Unhappenings (21 page)

“Leather is not exactly your speed, is it?” I asked.

She turned around, and her eyes hit me like a dopamine dart gun.

I had never seen this woman before. Given that I had spent much of my adult life training myself not to be surprised by unfamiliar faces, this sudden case of mistaken identity should not have fazed me. Yet, in that moment, I forgot all of my tricks for not making a fool of myself. She gazed at me, curiously.

“I know. I’m trying to reinvent myself, but I don’t think it’s taking.” She closed her book and set it down, then did a casual pirouette to model the jacket for me. “I don’t know,” she said. “What do you think? Am I working this?”

She was indeed.

“I’m… so sorry,” I said, attempting to recover. “I thought you were someone I knew.” The woman before me did not have Athena’s mannerisms or build. Her face was rounder, her eyes bluer, and her voice richer. Even her hair, which was the feature I had clumsily used to identify her, was shorter, darker, and lusher.

Her arms, which were outstretched to show off the jacket, slowly moved down to her hips.

“Really,” she said. “That’s your story. Someone you knew.”

“That’s my story,” I said, desperately hoping to sound both in control and terribly witty. “And I’m sticking to it.”

She touched her chin, pensively. “Needs polish,” she said. “But I guess it’s a classic for a reason. And you are?”

“Nigel,” I said. Then I heard myself saying it. “Graham!” I corrected, too obviously and far too late. The sudden adrenaline dump served to highlight the fact that my heart was already racing, and was now being pushed to its limit.

She stared for a moment, perhaps waiting for me to finish remembering my name, and her look went from pensive to downright devious.

“You intrigue me, Nigel-Graham. How many last names do you have?”

I laughed, afraid that it would sound fake, even though it was real.

“Just the one. Walden. And please call me Graham.”

She clucked her tongue. “Perhaps,” she said, “but I don’t think so, Nigel-Graham. Not yet. Helen. Helen Clay. Well, Helena, really, but I have never been able to get the hang of that third syllable.”

“Helen,” I said, mostly just to hear myself say it.

Her eyes narrowed. “So, you know me after all. Where’s your story now, bitch?” Then her face lit up. “Hey! What are you doing for the next two hours?”

“I… don’t know?”

“Perfect!”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because in two hours I have a job interview, and you are going to spend that time rehearsing it with me.”

I laughed again. “All right, I accept. Where?”

“Here,” she said.

“No, I mean where are you interviewing?”

With a big nod, and much more slowly, she said, “Heeeeeeere.”

“The library?”

“The print collection. They’re hiring a curator.”

“Oh!” I said. “So you’re my three o’clock.”

Her jaw dropped, and immediately spread into a smile. She pointed at me. “That was good.”

“Thanks,” I said with a grin, and almost certainly a blush.

She picked up a black leather bag that matched her jacket perfectly and said, “All right, Nigel-Graham. Find me a decent cup of coffee, and let’s do this.”

We spent the next two hours pretending to be a library board of trustees and a prospective curator. For much of that time, my background thoughts were of finding a way to use my knowledge of time travel to make those two hours last forever. But they didn’t. When she finally and warmly thanked me for my help and made her way back the library, I basked in her gratitude.

For the rest of the day, I tried to imagine realistic scenarios that did not end with her disappearing forever.

 

o matter what happened next, one of us was doomed. My doom would be figurative, of course. Helen’s would be quite literal.

This was no tentative attraction, like what had almost happened with Wendy. Two hours with Helen, and I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. Horribly, the only pattern I had ever been able to establish with any consistency when it came to my unhappenings was that every relationship I ever had ended well before it started, sometimes fatally. For seven years, for that very reason, I had been excessively cautious about getting to know women. I might have talked myself into believing the unhappenings had stopped when I considered dating Wendy, but I quickly realized how reckless and irresponsible that was. I would never have forgiven myself if anything had unhappened to her. If I talked myself into believing that again in order to date Helen, she would die. It had to be that simple.

That said, the thought of never seeing her again haunted me. It was as if the universe had put her in my path simply to taunt me. By all rights, I shouldn’t even have met her. In my true time, she wouldn’t be born for decades yet. This was a dream. A might-have-been from a parallel universe. I had no business even wanting to spend time with her. I would cherish those two hours, and spend the rest of my life wondering what would have happened if things had been entirely different.

In truth, I don’t know if I ever would have had the strength to make that decision, one way or the other. I never got the opportunity to find out, because Helen made it for me.

hree days after Helen’s job interview, our lab received a crate filled with thousands of identical black discs the approximate size of a bottle cap. Each one was a completely sealed and nearly indestructible clock, although there was no way anyone would ever know that from looking at them. They were smooth, unmarked and featureless. Using our newly upgraded time chamber, our task over the next several weeks was to send one of these objects exactly one gigasecond into the past, in five minute intervals, until they were all gone. Once that was done, a field team would go looking for them with scanners. Each recovered clock would be read, and the time discrepancy noted with respect to the target destination of one gigasecond. Very few were expected to travel exactly that amount of time. The prevailing conjecture was that they would follow a distribution skewed to the right with one gigasecond as the median. Presumably, many of them would be found by bystanders while they waited to catch up to the present, so they were specifically designed to be boring enough not to attract attention. Apparently the design was extremely successful, as the vast majority of the ones we were eventually able to locate were in landfills.

The formal name for these devices was Trans-Chronal Displacement Distribution Markers. Oscar called them tracer pucks.

I was given the scut work task of inventorying them, and scanning them in. Externally, they were all identical, but internally they all had unique ID tags to be confirmed, and extraction signals to be tested and activated. Doing that two thousand times took about as long as I expected it to, but I was glad to have something trivial on which to concentrate. The previous three days had been an exercise in distractibility for me, and Oscar and Andrea had both picked up on that.

About an hour into that, we got a call from the front desk that I had a visitor. It was not unusual for Andrea or Oscar to get calls like that. No one was permitted in or near our lab but the three of us, so any time someone needed to speak to one of them, they had to be called down. It was, however, unprecedented for me to get a call like that. I briefly allowed myself to fantasize that Helen had tracked me down to tell me she had been thinking about me non-stop for three days. That fantasy lasted exactly as long as it took for me come to the screen and see Helen waving in it.