Summer Days and Summer Nights (53 page)

I don't think anybody in the history of cinema has ever enjoyed a movie as much as I enjoyed
Time Bandits
that night. Roger Ebert watching
Casablanca
could not have enjoyed it one-tenth as much.

“Margaret, can I ask you something?” I said.

“Of course.”

“Do you ever miss your parents? I mean, I can hang out with mine pretty much whenever I want—and anyway, where my parents are concerned, a little of that goes a long way. But you hardly see yours at all. That's got to be hard.”

She nodded, looking down at her lap.

“Yeah. That's kind of hard.”

Her corkscrewy hair fell down over her face. It reminded me of double helices, of DNA, and I thought about how, somewhere inside them, there were tiny corkscrew-shaped molecules containing the magic formula for how to make corkscrewy hair. How to make Margaret.

“Do you want to go find them? I mean, we could probably track them down inside of twenty-four hours. Hit that yoga retreat.”

“Forget it.” She shook her head, not looking at me. “Forget it. We don't have to.”

“I know we don't have to, I just thought…”

She still wasn't looking at me. I'd hit some kind of a nerve, a raw one that led off somewhere that I didn't quite understand. It hurt me a bit that she wouldn't or couldn't say where. But she didn't owe me any explanations.

“Sure. Okay. I just wish you'd gotten a better day, that's all. I don't know who it was that chose this day, but I question their taste in days.”

She half smiled; literally, one half of her mouth smiled and the other didn't.

“Somebody has to have bad days,” she said. “I mean statistically. Or the bell curve would get all messed up. I'm just doing my part here.”

She took my hand—she picked it up off my lap in both of hers and sort of it squeezed it. I squeezed her hand back, trying to keep breathing normally while my heart blew up inside me a hundred times. Everything went still, and I almost think something might have happened—like that might have been the moment—except that I immediately blew it.

“Listen,” I said, “I had an idea for something we could try.”

“Does it involve unicycling? Because I'm telling you, I never want to see another of those one-wheeled devil-cycles in my life.”

“I don't think so.” I kept waiting for her to put my hand down, but she didn't. “You remember you had that idea once, where we travel as far as we can and see if we can get outside the zone where the time loop is happening? I mean, assuming it's limited to a zone?”

She didn't answer right away, just kept looking out at her backyard, which was getting darker and darker in the summer twilight.

“Margaret? Are you okay?”

“No, right, I remember.” She let go of my hand. “It's a good plan. We should do it. Where should we go?”

“I don't know. I don't think it matters that much. I figure we should just head straight to the airport and get on the longest flight we can find. Tokyo or Sydney or something. But you're sure you're okay?”

“Absolutely. Absolutely okay.”

“We don't have to. It probably won't work. I just thought we should try everything.”

“We absolutely should. Everything. Definitely. Let's not do it tomorrow, though.”

“No problem.

“Day after, maybe.”

“Whenever you're ready.”

She nodded, three quick nods, as if she'd made up her mind.

“The day after tomorrow.”

*   *   *

We couldn't start out before midnight, because of the cosmic nanny effect, but we agreed that at the stroke of midnight we would both leap out of bed and she would immediately book us flights on Turkish Airlines to Tokyo, leaving Logan Airport at 3:50 a.m., which was the earliest flight to somewhere really far away that we could find. Margaret had to be the one to do it because she had a debit card, because she had a joint bank account with her parents, which I didn't. I promised I would hit her back if it worked.

Then I snuck out into the warm, grassy-smelling night to wait and be attacked by numberless mosquitoes. There was no moon; August 4th was a new moon. Margaret came rolling up with the lights off.

It felt close and intimate, being in her car with her in the middle of the night. In fact it was the most boyfriendy I'd ever felt with Margaret, and even though I was not in actual fact her boyfriend, it was a thrilling feeling. We didn't talk till we were cruising along the empty highway, surfing the rolling hills on the way into Boston, under the indifferent, insipid orange gaze of the sodium streetlights.

“If this works, my parents are going to think we ran away together,” she said.

“I didn't even think about that. I left mine a note saying I caught the bus into Boston for the day.”

“I'm just picturing my dad saying over and over that it's okay if I'm pregnant, he totally understands, he just wants to talk about it.”

“The Tokyo thing's going to be the weirdest part. Like, where did that come from?”

“I'm going to say it was your idea,” Margaret said. “You were tired of reading imported manga; you wanted to go straight to the source.”

“It's cool that you're so supportive of my enthusiasms.”

We were joking, but I knew—really knew right then—that I was in love with Margaret. I wasn't joking, I was completely serious. I would have run away to Tokyo with her anyway, like a shot, for no reason at all. But I told myself I wasn't going to say anything, I wasn't going to do anything about it, till the time thing was fixed. I didn't want her to feel like she was stuck with me. I wanted it to count.

Also, yeah, I was terrified. I had never been in love before. I had never wagered this much of my heart before. As badly as I wanted to win, I was even more scared of losing.

Gazing out the car window at the black trees against the light-pollution-gray sky, I thought about how much I would miss August 4th, our day, if this worked. Mark and Margaret Day. The pool, the library, the tiny perfect things. Maybe this was crazy. After all, I had time and I had love. I had it all, I had everything, and I was throwing it away, and for what? For real life? For getting old and dying like everybody else?

But yeah: everybody else. Everybody in the world who wasn't getting to live their lives. They were getting robbed of everything, every day. My parents, getting up day after day after day and doing the exact same things, over and over again. Having their stupid fight about the car. My sister practicing her Vivaldi and never getting any better. Did it matter, if they didn't know it? I wanted to think that maybe it didn't. But I knew that it did.

And I knew that, deep down, I'd had enough of living without consequences too. Low-stakes living, where nothing mattered and all your wounds healed over the next morning, no scars. I needed something more. I was ready to go back to real life. I was ready to go anywhere, if it was with Margaret.

And it would be good to see the moon again.

This late at night the airport was almost empty. We collected our tickets from the kiosks and wandered through security. No lines. 3:50 a.m. is the only time to fly. We had no luggage so we breezed through security and just sat at the gate and waited. Margaret didn't feel much like talking, but she rested her head on my shoulder. She was tired, she said. And she didn't like flying.

After a while I went off to find us some Diet Cokes. They called our flight. We shuffled down the jetway with a lot of other tired, disheveled-looking people.

We'd gotten seats together. Margaret seemed more and more out of it, sunk inside herself, staring at the seat back in front of her. She felt far away even though we were sitting right next to each other.

“Are you worried about flying?” I asked. “Because, you know, even if we crash we've still got the whole reincarnation thing going. And anyway, if a plane crashed on August 4th we would've heard about it by now.”

“Don't jinx it.”

“You know, in a way I hope this doesn't work, because if it does we're going to be out a ton of money. Did you book round-trip?”

I was babbling, like I did the day we met.

“I didn't even think about that,” she said. “Though, on the bonus side, if it works we'll have saved the world.”

“At least there's that.”

I closed my eyes. My numberless mosquito bites itched. We hadn't had a lot of sleep. I liked the idea of falling asleep next to Margaret.

“Though, what if,” I said, eyes still closed, “what if the world is going to end on August 5th? What if that's what's happening here? What if somebody made time start repeating exactly
because
the world was about to get hit by an asteroid or something, and that person had, in effect, saved the world by stopping time forever—albeit at a terrible cost—and if we break the time loop, then actually we'll be dooming the Earth to certain destruction?”

She didn't answer. It was a rhetorical question anyway. When I opened my eyes again some Turkish flight attendants were closing the doors. It took me a second to realize that Margaret wasn't in her seat anymore. I thought she must have gone to the bathroom, and I even got up to check on her, but I was immediately herded back to my seat by concerned Turkish Airlines employees.

After five minutes I had to admit it to myself: Margaret was no longer on the plane. She must have run out just as the door was closing.

My phone chimed.

I'm sorry Mark but I just can't I'm sorry

Can't what? Fly to Tokyo? Fly to Tokyo with me? Leave the time loop?
What?
I started texting her back, but a Turkish flight attendant told me to please turn off all phones and portable devices or switch them to airline mode. She said it again in Turkish, for emphasis. I shut down my phone.

We taxied to the runway and took off. It was a long flight to Tokyo—fourteen hours. I watched
Edge of Tomorrow
three times.

*   *   *

After all that, it didn't work. I waited in the gate area at Narita—which looks surprisingly similar to all other airports everywhere, except that everything's in Japanese and the vending machines are more futuristic—until it was midnight in Massachusetts and the cosmic nanny reached out from halfway around the world and put me to bed, back in my house.

When I woke up that morning, I texted Margaret, but she didn't text me back. She didn't text me back the next day, either. I called her, but she didn't answer.

I didn't know what to think, except that she didn't want the time loop to end and, whatever the reason was, it had nothing to do with me. My entire world was just the little bubble I shared with her, but her world was bigger than that. Maybe she had someone else, was all I could think of, because of course everything had to be about me. There was somebody else and she didn't want to leave them behind. To me our life together was a perfect thing, and I couldn't imagine wanting anything else. But she could.

It hurt. I'd had one glorious glimpse of the third dimension, and now I was banished back to flatness forever.

For the first time I wished I was one of the normal people, the zombies, who forgot everything every morning and just went about their business as if it was all fresh and new and for the first time.
Let me go,
I thought at the cosmic nanny.
Let me forget. Let me be one of them. I don't want to be one of us anymore. I want to be a robot.
But I couldn't forget.

I went back to my old routine, back to the library. I still had two more
Hitchhiker's Guide
books to go, and I was nowhere even near done with the A section—I still had Lloyd Alexander and Piers Anthony to go, and beyond them the great desert of Isaac Asimov stretched out into the distance. I spent all day there, except that I went outside at 11:37:12 to watch the skateboarder nail his combo.

In fact I got into the habit of checking in with a couple of our tiny perfect moments every day, which was easy because, obviously, we had a handy map of them. Sometimes I redrew it; sometimes I just went by memory. I watched the hawk score its fish. I waved to Sean Bean at the corner of Heston and Grand. I watched the little girl make her huge bubble. I always hoped I'd see Margaret at one of them, but I never did. I went anyway. It helped me feel sad, which is maybe part of the process of falling out of love, which it was obviously time for me to do. I was getting good at feeling sad.

Or maybe I was just wallowing in self-pity. It's a fine line.

I did catch a glimpse of Margaret once, by chance. I knew it would happen sooner or later; it was only a matter of time (or lack thereof). I was driving through the center, on my way to see the Scrabble game, when I spotted a silver VW station wagon turning a corner a block away. The classy and respectful thing to do would have been to let her go, because she obviously wanted nothing to do with me, but I didn't do the classy thing. I did the other thing. I floored it and made the corner in time to see her turning right on Concord Avenue. I floored it again. Follow that car.

I followed her out to Route 2 and along it as far as Emerson Hospital.

I'd never known Margaret to go to the hospital. She'd never talked about it. It freaked me out a bit. My insides went cold, and the closer we got, the colder they got. I couldn't believe what a stupid jealous bastard I'd been. Maybe Margaret was sick—maybe she'd been sick this whole time and just didn't want to tell me. She didn't want to burden me with it. Oh my God, maybe she had cancer! I should have stuck with trying to cure it! Maybe that was the whole point of this whole thing—Margaret has some rare disease, but then we work together, and because we have the repeating-days thing we have all the time we need, and finally we come up with a cure for it and save her and she falls in love with me …

But no; that wasn't this story. This was a different kind of story.