by Erika Swyler
Theo shuffled concepts like cards: entropy, sound, and amplification of waves. Light moved like a wave, like sound, like water; time might do the same. He neared Crucible, and couldn’t help but admire the cool yellow light, laced with green. Then Theo did what he expressly told Nedda to never do in a lab. He reached out to feel the nature of the light, of this thing that he’d made.
Frigid, it drew the ache from his joints.
Crucible ruptured with light. The glare blinded Theo, and he fell like the dying, a subtle give that led to total collapse. As that light ran through him, Theo was horror and elation.
What if.
His every cell came alive, the awareness of it startling—every thought was a live nerve. Pressed to bursting, he cracked, the membrane that held him together shattering like glass. For twenty-five years, he’d been in some degree of agony. The nanosecond it vanished allowed him clarity.
Discovery could be both wonderful and terrible. He’d made such a discovery.
What if.
Then his body was no longer his own; it became all the bodies and shapes it had ever been, pulling backward, receding into what it once was. His thoughts were electricity, which, like water, had a flow, like light, was a wave.
This was time.
Theo Papas fell, a diver into a pool, swallowed by his existence.
Potential
His life rolls through him as an assault. Every atom in his being is fierce, vibrating, plaguing him with awareness of each particle that makes him, each particle’s location in space and time. He was asleep until the light—wandering, unmindful of the electrons inside him, the tension of chemical bonds that make his body, the quarks and gluons holding him together in crackling accord. How did he walk and talk—live—without awareness?
His scarred skin smooths, each cell righting, healing from oxidation; patches of flaking red become soft, new. His joints ache in reverse, pain signals crawl up and inward, and his nerves gather breath. He sees a formula, agony as a function of release over time. He becomes a great convergence, a monstrous and beautiful flexing of bonds. Electrical pulses rush backward, neurons transmitting signals in reverse. He chokes on a glut of memory.
The transition is not calm.
His thoughts skip and he is thirteen, listening to Glenn Miller’s “A String of Pearls” through the hiss of his father’s record player.
Then he is twenty and watching his father cough himself to death after a failed lung operation. Globs of mucus, the mustiness of sick. Nasal cells remember scent as much as skin holds on to touch, as much as taste digs a trench in the soul. Fear is there, that he will be alone, alone and burying a man who never loved him.
His body pulls once more with a pain that throbs like a migraine, and he is in a room, damp, cool, surrounded by equipment. School, he remembers school—sleeping after a lecture, up too late the night before, an exam in the afternoon, finals next week, and his father just dead. He needs to tell his professors, but the physics department is not known for its leniency.
He is hot, boiling; the bonds in him shake, searing with extension and contraction.
His father is interred in Mangrove Glades Cemetery, a flat plaque as a grave marker. Stones were $523 more than he had. After the plot and the burial, $523 had been too much.
Theo is thirty-two, opening a checking account. Black ink on a pale-yellow check that smells like his pen drawer. It slides across a brown veneer desk in the lobby of Sun Credit Union. Five hundred and twenty-three dollars. He never withdraws it or deposits more. His father’s headstone is preserved in numbers, depreciating in value, inflation both mercurial and constant.
He rockets forward, broken skin erupting. His back shrinks and cracks, contorting with decades of compressed time, his joints swell and crook, and thousands of unremembered things, things which have not yet happened—which may yet or never will—bend his neurons, tying them in knots. Theo thrums like a heartbeat, contracting and expanding with time.
Outside are footsteps, another person in the building. Time warps the sound into earthquakes.
Theo. There is a pause, then the name again. Theo. Someone called him Professor once, he knows this. The voice is as familiar as any of the particles that make him.
Theo.
The child sleeping by Crucible doesn’t know this name. He is Teddy, who wishes he could always wear gloves or mittens to hide his hands, who can’t pronounce his own disease, and wishes no one was afraid they would catch it from him.
Forty heartbeats pass. Fifty, sixty, more. He loses count. The old man who curls around the machine can’t remember his name. He remembers a woman, a blonde who smells like lemon soap and sadness. He remembers a little girl, familiar like his hand, his arm, part of a body you don’t know to miss until it’s gone. He misses her. Why does he miss her?
There are feet nearby. They are women’s feet, delicate. He should know them. He is certain he should recognize those shoes, that particular pair of feet.
Seventy heartbeats, eighty. He sleeps, wakes, sleeps. He is young again, eleven, and the older boys at Camp Tamiami are laughing as they piss on him in the shower. Their knees are knotty, their legs hairy like dogs. He doesn’t fight back. He says nothing when Sprague and Fitz do it, nothing when his own bunkmate joins in. He smells the stink of urine. He sleeps and cries against the machine.
How can the curve of an ankle be familiar? When has he ever looked at women’s legs?
He flickers, older, then younger, older again, rumbling through decades, cells warping. He cries for a little girl he doesn’t yet know, or knew already—perhaps he’s known and forgotten her. Forgetting and remembering web together.
Something is missing. There is a hole in him, something rends.
Somewhere there is a girl with dishwater hair; he knows this; he sees her. Gap-toothed. Reaching to grab a pencil from a desk. Ice cream all over her face, dimpled chin, fingers small and soft. She’s lodged in his memory, carved in places she shouldn’t be. He weeps.
He’s hurt her. He doesn’t know how.
Boys, he knows, are brutal and awful. They beat you with their bodies. He is this thing. Girls, women, are smarter. They break you just by living.
1986: Kinetic
Desmond Prater woke with an aching back, which had as much to do with oranges as it did the thirty-odd pounds he’d put on over the last fifteen years. Boss weight. It was good for a man in a position of power to have a little heft to him. He wore it well enough, but not so much on bad weather days. His father used to go on about how weather settling in a body was as good an indicator of danger to the fruit as anything else. Stiff knees meant you checked for frost, wrapped the trees. Tickle in your throat that won’t go away? Water more. What was good for the body was good for the oranges.
Fucking fruit.
Did ranchers feel some kind of woo-woo connection to their cattle? Thank God he wasn’t psychically connected to a steer. Des hadn’t cared much for his old man, who at the end smelled like vinegar and was just as sour. But the stuff about aching joints and cold was solid. His back had been bugging him for days. The trees could handle a day or two of cold, but without a warm turn, it was time to wrap trees or lose more fruit.
He reached to jostle Annie awake, but his hand met cold sheets. Right.
“If you think I’m going to share a bed with you after what you did, you’ve got another thing coming,” she’d said.
“It was an accident. I barely touched him.”
“You knew exactly what you were doing.”
“Fine. I’m a monster, all right? Are you happy? I’m the bad guy. But I’m the bad guy who’s not sleeping on the couch. Not in a house I paid for.”
“Fine.”
Fine was never fine, but at least it ended shit.
His father had never begged his mother, had never apologized for an errant fist either; he and his brother had taken it like they were supposed to. Chin up, no flinching, and whatever they’d done they didn’t do again. There wasn’t a da
mn thing wrong with that.
He pulled himself out of bed, cracked his back, and searched for his pants.
Denny had staggered when he’d hit him, actually staggered, which was ridiculous. He and John could take a punch by that age. It was self-preservation. Other boys hit you less once they figured out they couldn’t deck you. Sure, maybe he shouldn’t have hit him, but Denny had to learn what not to do somehow, and telling him never worked. It hadn’t for John or him either. One good punch did. You’d feel it for a week. Denny would remember it every time he looked at that pruner and know that his ass did not belong on a machine he hadn’t bought and paid for. Annie would have to get used to that.
The living room was quiet. “Annie? Annabee?”
Silence. He flicked on the lights.
She wasn’t on the couch.
“Ann? Denny?”
Coffee wasn’t set up. She might have taken Denny out to breakfast, thinking to avoid him. Denny was a sucker for pancakes, pouring syrup all over like he thought they might float.
He stumbled through two cups of instant coffee that managed to be both tasteless and bitter.
He’d been pissed off, but not Annie-packing-up-and-leaving pissed off. He remembered the feel of brow bone against knuckle. He shouldn’t have hit Denny that hard; just a little pop would have been enough to teach him. Still, if his son had the balls to try joyriding on an expensive piece of equipment, he should have the balls to walk around with a black eye.
He rummaged up eggs, managed to crack them into a proper scramble, but couldn’t get the stove to work. The pilot clicked but didn’t catch. Annie had some trick or other she did with the knobs, three times all the way up to high—but he couldn’t remember the rest. After a few unsuccessful attempts at lighting it with a match, he gave up. Fuck it. He’d go to the Bird’s Eye. Ellery would give him a donut on the house. Annie and Denny were probably there, anyway. Half the town probably was, all talking about the shuttle. There would be reporters trying to get local flavor or whatever they called rolling into a town and knowing nothing about it. Shit. People died all the time. This was just a car crash with a higher price tag.
He left the egg mess in a bowl and grabbed his keys.
The phone rang.
“Mr. Prater? Boss?” Little Mike Costas sounded dazed. Des didn’t care if the guys smoked a joint every now and again—hell, before the trunk shaker, it helped to be a little high to climb up those ladders—but Little Mike had never been one of those guys. Whistle clean. A tough rooster of a guy. If he could hire a million more of him, he would.
“Yeah?”
“Boss, there’s something wrong with the trees.”
“Damn it. It’s the freeze, isn’t it? How much do you figure we’ll lose?”
“It’s not a freeze, Boss. It’s— You’d better come look.”
Driving along Orange Way, Pete McIntyre’s truck blew by him and damn near forced him into a ditch. Maybe Little Mike called him in about a part. He was a fast thinker that way, fixed problems before you knew they were problems. On the cheap too. Someone was in the cab with McIntyre. The sun seemed off, but the sky was bright. And the clouds were that funny color they got right before a storm walloped. Must be why his back was acting up. He squinted at the horizon. Then Desmond saw what Little Mike had been talking about and stomped on the brakes. It sure as hell wasn’t a freeze.
It looked like the west part of the grove was doing the wave. One whole corner was scrunching down on itself, while just behind it, new trees were sprouting and stretching up.
“Shee-it.” Bile threatened to appear at the sight of his grandfather’s trees shriveling up and dying. What the hell was it?
Little Mike was standing outside the equipment shed with Marco, Jerry Reeves, and one of their boys—Desmond wasn’t sure whose. The shed door was cracked open and everyone stood around it like they were waiting for the messiah to show up. Loafing. His fucking trees were dying and they were loafing.
“What the hell’s going on? You should be wrapping trees.”
Little Mike picked at the brim of a sun-bleached ballcap. “No can do, Boss. We can’t get in. Something’s kind of … I don’t know. There’s something in there.”
“What the hell do you mean something? How come nobody got a tractor out?”
“Boss,” Reeves said. The squirrelly shit kept eyeing the shed door.
“What? You hiding something from me? You broke something too? I swear I’m the only one who gives a rat’s ass about this place.”
Des pulled the shed door wide.
He wasn’t sure what he was seeing. His son, but not his son. Quick flurries of movement, followed by stillness. His face was squarer. Different. Older. Then the movement began again, frenzied. He watched his son become a blur. There was color and shape where Denny was, where he’d been.
Denny was on top of that fucking pruner, which was rusting all to hell as he watched. Shit. Was Annie in there too? Had she come here with Denny? She wouldn’t want to leave him alone, she lived to coddle him. He shouted her name.
“She ain’t here, Boss.”
“Shut up, Reeves. I wasn’t asking you.”
Then, suddenly, Denny stopped moving and Des got a good look at him. He was taller than Des remembered, by a lot. He’d grown inches in few hours.
“I found him like this after I called you.” Little Mike’s voice was low, calm. “The guys and I were getting ladders to see if we could get the east acres covered, but.”
But.
Denny kicked furiously at the air, then fell back on the pruner. His son. A young man. There was no shiner, no bruise to show where his fist had connected with his son’s face. Desmond swallowed down a sharp lump and reached out.
“Den?”
For an instant, Denny’s eyes were on him, but then he was gone again. A soft shape and not a boy. Desmond’s hand touched something smooth that looked like—nothing. Like air. Hard air. How the hell could air be solid?
When Denny slowed down again, there were long scratches on his forearms, forearms that were covered in dark hair.
Desmond closed the shed door behind him. He couldn’t bring himself to look at his son, not again. He’d known they looked alike, and it had been a point of pride; the Prater chin was a mark of stubborn men since his grandfather and before. There’d never been any question that Denny was his son. Looking in a mirror that showed himself twenty years younger might have been something he’d wished for, but the reality of it made him break into a cold sweat.
“No one goes in,” he said.
“Nobody, Boss. You got it. You want me to call Mrs. Prater?” Little Mike asked.
“No. I’ll tell her.” If he could figure out where she was. “Get the full team in, everybody you can get hold of.”
“Chuck isn’t coming in. His pipes burst and he says there’s boiling water all over his house. Junior said he’s stuck in his driveway ’cause of a hedge. I tried some of the Mims guys, but the calls didn’t go through.”
“A hedge?”
“That’s what he said.”
“Try the summer kids, then. Somebody’s gotta want to make a buck. Whatever trees you can get to, I want them wrapped. And somebody’s gotta stay here and watch, make sure nobody goes in that shed. Okay? I’m coming back. If I come back here and this is fucked up worse, heads are gonna roll.”
He didn’t know what he was saying, didn’t care, but the tone got them running. He could still light a fire under anyone’s ass. You couldn’t let guys like this know when you’d gone to shit or they’d walk all over you.
He had to tell Annie. He had to find Annie. She’d kill him.
Desmond leaned on the shed, his back toward the men, and swallowed down something like panic, but worse. The metal siding was hot, burning his skin. That air, that hard air that his son was in was hot too. Desmond Prater knew himself to be a coward because he couldn’t stay with him. He couldn’t force himself to watch.
Denny was on the pruner.
<
br /> “I swear I’ll fix it, Pop. Lemme fix it. I can do it.”
“You lost the right to touch that machine the second your ass hit the seat without asking, you little shit.”
“Des, stop it.”
“I can fix it, Pop.”
The last thing he’d called his son was a little shit.
He looked out at the trees and noticed Denny’s bike leaning against the fence, baseball cards in the spokes. He was unused to seeing it without Nedda Papas’s bike next to it.
He had to find Annie.
In his truck, midway down Satsuma Drive, he ran into a backup. He craned his head out of the window and spotted flashing lights. An accident. The brush was high up on the side of the road without the canal, the trees dense, overgrown. There was no way to jack a U-turn without getting stuck. A hedge. Junior was stuck because of a hedge. He threw the truck in reverse.
This had to be some kind of divine retribution for letting loose on Denny. But Desmond’s father had belted him and John a good time or two for far less, and nothing bad had ever happened to him. It wasn’t like he’d broken Denny’s nose. A good knock every now and again was par for the course. Boys ran wild if you didn’t keep them in line. Annie knew that. But she’d left before he was up, and so had Denny.
Denny was hardly ever alone. He was always with Nedda.
And what the hell had Pete McIntyre been doing at the grove, and why was he starting to think that Theo Papas had been in that truck with him?
1986: Child and Man
Betheen walked through the tiki head, a fake god made by men who fancied themselves cowboys, men who built a monkey jungle without thinking about how to care for the monkeys, the same men who made Polynesian-kitsch buildings and put them beside an Old West saloon and shooting gallery.
As she ducked through the torn-down fence, static moved across her skin, a pricking burn, almost like fire. Once, when she’d been a student, someone had left a burner leaking and a small gas explosion singed the hair from her forearms. Fire left vacuums in its wake, a rush followed by absence. Michael had been a fire, and when he was gone, she was hollow, forced to rebuild herself from a molecular level.
