I glance at the shelves, over all the old-people games. I search wishfully for Monopoly. That’s the one I know. “Connect Four.” I can figure that out, right?
“Cards, James. We gotta play cards. I’ve got it. War,” he says. “Everyone likes War, right?” He goes ahead and splits the deck and gives half to me. Is he testing me?
I watch him carefully. He puts a card down and I follow. It’s clear the person with the higher-number card gets to take the card of the person with the lower one, and also the hierarchy of the cards with the weird-looking royalty on them. I amass a pile, facedown, just like him, of the cards I win.
“War!” he declares when we both put down a card with a four on it.
I look at him expectantly, and he looks at me, and in that split-second delay I realize he knows I don’t know how to play War or any of the other games he said.
Deliberately he puts a trail of three cards facedown so I can follow. “Ready?” he says. “Last one face up for the win.” He isn’t testing me anymore; he is teaching me.
I forget where to put my card. My head is clouding with too many thoughts. Our eyes meet and hold for less than a second.
He knows about me—he doesn’t really know, but he knows it’s something. Something different, something wrong, and something always afraid. He’s known it for a long time. It’s what makes me his special case, his charity friend. He knows I can’t talk about it, and he’s not going to push, but he is going to watch me and try to understand it. These are the moments of clarity between us where I know all this and so does he.
I take off my glasses and rub my eyes. I fumble around with my card. I feel things too much with him.
“Queen!” he cheers me, turning my card over when I finally get it out of my hand. “Nice!” He’ll smooth this over. He’ll let me off the hook. He knows I need him to, and he does. “What a time to pull out the queen, Jamesie. Go ahead and take ’em. They’re all yours.” He is happy to have me win. “I’ll get the next one,” he assures me, “so don’t get cocky or anything.”
He is trying to be lighthearted, but his face is also serious, questioning, protective. There’s always something under it with us.
“I’m hungry,” he says. “I’ve got some change. Let’s go buy up the vending machine out front.”
Gratefully, I stand up and follow him, jamming my hands into the front pockets of my jeans.
“Cards weren’t taught in a day, you know, Henny,” Ethan says, tapping the deck against my shoulder blade as we walk. “I think we should start with Go Fish and then maybe Old Maid. Then we’ll move on to Spit, and then I think Gin. I’ve got big plans for you, my friend,” he says.
I don’t know what to say. He’s accepted this as another of my weird deficits, and he isn’t demanding answers; he wants to help. He’s found another way in.
“And then, when you are ready, I’m going to teach you the best game of them all … Hearts. Trust me, you are going to love it.”
Drip, drip, drip goes the water. I can’t keep him out, because I don’t want to.
It turns out the vending machine is pretty close to empty when we get there. “Greedy kids,” Ethan mutters.
“Well, there’s chips,” I say, wanting my voice to sound normal.
Ethan makes a face. “Baked,” he says. “And what the hell is with the ketchup-flavored chips?”
I laugh. “Twizzlers?”
“Not greasy enough.”
“The cheese crackers are all broken.”
“They look like they’ve been there since 1982.”
“Gum won’t help anything,” I say.
He sighs. “What I wouldn’t do for three or four of those chocolate cupcakes with the squiggly white icing on top and the fluffy lard inside.”
“There’s Fritos,” I say. “One bag left.”
He nods. “I guess you’re right.” He puts his quarters in the slot and waves his finger over the buttons. “Uh … D … uh, four.”
“That’s sunflower seeds!” I warn.
“Oh, right. Uh … D … six.”
“No. Pork rinds!” I shout.
I am laughing. Of course he’s messing with me. I aim my finger at the 5 button and he pulls it away. “I’ve got this,” he says, pretending to slip up and hit E3 for Funyuns.
I push his hand away at the last second. “No one likes those!” I say, like I am your regular, carefree seventeen-year-old girl.
The sound of my laughter shuts me up. I look around for Jeffrey in the direction of the auditorium. Somebody, scold me quick. I am having a bit of a time here.
The Fritos drop from the spiral with a crinkly thump, and Ethan fishes them out.
I excuse myself to go to the bathroom, and I scold myself on the way.
I shouldn’t have touched his hand. I shouldn’t have laughed. I should not share his Fritos. I lie to myself when I pretend like these things don’t mean everything to me.
The phrasing of the twelfth rule is pretty brilliant, in a way. It doesn’t say you can’t hook up with a time native, though of course that is absolutely forbidden. It doesn’t say no kissing or no holding hands or even no to flat-out having sex (unthinkable for so many reasons). Those are the kinds of commands a person could dodge and weave around. Instead, it says you must never be intimate with a time native. That’s the kicker. Intimate.
I know what this word means. It is the second’s worth of a glance between Ethan and me. It’s every time he teases me and I tease him back. It’s every nickname he calls me. It’s when he taught me how to play War and turned my queen faceup. It is the thing I crave.
And it’s the thing they can’t quite get me for, because the real proof of it lies inside my head, the only part of me they can’t get to.
As it is, I’ll get a reprimand when I meet with Mr. Robert next week. I’ll say, Hey, I’m really just trying to act like a regular teenager, that’s all it is. And can I help it if I get lumped with Ethan all the time? They don’t want me acting like a recluse or a freak, do they? We can’t all be RuneScape addicts like Dexter Harvey, can we?
And once again, if I can sell it well, he’ll probably buy it for a little longer, at least. But I do know this: if he or the leaders saw the things I feel in my heart, my face would be up on the screen at the Rules Ceremony next April.
I get back from the bathroom and Ethan is coming toward me with a puzzled look on his face.
“Ben Kenobi is here. I saw him on his way in. He said he’s going to be upstairs in the periodicals room and he was hoping to talk to you.”
“Really?” Because this is unusual. Sometimes I leave the old man cheddar Goldfish or tangerines from the A&P. One cold day I left a hat for him in his shopping cart, but we’ve never really talked to each other. He’s more Ethan’s friend than mine. “Just me?”
“That’s what he said.”
I hesitate. I have no reason to be afraid of him. He seems like a sweet man, and very old, and the fact that he drags cans around and is crazy does not prejudice me against him. But still. I go up the steps and Ethan waits for me at the bottom.
The room is dark and otherwise empty, and he is sitting on the floor halfway under a table. He is hard to recognize without his shopping cart and his cans, but I’m sort of touched to see he’s got the hat I gave him.
“Will you sit?” he asks me. Most days outside the park, or at the grocery store, his wrinkles seem to angle upward. Today the lines on his face all point down.
I guess he means the floor, so I sit there cross-legged on the overworn brown carpet. I’m glad I left the door partly open.
“Can I look at your glasses?”
Reluctantly, I pass them to him, and the world goes predictably soft. “I can’t see anything without them,” I say.
He examines them and puts them in the hat on his lap. “I don’t believe that’s true,” he says.
“Oh, it’s true.”
It’s true for all of us immigrants. Something about the passage here did damage to ou
r eyes. Not even contacts can correct it. We all wear specially made glasses to be able to see at all.
“I kind of need those back,” I say, and I wonder, irrationally, if he knows something. The leaders and counselors track our movements, everything we see and say and hear. Nobody says so, naturally, but we all know it’s true. I think they do it through our glasses. I think there’s got to be a tiny camera and mike planted in them somewhere. Katherine doesn’t one hundred percent buy my theory, but while I told her my theory I stuck both pairs of our glasses in my dark closet and shut the door, and Mr. Robert said nothing about it.
“I’ll give them back in a minute, but I want to talk to you first.”
I am getting to feel very uneasy. I don’t think I’ve heard him talk before. I am unnerved by the things he’s saying, but even more by the sound of his voice. In the low light his hollow cheek glints silver. He’s so deeply weathered it’s hard to tell how old he is: Seventy? Eighty? Ninety, even? It’s especially hard to tell without my glasses.
“Are the glasses that ugly?” I try to say lightly, but he doesn’t smile.
“I may need you to help me.”
“Okay,” I say tentatively.
“I don’t want to get you involved in this, and if I have a choice, I won’t. But just in case I do, I wanted to warn you. Or, I should say, I wanted to ask you.”
My hands are in fists and my fingernails are digging into my palms. He is homeless and he is crazy and it’s important for me to be polite.
“Prenna, just listen, because it’s important. There is a moment in time when the entire path of the future shifts. It’s going to happen soon, and we can’t let it pass without doing something.”
My whole body is tingling. My mind is a static mess. The only thoughts I can follow are the most ingrained. Can Mr. Robert hear what is going on? What rules might I be breaking? How do I disconnect from this situation and yet not bring attention to myself?
“I am unsure exactly how it will happen,” the old man goes on, serious as a missile. “But I know when it happens. It’s less than three weeks away. Nobody sees it coming. It’s the kind of juncture you can only see looking back. That’s the unnatural privilege we have, you and I, and I am determined to make use of it.”
I start to stand up, but he reaches for my hand. “Prenna, please. Only another minute. It may be important. There is a single act, a murder, that will change the course of history, and it must be stopped. I don’t want to give you any more details if I don’t need to.”
The more he talks, the more I feel like I know him. But he’s not part of our community. He can’t be. His voice digs at my memory. I must have known him from my old life. A friend from my grandmother Tiny’s time or maybe an older colleague of one of my parents. I am too panicked to slow my brain down and figure it out.
I picture Mr. Robert. I’ve got to calm down. I need to play this off. I need to hide my fear. I can’t let the old man know any of this is getting to me.
“This man who commits this murder. He told me about it before he died. He was very sick, and he wasn’t speaking clearly. But I am sure of the date. I am sure it is the fork, and he knew it too. If we miss it, it’s too late. There’s no going back.”
“Well.” I clear my throat. I take a breath. I try to sound calm, even patronizing. He is crazy, after all. “If the guy died, you don’t have to worry about him murdering anybody.”
“He’s not dead yet,” the old man says, almost impatiently. “That doesn’t happen for another sixty years.”
I feel a new kind of anxiety start at the bottoms of my feet. Who is he? Where is he from? How does he know these things? Why is he telling this to me? I caution myself to stop the thoughts in their tracks. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
“I’m sorry to ambush you like this,” he goes on in a rush. “I didn’t want to, but as I said, I may need your help. We can’t let this date pass. Because you know this future almost as well as I do. You know we can’t let it happen.”
I get up. I am not calm. I need to get out of here. I don’t care how it looks.
“Please. One more thing. Your people say they are doing it, but they are not. They are doing nothing. They are hiding here like cowards, taking what they can for as long as they can.”
I am no longer breathing at all. I don’t think my heart is working. I don’t say a word.
“This man we’re looking for: he doesn’t realize what he’s doing, but he will in time. By the end, he understood. He said to me before he died, ‘Please, don’t let me do it.’ ”
“I have to go,” I say very, very quietly.
“In case you find yourself in need of help, you can trust your friend Ethan. He sees things other people can’t see. He is the one to help you.”
I take a step toward the door.
“You know the date already. It’s the seventeenth of May. I won’t ask for your help unless I have to.”
I stumble out of there as fast as I can, and when I realize what I’ve done, I stumble back in. “Please give me back my glasses,” I say. “I need them.”
He unwraps them from his hat and hands them to me. “They need you to need them.”
FIVE
I sit in my room and wait for the call. Or the knock. Have they told my mother yet? Will she come home early from work to make sure I do whatever they say? Will it be just Mr. Robert or others too?
It’s more than three hours later and my heart still beats wrong. Why hasn’t Mr. Robert found me yet?
I have gotten two calls, both from Ethan, but I don’t pick up. He’s wondering why I ran out of the community center like a lunatic without even signing out, and there’s no way I’m going to dodge that without lying.
He sees things other people can’t see. What does that mean? Has the old man been feeding the same garbage to Ethan he was trying to feed to me? Ethan would listen gamely. He wouldn’t find it troubling the way I do.
I want to seal up everything the man said in a mental garbage bag and throw it all away at once, but certain sharp things keep poking out.
He made it sound like he came from the same place as me, but that’s not possible. He’s way too old. He might have already been born here when we came. Talk about straining the integrity of time. Nobody over fifty made the trip.
Of course it’s not possible! Why am I even thinking about this? I shout at myself in my head. He’s crazy!
Why hasn’t Mr. Robert contacted me?
Another bit pokes out. The old man said nobody could hear us. He said the thing about them needing me to need my glasses. Did he figure out how to muffle the mike so we couldn’t be heard? How could he possibly know about that? He couldn’t know about that. So why would he take my glasses? Why would he say that?
And then the very pokiest thing pokes out. He said I know the date. I try not to know the date. I really don’t want to know the date.
Slowly and half willingly I let that date turn into numbers. I feel my intestines giving way, a clammy chill overtaking my skin. 51714. I do know the date.
I lie on my bed, trying to fall asleep, imagining why the call and the visit haven’t come. It’s almost scarier than if they had. I am trying not to think, but I can’t, so I give up and let my mind go where it goes. It keeps going back to the late spring of 2010. There was a strange period of amnesia just before the trip here and just after. I’m not sure why. I guess it’s pretty jarring on a body to travel through time. It could have had something to do with the sanitizing process we went through right before we left or the “vitamins” we took before we set off to reduce the stresses of the trip and protect us against a few dozen common illnesses we were especially vulnerable to. We still take pills every night to protect us from that stuff, but not nearly as strong. So anyway, I can remember the few days before and then nothing of the actual journey or arrival here.
My first memory in 2010 is the creak of the gate opening to a playground in a place I somehow knew was a few miles and eighty-eight year
s from home. It was near Rye, in Westchester County, where I waited with a group of adults and about twenty other kids from the immigration for long periods every day those first couple of weeks. It might have been longer or even much shorter. I have no idea how time passed then.
It was during this time that those grown-ups who weren’t looking after us got “situated”—fanning out over the greater New York City area, setting up plausible households and lives for us all.
I remember sitting alone at one end of a seesaw at that playground, facing the wrong direction, obliterated by the overstimulation of new smells, the sounds, the creatures darting and fluttering around the trees, all those heavy green trees. I remember wondering where my dad was, if maybe he was here with us but so busy making our new life that I hadn’t seen him yet.
It was at least a couple of weeks later, probably more—when I moved into our house with my mother and we sat down to our first dinner in this new world—that I realized my father hadn’t come and wouldn’t come. Mr. Robert and Ms. Cynthia each told me flat-out that my dad had decided at the last minute to abandon the immigration, and I should have accepted it, but it wasn’t until that evening that I started to believe it, because my dad hated to miss family dinner.
“Try not to look so stupid,” I remember Ms. Cynthia saying to me sharply in the playground, as I sat slack-jawed and worried on the end of the seesaw.
I imagine now how we must have looked: like a group of refugees from a ragged and wretched place. And we were.
I can remember the clothes I was wearing, picked up for me at some department store along with outfits for all the other kids. We thought they made us fit in, but that’s only because we didn’t know any better. It was late April and unusually warm, but we wore long sleeves and pants to cover the bruises and cuts from the trip—again, I have no memory of how we got them.
Already, in my very first week here, I was messing up and raising suspicions. The first thing was the dark-blue sweatshirt that said New York Giants on it. This was not something we brought with us, but apparently I was found wearing it soon after we arrived. My mom and Ms. Cynthia and Mr. Robert kept asking me where I got it, and I had no idea. Even the great Mrs. Crew took the time to ask me about it. They thought I was lying or hiding something from them, but I wasn’t. To this day I cannot tell you how I got it. Honestly, the whole thing is a pure mystery to me.