“Think about it. What if we’re both awake all night, we experience everything identically until morning, and then, somehow, we’re not living the same day?”
“I don’t know, Dylan. You mean we’d watch the morning news together and see different dates on the screen? If that happened I’d have to think you were hallucinating. And what if it didn’t? Would you tell me that staying up all night had broken the spell? I just don’t see what we’ll accomplish except being wrecked in the morning.”
“I can’t argue this, logically. The truth is, I’m too apprehensive to sleep right now. You can do what you want, but I wish you’d try to stay up with me.”
She gave in and we watched a late movie together. It felt good to feel her head on my shoulder, and half-way through the awful film I hugged her. “I really appreciate you humoring me this way.”
“You’re going to owe me big for this.”
We were quiet for a bit, and I thought about Al Khalifa. “I’m expecting to hear from Franklin again. Could be any time. If he calls, I might not be able to contact you for a while.”
She mumbled something and I got up to empty my bladder. When I came back Ilene was sound asleep.
I considered making a pot of coffee, but I’d already been awake more than twenty hours. I lay down beside her and before I knew it, I was asleep too.
14.
“Dylan! Oh my God, Dylan.”
It should have felt wonderful to be kissed so passionately as I struggled northward from a deep sleep, except for Ilene’s tears and obvious distress. No, it seemed more like relief. Let me guess – it’s Thursday morning and something happened to me on her Wednesday that scared the shit out of her. Ilene wasn’t a crier.
“Ilene, Honey…what’s this about?” I said, wrapping her in my arms.
She disengaged herself and pulled me to a sitting position, kneeling opposite me on the bed. Her tears dried, the convulsive crying slowing to an occasional whimper. She ran her fingers over my face the way a blind person might when she first meets you, feeling it gently as though she were afraid of hurting me, her head turning from side to side in disbelief. “You’re all right.”
“Yes, I’m fine.” I had to grit my teeth to keep from demanding that she get on with telling me what happened. “Today’s Thursday, right?”
“What? Oh, yes, right,” her words gradually transforming her shock into understanding.
“Why don’t you just start from the beginning?” It seemed like the right thing to say, but I was aware, as when Jerry’d said that to me, that beginning meant different things to us.
“The beginning,” she said, her faraway look telling me she was rewinding her memories of Wednesday. Then, her tears welled up again and she shouted at me, inches from my face, showering me with saliva. “God damn you, Dylan. Don’t you ever put me through a day like that again.”
I sat silently, suffering through her agony, knowing better than to reach out for her again. She breathed deeply and calmed herself.
“You weren’t here when I woke up, yesterday,” she said, then seemed stuck. “I don’t understand, Dylan. You said when you woke up and discovered it was Thursday, last week, there was no sign that I’d been there at all the night before. But yesterday, it just looked like you’d gotten up early and left.”
“I don’t understand either, except that you really weren’t here last Wednesday night, but go on.”
“No note, no recorded memo. Damn it, Dylan, you’ve never done that in the twenty-five years we’ve been married. What was I to think?” I knew I hadn’t done it yesterday, either. I hadn’t lived that day yet, but I didn’t say that.
“I had the same reaction when I thought you were missing, last week. I even wondered if you’d left me.”
That made her slap my arm. “Idiot!” I smiled and she composed herself.
“When I settled down, my first thought was, ‘He must have skipped to Thursday,’ which told me I really believed you were living your days out of order, and that scared the hell out of me. Even worse, your day swapping didn’t explain why you weren’t here next to me Wednesday morning. Was I going to live every Wednesday without you while you were with a different version of me in another universe on your Wednesday?”
Her horrified expression made me reach for her trembling hands and she continued. “Then, I thought, maybe that’s not it at all. Maybe your buddy Franklin called in the middle of the night and you had to leave without telling me.” She must have been too far into sleep to hear what I’d said about William, Tuesday night.
Ilene was to have been the principal speaker at an all-day conference in New Brunswick on Wednesday, scheduled to talk at 9:00, after which she was to run panel discussions all day. She’d called my office line and my cell phone but got my voice mail each time. Then she’d showered and dressed, feeling the whole time like she was an observer in her own body.
“I thought about calling Jim, but I knew if you were with Franklin, you wouldn’t have told Jim and not me. And if you’d skipped Wednesday, the only person I could tell was Jerry, but I wasn’t about to call him until I had more to go on.”
My heart ached over what she’d endured, but I also noticed how much she sounded like I had a week earlier. She wasn’t really making sense, either. Even if I’d skipped Wednesday, I was bound to return to it after Thursday. But I just let her talk.
“I don’t know how I got through the day. I can’t even remember delivering my speech and leading those damn panels. I checked my cell phone for messages during every break. A dozen times I nearly called the police to report you missing. What if you’d just gone out early to get coffee and been in an accident? When the conference ended, I didn’t know whether to be more worried or angry with you. I was sitting in my car trying to decide what to do when you finally called.”
She stopped, her manner saying she was done and she expected me to say something. Then it dawned on her. “You don’t remember calling me, do you. You haven’t experienced that yet. God, Dylan, I don’t know how long I can live this way.”
“I know.”
My head swirled with emotions. I hated seeing her suffer this way, hated even more feeling helpless to do anything about it. But there was something else, a mixture of awe and elation over what this implied. It proved I wasn’t crazy. I really was living my days out of order. Ilene knew it too, now, and that left me strangely calm.
I pulled her to me, holding her tight. “I wish I could make this easier for you. Maybe we can figure out a way to leave messages for each other so you don’t worry so much.” Having Jerry for support might help, but I didn’t say that, either.
She extricated herself from my arms, not saying anything, her mind obviously racing off in a new direction. The frightened look I’d seen a few minutes earlier returned.
“What is it?”
“I was just thinking. I know some of what you’re going to do today and what you’ll do tomorrow, your Wednesday, I mean. But you said you have free will and you can change some things. What if everything about today changes and you don’t wake up in Saint Vincent’s on Wednesday, and…”
“What?” God, something terrible must have happened. “How did I wind up in the hospital?”
She drew a long breath. “You called me at about six o’clock and asked me to pick you up in the parking lot outside the E.R. You sounded awful, disoriented. I found you waiting there, dressed in a hospital robe, looking terrible. Your forehead was bandaged and there were fresh scabs on your chin and jaw. The right side of your face looked like a lobster shell.
“You were so unsteady getting into the car I thought you were going to pass out. Your head hurt and thinking too hard made you dizzy. You said you’d skipped days and Franklin called late Thursday morning, a quick response thing about a ship berthed at a marine terminal on Staten Island. You couldn’t remember what happened but you were apparently injured and you woke up in the emergency room at St. Vincent’s.”
“That’s it?”
“You must
have suffered a concussion; you were still woozy last night. You seemed so confused I wasn’t sure I could trust anything you said. You kept repeating that you had to get out of there and contact Franklin before they started asking questions about how you got there. You found some way to call me and managed to slip out of the hospital.”
“Did I reach William?”
“You closeted yourself in your office when we got home; you wouldn’t talk about it afterward. I haven’t seen you that way since nine-eleven.” She shuddered. “I don’t like it.”
“I know this is hard on you. I’m really sorry, but I don’t make the rules when it comes to William, and I have no idea why my time stream is all screwed up. We’ll figure out some way to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
“Damn it, Dylan, how do you even know this is real? Maybe you really do have an alternate who took control while you were sleeping Tuesday night. He might have awakened you and made you leave the house during the night, and gotten you involved in something that caused your injuries and then played with your memories. If he can do that, he could also have made you think Wednesday hasn’t happened yet. But…” She reached out to stroke my face again.
All I could do was shrug helplessly. “I have an appointment with Jerry Friday afternoon. You can come if you want to.”
I shared Ilene’s confusion. I didn’t know what was going to happen later on Thursday, or if what she’d described was real, I had no idea what I might have said to William on the phone Wednesday night, though I imagined I’d have tried to use my knowledge of Thursday’s events to alert him about something.
Last week, I’d wanted to alter events using my knowledge of what was going to happen, but I’d never gotten the chance, and even if I had, I had no idea how that would have changed the world I’d awakened to on Friday. And if what I’d told William Wednesday night changed his actions, would that affect what was going to happen on my Thursday? Ilene was right – this was a crazy way to live. All I could do was take things as they came and be careful.
15.
I considered calling William when I got to work Thursday morning, but rejected the idea. If I’d reached him on Wednesday night, calling this morning would be superfluous and hard to explain. And if I hadn’t reached him last night? What would I tell him? Ilene had already implied he’d be calling later to let me know Al Khalifa was landing at a berth on Staten Island. He didn’t need me to warn him of possible trouble.
As for Jim, if my Wednesday turned out the way Ilene described, would he be wondering where I’d been all day or would it be like last week, when he seemed to have forgotten I existed? I decided to preempt the issue when he came in.
“Sorry I couldn’t check in yesterday. Remember I told you I was on quick call-up with my reserve unit?”
“Yeah, you mentioned it last week,” he said, apparently unconcerned.
I was about to tell him I’d been called in Wednesday morning, but I might not be gone on Wednesday if William changed his tactics after talking to me last night, and called off today’s operation. If he had I wouldn’t be injured and I’d awaken next to Ilene Wednesday morning and go to work normally. Was that even possible? I felt like I was going in circles. Maybe hearing about Wednesday from someone else’s point of view would help. I went to see Wilson.
“Hey, Dylan, how’s it goin’?” he said, innocuously enough.
“Nothing special. You guys doing all right?”
“Right on schedule. Gayle’s been on top of things from home.”
That wasn’t very helpful. “Where the hell have you been?” would have told me a lot more.
I realized that trying to figure this out was a non-starter, so instead of obsessing over Wednesday, as I had last week, I stuck to the agenda I’d worked out on Tuesday and waited to see what would develop. I loaded my favorite financial webpage and looked at the list of Wednesday’s biggest stock gainers. I knew I was supposed to research stocks before buying them, but with the element of chance all but removed, it was like fishing in a trout pond.
Even so, I treaded cautiously. I doubted that anyone monitored my transactions but there were all kinds of scenarios in which they might later. Anything I did today would be available to audit or subpoena for years.
I picked four stocks to buy Wednesday morning. One had gained eighty-three percent, another sixty-nine, while one has risen modestly and the fourth had actually lost a little. That wouldn’t fool anyone intent on proving I knew the stock movements in advance, but my need to seek balance in all things hadn’t yet adapted to the new rules.
After puttering ineffectually for a while, I loaded the Maritime Association website to see if a berthing assignment had been made for Al Khalifa. It took only a few seconds to find it, berth 24.1 at the Howland Hook Marine Terminal on Staten Island, north of the Goethals Bridge. She was due to dock at 9:40 this morning, which fit with what Ilene had said.
Did that mean the impound order hadn’t been issued? I didn’t have a lot of time to ponder that before William called. “Ready to move, Dylan?”
“On your count, William.”
“There’ll be a car outside your building in fifteen minutes.”
“We going to Howland Hook?”
Any surprise William may have felt was masked by annoyance. “That’s out of order, Dylan, and you know it.”
He was right. Even with a scrambler, you never gave unnecessary information over a phone line. What the hell was I doing, showing off?
“Will I be riding with you?” If he said yes I still had an opportunity to warn him that something bad was going to happen, but all I heard was an exasperated “Jesus!” followed by a sharp click.
For all William’s concern with security, I wondered why he hadn’t rejected the trite, black SUV that pulled up fourteen minutes later. We might as well have been flying cavalry flags. Inside were William, Samir, and two grunts that William generally referred to as gorillas. William whirled on me before the door had closed.
“What the fuck is with you, Dylan? You forget everything I ever taught you?”
“Sorry, William. I wasn’t thinking.”
He grumbled something, and that was that. “Couple more guys’ll meet up with us at the terminal. I had to wake up some people this morning to get Homeland Security’s attention. The least the fuckers could have done was contact the Port Authority and keep that damn ship on hold while they scratched their asses makin’ us wait.”
William shook his head, obviously disgusted. Putting domestic security under a single umbrella was supposed to improve communication among agencies. “We’ll just have to make the best of it. Customs should be on the dock with an impound order by now. Blows the shit out of our cover, but it can’t be helped.”
William wanted us on board the ship the instant we arrived. Samir and I would head for the suspect container with one of the gorillas alongside. It turned out the latter was a wiz with small explosives, which would be our last resort for getting the container open. I didn’t like that – one slip and we might set off our own dirty bomb. William logged my objection and we moved on to the rest of his plan, which isn’t worth repeating, since we never got to put it in play.
We had a few minutes of quiet which I used to wrack my brain, but the best I could come up with was, “I have a bad feeling about this, William.” We were already on the Bayonne Bridge. We’d be there in three minutes.
To my relief, he didn’t bite my head off. “I know. What’re you thinkin’?”
“This has been dragging too long. There’s a good chance they’re onto us. Wouldn’t surprise me if they knew all along there was an impound order in the works. They’ve had plenty of time to set something up.” Not bad, Dylan, you got his attention.
“We’ll be careful. That’s what the extra personnel are for. First sign of anything unexpected we break off and call in reinforcements.” At my raised eyebrows, he said, “A couple of patrol boats and a helicopter are on standby. Best I could do.”
W
e came to a much too conspicuous halt near the end of the rail head serving the terminal. Looking up at the “Howland Hook” sign as we walked past it, William said, “By the way Dylan, that was a nice catch. Just try to be a little more discreet, will ya?”
Al Khalifa rode low in the water, her cargo still mostly on board, but a number of containers had been moved up to be unloaded and several had already been hoisted onto waiting rail cars. From five hundred yards away, we couldn’t see details, but it was clear that armed customs officers were evacuating the crew and herding them onto the pier. A uniformed man, presumably the captain was gesticulating angrily at the officers, but we couldn’t hear anything except the sounds of cranes and hoists at that distance.
Samir was irate. “So much for getting in and out quickly. They’ve already started unloading. We’re going to be as obvious as a camel fart.” He liked to joke that way even though we all knew he’d probably never been within a mile of a camel. He seemed to think we expected it of him.
“It’s after one,” I said. “The ship was berthed before ten.”
“Fucking Homeland Security!” William muttered. “It’s a wonder New York’s still standing.” The gorillas didn’t say anything.
We waited a couple of minutes for the second SUV to arrive. This one had “U. S. Government” stenciled along its side. Six men got out, including two who I recognized from previous operations years earlier.
William saw me turn to greet them. “Social hour’s not till three. Let’s move.”
We may not have been subtle, but I thought we looked pretty intimidating, eleven men, nine big and burly and two, Samir and me, average-sized; black, white, Asian, Muslim – I thought inanely that we looked like a professional football team advancing on the pier, eager to hit someone, all of us armed, four carrying shotguns in addition to their sidearms – more effective for crowd control when the crowd was likely to be hostile. At the moment, the growing group of displaced crew didn’t seem very aggressive, but their restless milling about made me uneasy. This was supposed to be a covert operation. We all kept sharp nervous eyes, me especially, but there was no obvious sign of trouble.