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  For Ryan, who sees the seabirds home

  It was as if it were now up to me alone, as if by some trifling mental exertion I could reverse the entire course of history, as if—if I desired it only—Grandmother Antonina, who had refused to go with us to England, would still be living in Kantstraße as before; she would not have gone on that journey, of which we had been informed by a Red Cross postcard shortly after the so-called outbreak of War, but would still be concerned about the wellbeing of her goldfish, which she washed under the kitchen tap every day and placed on the window ledge when the weather was fine, for a little fresh air. All that was required was a moment of concentration, piecing together the syllables of the word concealed in the riddle, and everything would again be as it once was.

  —W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

  SEPTEMBER 1981

  * * *

  People wishing to time travel go to Houston Intercontinental Airport. At the orientation, the staff tell them that time travel is just like air travel, you even go to the same facility. People used to be apprehensive about airline travel too. But when you arrive at the airport, it is not the same at all. Before you can get within a mile of the terminals, you reach a bus stop moored at the edge of a vast concrete flat, where you must leave your vehicle and ascend a snaking trolley, like the ones they have at the zoo.

  A quarantine taxi makes its way to that lone bus stop, the airport appearing through a million chain-link diamonds. The driver is encased in an oval of hermetically sealed Plexiglas. In the backseat, Frank is wearing a yellow hazmat suit. The color marks him as infected.

  Now is the time for last words, but Polly’s got nothing. Frank keeps nodding off and then snapping awake, stiff-spined with terror, until he can locate her beside him. “We can still go back!” He has been saying this for days. Even in his sleep he carries on this argument, and when he opens his eyes, he moves seamlessly from a dream fight to a waking one. Already his voice is far-off, sealed away inside his suit.

  She pulls his forehead to her cheek, but his mask stops her short. They can only get within three inches of each other. The suit rubs against the vinyl car seat and makes a funny, crude noise, but they don’t laugh. Polly would like to breathe in the smell of Frank’s skin one last time, a smell like salt cut with something sweet, like when it rains in the city. But all she gets is the dry smell of plastic.

  The news outlets went down weeks ago, but that didn’t stop the blitz of ads for the Rebuild America Time Travel Initiative: billboards painted on buildings, posters wheat-pasted over empty storefronts, unused mailboxes stuffed with mailers. There is no flu in 2002 and Travel to the future and rebuild America and No skills necessary! Training provided!

  At first, the ads were like a joke, gallows humor for people who were stranded once the credit companies went down and the state borders were closed to stop the flu’s spread, people like Polly and Frank, who got trapped in Texas by accident. Later the ads made Frank angry. He would tear the pamphlets from the mailboxes and throw them on the ground, muttering about opportunism. “You know they don’t market this to the rich,” he’d say, and then an hour later he’d say it again.

  They stayed indoors except for the one day a week when they traveled to the grocery store, which had been commandeered by five army reservists who doled out freeze-dried goods to ragged shoppers. The reservists had taken it upon themselves to impose equal access to the food supply, partly out of goodness and partly out of the universal desperation for something to do. One day the glass doors were locked. A handwritten sign said to go around the back. The soldiers were having a party. With their rifles still strapped on, they were handing out canned cocktail wieners, one per person, on candy-striped paper dessert plates that looked forlorn in their huge hands. Ted, the youngest, a boy from Kansas who had already lost his hair, was leaving for a job in the future. He was going to be an independent energy contractor. There was another sign, bigger and in the same writing, on the back wall: 2000 here we come! It was a rare, happy thing, the soldiers and the shoppers in misfit clothes, standing around and smiling at each other and nibbling on withered cocktail sausages. But just that morning the phone had worked for five minutes and they got a call through to Frank’s brothers, only to be told it had been weeks since the landlord changed the locks to Frank’s apartment, back in Buffalo. The landlord was sympathetic to Frank’s predicament, but he could no longer endure the absence of rent. “But what about my stereo?” Frank had said. “What about my records? What about Grandpa’s butcher knife?” His voice was small, then smaller, as he listed off everything that was now gone.

  Frank was usually the life of the party, but that afternoon behind the grocery store he picked on a pinch-faced woman, muttering at her, “Why don’t they stop the pandemic, then? If they can time travel, why don’t they travel back in time to Patient Zero and stop him from coughing on Patient One?”

  “They tried.” The woman spoke with her mouth full. “The earliest attainable destination date is June of ’81. Seven months too late.”

  “What? Why? How can that be?” This clumsy show of anger was new. Frank was normally charming. He was the one who did the talking. Later, his sudden social frailty would seem like a warning of the sickness that arrived next. It unsettled Polly, and she was slow to react.

  But the woman didn’t need someone to intervene. “That’s the limit of the technology. It took until the end of ’93 to perfect the machine, and twelve years is the farthest it can jump. Or, to be precise, four thousand, one hundred, and ninety-eight days is the farthest it can jump. Do you live under a rock?”

  The tips of Frank’s ears pinked and Polly should have made a joke, offered comfort. But she was distracted. In that second it stopped being a fiction. Time travel existed, and the plates of her reality were shifting. She felt a greasy dread in the center of her chest. She wanted to drop her food and take Frank’s hand and anchor him in the crook of her arm, as if he were in danger of being blown away.

  Now they are pulling up to the lone bus stop, and they can see the new time travel facility, across the lot bisected by trolleys. The facility is a monolith, the widest, tallest building either of them has ever seen, and something primal in Polly quails. The only thing remaining of familiar airport protocol is the logistical thoughtlessness of the curb: once you reach it, the line of unfeeling motorists waiting behind you means only seconds to say good-bye.

  “You don’t have to go,” Frank says.

  “Say something else. Say something different.” Polly is smiling and shaking her head, an echo of some long-ago courting coyness that once existed between them. It has landed here, in the wrong place entirely, but she can’t get control of her face.

  “You don’t have to go,” he says again in his faraway voice, unable to stop.

  Polly can only muster short words. “It’s okay. We’ll be together soon. Don’t worry.”

  The sole way Polly was able to convince Frank to let her go was through Ted, the reservist from Kansas. He and his buddies had a plan to meet in 2000. They had chosen a place and everything. “We can do the same,” she said to Frank. “I’ll ask for the shortest visa; I’ll ask for a five-year visa.” It was a setback when she got to the TimeRaiser office and they offered minimum twelve-yea
r visas. But still he would meet her, on September 4, 1993, at Houston Intercontinental Airport. “What if you’re rerouted?” he asked. He had heard about this from another patient, who had heard about it from a cousin, who knew someone who worked at the facility, who said they could change your year of destination, while you were in mid-flight. Polly said reroutements were a rumor, a myth. Why would they send you to a time totally other than the one you signed up for? That would be like buying a ticket to Hawaii and winding up in Alaska. But to calm him, she came up with a backup plan. If something went wrong and either of them couldn’t make it, then the first Saturday in September, they’d go to the Flagship Hotel in Galveston, until they find one another. “Not just the first,” he said. “Every Saturday, every September.” This was overkill, a lack of good faith, but he was distraught, so she gave in. And if the Flagship Hotel is gone, they’d meet on the beach by its footprint. Even if, between now and ’93, aliens invade and the cities are crumbled and remade, the land will still end where the sea begins at the bottom of Twenty-Fifth Street.

  Still he is not satisfied. He puts his head back. His skin is so gray and drawn that it looks about to flake off, and it’s as if the brown is fading from his hair. When Polly speaks again, it sounds like when she is drunk and trying to conceal it, enunciating each of her words, a single phrase requiring maximal concentration: “If I don’t go, you will die.”

  “You’ll be gone twelve years. When you come back, I’ll be forty.”

  A set of comforts she repeats to herself have become like the chorus to a song. Men age well. I’ll still be young. We can still have a baby. But now her face, her throat, and her lungs flush with hot, hideous panic, like water rising over her head. She grabs the inside of his upper arm so hard that she can feel his flesh give way, even through all the sealed layers.

  “You meet me on the other side. We’ll see each other there.”

  He yelps and tries to pull away, but she won’t let go.

  “We can still do the things we talked about.”

  They will get back to Buffalo. They will eat meatballs at Polly’s favorite restaurant on Seneca Street. They will push their bed under the window and every night after dinner they will lie there and chat, with their feet pressed against the cool wall. They will have a baby with curly hair, a warm, happy weight in his arms, kicking her chunky legs. But Polly can’t say this out loud and expose it to a jinx. She wills him to know what she means through only the pressure on his arm, as if transmission requires just touch.

  His face swims in the fog of his suit. He smiles. He’s got her pictures in his mind.

  One car behind them honks. Then others join in. The voice of their driver, made tinny by the intercom, says, “You gotta go.” They squeeze each other’s hands so hard, the skin of his suit bites the web between her fingers and there is no way they can touch skin to skin, and the seat of her heart falls away and so does her resolve. She says over and over, “Don’t forget about me,” and she tries to memorize his shape. But there is no more time. All the cars honk like the end of days. As soon as the car door opens she is taken to Decontamination, and they do not get to wave good-bye.

  * * *

  Since no one carries much luggage, there are no bags to block pathways or take up seats, and a trolley bench can fit three. Polly has the middle seat between a man and a woman. The trolley passengers sit with their few belongings on their knees, in paper bags or in a battered briefcase, like the one the woman next to Polly holds. They must bring their papers and then they may bring anything else they can fit in a small bag, excluding weapons or flammables. They can bring photographs, but they’ve been told there is no point: photo paper can’t survive the journey.

  It is a stifling end-of-summer day, and heavy colorless clouds sink towards the tarmac. Plenty of them are traveling in groups—brothers and sisters, friends and couples—but no one on the trolley speaks. Once they’re out of the bay, the trolley makes a wide loop, and the travelers get a clear view of what they’re leaving behind. The woman on Polly’s left twists her neck sharply, like someone looking away when a nurse gives a needle.

  They travel through a parcel of trees, musty and dappled, the electric motor whirring, like on a children’s field trip. Polly inflates with a bright, absurd calm, an anesthetic for this excision. She thinks, This is all right. Now we just have to get on the boat. She must remember to tell Frank that time travel is much more efficient than air travel; these trolleys mean no more getting lost on the way to Departures, no more taking the wrong ramp, going up when we should be going down.

  The man has his travel handbook open to the Frequently Asked Questions list, but his eyes are on the back of the seat in front of him. Polly read hers the same way, with rapt attention cleaved by stretches of averted gaze. The first part is easy—Those with special skills may be eligible for an O-1 visa for aliens of extraordinary ability—because she has one of these limited visas. Another part offers material for grim jokes: You must not have any living descendants—i.e., children—or they must travel with you. Ensuring travelers have no descendants remaining is to diminish confusion or genetically incorrect alliances in the future. But then the text declines into reality: TimeRaiser can convey the whole cost of your travel expenses and you will be bonded to TimeRaiser for an agreed-upon period. Only the small print spells out in blunt letters the atrocity of what she’s about to do: Attempts to mitigate the pandemic or generally shift outcomes of events through chronomigration lead to poor outcomes, hence international and federal law permits only correspondence with the past that is solely of administrative significance and of a non-personal, non-historical, non-legislative, and non-narrative nature. Human cargo may only pass to the future and never back. She had read this passage to the end only once, and even then the hatches of her mind sealed shut before understanding could reach the inside.

  The woman next to Polly is crying, at first with restraint, but now holding her fist to her teeth, her knuckles turning shiny with spit. When she begins to make noises, Polly wonders if she should pat the woman on the leg or tell her not to worry.

  The trolley stops in the mouth of a hangar. Travelers peel away in strips. Some head deeper into the hangar, into a vaulted hall lit by fluorescents. Others take up position inside the red lines chalked on the floor that show where to wait for the mandated extra health screenings and bactericidal showers in advance of boarding the special planes with quarantine cabins, flying to TimeRaiser facilities elsewhere: Shanghai, Frankfurt, Harare, Caracas, or Sydney.

  In the midst of this clamor, the crying woman moves in slow motion. She gets to her feet once, but the weight of her bones and her sadness topples her, and she sits down again so heavily, the flimsy bench shudders. The staff, dressed like hospital orderlies, try to move her forcibly, but the woman says, “Wait, just wait. I’ll do it.” She is short and wearing sandals with multistory heels, the fabric straps crusted with sparkling purple stones. All the other travelers wear cheap shoes with zero decorative function. Polly suggests that the woman take off her sandals to make it easier to get down. The woman doesn’t acknowledge Polly, but she removes her shoes. Her feet are dirty and the skin of her heels is cracked and fissured, and the shoes look even more out of place.

  Polly and the woman are among the last to reach the inner door of the hangar, where travelers break into shorter lines, waiting for an agent to take their passport and their ticket and their fingerprints. Polly’s ticket says GALVESTON SEPTEMBER 4 1993. It’s twelve years. It’s a quarter of a blink of an eye in the life of the universe. Polly shuffles her documents around to find the order that will best please the agent. She makes sure the O-1 embossed on her visa card is prominently displayed. Her passport is fresh and the pages still have that scent like money.

  It was only last Thursday that they went to the makeshift clinic, where whole hallways were tented off, transit areas for the lucky sick, the ones awaiting transfer to the treatment centers. There, a nurse in a trim turquoise hazmat suit told
her Frank was positive for the flu. She laid out the test strips like a card dealer, so Polly could see she had already run the test three times, with the same result for each pass. The medication he needed was thousands of dollars. They could give him the free treatments dispensed by the public health service, but their efficacy was not so good. Though there was time travel, she said. Polly had not understood her. Was she saying that Frank should travel? Oh God, no, the nurse said, they didn’t let carriers go, but Polly could go, so long as she passed the medical evaluation. TimeRaiser offered family health benefits. Once Polly signed on as an employee, even though they weren’t yet married, Frank could go straight to treatment; she just had to write his name on the line.

  Polly tries to focus on the floor tiles, the grouting and the shiny chips in eggshell white. But her mind keeps retracting to an evening last week when Frank took her up to the roof of their apartment to watch the sun set, that last day before his symptoms appeared.

  Months earlier, they’d chosen the complex because it had been emptied of life. Then the emptiness turned oppressive. But the roof was specked with soda cans and butts from hand-rolled cigarettes, clues of others in this world who also came to snack and watch the sky.

  They sat on a waxy banana box, back-to-back, and Frank produced a treat from his jacket pocket: a warped, fun-size box of raisins. They ate the raisins slowly so they would last until the sun went down, chewing each juiceless bead until only threads remained between their teeth. A wind-beaten pigeon approached, hopeful. “Don’t fold,” Frank said. “Don’t waste anything on that sky rat; I saved those for you.” Polly said, “But he’s hungry,” and held a raisin to its jerking beak. A second pigeon soon joined the first. “And another mouth to feed,” Frank said, watching wistfully as she gave away the last raisin.