An Ocean of Minutes Read online

  “You traveled to benefit someone, didn’t you?” he said. “That’s who you were supposed to meet in ’93?”

  She nodded.

  “Who’d you travel for?”

  “My cousin.” She was going to be careful, until she knew what was safe to reveal and what wasn’t.

  “I thought about making that choice, but in the end I couldn’t.” He gazed at his thumbs, sly and uncomfortable. “It was for my boyfriend.”

  Pain enveloped them and she couldn’t tell if it was his or hers.

  “They wouldn’t allow you? Because you are . . . ?” She struggled. She didn’t know what word was polite. Did they still say “gay”?

  “Homos? Something like that.”

  What must they have suffered? This was the key to everything about this man: the rudeness, the jitters, the blundering. No wonder he was thoughtless: all his thoughts must be expended on trying to forget.

  But they had arrived now, back at Twenty-First Street. There was still summer light in the sky. She was only four blocks away from Twenty-Fifth Street. Even if she was on the wrong end of the island, it could not be more than an hour’s walk to the Flagship. Possibility and ache rebounded.

  * * *

  The driver from yesterday was waiting for her at Moody Plaza, in a room off the lobby that smelled of newspaper and mushrooms. Tidy, tightly spaced shelves were stacked with wooden toothbrushes, cakes of soap in paper, pajama sets, and jars of food. Under the window was a picnic table littered with packs of cards and old books. Two men were playing a game of twenty-one. The driver shooed them away. “It’s twenty minutes to closing time,” they protested.

  “Item twelve,” he replied, pointing to a list of policies pasted to the door: #12 TimeRaiser reserves the right to revoke this space for confidential purposes at any time.

  “You got on the wrong bus,” the driver told Polly. “You got on a bus that arrived at 0715 instead of 0730. If you’re not careful, next time there’ll be serious deductions off your LifeFund.”

  “Life fund?” she asked.

  “Uh-oh. Did you miss your orientation today?”

  He tried to figure out if she could attend another orientation. But the next one wasn’t till the twelfth, and such a wait was against policy. He’d have to do it manually, now.

  “There’s a protocol for how to lay things out. To avoid undue distress. I’m no match for the video you’d view at the real orientation, with images and music. All I have is a basic script.”

  “I was hoping to go for a walk this evening. To get my bearings.” She spoke so slowly, it sounded like she was making up a lie, but it was only because she was trying quite hard not to cry. She was so close. If she left right now, she could make it before this Saturday slipped away.

  “Oh no, it’s not safe for you to go walking about. Anyway, the shuttle will take you everywhere. You don’t need to worry about your bearings.”

  “Can I make a phone call?”

  “I’m Norberto. I didn’t introduce myself.”

  “Can I make a phone call now?”

  “It will cost you.”

  “How much?”

  He directed her to sit in front of a grubby old desk that was leaning in a corner, labeled Concierge. The top of the desk was immaculate—pens sat perky in a cup, a coffee cup rested on a coaster—a puzzling thing, considering the scored surface of the desk, blotched here and there by the gum of long-gone Scotch tape. There was a long-distance rate chart on the wall.

  “Where do you want to call?”

  “Buffalo.”

  Norberto studied the chart. “Connection fee is . . . fifteen dollars. And then it’s two fifty a minute. Dang! You still want to call? You know most likely the folks you’re calling won’t be there anymore?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. It charges to your LifeFund. What’s the number?” He dialed Donna for her. “Yup. Disconnected.”

  “Can I listen?” She put the receiver to her ear. She heard nothing.

  “Nothing means it’s disconnected,” he explained.

  “Can you dial again?”

  “It’s going to add up.”

  “I understand.”

  She heard the song of the number as he dialed, watching to make sure he did it right. There was a ring and she shouted, “There!” Then the sound cut out before the first bell finished. The phone transmuted from a portal into only plastic. She tapped her other ear to make sure she hadn’t gone deaf. She asked if it was properly connected and he showed her the translucent line running into the wall and told her about cables being laid two years ago by Journeymen.

  “Can I call someone else?”

  Norberto dialed the bar where Frank had worked. The same thing happened: the first blurt of the ring and then the bottomless silence.

  “Do you want to make another call?”

  She tried Frank’s parents. The phone rang. Then it rang again. Polly screamed.

  “Hello?” A scratchy voice spoke.

  “Mrs. Marino! It’s Polly!”

  “Wrong number,” scratched the voice, and hung up.

  “That’s sixty dollars plus ten dollars,” Norberto said.

  She nodded without hearing him; her brain was clicking too fast. It confirmed nothing except that the lines were out of service. They’d experienced a national disaster. A global disaster. It was silly to think she’d get them on the phone. It didn’t mean Frank and Donna were dead. There would be other ways.

  Norberto opened a binder filled with sheaves of paper in plastic holders, and it hit the desk with a fat slap. He moved like an old man, but he could not have been over forty.

  “Ready?” he said.

  She nodded.

  “What year did you come from?”

  “1981.”

  “Let me see . . . 1981.” Colored tabs dotted the fore edge. Polly tried to count how many. “There’s some preamble. Greetings and introductions. I’ll skip to the meat.” He started to read: “ ‘Welcome to 1997’—I mean 1998; sorry. It says 1997, but it’s 1998 now. ‘We are so happy to have you join us. You’re a participant in a pivotal point in human history: not only can we time travel, we’ve perfected a method for carrying it out humanely, with as little disruption to history as possible. Today is the first day of the rest of your life, and you have a chance to begin again.’ ”

  The text itself had the artificial intimacy of a motivational speaker, but Norberto read the words in a stuttery monotone. He ran his finger along the page so he didn’t lose his spot, and his effort made the words genuine.

  “ ‘You will find many changes have elapsed in the time you were in transit. We will let you uncover these in your own time, save for one. The borders of our land have been redrawn. No longer within our borders: Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York—’ ”

  Her aching legs felt far away, as if she were sitting in one room and her body in another.

  “Excuse me.”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you listing states in alphabetical order?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’m having trouble following. Maybe if I look at a map?”

  They had to get up and go back to the entryway to see the map that hung there with the heading America, c. 1997. The poster showed a squashed shape, not the one she knew. The top half of the country was black: Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and anything north of the Mason-Dixon Line. The states that remained were in neon: Nevada, Arizona, the South. California was called New California.

  Norberto had brought along the binder with the script, holding it out like a missal. He continued the list: “ ‘Ohio, Oregon . . .’ ”

  Polly became very aware of the sounds of her own body, of her epiglottis closing in her throat, of the rush of air in her ears.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Can you just tell me what happened?”

  “You don’t want to hear the script? I ha
ve a pamphlet you can have.” She shook her head no. He tucked the binder under his arm. He smoothed a curling corner of the map, rubbing it with his thumb like a stain.

  “You know why they invented time travel?”

  Polly didn’t know what to say. “So we could time travel?”

  “To go back and stop the pandemic from ever happening. But that wasn’t possible—you heard why? Because they could only reach as far as June of ’81? So instead they sent the vaccine that scientists had working by the late ’80s to ’81.”

  “They did? When?”

  “When was your origin point? September? It went in November. It was a good idea. I don’t know what went wrong. I don’t know disease science, why the vaccine worked in ’93 but not in ’81. The flu didn’t go away. It mutated, got nastier. But only in the South. TimeRaiser distributed the vaccine to Texas first, thinking it would be a leg up. By summer of ’82, we had problems with water, sanitation. Disease spread like a house fire.

  “So the North cut us loose. They set up roadblocks and a regional border from coast to coast, and they sealed that border. There was pushback, but they had the United States military, so that only lasted three or four days. The border was supposed to be temporary, only for the worst spikes of the disease, but by the end of that year the government dissolved, and people living in the North decided to keep defending their border.”

  She could not control the cinching of her ribs and the closing of her throat.

  “How about now? Can people cross that border now?”

  He grimaced. “They cross it now to get the oil. By the early ’90s the South was desperate to get the oil back online, to get leverage once more. Errors were made. After the ninety-three percent, there wasn’t the necessary expertise. Around ’92 the North agreed to come down and fix the wells and refineries, but only on the condition they get nine-tenths of access to the oil. Greedy bastards. What was the question?”

  “Can I cross the border now?”

  “Borders reopened in ’93, when eradication was declared in the Americas. But we’re different countries. We’re America. They call themselves the United States. United, my butt.” Redness flared around his hairline. He rubbed the back of his neck, like he was trying to rotate it. “I’m speaking out of turn. I’m sorry if I’m causing undue distress.”

  Like most people, it was impossible for Polly to have an immediate emotional response to the behemothic movements of global powers. Instead, she could make sense of this only in narrow slices, at the place where politics intersected with the needs of her own small life.

  She said, “If you were sick, say, in 1981, and you were treated in Houston even after the countries separated, you’d just stay wherever you were treated, wouldn’t you?”

  “It’s hard to say, really. It would depend on a lot of things. Some people roved. Other people stayed put. People had all sorts of strategies for getting through the hard years.”

  “When were the hard years?”

  “That’s a personal question. We can’t get personal with tenants.” Again Polly had that sour feeling of violating a rule of engagement invisible to her, and inborn in everyone else.

  He returned to his desk and pulled a stuffed envelope from his desk drawer. She sat and spilled its contents into her lap. There was an ID card and manual and a stiff red book—a passport—embossed with America—Conditional.

  “Do you need to buy anything?” Norberto asked.

  It took her ages to say, “Can I buy a toothbrush?”

  He took out an index card. “Let me have your ID for a second.” He printed her name and the nine-digit number on her ID. Then he wrote down the date and made a list below it.

  Long-distance phone call

  $17.50

  Long-distance phone call

  $17.50

  Long-distance phone call

  $17.50

  Long-distance phone call

  $17.50

  Toothbrush & paste

  $9.75

  “What’s this?” Polly asked.

  “Oh, right. This is your LifeFund. To streamline your financial experience, all your pay is deposited into your LifeFund, and any living expenses—lodging, food, medical, purchases at any TimeRaiser PX like this one—are deducted out of it.”

  “What if I need to shop at a regular store? Or buy . . .” She trailed off.

  “You can get everything you need at the PX. TimeRaiser will pay for your transportation to and from your workplace. It’s completely free. There are no regular stores.”

  He put some beans in a pot on a hot plate behind the counter, pouring them into two yellow children’s bowls when they were done, because he hadn’t had dinner yet either. The beans tasted like paper pulp and her guts clutched painfully.

  “Any questions?”

  Her brain was not able to sustain the information he’d given. It held it for a pause, then rejected it, like a coin slot dropping a bad dime. Instead, a query from this strange day floated to the boggy surface of her mind.

  “What is that place I went to today? The vacation homes and the cycle center.”

  “Where did you wind up again?”

  “I think it was called Gulf Pearl.”

  “It’s a resort.”

  “It’s not like other resorts.”

  “In what way?”

  “I don’t know.” She was too modest to ask him about the naked people. “I thought that there were children. But it turned out to be a recording of children laughing. There was a speaker hidden in the bushes.”

  “Sounds nice.” He was rinsing their bowls in a tiny sink, and she thought he might have misheard.

  “What?”

  “Having a recording of children laughing. Nicest sound in the world.”

  “There were naked people,” she blurted, “with jars on their heads.” Saying it out loud, she wondered if she had hallucinated it.

  “Jars?” His face furrowed. “Or do you mean something like diving helmets?”

  “Maybe. Yes.”

  “Hyperbaric oxygen therapy. The helmets deliver one hundred percent oxygen, for beautifying and to promote longevity. Don’t know why they’d be naked.”

  “Why does everyone speak Spanish to me?”

  It was this question, not the ones about fake children and jarred heads, that ruffled him. He stopped his work and turned from the sink. “Texas used to be Mexico, you know.” Then she saw he wasn’t startled by the question; he was annoyed by it.

  “I know,” she said, though she didn’t really know Texas history. “But why does everyone speak Spanish, to me?”

  The phone rang. He said, “That’s my nightly check-in. Look around awhile.”

  There were corkboards papered in ads for swaps: Exchange boots for water filter? Exchange towels for dictionary? Norberto was holding the phone to his ear, but he didn’t speak. He listened, and from time to time he pressed the keys.

  When he hung up the receiver, she asked, “Can you tell me which way the seawall is?”

  “You can’t go for a walk right now. I’ll be locking the doors for the night soon. You won’t be able to get back in.”

  “I was just curious.”

  “The sea is two ways. As the crow flies, if you go out our door and look right, that’s north, and that’s Galveston Channel, and if you look left, that’s south, and that’s the Gulf.”

  “May I ask you something?” Her own politeness was a comfort, willing that the kind of manners she knew were applicable still. “I don’t know if you know I was rerouted? I thought I was going to arrive in 1993.” She couldn’t read Norberto’s face. “They said if I was rerouted, they would get in touch with anyone expecting me and tell them where to meet me.” He led the way out of the store. “I filled out a form, an emergency contact sheet. How do I tell if they got the information to the person who was expecting me? How do I know if he knows I came late?”

  “Oh. I’m not positive. That’s not my area.” He opened the door to the stairwell for her
.

  “Do you know who I can ask?”

  “I’ll look into it.”

  She didn’t move.

  “I’ll look into it,” he said again, and though she stayed there, he went away.

  * * *

  Polly sat on the bed with her back to the window. Behind her, on the other side of swampland and age-corroded strip malls and fallen-in churches, and chalets with marble sinks and migrants sleeping in cans, Frank must be trudging up the beach and walking away. This was an idea that did not make sense.

  There was no socket for a radio, no books. Her room was the size of a large sandbox. There was a cupboard, a hot plate, and a fridge no bigger than a shopping bag. The fridge was dark and warm. It had a coin box; she would have to feed it tokens to keep it cold. There were instructions next to the light switch: if the light was on more than two hours per day, she’d pay overage fees. There were five jars of food in the cupboard, with handwritten labels: black beans, kidney beans, potatoes. There was a polished-steel mirror, but she kept away from it, not wanting to see a stranger’s face. The rest of the space was bed: a single mattress on a frame lifted high off the ground, so there was storage underneath, although did anyone who lived in these rooms have much to store? She had seen the container houses. She should be grateful for this room.

  She would unpack. She opened the cupboard and laid her case on the floor. She had hardly anything in it—only toiletries, some papers, and Frank’s baseball cards.

  What Polly had liked most about baseball was not the game but all the red-faced, cheery people, the foolish happiness of doing the wave, the ordinariness of headlights in the parking lot afterward, on their way home. The cards were so fastidiously sealed, and it was that, most of all, that distressed her, the pains he had taken to keep them pristine, how sincerely she had ferried them over. She heard the sound of waves crashing, but really it was that plastic sheet, gusting in and out at the hallway’s end, like the south side of the building had gills.