And I know what I can do for a grand gesture. Still in my pajamas, I grab my book bag from the wardrobe and run through the misty dawn to the kitchen.
By the time I climb the apple tree, the day is full sunshine. While Umlaut chases squirrels around the branches, I check for frogs—I don’t want to accidentally shut one in. Then, moment by moment, I empty my book bag, and fill up the tin box. The seaweed from the beach. Canadian coins, the treasure map and my constellation, the little plastic stars, a pair of Thomas’s balled-up socks, my ice-cream-sticky napkin from the fair yesterday. The recipe he wrote out for me.
And the squashed and terrible results of my first solo baking attempt this morning—a chocolate cupcake.
I close the lid and padlock it for Thomas to open. This time capsule of our summer. It’s the best I can do. Then I lean back against a branch and start writing him an email on my phone.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Date: 24/8/2015, 11.17
Subject: Bawk, bawk, bawk
Trouble times two, remember? Turns out, one is worse. I can’t explain it, but I need you to come and open the time capsule with me. I know you’ve got no reason to. But I don’t know how to be without you.
If you need more reason than that … Picture me now, holding out my little finger to you. And saying: Hey, Thomas. I dare you.
I look at what I’ve written. I think about Thomas’s email, and that he told me it was a reply to mine. My fingers move on instinct, adjusting the date to 4 July. And I know it will work, because it already has. I hit send and shove the phone in my pocket, along with the key for the padlock. Now I just need to shower and go find Thomas.
I’m standing up and turning around on the branch, one foot reaching out into the air, searching for a knothole, when the time capsule begins to change. First, the old and tarnished padlock I took from the toolbox this morning becomes shiny and clean. Then the names on the top, THOMAS & GOTTIE, fade away.
“Uh,” I say to no one, to Umlaut, as I pause, half in, half out of the tree. I thought all this nonsense had stopped after the party. After the last wormhole. Except for, um Gottes Willen, Gottie you moron, except for the fact you could suddenly read Thomas’s email this morning! Talk about a screenwipe.
As I watch, captivated, the writing reappears, followed by the tarnish. The lock re-rusts at warp speed. The time capsule pulsates back and forth, faster and faster: clean/dirty, letters/blank, rust/shiny. Past/future, past/future, past/future. The Weltschmerzian Exception didn’t begin when Grey died. It’s starting now.
And a drop of rain falls.
Upwards. There’s not a cloud in the sky. As another drop of rain hits me, I scramble away from the time capsule, and “Oh, shit—”
I think I hear someone shouting my name as I fall out of the tree.
Five Years Ago
“Did you just SEE that?” Thomas shouts through the rain.
It’s pretty dark, but I still saw the ginger cat run past us under the annex.
“Yeah, it’s under here.” I get down on my hands and knees, trying to peer under the building. The grass is gross—all wet and slimy—but my jeans are already soaked. It’s just water though. I’m a twelve-year-old girl, not the Wicked Witch of the West.
“Here, kitty kitty.”
“What? No,” says Thomas behind me. “G, you have to see this.”
“Mmm. In a minute.”
“G,” says Thomas impatiently. “Forget the cat for a minute. A girl just fell out of the tree.”
“No, she didn’t.”
“Geee…”
I sigh. Thomas has been weird all day, ever since the head-butt kiss. I don’t want to play his stupid game. I want to get the cat. But I stand up anyway, turning round, wiping my muddy hands on my jeans.
There’s a girl lying on the grass under the apple tree.
Seriously.
It was just me and Thomas in the garden. Grey booted us out the Book Barn, then came home and booted us out the house too. Unbelievable! Thomas is leaving for Canada today, and it’s my last chance to kiss him—to kiss ANYONE in my whole life—and we keep getting interrupted. Then the cat ran through. And now there’s this girl. She sits up, rubbing the back of her head.
“She fell out of the sky-aye,” Thomas sing-songs as he starts crab-walking towards me.
“Actually,” says the girl, standing up tall tall tall. “I fell out of the tree.”
She shields her face with a hand from the rain and peers at us. At me. “Hi, Gottie.”
I stare back, spooked. How does she know my name? She looks like my mami, who I’ve only seen in photos. They all look the same as this girl: dark and skinny, with a big nose, and choppy hair like mine.
“Aren’t you cold?” I ask. I’m wearing rain boots, jeans, a T-shirt, Thomas’s jumper, and a Windbreaker. The girl is wearing pajamas and a book bag and no shoes. She must be friends with Grey. And she’s not wearing a bra. I can tell. Her toenails are cherry red and chipped.
“Did you hit your head?” asks Thomas. I sidle next to him and take his hand. He squeezes mine back.
“No, I hit the hedge.” She giggles.
She’s loopy: there isn’t a hedge back here. The ginger cat comes running to her, and it purrs and rubs against her ankle.
“I knew I should have called you Schrödinger!” she says to it, then turns to look up into the apple tree. “Holy long division—it’s a paradoxical time loop.”
What is she talking about? Thomas looks at me, and, slowly so she doesn’t see it, I point my finger at my ear and move it round in a circle. Mouth: “Cuckoo.”
But how can he smile when he’s going away today? Doesn’t he mind?
“But why here? Why does it open today and not somewhen else? Is it the time capsule?” the girl murmurs to the tree. Then she looks over at us. “Hey, Trouble Times Two. Can you do me a favor?”
“No,” I say, at the same time as Thomas says, “Yes.”
I glare at him.
“After I’m gone, climb this tree and see what you find,” says the girl, taking something out of her pocket and throwing it through the rain to Thomas. It’s small and silver.
“I’ve got a knife!” I blurt. It’s true.
“I know.” She winks. “And you really shouldn’t. Gottie. Listen. I know I should say something so ficken wise to you right now. Like, talk to Papa. Eat your vegetables. Phone Ned when he’s in London. Pay attention to the world. Say yes when someone asks you to bake a cake. Make grand gestures. Be bold.”
She laughs. “But … eh, we’re going to forget, and do everything wrong, anyway. But be careful with that knife, okay? We could get hurt.”
I think We? But the girl’s already darting off through the garden and Thomas is tugging on my hand, saying, “There’s something in the tree, I’ve got the key. C’mon.”
And he’s leaving me for forever in an hour and we have a blood pact to swear, so I climb up after him, the knife in my pocket.
* * *
Since it’s already happened, I can’t stop my idiotic younger self from getting stabbed in a tree, so I go and hide from the rain in Grey’s car. It’s parked askew, half in the hedge. One wheel is missing, propped up on bricks. We got an ambulance to the hospital today, so I’m safe here. I won’t bump into anyone else.
What did I cause by meeting myself just now? When Thomas asked me about time travel, I’d been absolutely certain in my explanation of why this could never happen. Cosmic censorship. Clearly, I was wrong—you can see beyond an event horizon. But, then, this: I still don’t remember what happened with the blood pact, but I do recall the part beforehand, when Thomas and I were in the garden, in the rain. It’s coming back to me.
And there definitely wasn’t a cat. There definitely wasn’t another me. What’s different about this time?
Rain slashes at the car windows as I try to figure out what’s missing from my theory, what could cause the memory gap.
Then I hear a yell and turn to see little Thomas, running across the garden, clutching his bleeding hand, screaming fit to bust for Grey, for Papa, for tree girl—that must mean me, I think—for anyone, to come quickly.
Papa pokes his head out the kitchen door. When he sees Thomas, he turns green, turns away. A few seconds later, Grey strides out of the house.
And I’m verklemmt.
It’s been one thing, seeing him in my memories, reading his diaries. Remembering him, over and over. But this, this is him here now, flesh and blood and here and alive …
I ache with how much I miss him.
He starts crossing the garden, half running to the apple tree as Thomas wails and runs behind him.
Grey. Grey, alive, and here, and I’m here too, and if I could just follow him through the garden—he’s disappearing beyond the shrubbery, almost gone, if I could just talk to him … My hand is on the door handle, ready to leap out, to run across to him, one last time—
If I could just.
But I can’t. It’s the wrong time. It’s the wrong place. It’s the wrong me.
And anyway, Grey is moving out from behind the rhododendron now, carefully and urgently. He’s carrying other Gottie in his arms. I’m already with him. Another me, in another time, always I’ll be with him.
I laugh, a little, through my tears. Seeing my younger face, its stubborn, gremlin-y achievement, muddled with pain and confusion. And pride! I think that I look safe. I think that Sof was right—Grey was all of our dads. He was my daddy. There I am, in his arms.
All the love we’ve lost hits me like an ocean wave.
There are sirens now; Papa must have called the ambulance. And there’s shouting, and there’s pain.
God. Why can’t I remember this?
Is it because there are two of me? And why weren’t there two of me when I went back a week to the kitchen? I made all that stuff up, about the universe hiding you in a tiny cannoli—but perhaps it’s true, and that’s where my memory has been all along.
Or, perhaps, it’s this: when only seven days had passed, I was the same person, unchanged. I couldn’t meet my week-ago self, because of causality. This is different. Me at twelve, and me at seventeen—there’s a chasm of grief between us. I lost myself when Grey died, and there isn’t a single particle left of who I was. I can meet my younger self, because we’re not the same person. I’ll never be that girl again.
Thomas scurries to keep up with Grey’s seven-league strides. I squint, trying to see what he’s holding. As he runs across the garden, his unhurt hand forms a fist. The Canadian coins? There’s chocolate cake round his mouth. And I hope, in his pocket, there’s a recipe. He doesn’t look left or right, or at me in the car: he runs after Grey, after me, into the kitchen. And then we’re gone.
It’s time to go home.
The rain is easing as I climb out of the car and cross the garden. Under the tree, I retrieve the discarded knife from the grass. Water has washed the blood away. I stuff it in my pocket, then climb up into the branches.
Umlaut is waiting for me, next to the open time capsule. The padlock is lying next to it, and all that junk I put in there before—the seaweed, the coins—is gone. Was I really going to woo Thomas back with a pair of old socks?
I settle myself on my usual branch, take a notebook out of my book bag, and I start to write.
The Gottie H. Oppenheimer Principle v 7.0.
A general theory of heartbreak, love,
and the meaning of infinity, or:
the Weltschmerzian Exception
Dear Thomas,
You promised me that whatever I tell you, you’ll believe. Remember? So here it goes.
Time travel is real.
Five years ago, you and I accidentally created a paradoxical time loop. It’s fate.
What’s a paradoxical time loop? Okay, so you bake a cannoli … Kidding! It’s a wormhole that exists because it exists. You know the equation I wrote on your email? My physics teacher called it a joke. It describes a wormhole opening in the present, because at the same time, it’s opening in the past. Impossible, right?
I disagree.
It’s real. And I think its power comes from the negative energy, or dark matter, that naturally exists in the universe.
I think it comes from grief.
I’d already lost my mum. There was already grief in my world. The circumstances for a Weltschmerzian Exception (more on this later) were ideal. And you were more than my best friend. We were unquestionable. When you went away, all I had left was a scar, a hole in my memory,* and the thought that you didn’t want to kiss me. I broke your heart? You broke mine first. So we’re Even Stevens. That’s why the loop comes back to this day in particular (I’m writing this from our tree, the day you cut my hand, by the way).
When my grandfather died, I imploded. This second heartbreak completed the loop. Could I have traveled down a wormhole to five years ago if Grey hadn’t died? Would his death have shattered me, if I hadn’t already lost you? To put it another way: would losing you have hurt so much, if I hadn’t lost Grey in the future?
And then there’s this summer. You’re not supposed to be here. You’re here because of an email I sent. But I only sent it, because you’re already here. When you came back to Holksea, time went wackadoodle. I think you triggered something. What did we find, that day in the tree? I still can’t remember, but I’m going to guess: Canadian coins, which you took to Toronto with you. Did you buy a comic with them, and bring it back on the plane this summer? You wrote me a recipe for chocolate cake this July and discovered it five years ago—is that why you want to be a baker?
The universe has been tying itself in knots trying to correct all these paradoxes.
It’s called the Weltschmerzian Exception.
The rules of spacetime don’t apply. When you broke my heart, the world split into a thousand timelines. In your version of the universe, you got an email from me. Want to know why I was so weird this summer? Every time you mentioned it, we jumped to a new timeline. You know how particles get to their destination without traveling there? That was me. Sometimes time froze, like a knot in a thread. Or it bent and distorted completely, letting me step from my bedroom one rainy night into a warm kitchen the week before. Where I kissed you. (There’s a secret I never told you!)
There are years of twists and turns, but the world kept bringing me back to last summer most of all, because that’s where I needed to be. And for that, I wanted to say: thank you.
Indelibly yours,
G. H. Oppenheimer x
PS *That memory is in a tiny cannoli somewhere. Lost in spacetime. I don’t need it anymore.
I write the future date, 24 August, at the top, then I put the letter in the time capsule, close the lid, and padlock it.
The effect is instantaneous. First the apple tree bursts into blossom. Within seconds, the petals are falling like confetti. The sun rises and sets, rises and sets, a heartbeat in the sky. The clouds race by.
“It’s okay,” I whisper to Umlaut, scooping him into my lap. “We’re going home.”
I’m no longer afraid. I can see all the loops and snags and knots I’ve made in time. I can see all the universes at once.
The timelines layer over each other. I watch a dozen different Gotties running through the garden, appearing and disappearing, faster and faster. Mathematically speaking, all this will happen over and over again, a hundred different heartbreaks in a hundred different ways. One of the Gotties will wake up underneath this tree at the beginning of summer, drenched in déjà vu, sad, and alone. My heart goes out to her. But for me, that’s in the past.
I’m ready for now.
The years pass more quickly now, snow then sunshine then snow. The garden is a blur. As the sky gathers into one last autumn and the leaves come fluttering down, a torn scrap of paper floats by. I stand and catch it: a page from a future textbook. The yet-to-be-written equation for the Weltschmerzian Exception. And I see my name next to it, and th
e title “Dr.”
In a moment of complete clarity, I know: I won’t remember everything. That I shouldn’t remember everything. Especially not this. So I hold the page out to the wind and let it fly away in the snow. It vanishes into thin air. This is a secret that the universe can keep. The sun comes out, first spring, then summer. Then I close my eyes, and I jump out of the tree …
Now
I land in the grass, my pajamas still soaking wet.
Dazed, I sit up, peeling off my book bag, and look around the garden. The lawn is freshly mowed and has the scent of cut grass. There’s no more rotting fruit on the ground. Yellow roses, hundreds of them, tumble over the kitchen window.
I tilt my head back and see my room, upside down. The ivy is clipped back, and I catch a glimpse of curtains inside the windows. Beyond them, against all odds, I think I can see a glow of stars.
Curtains in my room. Yellow roses, not peach. Thomas’s cosmos, back on my ceiling. A thousand tiny details, a thousand incremental changes. I’ve remade the universe. Better. It’s the end of my weltschmerz.
A sudden burst of Black Sabbath blasts across the garden from Ned’s room. Some things stay the same. And when I tilt my head forward again, Thomas is peering down at me from the apple tree, leaf-dappled. Was it him calling my name, when I fell?
“Welcome back,” he says. A smile tugs at his face.
“Um. Hello.” I stare up at him. “What are you doing?”
“Reading your letter.” He waves the pages at me, through the branches. If he’s surprised by what I wrote, or the fact that I’m dripping wet in pajamas on a blazing sunny day, or that my feet are smeared with mud, he’s not letting on. Unless … Memories of the summer drift down around me like dandelion fluff.
Remember? That day with the time capsule. You had short hair that day.
The Square Root of Summer Page 22