Here’s what he said:
“Time isn’t just one long tunnel all of us humans travel down, keeping each other company inside while we’re alive, and that we leave behind for the rest to keep on exploring when we die.”
Honestly, I hadn’t thought much about the nature of time before, but if I had, I would’ve described it more or less the way he just had, so I said, “It’s not?”
“Nope. Time is a garden hose stuffed in a suitcase.”
I laughed.
“No kidding,” said my dad. “An infinitely long garden hose stuffed into a very big suitcase, a suitcase larger than just about everything you can think of, including our universe.”
“That’s big.”
“Yep. And the hose is stuffed in such a way that every bit of it is touching every other bit of it, if you can imagine that.”
I tried. “I can’t.”
“That’s okay, I can’t either. But the point is that every bit of time is actually curled up cozily beside us, all day every day, even if it is hopelessly, eternally just out of reach. Out of reach unless—and here’s where things get tricky, so please pay attention—you figured out a way to poke a pinhole in the walls of the hose, those walls being otherwise known as the limits of reality as we know them, and you slipped through the pinhole from one loop to the next in an instant.”
“Yeah, but nobody could do that,” I scoffed.
It’s possible that I rolled my eyes at this point, because my dad said, “Once you’ve stopped rolling your eyes, ladybug, do me a favor.”
“What?”
“Picture your average pair of workout pants.”
I laughed, again.
“Or shirt. Actually, any item of breathable, high-performance athletic apparel will do. When you look at your item, it appears to be all one piece, right? But actually, it’s full of holes, exactly like . . . can you guess?”
I shook my head.
“The fabric of the universe! Everything you see around you is at least as much not-there as it is there. The spaces between the particles inside the atoms that make up your own body? Huge, like the distances between the stars in the Milky Way. The pinholes in the garden hose? No need to poke them yourself; they’re already there, at least until they close up. The basic material of reality is all loosely connected and shifting, the tiny bits shimmering and scattering into holes that flash open and shut, blinking all around us.”
I tried to picture this, and, weirdly, I could. So I nodded.
My dad continued. “The problem is that almost nobody can see the blinking holes because most people’s perception is as holey as everything else. You know those flip books? The ones with a picture on every page, pictures that vary just a little, so that when the pages are turned quickly, the pictures turn into a kind of animated cartoon?”
“I made one in art class,” I said. “Remember? The guy diving off the edge of the soup bowl and swimming around with the dumplings.”
“I do remember. The animation with those books, even one as excellent as yours was, tends to be a little herky-jerky, but if you added more pages and flipped faster, it would smooth out, look continuous, tell a story. Same goes for perception. Take Mr. Yang, for instance.”
My dad nodded in the direction of our neighbor, who was running down our street, like he did every weekend morning, listening to his iPod and dancing to the music just ever so slightly. I smiled.
“Take him where?” I said.
“Ha ha. Your eyes are seeing him at just ten frames per second, which is pretty herky-jerky, but your brain is guessing what’s in those blank spaces and is kindly filling them in for you, adding pages to the flip book, so that Mr. Yang’s running looks seamless, smooth as silk.”
“Well, except for the dancing,” I said.
“In situations like these, your brain usually guesses correctly, but there’s always the chance that in one of the gaps, Mr. Yang doesn’t keep running, but instead jumps—at lightning speed—twenty feet in the air, grabs a Frisbee out of the sky with his teeth, and flings it into the distance. And you miss it because your eyes don’t see it and your brain guesses that he won’t grab a Frisbee, that he’ll just plain run, with a few dance moves thrown in. Get it?”
“I think so.”
“Similarly, your brain guesses that in one of the gaps between frames in whatever you happen to be seeing, a pinhole in the form of a portal into the past doesn’t blink open and shut. So you miss it, the portal, as though it were never there because, for you, it never was. Unless you’re an O’Malley.”
At this, I jerked my head around to look at my dad. He nodded.
“Or a Picasso or a Tubman, if Uncle Joe is to be believed, which maybe he isn’t. If you’ve got the O’Malley quirk, your big, odd, glass-green eyes, at least while you’re young, before your eyesight starts to fade, can see things other people’s eyes don’t.”
“Like what?”
“Like way more pages of the flip book than other people can see. Like the Frisbee between the teeth and the blinking holes in time.”
“Whoa.”
“Whoa is right. But even we don’t see this stuff all the time, because how would that be? Can you imagine it?”
I imagined it. Images coming at me from every direction all the time, bombarding my brain. I shivered at the thought. My dad grabbed a piece of my hair and gently tugged it, which was one of his versions of a hug.
“People would shut down, short out, freak, right? The O’Malleys, too. The good news is that, under ordinary circumstances, our brains block out all but what we need to know in order to function in an ordinary way. On a daily basis, we perceive more or less what everyone else does. But unlike everyone else, we can deliberately put ourselves in extraordinary circumstances, in exactly the right position and mood and frame of mind to, well, travel.”
“Travel,” I said, wonderingly, turning over the word in my mind. “Time travel?”
My dad nodded. “We can see the holes in time, choose the one we want, and slip through, quick as a mongoose, into the past. Possibly also into the future, although no one seems to know about that, which probably means either that we can’t do it, we just don’t see those portals, or that if any O’Malley ever has done it, she or he hasn’t, uh, well . . .”
“Lived to tell the tale,” I finished, grimly.
“Anyway, traveling is something we have to choose to do. Or choose not to do.”
And this is where the forswearing came in, the words generations of O’Malleys promised to live by, even if we knew they weren’t precisely true:
There is one Now: the spot where I stand,
And one way the road goes: onward, onward.
I forswore for the first time that day, and my dad would have me repeat it from time to time over the years, just for good measure. Everyone takes the vow. Nobody breaks the vow.
But, after my conversation with Grandpa Joshua about changing the past, saving Aristotle and therefore Luke and therefore (oh please, please) my dad, as I rode home from Charlie’s house, blindly, wildly zigzagging down the road like a bat in sunlight, I began to consider the possibility—and it was a terrifying one—that that “Nobody” might not include me.
Josh
1938
BY THE TIME DOC O’MALLEY finally took Preston to the infirmary and told the nurse at the desk, “Just admit him, he’s a little boy, for Pete’s sake, I’ll pay the bill!” food was running low for all of us. I went to ask Luke to hike up the mountain with me for more jam and possibly squash, but he was nowhere to be found.
So I went by myself. It wasn’t exactly a Sunday school picnic. The Model T tank was long gone, but there was no shortage of alleged detectives lurking around to make sure none of us broke any of the new rules in effect after what Biggs and the company called the “Canvasburg Uprising,” which was their name for the machine-gun attack, rules like no sneaking out of Canvasburg.
Unbeknownst to the detectives, who weren’t the smartest bunch, Aristotle a
nd sometimes the Kowalski brothers or my dad were still climbing over the mountains at night to mail our letters, and once in a while they brought back boxes packed by kind folks from towns as far away as Arden, Delaware, and Oneida, New York, full of sweaters, canned beans, and notes of encouragement. A church in Philadelphia even mailed us three live chickens. It was nice to realize people across the United States understood our plight.
The chickens managed to escape from their crate in the middle of camp, and after that they roamed free, laying eggs under random tumbleweeds.
I bet Biggs would’ve made chickens against the rules if he could’ve. It drove him crazy, the way we crept around and held on and managed to keep ourselves alive.
So I waited until the detective watching us that morning went off to buy cigarettes, and I ducked into the trees beside Honey Brook and sneaked behind them into Honey Canyon and waded up the stream until I was hidden from Victory, and then I hiked to Aunt Bridey’s.
The cold had let up that morning, and with the sun beating down on me, I ended up panting by the time I got there. I found Aunt Bridey’s door ajar, so I walked in. I could hear her clattering around in the kitchen, but before I got around to announcing I was there, I noticed the picture she’d slammed onto its face the day I’d met her. She’d set it upright again, so I took the opportunity to look it over in detail. While I did, she lurched in, carrying a drink the color of honey, a glazed look in her eye. “I’ve got twenty-five pounds of potatoes you can have, in a basket under the porch,” she said. She stopped short when she found me staring at the photo.
“I was young once, just like you,” Aunt Bridey said.
This revelation stretched my imagination farther than just about any concept that’d come up since I’d left Low Ridge, Mississippi, but I managed to keep my trap shut.
“Don’t look so shocked!” she snapped. “I don’t mean I was just like you. Nobody I knew was in danger, nor was I. Truth is, I’d have envied you. You’re brave and you have challenges to meet—”
“I wish I didn’t,” I murmured.
“I know,” said Aunt Bridey as kindly as I ever heard her say anything. “I was a silly girl. I craved excitement. I hankered for adventure. I felt sure I’d been born to bigger things than my life here.”
“Here?” I asked, pointing at the floor under my feet like some kind of idiot who, from time to time, loses track of where he happens to be standing.
“This house,” Aunt Bridey continued. “I was raised in it, back when my little vegetable patch was a whole farm. Before the Victory Corporation forced my father’s spread out from under him because there was coal buried in it. I grew up during the quiet years, which I felt were far too quiet.”
She glanced at the photo of herself and the soldier. No slamming it on its face today.
“So you went looking for an interesting friend,” I supplied. “You went to a Halloween party with that guy who wore a Confederate costume?”
“I went looking for an interesting time,” she corrected, “inhabited by Lieutenant Walker, of the Confederate States Army, whose uniform was anything but a costume.”
I took a long look at Lieutenant Walker. He had that look in his eyes, the stare, the expression only real soldiers in real pictures from the Civil War ever had, because they had to stand in rows and shoot their own neighbors and sometimes their own brothers.
“Deserter, visionary, hero. A young man with a dream,” continued Aunt Bridey, “that I thought I was going to help bring to life.”
“Wait—” I stammered, doing the math. By my calculations, Aunt Bridey couldn’t have been more than forty years old. “How were you going to help him, if he was in the Civil War? I mean, you weren’t born yet.”
Bridey just stared at me with her fizzing eyes like she was deciding something about me. Then she gazed back at the picture. “I left myself this daguerreotype as a souvenir,” she said. “I couldn’t bring it through time with me, because that’s not allowed, so I hid it in a corner of that cave out back, and it waited for me through the years.”
“Where’d you stash it—next to the time machine?” I joked. Aunt Bridey was making me nervous. “Does H. G. Wells live across the creek?”
“Time machine,” she scoffed. “H. G. Wells was an idiot. He didn’t know the first thing about time travel.”
“Hold on.” I realized I halfway believed her. The photo was so strange—and of course, so was Aunt Bridey. “What are you telling me?”
“I traveled through time,” she said evenly. “And made a friend who was as brave as anyone in history. But after what you and Luke did in the face of that gunfire, you might be his equal.”
“Aunt Bridey?” I pleaded, confused and a little scared. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I want you to realize,” she replied, “that I understand time backward, forward, and inside out. And I understand friendship, too.”
“So—” I began.
“So I know beyond the shadow of a doubt,” she said, fixing my eyes with hers, “that friendship will stand the test of time.”
“I see,” I said slowly.
“I doubt it,” she said. “Not now. But you will.”
“Thank you, Aunt Bridey,” I gulped. “I think.”
“You’re welcome,” she replied, “I think. Now: Never tell a soul about this. If you do, I’ll just say you’re crazy.”
“You would know.” I grinned. But I stopped grinning as my mind took off going ninety to nothing, considering all the angles, because if she could really time travel, then maybe she could slip back to the night before the gun opened up on my friends, and maybe she could pilfer the ammunition, or maybe she could sabotage the gun, or maybe, or maybe . . .
“Now don’t go getting any ideas,” Aunt Bridey warned, “because I can’t travel anymore. And even if I could, I wouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“There’s something my relatives have to say about that—since the ability runs in our blood, we made a family rule:
“There is one Now: the spot where I stand,
And one way the road goes: onward, onward . . .
“. . . you get the idea . . .” She trailed off.
“You’re drunk, aren’t you?” I said.
“Possibly,” she said. She poured out her nectar in a nearby flowerpot. “But I’m not crazy. Now take your potatoes and go. At least”—she added as I turned to leave— “you’re in no danger from that awful Tin Lizzie anymore.”
“That what?” I asked.
“That tank Biggs’s thugs shot at you with. One of my goats got out yesterday. Had to track him to Humboldt Draw to catch him. Those idiots stashed their Model T behind a boulder there. It won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. Oscar ate all four tires.”
“Oscar?” I asked.
“My goat,” replied Aunt Bridey.
“Which way is Humboldt Draw?” I asked as I headed out the door.
She told me.
“I’ll be back later for the potatoes!” I hollered over my shoulder.
When I got back to Canvasburg, I realized where Luke had been that morning—jail. As soon as he’d heard the doc say we needed to keep Preston warm, he’d run off to steal more coal, but by then, we’d picked up everything in sight. So by the light of dawn, Luke fired up the elevator all by himself and went clattering down to the mine to do his collecting. Maybe he wasn’t thinking straight because he was flustered about Preston. Maybe he wanted to provoke the company. Whatever he hoped to accomplish, when he came back up, the sheriff and Elijah Biggs were waiting for him.
But before Luke spent too long in the clink, Aristotle got the sheriff to release him, since he was just a kid. I met them coming back from the sheriff’s office. Luke was shouting, “But Preston was gonna die! Doc O’Malley said!”
“Preston’s in the infirmary,” Aristotle said.
“He’s safe,” I threw in. Startled, they noticed me for the first time. “He can have food and medicine. Doc O’Malley
made them admit him.”
“Son, you act too hasty,” Aristotle admonished Luke.
“I just wanted to keep him warm,” protested Luke.
“I know. It was a brave thing. You try. But why you start that elevator, where everybody can hear? Why you go looking for a fight?” asked Aristotle.
Luke stiffened. “The fight came looking for me,” he retorted. “It came looking for all of us. You just won’t let us fight it!”
We walked past the company store. A couple of customers strolled out. People from Victory. Lawyers, accountants, folks like that. Folks who still had money for food. The baker must’ve just pulled his bread out of the oven. The aroma was enough to drive a starving kid nuts.
“You know what this is, Dad?” Luke demanded, digging a brass key out of his pocket.
“I don’t wanna know,” said Aristotle.
“It’s the key to the sheriff’s gun cabinet. He just leaves it in his top drawer, and while you were promising him you’d keep me out of trouble, I stole it. And guess what?”
“I can’t,” said Aristotle tiredly as we neared Canvasburg.
“I’m gonna go into camp, and tell Mr. Martinelli and everybody else, and we’re gonna steal those guns, and rob the company store tonight, and we’re gonna eat, and after that, we’re gonna—”
Aristotle snatched the key from Luke and threw it what looked like half a mile, over the tents, out into the desert. Which was as close as I’d ever seen him to losing his temper.
“You never listen to me!” exploded Luke. “You never pay attention to me! You never take me when you go do things at night, and you never let me help!”
“You brave!” cried Aristotle. “You good! I love you! And I’m doing this for you, my Luke!”
“I found the tank!” I shouted. I wanted to put a stop to this argument. I wanted to help Aristotle. I wanted to help Luke. So I said, “It’ll get reporters here, won’t it? It’s what we need to show the world what happened? It’s evidence of what happened, right? A goat ate the tires, but the rest is still there.”