The Time Traveler's Almanac (29 page)

The world stops. The ESPN guy, in the midst of saying something about the Cubs, freezes on the “ah” of “Chicago” and just keeps saying “aaaaaah.” There’s a steady drone coming from the air conditioner, not the usual back and forth rattle but a constant monotone. The thin ribbon of smoke snaking up from Ernie’s ashtray stops dead and just hangs there.

“Weird,” Ernie’s about to say, but saying this is weird is like saying Ted Williams could hit a little bit, so Ernie doesn’t bother. Apart from him, the only things moving in the whole house are the numbers counting down on the kitchen timer.

Even the air feels like it’s stuck in place. Ernie’s got to suck it in like a milkshake through a straw. Standing up is hard and walking is like pushing through chest-deep water.

There’s a compression left in the couch cushion where he was sitting a second ago, still squished down though there’s no big cabbie ass to squish it. He wades over to the ashtray and touches the cigarette smoke with a gloved finger. It doesn’t move under a light touch, but a little nudge frees it up somehow and the part he touched starts its slow crawl toward the ceiling. The rest just hangs there like a question mark made of white cotton candy.

He fiddles with other stuff for a minute or two.

Everything he tries to pick up feels like it’s glued down, but he can budge it if he muscles it. The TV remote doesn’t do anything, though; it’s still just whatshisname saying “aaaaah” with a not-so-bright look on his face.

The kitchen holds the best surprises. That brat he picked up for dinner wasn’t doing the trick, so before he turned on the TV and cracked open that beer he put a pot on for spaghetti.

When he gets to the kitchen, the flames under the pot look like they’ve been airbrushed there. They don’t move a bit. The water looks like it’s boiling and frozen at the same time, the bubbles stock-still, a big one half-popped on the surface and looking like a crater.

Then bam, the world starts moving again. Bubbles bubble. Flames flicker. The couch cushion springs up from the ass print he left on it. The ESPN guy finally finishes whatever he was going to say about the Cubs. Ernie looks down at the box on his chest and he sees the timer’s at zero.

Ernie dumps some angel hair in the pot, then sits in front of the air conditioner and sweats, trying to figure out what the hell just happened. In the four and a half minutes it takes the angel hair to cook, he comes up with nothing. He goes back to the kitchen, grabs a black pasta spoon, and hooks a noodle to taste it. They’re perfect. Then the world gets funny again.

One second he’s holding the cheap plastic spoon over the pot. The next he’s holding a hot drooping handle and there’s spatters of black plastic all over the stovetop. The business end of the spoon is bumping around in the pot, half an inch of melted handle curling down from one side like a tail.

To beat that, his angel hair’s gone from al dente to mush.

He finds that out after he drains it and fishes out what’s left of his spoon. Right about then is when he sees the red light blinking on the answering machine. Ernie’s old school. He has an answering machine, a big brown-and-black one, and despite the fact that there were no messages on it when he got home, now there is one and he never heard the phone ring.

He plays the message. It’s Janine. She says she’s coming over in a few minutes. According to the time stamp she left the message while he was standing five feet from the phone, watching his angel hair and his pasta spoon turn to garbage in something like a millionth of a second.

Then it hits him. She’s coming over in a few minutes. He’s dressed to go scuba diving with Buck Rogers.

He struggles out of the suit, which is no easier getting out of than in. He’s in his boxers, shirtless and sweating like a dockworker, when he hears her key slide into the lock. He stuffs the blue suit behind the couch and gets turned back around just in time not to look suspicious. And desperate. He hopes.

She takes one look at him and says, “Jesus, Ernie.”

Janine’s the type of woman you can tell was beautiful once.

The tanning she did when they were in their twenties isn’t so easy to wear anymore, but hot damn was she a looker back then.

Gravity hasn’t been so kind to what used to draw long looks from every guy on the street, but back then every last one of them was wishing he was Ernie. She’s not what she used to be, but to Ernie she’s still Rita Hayworth.

He’s not even sure he realized that himself, not even just the night before, when the yelling got bad and she slammed the door on her way out. Now, after the day he’s been having, it feels damn good to have her in the house again.

“You’re letting yourself go,” she says.

“Just getting changed,” he says. “Long day at work.”

“If it was a long day at work,” she says, “you’d still be out working. You knock off after the game again today?”

“Again with the game,” he says, wishing he could take it back the second it leaves his mouth. “Look, they tip good over there,” he says. “I don’t have to work a full eight hours on game days.”

“I’ll worry about eight after you put in six,” she says. “I just came for some clothes.”

Ernie follows her to the bedroom and sweeps yesterday’s jeans off the end of the unmade bed. “You want to stay for dinner?” he says.

She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t need to.

She rolls an armful of bras and underwear in a T-shirt and drapes another shirt and a pair of jeans on top. Ernie asks her if she’s staying at her sister’s again tonight. She says yes.

On her way back to the door, she says, “Christ, Ernie, did you steal something from a fare?”

“No,” he says – maybe a second too soon. It’s been a point of pride for him. You wouldn’t believe how many cabbies figure a fare leaves something in the cab, that means they must not want it that bad. It’s been a point of pride for Janine, too.

She always said he was better than those other guys.

She gives him a cold look and says, “Where’s that suitcase from, then?”

The silver Samsonite’s sitting right there on the couch.

He only has to look at it for a second before he answers. “It’s for you,” he says. “I figured maybe you’d need it to get your stuff.”

Her eyes get colder. “Bull,” she says. “You’re telling me you’re making it easier for me to get out of here?”

“No,” he says. “I’m making it easier for you to come back.”

It softens her for a second. She puts her stuff in the suitcase. He invites her again to stay for dinner. “You put in a full day’s work and maybe I’ll stay,” she says. Then she walks out.

*   *   *

He stays up late thinking about things – about Janine, about the suit and the timer on it – and before he knows it it’s nine in the morning and the snooze on his alarm clock’s been yelling at him for over an hour. Some cabbies have to drive when the company tells them to, but Ernie owns his own car so he drives when he wants. That’s part of the problem with Janine.

By the time he fell asleep, he’d managed to convince himself things weren’t so bad. He didn’t steal the suit from that kid. Right from the beginning he meant to give it back.

He just forgot. And things with Janine weren’t as bad as they could’ve been. She was pissed, sure, but she still had her ring on. She never did get pissed off the way Ernie does. She stores everything up, lets it build, and it takes just as long for her to bleed the pressure off. Ernie, he’s more the firecracker type. Short fuse, short burst, then back to peace and quiet.

But he figures she meant it when she said she’d stay for dinner. Too bad that’s not going to happen anymore. It’s too late to get a full day’s worth of fares and be home by dinnertime. He missed the morning rush and the Sox are on the road. But before he nodded off he got himself an idea about the suit. He told himself he wasn’t going to go through with it, but that was before he slept through the morning rush. Now the more he thinks about it, the more he figures there isn’t another way. Before he tries it, though, he’s got to try an experiment.

He sets up the suit exactly the same way he did the night before – two minutes on the timer, the clock set five minutes fast – only this time he doesn’t put the suit on. He holds the suit up over his head and gives it a little upward toss the second he hits Start on the timer.

The suit’s on the ground without falling there. He’s looking at it overhead and then it’s on his feet. He never sees it fall. He’d have said this is pretty weird, but the weirdest part is this is exactly what he thought would happen.

He’s got five minutes to wait before the next part of the experiment, and during that time he learns five minutes is way too long to think about whether being near this suit is going to give him cancer or something. For all he knows, the suit’s radioactive. For all he knows, he ought to be wearing a lead jock strap.

At the end of the five minutes, he pokes and prods at the suit with a big stubby toe. He can’t move it. He kicks it.

Can’t even ruffle the neoprene. A harder kick and all he does is hurt his foot.

Just for grins he pours a glass of water on the suit. The water looks like it slides off the suit without ever touching it. Not like rain on a waxed car, where it beads up on the wax; it’s as if the suit’s not wet because the water can’t touch it at all. There’s a dark spot in Ernie’s orange shag carpeting and not a drop on the neoprene. For two minutes nothing he can do affects the suit.

By this time he figures he’s got a pretty good idea of what this suit is and what it does. He can’t even begin to imagine how it’s possible, but at this point he can’t afford to care.

This little jewel is the end of all his worries. Never mind a full day’s pay; what he needs is for Janine to take him back, and with this thing he can get her back for good.

He stuffs the suit in an old duffel bag and heads downtown.

He doesn’t turn his lights on, doesn’t roll by the hospital or the Huntington Avenue hotels to see if there’s a fare, doesn’t even bother calling in to dispatch. Whatever he’d make from fares isn’t squat compared to what the suit can do for him.

Ernie parks at the first Seven-Eleven he sees, grabs the duffel bag, and asks the old guy behind the counter if he can use the john. In the bathroom he changes into the suit, sets the clock one hour fast, and sets the timer for ten minutes.

Then he punches Start.

It’s hard to breathe again and opening the door feels like he’s pulling it through water. He finally manages to get it open, though, and outside the whole store’s frozen. The second hand on the clock isn’t moving. The little hot dog rollers don’t roll. The hot dogs don’t even blister under the heat lamps.

It feels like wading as he makes his way to the cash register. There’s a little portable radio on behind the counter; he can’t tell what it’s playing because there’s just the one note coming from it, like someone leaning on a car horn.

The old guy is staring at the chest of a busty eighteen-year-old buying
Cosmo
and cigarettes. Her eyes are fixed in mid-blink, her teeth at half-chew on her gum. Their hands are stone still above the counter, her change in mid-slide from his hand to hers. The till is open.

It’s hard to pull up the black plastic drawer, and not just because it’s stuck there like glue: Ernie doesn’t know if bumping into the old guy will be like nudging the smoke, freeing him, so he’s got to be careful not to touch him. It takes him about a minute to lift the drawer. One minute to make a solid day’s worth of fares. It wouldn’t be too hard to pick up the hundred dollar bills if he could use his fingernails, but they’re gloved under an eighth of an inch of blue neoprene and so he needs to use the edge of a quarter to pry them up. He takes all three, and the fifty too, and leaves the checks.

He leaves the rest of the cash too. No point in bankrupting the place. Nor does he go after the white Coach purse hanging from the girl’s shoulder. He’s got nothing against her. Nothing against the old guy or Seven-Eleven either. It’s just that he’s got to get his wife back and this is the only way he can see to do it.

He heads to the bathroom, drags the door open, and grabs his duffel bag. The timer on his chest says he’s got four more minutes. It takes him a little over a minute to open one of the cooler doors and pry a can of Dr. Pepper off the shelf. Another minute to wade over to the front door of the store. Half a second to realize that leaving now would mean that apart from the teenage girl and the old cashier, the only person the security camera’s going to show is a chubby balding white guy who walked into the men’s room and never came out. He wades back to the john, he locks himself in, and he waits.

When the timer hits zero, he unzips the suit and crams it back in the duffel. By the time he gets out of the bathroom, the girl’s gone and the old man still doesn’t have the slightest clue what happened. And why would he? He hasn’t opened the drawer again yet.

The clock on the dash said it was eleven o’clock on the dot when he parked the cab in front of the store. When he starts her up again, it says eleven-oh-four. Still plenty of time.

On the way home he stops by a J.C. Penney and buys a small silver Samsonite just like the one he gave Janine the night before. He tucks the receipt in his wallet, and when he gets home he stows the carry-on with all the rest of the crap he’s got piled up under the basement stairs. Then he waits.

Just before noon, he makes sure to be sitting right in front of his alarm clock. He waits for it to hit. He’s sitting on the edge of the bed looking at the big red digits telling him it’s 11:59. He blinks.

When his eyes open it’s 12:10.

He didn’t fall asleep. He knows he didn’t. The time just passed, like a movie he didn’t buy a ticket to. He hits the streets again with the suit in his duffel.

It turns out he got lucky at the Seven-Eleven. The next men’s room he uses is at a gas station, and when he gets to the cash register the drawer’s closed and nothing he can do can make it open. He figures he’ll make the best of it so he goes outside and tries to fill up on gas. He can pull the nozzle loose and force it into the mouth of his gas tank, but squeezing the handle doesn’t do a thing. It isn’t like the Dr. Pepper, where prying loose the can pries loose everything inside it. The gas is separate from the nozzle, and it’s all still frozen in that big reservoir under the pavement.