A Flash of Blue Sky

by Alon Preiss

  So the night of his planned rendezvous with Irina, when he went to bed with Katherine and kept himself awake until two am, he saw before his eyes the swirling darkness that he had always sworn could never be a part of him. When he rose and dressed, it was as though in a dream, as though he were watching another man, a character in a film. What was he doing this for? He did not even know. Quietly he went downstairs to his lobby, where Irina stood, in a long, dark raincoat, speckled with droplets from the light drizzle that had begun minutes before.

  “Emmett.” She smiled.

  He whispered, “We have to get out of this neighborhood.” She took his arm, and they walked outside into the rain.

  “You’re always so nervous,” she said. “You don’t know the things that I’ve seen. You have nothing to be frightened of.” She laughed. “Undoubtedly you will survive. You have no one who wants to murder you. You don’t have millions of dollars invested in your ability to say ‘I love you’ with enough anger to kill.”

  Emmett shook his head. They were now crossing the avenue, stepping over puddles that reflected automobile headlights and the neon of all-night bars. “Not happy with stardom?” he asked.

  “I just need you there.”

  “Why? Why possibly do you need me there?”

  “Because you would protect me.”

  “How Irina?” he asked. “How do you expect me to protect you?”

  “By the purity of your soul,” she said. “You had no ambition to make money from me, or hurt me, or exploit me. If I put myself in your care .. nothing bad can happen anymore.” She nodded, as though that made perfect sense

  “You want a benevolent dictator,” Emmett said, “or a rabbi. Look, suppose I just give you advice. I’ll be your unpaid adviser. I’ll tell my wife that you’ve hired me, and every other day you’ll call me from the set and tell me what’s been happening to you. I’ll tell you what to do about it.” He smiled unconvincingly. They were standing very still at the corner of a dirty Los Angeles street.

  “Our lives have to be connected,” she said. “Otherwise, none of this will work. You have to break free from your wife. It’s meant to be that way. I know you can feel it.” She took hold of his jacket lapel and pulled him close. When their lips touched lightly and gently, Emmett saw before him frightened, dead-empty faces, calling silently to him across dark green oceans of time and space. When Irina released him, he stared into her beautiful, angry-alive eyes. “Irina, who are you? How did you get to this point in your life? Have you ever done anything very bad, something you will never stop regretting?” He was surprised at his audacity.

  She dropped her hands to her sides. “Oh, Emmett. Can’t you just think about the future?”

  The next morning Emmett awoke with Katherine as usual, wrapped in a tight embrace. “Did you get up in the middle of the night?” she whispered. “I think I woke up and you weren’t in bed.” He said yes, that was correct He’d been unable to sleep, he’d watched TV for a while, then gone out for a walk. She seemed unconcerned. She trusted him, he thought, absolutely.

  A day after their climactic parting, Susan could feel Daniel with her. She still felt his breath on the back of her neck, still felt his arms around her, as though he would always be holding her. Daniel was in a hotel room on the interstate, in the middle of the strange wasteland that exists just for travelers to spend the night, and he was calling out her name, telling her that he loved her. She knew it, she could hear it in her head. Still, it didn’t matter; she would leave him forever, and carry him with her always.

  She didn’t know where she would go now. Maybe down to New Mexico, maybe to see the Grand Canyon, to wander accidentally into photographs of seventy-year-old men taken by their sixty-year-old wives, risking a moment in the deadly western heat before retreating to the luxury of air-conditioned double-wide campers.

  She drove west, heading towards Nevada instead of south to L.A, listening to a country-music station because that’s the only thing to do when you’ve lost the man you love, because country singers are always less happy than you could ever be. At two am she pulled off the interstate, checked in at a roadside motel. Almost asleep, she fell into a common habit: quietly calling to Joren through the darkness, her eyelids tightly shut, imagining herself held by Joren as they floated far above a gleaming city of lights and possibilities. She wished that her phone would ring so that she could share this dream, once again, with this man about whom she knew so little. She woke up at six am, not even slightly tired, but deeply lonely. She drove about fifty miles before the sun came up, then pulled over at a rest stop. Inside she ate scrambled eggs and bacon under the fluorescent lights. She talked a little bit to the waitress, a twenty-year-old woman who wanted to save money for college. She’d just gotten married, and now, she admitted sadly, she was gaining weight. Susan left her a five-dollar tip, then walked to her car, sat on the hood and looked out over the parking lot, at the senior citizens in their big campers, coming and going, driving back and forth and back and forth until they died. She got back into her car and drove for six hours, until the interstate became a winding two-lane highway and she was stuck behind a pickup truck driving only ten miles over the speed limit. The traffic driving east was voluminous, and she could not pass the pickup. Still stuck behind the truck, she watched the sun set, then exited the interstate, looking for a gas station. This seemed to be a mistake, since she soon found herself on a narrow gravel road in a tunnel of trees, no light or stars or buildings visible. She turned back and drove for an hour, but still she didn’t see the entrance to the interstate. Pebbles crunched beneath her tires. Frustrated, she pushed the accelerator to the floor, heard the gravel blowing away behind her as the car skidded left and right. Suddenly the tires hit bare earth and screeched forward, and the car was flying through a tunnel of light, a black hole.

  She thought the headlights caught a deer leaping through the trees across the road. Susan tried to spin the car to the left, and she shut her eyes at the moment of impact. When she opened her eyes, she saw a man’s face, bouncing into the air from the crushed windshield. She stopped the car and flung open the door. She knelt down beside the man and looked at his face in the glare of the headlights. “Are you all right?” she asked, tears coming into her eyes. The man was in his early sixties, and he could barely breathe. He had dark black hair. He could not speak. He stared at Susan through the blood that covered his face. “Where is there a hospital near here?” she asked hopelessly. She looked away for a moment, and when she looked back, she saw that this man was not in his sixties, that he was ageless, his face was not bleeding, but it was smooth and untouched. It was Joren, in all his beautiful ambiguity, Joren, lifeless and untouched and still. His eyes stared up at the branches overhead. She touched her pointer finger to her mouth, held it there for a while. Then she touched his still-warm lips with her finger. Now his face changed again, suddenly and smoothly, melting from one form to another, the sort of thing computers could do these days and Susan had seen so many times on television and in movies. He was now a much younger man, struggling to breathe. “Can you hear me?” she asked, but he didn’t answer, looked right past her. “Please answer me,” she begged him. The headlights dimmed then went out. Susan looked back; the darkness swallowed the car, just like that, in a split-second. She walked a few steps in blackness. Then without warning the world collapsed beneath her, and she fell headfirst into swirling nothingness, whirlpools of blackness buffeting the weightless young woman to and fro. At last she awoke in an unfamiliar landscape beside a lake and a horse. She realized that she had been awakened from her deep sleep by the noise of wolves in the distance. A full moon illuminated the bluish mist that floated in between the nearby mountain peaks then skimmed along the surface of the water. On every plateau, jagged trees clung desperately to the rock. Some distance away, small covered boats bobbed on the gentle lake currents.

  She wore a gray robe that fell almost to her feet. Memories filled her head, images of someone else’s chil
dhood, doting parents, scenes of terror, breathless nights of hiding in the dark.

  She mounted her horse, which had stood patiently beside her through the night. Together they plunged into the forest.

  She felt powerful, invincible: dead already, long dead.

  Though engulfed in darkness she did not light a lantern, because she could not allow herself to be seen. To be seen by whom? She could not attach a name to the frightening consequences and emotions that ran wild in her memory and imagination. Still, she felt very tired, and the horse’s regular stride lulled her to sleep and she began to dream. In her dreams, she was still on horseback, still riding through the thick woods. Eventually, they came to a clearing, a decrepit shack beside train tracks which were overgrown with brush. She sat on her horse by the side of the tracks, which had clearly been abandoned long ago, as though she were waiting for something, for someone. The train station was just a little shack, filled with cobwebs. No trains had come here for a very long time. Beside the tracks, a few meters away, she saw two men standing just inside the forest, their eyes crazy. They were covered with dirt, and they looked as though they lived in the woods. Their clothing was torn, rag-like.

  Around the bend, smoke puffing. A long train pulled into the station, one of those commuter trains, the sort that took businessmen into Manhattan a long time ago. The doors creaked open, and about a hundred old men and women stepped out of the train, unwashed, dazed .... The men wore navy blue business suits, covered with dust, filled with holes. The women wore tasteful gray skirts and blouses, similarly wrinkled and threadbare ... What do we do now? one old woman asked, and she began to cry. Susan saw that the old woman had no teeth.

  She awoke. The horse was now walking more carefully. They were beside a small stream that cut through a mountain; the two peaks jutted out on either side of her. When the sun came up, the horse galloped across a barren plain until they reached the forest. Susan settled into the darkness beneath a broad tree, shut her eyes and slept. Night fires still burned in the villages, just barely visible on the horizon.

  The next night, denied the cover of the woods, they moved more swiftly, galloping through the swirling sands of the plains. Shortly before sunrise, they reached the top of a high plateau. Far below, she could see a simple but sprawling stone building with very small windows. Farther away was a vast city lit at the gates with torches but otherwise in a state of disrepair. She could remember the city burning, the cafés and inns, and especially a beautiful boat in the center of a man-made lake on which foreign dignitaries and the city’s elite dined – she could remember all of that smoldering for days. Many buildings had been reduced to rubble, but the city still breathed, just barely.

  Her bare feet tapped along the stone floors. A few cloaked figures passed in the hallway, but they didn’t notice her. She was just one more torturer in a gray robe. She could picture these cells when they were full, when bereft prisoners sobbed quietly in the dark corners. She felt hunger in her stomach, mused that it had never been otherwise. She thought about the children and their parents who had once filled these cells, and she wondered whether, after their painful, protracted deaths, they had gone on to happier lives, as different people.

  In the last cell, she saw Joren. He looked younger, maybe only a decade, maybe a hundred decades. His fine clothes were torn and dirty, and his chest and back shone with cuts and burns, but when she drew closer, she could see that they were only scars, they had long ago ceased to cause him any pain. She pulled out her keys, tried one after another, sliding them into the lock with trembling hands. They would only have a few minutes to escape from this prison, to return to him some approximation of his once noteworthy life. “Who are you?” he whispered, and she put one finger to her lips. Now she realized for the first time that she could not speak, that in her life she had never uttered a word.

  They moved quickly across the plains, she and Joren, riding together on the same horse, he, weakly, holding on to her for support. When the sun rose, they continued to ride, to get as far as they could from the city where Joren would soon be hunted once again. Finally they came to a forest that opened up into a clearing, with a crystal clear lake. “You saved me,” Joren said. “You’re utterly silent, and you saved me.” She smiled, turned her back and plunged into the woods to gather food. She wondered now what she looked like, whether she was beautiful, and whether Joren loved her. When she returned, Joren had bathed in the lake, and he was sitting by a fire, staring at the flames.

  In the darkness that night, under the stars, Joren said, “When you were born, I was already in that jail cell. At first they kept me for my importance, but, as the years went by, they forgot about me.”

  He looked over at her, his face wild and desperate in the moonlight. “You are so young,” he said again. “You cannot have seen what I have seen. You do not know what you have saved me from.” She wondered, if she had not even been born when he had been taken to the prison, when the fires destroyed the life of the city, then why did she remember it so clearly? In her memory, she could see the rag-clothed men pulling Joren from his bed, she could hear his screams .... “I never thought anyone would care about me again,” he said now. He paused, grateful and baffled. “You risked everything to save me. You could have been killed, sent to a cell in that prison yourself. Why did you do that for me? Why are you completely silent? Will I ever know who you are?” She moved closer to him, brushed a hand across the roughness of his face, smiled tenderly into his eyes. He grabbed her hand and held it in the coarseness of his own. There was a reason why she had saved him, and she almost knew what it was. There was also a reason why she could not talk, and a reason why, while he slept that night, she would abandon him, leaving her horse and the last bits of their food, fleeing by cover of darkness to a poor village of a dozen thatched huts many hundreds of miles away, a place where she would live out the rest of her days, longing for Joren’s touch, for the sound of his voice. As she breathed her last, alone on the dirt floor on a very cold day, his name was on her silent lips. Darkness overtook her.

  Susan reappeared very suddenly behind the wheel of her car, driving east. She felt as though she had been away for more than a lifetime. I have slipped through a hole in space and time, she thought with a little bit of glee. This unlikely misadventure did not bother her. She had read that such things were now acknowledged as scientific fact, little holes that one might slip through into another time or place, or dimension, or universe. Susan, after all, had once seen ball lightning rolling down an airplane aisle and charring the carpet, had once floated on fluffy white clouds miles above her little drowned body, had once taken a train to the most stately mansion in Heaven. And so she merely felt grateful again to have been chosen, and to have returned unharmed. And she drove on.

  That evening, on some late-night news show, a local anchorman was trying to get the bottom of “these holes in space and time.” He’d invited a professor of physics from Harvard University to expound on the secrets of the universe.

  “Professor,” he asked, “let’s cut to the chase. Are there holes in space and time? How about it?”

  “Well, yes and no,” he said. He was in his early fifties, with a somewhat unruly beard. “You’re talking about so-called ‘wormholes,’ which I think have been misunderstood by the public. Wormholes, of course, have nothing to do with worms per se. They were first postulated many years ago as they related to something known as ‘geo-metro dynamics’. The idea was that you could have a circular electric field that just went around and connected to itself, there would be no charges connected – the field line would go out of this space, into the wormhole and around and come out, so that one end of the wormhole would look like a positive particle and the other end would look like a negative particle, and you would just sort of know theoretically that it was there. And then what would happen was the tension of the electromagnetic field and the curvature of the space would pull the two ends of the wormhole towards each other, which is what happens when a
positron and an electron are loose. We say that they are being pulled by a field, and then when they collide with one another they annihilate and produce radiation, and then the wormhole disappears, and then nothing but the stressed energy in the form of radiation would come out.” He nodded, smiling.

  “I thought ...” The anchorman blinked irritably. “All right, now, you’re not telling me anything at all, it seems to me. I thought these wormholes were like black holes. We all know that if you go into a black hole you wind up in another universe. These wormholes, I thought, let you go to another time, and maybe ... I don’t know. Correct all your mistakes. Live your life all over again.”

  The professor shook his head, smiling wisely.

  “No, I’m afraid not,” he said, laughing with affection. “First of all, if you go through a black hole, you get torn limb from limb because of the tidal force. You’re right that a black hole by itself implies that you come out of this universe and disappear, so that as far as this universe is concerned you’re not here anymore. There is some indication that a wormhole is like a black hole that bends in a different direction, so that instead of coming out in another universe you come out in another part of this universe, but of course another place can be another time, because time and place are sort of connected to each other. Of course, a wormhole is inherently different from a black hole because a wormhole is not created by the extinction of a star. Now, to answer your most pressing question: Yes, this is a time machine! However, can you actually make any use of that time machine in a practical sense? You can’t. The tidal gravitation force at the throat of a wormhole is of the same magnitude as that of a black hole – the time traveler would be killed trying to pass through the throat. Next, the wormhole expands and contracts so rapidly that it would shrink to a circumference of zero before a traveler moving at the speed of light could even get through it. Finally, even if one could imagine a wormhole that lacked these restrictive properties, you could not travel back to a time earlier than your first trip in the wormhole. That is, if you first entered the wormhole in 1985, you could travel from this year to the year 1985 in a few minutes, but no earlier, then back to this year. So, as for correcting those earlier mistakes, you couldn’t.”