Zig Zag

by Jose Carlos Somoza

  "Be quiet!" a gruff voice said in English. There was a flash of light and she realized, now, that she'd been screaming. "I'm sorry to have scared you..."

  She had no idea the soldiers patrolled the inside of the barracks at night. The flashlight he turned on cleared up the mystery. His rifle was what she'd thought were outstretched arms; the "intense" look came from his infrared visor; the lack of face was some sort of walkie-talkie that covered his mouth. He wore a nametag on his shirt front: Stevenson. Elisa knew him. He was one of the five soldiers on the island, and one of the youngest and cutest. Until that moment, she'd never spoken to any of them. All she did was wave when she saw them, aware of the fact that they were there for her safety and not the reverse. Now she felt deeply embarrassed. Stevenson lowered his flashlight and raised his infrared visor. She could see that he was smiling.

  "What were you doing wandering around the hallways in the dark?"

  "I thought I saw someone outside my room. I wanted to know who it was."

  "I've been here for an hour and I haven't seen anyone." She thought she could detect an edge to his voice.

  "Maybe I made a mistake. Sorry."

  She heard the sound of other doors, people alarmed by her ridiculous scream. She didn't even want to know who they were. Apologizing once more, she went back to her room, got into bed, and, thinking she'd never be able to fall asleep, promptly fell asleep.

  THE next day, Tuesday, July 26, 6:44 p.m.

  She yawned, got up, and put her computer into sleep mode. She'd programmed it to keep working on the complicated calculation by itself.

  The Shadow in the Night Incident was still floating around in her head. She decided she'd tell Nadja about it at the beach, at least for entertainment value. For the moment, she needed to rest. She'd been on New Nelson for only six days, but it felt like months. She wondered if she might be getting sick from exhaustion. No problem, though. I've got the hospital right here. She looked at the paleontologist's silent lab, which doubled as a clinic and even had an examining table. If she didn't feel better soon, maybe she'd ask Jacqueline for some kind of pep pill. "I've used up all my energy on calculating energy," she'd joke.

  She left the lab and went back to her room, grabbed her towel and bikini, and walked out of the barracks and into the fading sunlight. It was one of those rare days during the monsoon season when it hadn't rained, and she wanted to take advantage of that. Seeing the soldier on guard duty at the fence reminded her of the previous night's incident again, but this time it wasn't Stevenson but Bergetti, the stout Italian that Marini sometimes played cards with. She said hi to him on her way past (she was terrified of those human porcupines, so heavily armed), walked through the gate, and then wandered down the gentle slope to the most amazing beach she'd ever seen.

  Over a mile of golden sands, a sea that on good days was an amazing array of blues, and foamy waves that could make Nadja's skin look as tan as hers. The powerful waves were brutal, totally unlike any of the piddling, domestic undulations on civilized beaches. What was more, as if the god of that paradise didn't want to create any disturbances, the strongest waves broke far enough offshore that she could walk out for ages in shallow water, even swim with ease.

  Nadja Petrova waved to her from their usual spot. In just a few days, she'd formed an easy, intense friendship with the young Russian paleontologist, the way people often do when forced to live together in isolated places. They had several things in common, in addition to their ages. Enthusiastic personalities, sharp wit, and a way of climbing the achievement ladder, step-by-step. In this, in fact, Nadja was ahead of her. Born in St. Petersburg, she'd emigrated to France as a teenager and worked nonstop until she obtained a highly coveted scholarship to do her PhD with Jacqueline Clissot in Montpellier, where she became Clissot's number one disciple. And all of that without having a rich mother who paid for everything, including her time. But when she spoke to Nadja, she never seemed bitter or jaded. In fact, she always got the impression that she was an open, friendly girl, with snowy skin and almost-white hair, who put all of her time and energy into smiling. Elisa thought she could never have found a better companion.

  "Mmm. The water looks so tempting today," Elisa said, dropping her towel and bikini on the sand, then starting to undress. "I think I'll go in and see if I drown."

  "So, you still haven't got it," Nadja said, smiling from underneath enormous black sunglasses that covered half of her sheet-white face.

  "What I did get was depressed."

  "Repeat after me. 'Tomorrow, I'll get it. Tomorrow will be the day.'"

  "Tomorrow, I'll get it. Tomorrow will be the day," Elisa obeyed. "Can I alter the mantra slightly?"

  "What do you have in mind?"

  "Well, what about 'One of these days, I'll get it,' for example." Elisa pulled the bikini bottom up over her hip and grabbed the top. "That way I can keep hope alive but still not get bored."

  "But the key to a mantra is getting a little bit bored," Nadja declared, giggling.

  After she had her top on, Elisa placed her clothes in a pile and weighed them down with one of the countless bottles of lotion her friend always brought with her. Then she spread out her towel and used more bottles to weigh down each corner. The wind didn't seem as strong today as on other days, but she didn't feel like spending her downtime chasing her panties or towels across the sand.

  Nadja lay facedown. Elisa glanced at her thin body, beneath a curtain of white hair, and saw the pink lines of her bikini strap. On the first day, they'd laughed when they tried on the bathing suits Mrs. Ross had found them (neither of them had thought they'd need a bikini in Zurich). She got the pink one and Nadja the white one, but she had bigger breasts than Nadja and the white suit was bigger and fit her much better. They decided to switch right away.

  "Still stuck in the same place?" Nadja asked.

  "Ha! I wish. Every day I go farther backward, it seems. I'm going to end up at the beginning." Elisa planted her elbows in the sand and stared out at the sea. She turned to her friend, who was wagging a bottle at her and smiling graciously.

  "Oh, sorry, I forgot."

  "Yeah, sure," Nadja said, untying her top. "More like you think putting lotion on my back is undignified."

  "Well, I'm better at that than at doing calculations, that's for sure." Elisa poured lotion into the palm of her cupped hand and began to spread it over Nadja's back.

  Her skin glimmered under the ton of protection she wore, despite the fact that she never came to the beach before late afternoon. Elisa felt bad about her friend's "almost albino" condition. It was such a disadvantage, given her profession. "I'm not an albino, I'm almost albino," Nadja had explained. "Strong sunlight can really do me damage, even cause cancer. And you might imagine that, as a paleontologist, I have to be outside a lot, sometimes in the tropical sun or in the desert." But, given her personality, she made light of it. "I go out at night in search of merocanites and cephalopods. I'm like a vampire paleontologist."

  "Your friend Ric is stuck, too. But he doesn't take it to heart so much. He says he's going to beat you."

  "He's not my friend. And he always wants to beat me."

  They'd divided the work between two groups. Valente had joined Silberg's team and she was on Clissot's. Her job was to find the exact energy required (the solution required at least six decimal points) to open a time string from 150 million years ago, which was four thousand seven hundred billion seconds before she and Nadja had plunked their bottoms down on this beach in the Indian Ocean. "A sunny, jungle day in the Jurassic period," Clissot said. If they managed, the results would be amazing, inconceivable. They could see the first ever images of a living... (no, don't say it, we don't want to jinx ourselves).

  She and Nadja dreamed of it.

  Elisa, who had always loved dinosaur movies as a kid, thought there was nothing she wouldn't do to achieve that goal. If her work could help obtain the image of some great prehistoric reptile doing anything at all (even if it was just peeing
on the grass!), then she would have seen and accomplished everything she ever wanted to do. Jurassic Park was a joke compared to this. Eat your heart out, Steven Spielberg. She could die happy.

  But it was an incredibly complex, tedious task. In fact, she and Blanes had split it up between them. While he tried to calculate the energy needed to start opening the time strings, she was searching for the final energy push. Then they'd compare and double-check each other's work to try to make certain they were the correct quantities. But she'd been lost in a forest of equations for days, and although she hadn't given up, she was afraid Blanes was regretting his decision to bring her on board.

  "I'm sure you'll get it soon," Nadja said encouragingly.

  "Yeah, I hope so," Elisa wiped her hands on her thighs to get the remaining lotion off. "Anything new with the Perennial Snows?" she asked.

  "Are you joking? I don't even know where to begin. Every time she sees the image, Jacqueline discards twenty more paleogeological theories. It's unbelievable. Those few seconds are enough to write a whole treatise on the Quaternary period." Still facedown, Nadja bent her knees and lifted her legs in the air, touching her toes together. Her dainty feet were pretty and elegant. "You spend half your life studying glaciation, you find proof in the subsoil of Greenland, you dream about it... But then suddenly you see England under tons of snow and you say, 'All the science and all the work of all the professors in the world can't compare to this.'"

  "It must be the Impact. You're losing your mind," Elisa joked.

  Surprisingly, her friend took her seriously. "I don't think so. Though I have been sleeping really poorly the past few nights."

  "Have you mentioned it to Jacqueline?"

  "Yeah. She's not sleeping well, either."

  Elisa was about to say something when, out of the corner of her eye, she noticed one of those fighting crabs with one huge claw sidling up to her left leg. Her friend had told her that in the jungle and at the lake (which she had yet to visit) there were other species "of great paleontological importance."

  "Quick question," Elisa said. "Is this creature that's about to pinch my calf of great paleontological importance, or can I smash it to smithereens?"

  "Poor thing," Nadja laughed, sitting up. "Leave it alone. It's a fiddler crab."

  "Well, he can go play his music somewhere else!" She threw a fistful of sand at it, changing its course. "Go on. Scram!"

  When the "danger" had passed, Elisa turned over and rested her chest on the towel. Nadja did the same. They were very close and stared at each other (Nadja at her, and she at herself in the reflection in Nadja's glasses). She couldn't help but notice the contrast in their bodies: cappuccino brown and vanilla ice cream white. The breeze, the waves, and the afternoon temperatures relaxed her so much she thought she was going to fall asleep.

  "Did you know that Professor Silberg has lots of different images saved?" Nadja asked, nodding at Elisa's dumbfounded expression. "It's true. They'd already done a lot of other experiments. The Unbroken Glass and the Perennial Snows aren't the only ones. But don't get excited; the rest of them are all blurry due to incorrect energy calculations. They call them 'diffusions.'"

  "How did you find that out? And why haven't they told us?" Suddenly, Elisa recalled Valente's words. Was it true that they were hiding things?

  "Jacqueline told me. But Silberg swears you can't see anything in any of them. 'I seenk I smell somesink feeshy, comrade,' " she joked, affecting a terrible German accent. "But seriously, haven't you ever wondered why they brought us to an island?"

  "The project's top secret. You heard Silberg."

  "But there's no strategic reason that we have to work from an island. We could do this from Zurich. In fact, we'd attract less attention there."

  "Well then, why do you think we're here?"

  "I don't know. Maybe they want to keep us isolated," Nadja ventured. "It's like... like they're afraid we might... I don't know, become dangerous or something. Have you seen how many soldiers there are?"

  "There's only five. Six, if you count Carter."

  "Well however many there are, it's too many."

  "You're a little paranoid, you know?"

  "I don't like soldiers." Nadja looked at her from over her sunglasses. "I saw them all the time in my country. And I can't help but wonder if they're here to protect us, or to protect everyone else from us." The wind blew her hair into her face.

  Elisa was about to reply when they heard a shriek.

  Someone in a T-shirt and shorts ran across the sand, about a hundred feet away. Another figure, in red Bermudas, chased after the first with long strides. The person running away didn't seem very intent on escaping; the second one caught up in no time. For a few seconds, they stood very close, back-lit by the sinking sun. Then they dove onto the sand, laughing hysterically.

  "New experiences, new friends," Nadja quipped, winking.

  Elisa wasn't surprised. She'd seen them talking together several times already in Silberg's lab, him gazing at her with those watery, reptilian eyes and her staring back with the same sour expression she always wore, as if the world owed her an immense favor that could never be entirely paid back. Poor Rosalyn Reiter. She didn't like seeing Valente taking control of that quiet, homely woman so easily. She felt like giving the German historian a few pointers about her new Latin lover.

  "Some of us seem to be searching for energy levels in all sorts of new ways," she joked. "Yes, and very energetically!"

  Valente and Reiter were working with Silberg to open time strings from sixty thousand million seconds ago, capturing images from Jerusalem. If all went well, the Jerusalem time strand could prove more groundbreaking than the Jurassic time strand. Much more important for them, and for the rest of humanity.

  They'd see Jerusalem during Christ's lifetime. Specifically, the last years of his life.

  They might catch a glimpse of some historical or biblical event.

  Maybe a very unique event.

  Although their chances were about the same as having one shot to hit a millimeter-wide bull's-eye set from a thousand miles away ... maybe they'd see him.

  A tyrannosaurus, Napoleon and Caesar, would be child's play in comparison. Anything would be child's play in comparison.

  Elisa had told Maldonado the truth when she said (and now his questions about her beliefs made perfect sense) that she was an atheist. But still, not even an atheist could remain passive at the idea of seeing him, even for an instant.

  Let she who remains indifferent cast the first stone.

  And one of the people in charge of trying to make that miracle come true was currently sticking his red-shorted butt high in the air, no doubt thrusting his tongue into the mouth of a mature, frustrated historian who appeared to be at his beck and call.

  Nadja seemed to be having a blast, watching the show. She glanced over at Elisa, one cheek on her towel, her face red.

  "They spent the night together the other night."

  "Seriously?" Elisa wasn't sure how she felt about that. Images of her visit to Valente's house in Madrid flashed before her, along with the warnings he'd given her regarding their bet. She imagined him humiliating Rosalyn Reiter.

  "Don't say anything about it," Nadja laughed. "I shouldn't tell you, it doesn't really concern me."

  "Me neither," Elisa said quickly, hoping her friend wouldn't change her mind.

  "It was Sunday night. I heard some strange noises and got up. I looked through Ric's peephole and... his bed was empty! Then I looked through Rosalyn's, and I saw both of them in there." Nadja laughed quietly, showing her white teeth, which had spaces between them. "Are all the men in Spain like that?"

  "What do you think?" Elisa snorted, and her friend burst out laughing, maybe on seeing how serious she'd grown. "I saw something last night, too. I was going to tell you. There was someone wandering around the hall. It turned out to be a soldier, but he scared me to death, the asshole."

  "Are you serious? She sleeps with soldiers, too?" The y
oung paleontologist's face, just inches from hers, was so red Elisa thought she was going to explode. She threw some sand on her shoulder.

  "Shut up, you Russian pervert! I'm going to take a dip and cool off. Their show is getting me all hot and bothered."

  She walked to the shore without glancing over at the couple stretched out on the sand a hundred feet away.

  THAT night she heard noises. Footsteps in the hallway.

  She jumped out of bed and looked out the peephole. No one.

  The footsteps stopped.

  Grabbing her watch from the nightstand, she pushed the button that illuminated the clock's face. It was 1:12 a.m., still early, but not for the customs and traditions of the scientific community of New Nelson. They ate dinner at seven, and by nine thirty everyone was in their rooms. Lights-out was at ten. Elisa still had insomnia. She thought about the soldiers who glided around silently, about shadow-soldiers with no faces slipping down the darkened hallways, passing by her room ... And about Valente and Reiter, though she wasn't sure why.

  Footsteps. Yes, now she could distinguish them clearly. In the hallway.

  She half opened her door and peeked out, turning her head left and right.

  No one. The hall was empty, and the door to the next wing was closed. The steps had stopped again, but she thought of a possibility. They're coming from his room. Or hers.

  Unable to resist a sudden impulse ("you're such a child," her mother would say), she dashed out into the hall without even getting dressed. First, she stopped next door at Nadja's room and peeked in through the peephole. Nadja was in bed.

  In the light streaming in from outside, her white hair was as bright as a neon sign. Her position, and the sheets tangled up around her legs, indicated that she'd been asleep for some time. She looked like a fetus tucked inside a uterus. Elisa smiled. She recalled a conversation they'd had at the beach that weekend.