The Heavens

by Sandra Newman

  She talked about her dreams, of course, although José never talked about his other life, his life in the presumably desperate future. But he did drop hints about what she should do. She should steer clear of politics; she shouldn’t try to have a public career; she should lead a quiet, therapeutic life. He would involve her in discussions about how one person couldn’t make any real difference, even if that person were a charismatic leader, and once he got it off his chest, he looked calmer. Kate didn’t point out that she was clinically insane, that no one would mistake her for a charismatic leader. He was trying (she knew) to protect the future. He was trying to enlist her in protecting the future. For the same reason he would never say to anyone: I time travel, too, and Kate’s not crazy. She had to stay crazy and obscure and insignificant. She knew and she agreed. It was the least she could do.

  Still, at times she sensed what it would be like to be that destructive atom, the great individual who broke the world. Within it was nostalgia for the lost simple life in which she’d been a person who could live like anyone—as, until he’d dreamed of Alexander, Will Shakespeare had lived like anyone and died and been forgotten. So every world was a soap bubble ripe to be burst by a weaponized nobody, to yield the airy glory the bubble contained. And she saw how one could arrive at a point where that glory was the only thing left to want; when all one’s human life was gone, the family vanished and the friends not friends; all the world become an alien hostility, a grave. She could say all that to José.

  Their friendship lasted while she went to psychiatrists and while she was adjusting to meds. It lasted through the end of her and Ben’s relationship. She woke up pregnant, and José was still around. In the hospital, he visited once a week. They did jigsaw puzzles in the cafeteria, José often holding the baby because he was predictably good with babies. She talked about killing herself in the dream, and José didn’t say he understood, but she knew. And when he reenlisted, she took it for a sign he intended to be killed in Afghanistan for the same reason, to be freed from his dreaming self. It was a tacit camaraderie; they both knew what needed to be done. It was a bond not unlike love.

  That phase came to an abrupt halt when she learned José was her baby’s father. They’d never had sex—but they obviously had. It felt as if she’d been raped. Then a black lost time where the meds were too strong and she was crazy and the baby kept crying. She couldn’t wake up or sleep; it couldn’t last. It was a white pandemonium with the wrong past.

  When she spoke to José again, it was a phone in the hospital corridor, with staff and patients wandering by. He was calling from a forward operating base in Afghanistan. It was just after the first use of tactical nukes, in which ten thousand civilians were incinerated, and José was strung out, not concerned with making sense. He talked as if he were calling from an apocalyptic future. He sounded like the voices in a crazy person’s head.

  He started by saying he was done with games. He would level with her, so she should take a deep breath. She should ignore all the doctors and ignore what people like Ben were telling her. She wasn’t really sick, and there was still a decent chance, if she could just hang tough, if she could just not blink. He went on, sounding increasingly loony tunes, explaining what he called the “time travel thing.” He said, in his time, people knew about the time travel thing. They believed it relied on the transmission of consciousness, which was now thought to be a subatomic particle with the ability to move in all directions through time. They believed that in the distant future—roughly a thousand years in the future—scientists had figured out how to bounce these particles between two people, past and present. When they did it, the phenomenon replicated itself, bouncing backward from person to person, so a chain of travelers was created, going deep into the past.

  When José’s people first discovered this was happening—when they discovered José—everyone was ecstatic, and José was treated like a cross between an astronaut and a wizard. His counterpart from the future appeared—a trans woman named Breton who was José’s hairdresser. In her future life, she was a physicist, and so she gave public presentations about the principles involved in time travel. No one understood it (even Breton didn’t fully) but everybody talked about it happily, incessantly. It was a time of headlong optimism; the frame of the world had changed. José and Breton were popular celebrities, feted wherever they went.

  That soured when people learned about the negative effects. Apparently, whenever someone traveled to the past, whatever they did there was toxic for the world. It didn’t matter if they murdered the pope or sneezed; when they woke, it had damaged the world. But the traveler, who’d started as a nobody, gradually turned into a colossus—a Shakespeare, an Alexander the Great. Somehow, these people turned history into a vehicle for their own wish fulfillment. They even worked together to do it, like a trans-temporal cabal or clique; one person would go back in time and immediately help the person before him, who would help the person before her—typically they saved each other from early deaths and steered each other into better opportunities—and they all became great while the world fell apart. It didn’t matter what they thought they were doing. They did exactly this. It appeared to be an ungovernable impulse, or possibly a parasympathetic function, like breathing in your sleep.

  Finally, this process had triggered an apocalypse. The devastated city Kate saw in her dreams—the one all travelers saw in their dreams—was believed to be a vision of the day when the time travel experiment had first been launched. The people who’d invented time travel were gone, their civilization erased and every living thing dead. Their experiment had caused the Earth to be destroyed many centuries before they came to be. What’s more, the apocalypse seemed to be creeping backward, coming earlier and earlier. In fact, José had now stopped waking up in his own time. He didn’t want to be dramatic, but he was terrified that everyone he knew was gone, his civilization erased and every living thing dead.

  So he didn’t want to tell her what to do, but he didn’t want to hide things from her either. And okay, it was looking like she ended his world. She became important and it ended the world, his world. She killed everyone two centuries earlier. He of all people wouldn’t judge, and she had time to think, and this was totally her decision. But maybe when she got to Ohio, she should go into the hospital there and just accept dying early. It sucked, but for the world, it was the safest choice.

  He hoped it wasn’t wrong to tell Kate this. He’d had a lot to drink but he thought she should know.

  “It’s fine,” said Kate. “I’m good.”

  (She leaned against the wall and watched three mental patients passing, shuffling, in their NyQuil pajamas. She was heavily sedated, and José’s voice made her nostalgic for Martin’s house. She wanted José to go on talking. She thought if he talked a little longer, she might feel something about what he was saying; she might think of something helpful to say. The baby slept in his sling, her warm and constant thing. Her one thing. The phone was warm against her ear. At the same time, she was conscious that the hospital charged ten dollars a minute for incoming calls, and her mother would end up having to pay. But when Kate woke up next, it would have all changed. José might not have called, or it might cost nothing. It didn’t really matter. Nothing could.)

  He said, “Another thing. You have to give up the baby. You have to give him up for adoption.”

  “No,” said Kate, and hung up the phone.

  He called back two days later and started with the baby: Kate had to give the baby up for adoption, and he knew it was hard but it was what she had to do. “I’m not saying this for personal reasons. I’m saying this because I know how it ends.” She hung up again and was trembling with rage. Of course she should give the baby up for adoption. And Oksana should have given Qued up for adoption. Ben’s mother should have given Ben up for adoption. All babies should be given up for adoption, except there was no point. There was no safe place. What made José think there was any safe place?

  Then she mov
ed to Ohio to live with her mother and was trying to be okay. For the baby, for her mother, just in case there was something at stake, she was trying to be okay. But still she would drift off over a book and find herself staring at the blackened dead towers, the broken skyline glittering with ice, and wake up screaming with her mother at her side. Her mother would stroke her forehead and wasn’t quite her mother; had changed, had coarsened. Then every night, Kate dreamed of dying in Southampton’s barge, Will gripping her throat in his fright-red hands, Southampton weeping and shouting at the oarsmen—and she woke in Ohio, gasping and alone. In her bedroom window, the dull flat night. The yard was muddy, overgrown. The woods beyond were thinned by dieback; everywhere were rotten leaning trunks, bare crowns like patches of winter. Kate was sweating, disoriented. She got up in a panic and went to her son. Usually she found her son.

  But three times she’d found a changeling baby looking at her with bright strange eyes. She’d done something in the dream and switched him; he was now the baby of an unknown father, or José’s baby from a different day. He was always a boy, which didn’t have to mean anything; a coin that came up heads four times. She didn’t know if she knew his name.

  She took the new baby unconfidently in her arms—and was his mother. He was hers. He had grown beneath her heart. It pierced her through, and she loved him absolutely—this boy who had usurped her boy, this avatar of boy who was all she had. And when he latched onto her breast, the faint, haunting queasiness of milk being drawn was a vow. She couldn’t know anyone, but someone still needed her. She couldn’t be anyone, but she could still love. And she would sleep on the floor beside his bassinet as she’d once slept beside Qued’s bassinet with her friends, with Ben, in a summer when the forests were thick and green; in a year when the world still could have survived.

  She’d told people not to give José her Ohio number, but of course he got it at last. When he called, he was already boarding a plane. She said, “Don’t come. I don’t want you to come.” He apologized but said he would be there in the morning.

  And she dreamed about the barge and she dreamed about the city. The last night passed somewhere else while she dreamed. Morning came, and she took a long shower. She prepared herself meticulously as if for a date. She faded in and out; in the city, in the world. And the doorbell rang and she went down the stairs, compelled and afraid, to confront José.

  He said, “We need to talk. I have to tell you something.”

  “I know you’ve come a long way,” she said, “but I can’t deal with difficult things right now. So I’m going to ask you to just go away.”

  “Kate, I’m here for you. Just hear me out.”

  “I’m trying to keep my life simple. If I tell you not to come, it’s because I need that. I’m making my decisions and you have to respect that. You said I have to make my own decisions.”

  “No, please listen. Something bad happens today.”

  “Is the world ending?”

  “No, the world’s not ending,” he said as if that were a ridiculous idea.

  “Then go. Go wherever you go. Please go.”

  “Can we both just accept that I’m not going to leave?”

  “No. I’ll call the police.”

  He stepped back but didn’t turn to go. His face was stubborn. Kate had been standing in the doorway, and now she came out and let the door swing shut behind her. It was immediately colder. It felt like stepping into an arena. It felt as if battle had been joined.

  She said, “I have to concentrate on getting better. You can’t talk about taking away my baby and expect me not to be harmed. It’s crazy.”

  Then she went on talking, her voice rising shrilly, while part of her was mortified and frightened of her voice. José listened grimly, impassively. The sky full of rain clouds, a heavy damp wind. An ominous shining in the wet grass. By the end, she was leaning back against the house and José was staring at his feet with a stiff, pained face. He would have cried, perhaps, if he were a person who cried.

  She finished senselessly, “So that’s why you should leave. If you don’t understand, I don’t know what to do. But I need to have some peace. I need that from you.”

  He said, “I know my phone call to the hospital was out of line. But you don’t have to be afraid of me. I don’t blame you.”

  “Okay. So you told me that. Now you can go.”

  He shook his head. “No, listen. You’re going to have a kind of an amazing life. Try and look at it like that, ’cause none of this is your fault. If you live, you get to do all these incredible things.”

  “Stop it. I’m not doing anything. I’m not.”

  “You do. You become a grassroots leader. You spearhead this whole grassroots movement. I know it’s hard to see from here, but it happens. I mean, you know I’ve got to try to stop it.”

  “I’m not a leader. I live with my mother. So if you came here to stop me, to kill me, whatever you came to do, you can just go away. All I want is to stay out of the hospital so I can raise my son. Our son.”

  “Kate. He dies.”

  A thrill of fear went through her, a physical jolt. In that first moment, it was sexual. She almost laughed from fear.

  She said, “No. What are you talking about?”

  “He dies. Our son. I couldn’t tell you on the phone.”

  “Don’t say that. Why are you saying that?”

  “I’m sorry. That’s why I came here.”

  She took a breath that caught in her chest. “But you’re saying if I … I can stop it?”

  José flinched. “I’m sorry. It’s not anything you do. He just stops breathing. It’s no one’s fault.”

  “No. When does he die?”

  José looked up at the windows of the house. Already she’d realized and turned to the door. At first she couldn’t get the door to open. She was pulling without turning the doorknob, panicking. It felt as if the house was broken. Then she was through and going up the stairs, scrambling clumsily, using hands and feet. She was swearing out loud while she prayed in her head. The door of her son’s room was open, and even the open door looked unnaturally still. The mobile over his bed was turning slowly although there was no draft.

  She couldn’t breathe. It was as if she were floating in the air over her own head. She went to him, and walking felt like falling. At the bassinet, she touched him gently but his flesh was wrong, wrong like a missed step. He was dead. He looked the same but he was cold. He was dead.

  And the room was suddenly massive, contained all space, and it spun around her head. She heard José’s footsteps on the stairs, huge. The light grew blackish. It trembled and eluded her and wouldn’t hold still. The bright scene collapsed as if she shook it from her shoulders:

  Then a time where she was nothing. She was no one in the world.

  And she dreamed into the scene she always dreamed. She was lying on the floor of Southampton’s barge. It was sunset already and the river was dark, but the sky above was still large with day. As she came into the dream, the pain opened wide. She breathed and dragged a thread of agony; her breath was a long knife that drew a thread of air. Will’s hand still pressed a soggy fold of cloth to her throat: a numb blot. Southampton was crouching at her side, his white satin doublet smeared with blood, his narrow face alien with tears. Death’s blackness seeped through the world, while the world was the same soft evening with all its pretty details: dim lights beginning to appear in the windows of the nobles’ great houses on the northern shore, the rose petals strewn on the floor of the barge, the Turkish rug on which she lay. She wept for pain, though it made her nose run and suffocated her. She wept for the world and pain. In waking, the other pain waited and made a kind of balance that let her stay. And she wept as if balanced unsteadily, rocking, as the oars went through the time and pain.

  And the wind blew over her tears, and they dried, and time passed rockingly on the water until the tears were gone. Emilia breathed dirtily, weakly. Her head lolled against Will’s chest, and the sky wa
s beautiful, after all. The world; she had loved it, after all.

  Then a waterman’s voice carried over the river. He was singing “Tom o’Bedlam,” the sound coming hollow and pure in all that air. Emilia turned her eyes to the sound and saw a low drab boat, its occupant singing like a happy dog barking and letting his oars trail in the water. Then Southampton rose like a golden delirium—his long tresses flying in the air, his white gloves bright with blood that looked fluorescent in the woolen light. He screamed at the man to be quiet; she didn’t understand the words he was screaming while Will laughed under his breath. The man sang on, oblivious. Perhaps he never guessed that the golden lord saw him. Emilia shut her eyes and heard:

  That of your five sound senses

  You never be forsaken

  Nor wander from your selves with Tom

  Abroad to beg your bacon

  Then she was dying, and the water seemed to realize beneath her, and splash it to the air with the cut of the oars. The enormous day that fell like downpour. The whole sky of air that could not breathe. And she knew one last thing that didn’t mean anything, that freed her from the changes of the terrible world.

  III

  23

  Ben married Kate in Sabine’s ghost town—strictly speaking, not a town, but an abandoned neighborhood in a depressed but still extant town. All the houses in the neighborhood had been foreclosed, then bundled into one large property in the hope of attracting a developer. It was in West Virginia, in an ex–coal region. For hundreds of miles around, the people were white, xenophobic, open carry, evangelical. Sabine had bought the neighborhood to test-drive a strategy for turning poor red states into swing states by talking to every single person there. She would repair all the homes in the ghost neighborhood and offer them at locally affordable rents. She would open free preschools and clinics. She would recruit seasoned activists and sympathetic locals. She would be a big éminence grise in a small pond.