She looks up at me from under her stringy hair and asks, “When’s the last time you were out?”
“A while,” I say, trying to give the impression that I’m not clear on the time rather than tell her how long I’ve been here.
Now we’ve gotten some of the prelude aside, and I think she knows I’m going to go to the heart of the matter. Given our situation, she must know I’m going to ask. Her shoulders are bowed over her lap and her fist is tight around her object, her other hand clasped over it to be sure she doesn’t let go.
Her tension is palpable, so I decide to take a detour before getting right to the question. I hold out both of my empty hands and ask, “Notice I don’t have to carry one?”
That draws her out of her anticipatory funk, and she looks me over, searching for a bulge in my cheek or some other indicator of where I’ve got my object stashed. “How? You don’t have one at all?”
It’s a risk to show anyone this, but really, what does it matter? If my heart stops I’ll disappear anyway, and she doesn’t look like the sort to dig it out of my body while keeping me alive just long enough to get my object into her hands.
At least one of the bad ones out there does this. I learned this from another man I encountered in the mist, a man who had run into the bad one and barely escaped. Bleeding and frightened—and quite understandably terrified of any new person, including me—he had been hard to help. It was only when I held up the medical kit that I was able to persuade him to come forward and let me tend to him.
After that, he’d been eager to share his story, to show me the long gash the man had made to dig out his object. It was his story that gave me the idea in the first place. The bad man, who I’d taken to thinking of as Cutter, wanted to control all the objects. He apparently believed that would give him the ability to change things back.
I unbutton the top few buttons of my shirt, and laugh when she gives me a look exactly like a teenager should. Folding back the top wedge, I show her the top of my chest and the little bulge there. An angry red line crosses it, and I still have pieces of tape over the top and bottom of the cut. It’s healed, but I can’t be sure how strong it is yet, so I won’t risk it working its way out.
Sarah gasps and leans forward, stopping abruptly when she nears my web of wires. Her gaze is on the lump, and I can see her working out the geometry of my object and the mechanics of what I’ve done. When she leans back, her fist tightens again and she asks, “What is it? Yours, I mean.”
“A little green pebble. I found it on the beach. Yours?”
She opens her fist so cautiously that I can almost hear her joints creak. Her fingers don’t straighten all the way. They’ve been curled into a fist for too long, and there are dark lines of grime along each joint. In her palm rests a small shell of a type I’ve never seen before. It’s tiny, no more than an inch long, and beautifully whorled with colors that would have attracted any eye.
I ask, “Did you find yours at the beach, too?”
It’s a good a way as any to broach the subject.
“No. A man gave it to me while I was waiting at the tube station,” she says, and I know she must dwell on that moment a great deal.
“Ah,” I say. I’ve heard of that before. Some that find the objects get themselves into such a muddle that they can’t take it anymore, and would rather disappear than keep going. Or they think they can make everything go back to the way it was if they give it away. I’ve never figured out how or why they get these ideas.
We sit in silence for a moment, the ever-present soft sound of nothingness around us—and it does have a sound, although one that can’t be described—absorbing what’s been said and shown. I see her eyes dart back up to the area where I’ve stuffed a rock under the skin of my chest, and I ask, “How did you figure out what it was? Aside from what must have happened to the man that gave it to you.”
Sarah sighs and says, “Because I was mad at my mum, I found out right away. When the man held my hand like that, he scared me. He was dressed nicely but he looked frantic and sort of sweaty. He grabbed my hand and said that I was young and couldn’t have too many regrets. He pressed the shell into my hand and let go. Then he just disappeared.” She makes the poof motion with her hands—or rather, with one hand and one fist.
“There had to be more to it than that. You could have just dropped it.”
“Yeah, but he said not to,” she says and shrugs. “And then everything just changed, like it shifted or something. The walls had been tiled but full of these huge murals. I know it was like that. I remember it. But then they weren’t anymore. It was just white tiles, all streaked with black like they are, covered with loads of flyers and billboards and such. And I remember that, too.”
“And no one else noticed, right?” I say, knowing the feeling. Holding an object takes you out of the loop of repercussions when something changes. Letting go of it means it all catches up with you. No one is absolutely sure what dying with an object does, but I think I have a good idea. Some things change back, but it’s all dependent on what else got changed by someone else in the meantime. That’s my theory.
She nods and smiles at me. “Exactly. I was completely freaked out. I mean, who wouldn’t be? But then I did the exact wrong thing. I wasn’t supposed to have taken the tube that day. My mother, like always, called at the last minute and canceled on me, so I didn’t have a ride. I was really irritated at her—and when this happened, the first thing I thought was how stupid she was for not showing up, making me end up having to see a weird guy disappear and the walls change. I thought about how I wished she wasn’t my mother.”
“Oh, no,” I answer, because that’s all I can say. I know exactly where this leads.
She nods again, but her smile is so completely gone it’s as if it had never existed. “Yeah, exactly. All shifty weird, and then when I got home it wasn’t my home. Some other family lived there. My mum’s law office wasn’t there, and I couldn’t find my dad at all.
“But you kept the shell?”
“Of course! That man said to keep it, and once the shifty weird thing happened I knew something was going on. At first I thought it was like a magic lamp or something. I didn’t understand that it was rearranging time.” She waves a hand again, like she’s going to tell an old story. And in a way it is an old story. “I tried to fix it. Kept putting things back. But you can’t control your head, you know.”
“The old brain does it to us all,” I answer.
“Do you know what this is? How it works? Why they’re here?” she asks. It’s clear that if she’s met any of the others in here, she hasn’t had a chance to really talk to them.
No one knows what’s really going on, of that I’m quite sure. Some say it’s supernatural or divine; some say natural. But most think it’s from beyond Earth.
I’ve had more time in comfort than anyone I’ve met, time when I can just think about it and try to reason it out. In my life I did that for a living: divining the future aims of others based on the outcomes of their past actions. It paid great money. It allowed companies to predict what people would do, want, or buy next. I’ve been using that skill while sitting here and stewing on my mattress in the midst of the end of everything.
“I can tell you what I think it is, but I can’t prove a bit of it,” I offer.
“Please.”
There are no blankets on my mattress, because that would create too much risk of them getting tangled with my wires, but I do have two pillows, and I carefully move one of them through the tangle toward Sarah. I plump up my own and lie down on my side, facing her. She does the same. It’s incredibly comfortable, and she’s relishing it—if the groan that escapes her is any indicator.
“Let’s just say you’re looking for great places to live, and you find this planet. It’s perfect: lots of water, the right amount of heat. The only problem is that it’s covered with life. Life that doesn’t match whatever passes for DNA in your species, and is utterly useless to you. And it’s e
verywhere. Every nook and cranny. What would you do?” I ask her.
Her eyebrows lift, and her crooked grin tells me that she’s hearing something new—and not particularly believable. “Really? You’re going with aliens?”
“Okay, I know it sounds weird, and maybe the motive isn’t malevolent. Just go with me here,” I say, and she nods. It’s only one of my many theories, but there’s something about this one that rings more true to me than the others. Not completely, because I’m surely missing a whole lot, but in general principle.
“Right, so if you’re smart—and let’s face it, if they got here they are smart—you’re going to study the dominant species of the planet. That would be us. What’s the one thing that you can always count on with humans?”
She thinks for a moment and says, “That we’re assholes.”
I laugh because she’s utterly serious in her answer, and counter with, “That we’re curious and grabby.”
Again she looks dubious, so I add, “If you find a bag of money on the sidewalk and you’re a nice person, you might hesitate to pick it up, or you might call for someone else. But if you find a pretty rock or shell, you wouldn’t hesitate.”
She opens her fist a little to look at her shell and then says, “Yes. I can see that.”
“And there’s something else about us that is utterly consistent. Our brains are a running monologue of regret and wishes for change.” I finish by gesturing toward her, referring to her first experience with her own object.
Instead of agreeing with me, she shakes her head and says, “No. I don’t think that’s true. That was just a fluke what happened to me.”
I shake my head back at her and say, “Not a fluke. We regret things all the time. All day, every day. We just don’t know it.”
“How do you figure?” she asks.
“I found out what my little rock did almost from the moment I picked it up, just like everyone else I’ve talked to did. I picked it up, and when I stood up, the stinging from getting my legs waxed bothered me. Though I have no conscious memory of anything specific, I do remember thinking I was stupid for getting it done right before I went to the beach—with all the salt and so on.”
She nods and waits, her hand tucked under her head as she sinks further into the pillow.
“Well, you know what happened then. Everything went all shifty and blurry, and I felt like I wasn’t balanced or something. It felt like vertigo. So, naturally, I dropped the pebble.”
“You did? What happened?” Her voice still sounds wide awake, but her eyes are getting heavy.
I laugh, breaking my own rule about noise, and clap my hand over my mouth. “Oops. Well, it wasn’t a huge thing, so all that happened was that I was suddenly standing there with all the hair that had been removed right back on my legs where it had been before. What a waste of pain that was!”
She grins. It lightens her features and smooths the lines of strain for a moment. They return almost immediately and she says, “So you picked it back up.”
“I picked it back up,” I confirm, but even I can hear that flat tone of regret in my voice. “I figured it out right away. You can move the time to make whatever it is you’re thinking about not happen, but it won’t affect you so long as you’re holding the object. Like you, I thought I’d stumbled onto some sort of weird magic lamp or something. At first I tried to control it. Little stuff, like going back and not dating the guy that wound up wrecking my car while drunk and getting my insurance jacked up. Stuff like that.”
I had done so much more than that, but how to explain it to a girl who has never driven the crowded freeways around my city or pressed through crowded sidewalks or waited in long lines for coffee? How can I explain the moment someone cut me off in traffic and I thought—for only the briefest of moments—that it was payback for cutting someone off the day before? Poof. I could remember both the bad-mannered cutoff and also being late for work because I’d stayed in my lane. A thousand such thoughts pass through our minds every day—and for three days, a thousand shifts came unbidden. Sarah’s voice breaks through the thoughts that roll pointlessly around in my head.
“I never thought of that,” she says. “I just freaked out, but then all the other changes started happening so fast and I had nowhere to go. And then I was here.”
“Oh, for me it took a lot longer than that. I must have been one of the early ones,” I say.
She’s looking at me intently, and I can hear the question she wants to ask just from her expression. She wants to know what happened that was bad. Because, of course, there has to be something bad somewhere in there.
I press my hands underneath my pillow and snuggle my cheek into the cloth. It’s getting dirty and smells a little of sweat, a little of dirty hair in need of a wash. I may have brought a lot of stuff, but I’m slowly losing the battle to maintain myself all the same. Dry shampoo is a stopgap; it wasn’t meant for weeks in this chronological limbo of ours.
“It’s the consequences of erasing the bad that wind up getting us in the end,” I say.
Sarah seems to withdraw for a moment, looking into herself and her own past. The only thing she has conscious memory of changing was a whopper, and one that certainly fits the bill. Her eyes refocus on me, back in the present, and I try to give her a supportive smile, though I know it’s weak.
I press on and say, “That bad boyfriend, the one I went back and un-dated?” She nods. “After the shifty bit, I realized all that I had lost even though I’d regained my old car. I could see the key fob for it on the rack on the wall, back where it should be. I could remember both the boyfriend and the wreck—but also me telling him I wouldn’t go out with him on that first date. Both at once.”
Again she nods, the side of her face pressed into the pillow so that it pushes one cheek up, giving it a look of roundness that the thinning of her body has taken away.
“Then I looked again and realized my dog was gone, too. No bed covered in little hairs, no toys scattered into the corners where he liked to stash them. The bowls were gone. Everything.”
“Oh,” she says. I can tell by the way she says it that she’s mentally comparing it to the loss of her parents, and my loss is coming up wanting.
“I know, a dog. But that’s not the point. The point is that I got Bumpy while I was dating that guy; I got him when I saw a flyer at work about him needing to be adopted because he was about to be put down. Do you see what that means?”
She doesn’t answer directly, but I can see the wheels turning, so I wait. It’s important she understands that it’s more than the loss of a dog.
Finally, she answers, “It means your dog probably died and you either never saw that flyer or you ignored it.”
“Right. That’s exactly right. And yet I know I must still have seen it, since it was up at my work—so that means I must have ignored it. It means… It means that even though that guy was a dick who didn’t treat me well and eventually wrecked my car, he made me a better person. A kinder person. The kind of person that doesn’t ignore a plea for help to save a dog’s life.”
Sarah is starting to understand now, and it’s so very important that she understand. She says, “The bad stuff is what makes us better?”
“Sort of. Maybe not all the time, but it’s like everything else that happens in our lives. It has ripples. And all that we are is contingent upon what happens to us without our knowing it will happen. The unplanned beauty of it all,” I say.
We fall silent again and I watch her. I can see a look—not quite peace, but more a sort of acceptance—settle over her features. She’s no less grimy or tired-looking, but she does appear less worn, and perhaps less burdened.
“Where does it end?” she asks.
This is where I need her to go. This is the question I need her to ask.
“I think the last one alive is the one who will decide that,” I answer.
Her brow crinkles, and I think she must realize the math doesn’t quite work out. “But everything does
n’t come back right when people die. At least, not perfectly.”
“No, not exactly. There’s a trick to it,” I say, and see the interest in her eyes. “The person has to die with their object… and be focused on wishing they had never picked it up.”
Her laugh is bitter. “I wish that every moment of my life.” She stops talking, and the thoughts in her head are churning almost visibly. Then her body stiffens, she looks at me as if taking my measure, and asks, “How do you know this?”
“Oh, I don’t know it,” I say, making my voice light to ease the tension I can feel coming off of her. “It’s a supposition on my part. I’ve been alone a while, and have had a lot of time to think.”
The tension does ease then, and her frame relaxes into the mattress again. It’s a slight change, but one so visible to another human that it might as well be a spoken word.
“There must be a lot already dying, if they have nothing, like me,” she says, the words rising at the end a bit like a question. “But it’s still the same out there. Dead, lifeless. And that is the present out there, not the past, right?”
This is one of the problems that bothers me most. We don’t feel the shifts in here, in the mist, and I can’t pop out like someone less encumbered can, but enough have told me the same story of our unchanging and lifeless world for me to form a theory. I know that whoever the nihilists are—the ones still filled with the idea that life should never have developed on Earth, the ones who have gone back far enough so that life simply never took hold—are still alive and well in here somewhere. I’m betting one of them is Cutter. I nod but say nothing.
Synchronic: 13 Tales of Time Travel Page 19