It looked to Terence like there were seven or eight other guards in the rotation, though they would come and go. Most of them would bring books along too, and that meant he’d be left alone to read, which was great. (Lately he’d been working his way through some novels by this woman Octavia Butler. He’d found some paperbacks at a yard sale priced at a dollar each and picked them up for the hell of it. Wild-ass stuff, and maybe a little too touchy-feely for his tastes—he was more of a Don Pendleton guy—but he was kind of into it.) One guy, who he guessed was some kind of off-brand minister, would sit at the desk with a King James Bible and The Oxford Bible Commentary open in front of him, his back straight as a board, only moving when he turned a page in one of the books. Another had a different paperback in his hand whenever Terence saw him, and every single one had a picture on the front of either a zombie or a vampire. Then there was this one Brazilian woman who was about forty-five and had these big broad shoulders and completely jacked biceps, like back in her teenage years she’d put a serious hurting on a pommel horse, and instead of reading a novel or something she’d just sit there, not saying a word other than hello or goodbye for the whole shift. That was weird, but Terence could deal with that: at least she understood the value of peace and quiet.
But there was one thing that never failed to make Terence swear under his breath, worse than drawing the shift from midnight to four on a Saturday night, and that was pulling duty with Spivey. Terence liked this job because it wasn’t the least bit dangerous, and it gave him a chance to spend some time in his own head: during the first couple of shifts where he wasn’t allowed to have a phone or a tablet he got fidgety as hell, but he got used to it, and came around to liking it. It turned out he liked quiet: he had just never really had the chance to find out.
But Spivey did not like quiet! The man would not let you alone. He had to talk, and he had the gift of gab. If you put Spivey in solitary confinement he’d talk his way out: he’d just sit there running his mouth about every damn thing he could think of until the very prison walls said Fuck it and crumbled. And he wouldn’t take a hint, either: Spivey couldn’t care less. Ten minutes into the shift he was guaranteed to say, “Hey. Hey Terence. Put that book down for a second. Put that book down for a minute and help me bullshit.”
Spivey was older: fifties, maybe, hard to tell, but he was headed toward being one of those retired guys who did nothing all day but drive slow down back streets in a land boat, wearing a track suit and a trucker cap, flagging down anybody he knew on the sidewalk to shoot the shit, burning away the day. He was the only other black guy in the rotation, and Terence figured that because of that, Spivey felt like they had something important in common.
Terence thought that was very old-fashioned, very twentieth century, this idea of all black people being brothers and sisters by virtue of their race, sharing the same blood and language. He guessed that he was “conscious” of his racial identity, whatever that meant these days, but not in the same down-to-the-bone way as Spivey. Terence’s daughter Harlie, however, seemed not to be “conscious” at all about these matters, in a way that concerned Terence a little sometimes. (For example: lately Harlie had been playing this game on her tablet that all the kids in her classes were into. It was one of those games that tricks you because it says it’s free: then when you start playing it, it nickel-and-dimes you for this and that and then you’ve dropped a Reagan on the thing before you know it. It was a popularity contest, basically. The whole thing was set in a school, and every time someone said hi to you in the hall or you answered a question right in class, you got a coin, and with enough coins you could buy things in the shops for your character, like cute little bows for her hair, or sparkly dresses. Then if you had a printer you could send it a file and it’d make a little doll that looked like your character, and wore the same stuff it did in the game. The thing is—and this is where the bastards got you—if you played this game all day, you might get ten coins for free, and even a little plastic bracelet for your character cost two hundred coins, minimum. Or: you could go get Daddy’s credit card, and buy all the coins you wanted! Ten thousand coins for fifty dollars! It was a bargain! A lot of the other kids did that, it looked like, but when Harlie came to Terence, begging and pleading for him to spend his hard-earned money on a bunch of voxels, he said hell, no. If she wanted to trick out her character with doodads she could earn the money in the game fair and square. Terence figured it’d teach her perseverance—either that, or she’d figure out the game was a scam. So one day Terence was looking over Harlie’s shoulder while she was playing this game: she fired it up every day as soon as she got home from school, and all the other kids did, too. God knows why she wanted to spend her free time pretending to do something she already had enough of in real life. On the tablet’s screen there were a bunch of kids sitting in this classroom, with old-fashioned wooden desks and a chalkboard at the front, and Terence felt a little bad for Harlie at first because all the other kids in the class were wearing top hats and diamond tiaras while Harlie was just sitting there in jeans and a T-shirt, but the kicker was that while the other kids’ characters looked like cartoon versions of real children, the skin of Harlie’s character was straight-up green. It had pigtails like Harlie liked to wear, and hazel eyes like Harlie, but it also had this shimmering green skin that twinkled like an emerald with light shining through it. Terence figured he was going to have to sit her down and have a talk with her about how there was no shame in being black, and how she was beautiful no matter what the TV said sometimes, but when he just casually asked her, Hey, why’d you make that girl look like that? Harlie looked at him like he was a moron and said, “I made her look like that because that’s what I look like!” Terence was so puzzled he left it alone. What the hell did that even mean?)
Truth be told, Spivey’s idea of blackness made as little sense to Terence as his own daughter’s sometimes. Like a lot of black men of that older generation, Spivey had two voices, a private and a public one. The public voice was a buttery baritone that he used to welcome people (who, yes, were mostly white) into the lab, asking after their health and getting them to pose for ID photos. The private one, on the other hand, was melodic and slangy: that one he saved for when he and Terence were alone on the graveyard shift, and Terence was helping him bullshit. It was a voice for black folks, a voice for Us: Terence could hear the capitalization in the pronoun when Spivey said it.
Which of Spivey’s voices was real, and which one was performance? Maybe the voice that was meant for Us was the real one, and the other one (what Terence’s mother would have called “talking proper”) was intended to set white people at ease, to convince them to accept him as one of their own for long enough a time to do business. Or maybe it was the other way around: maybe his public voice was the true one, and when alone with Terence he laced his speech with shibboleths to avoid getting called out for “talking proper,” like Terence’s mother would have. Terence couldn’t say.
Or maybe that was asking the wrong question. Maybe both of Spivey’s voices were put-ons, the one as well as the other. Maybe when he slept he dreamed in Portuguese, or German.
Helping Spivey bullshit didn’t involve much more than listening with impartiality, if not agreement, to his limitless supply of anecdotes and strong opinions. He talked a lot about his sister Rita in Camden, with a mixture of love and disapproval. (Recently her diabetes had gotten worse. “Two weeks ago Rita calls me, crying up a storm. I say what’s wrong, girl? She says: The doctors are gonna take my leg. And I feel sorry for her—it’s my own sister—but damn if it didn’t make me angry, too. The doctors are gonna take my leg. Like she didn’t have anything to do with it. Like the doctors loaned her her own leg and now they’re taking it back, like repo men coming to get a car you quit making payments on. You go to Camden and you see plenty of people on the street, missing fingers and toes and legs that the doctors took. People young as you! But see, the only thing they eat comes out of a fast-food place or a bodega
. Because damn if you can find a single green vegetable for sale in Camden: broccoli doesn’t make it into that town. Oh, everybody gets the sugar: then the doctors come and take. I drop what I’m doing and I go right over to see Rita. And there she is sitting on the couch, watching Price Is Right, holding: guess what. A bellywasher. A soda. And she looks at me and says, Spivey, the sugar got me. Like sugar is as sure to come as death. I was so mad I couldn’t even figure out who the hell to be mad at.”)
And sometimes he talked about current events or politics, on the occasions when they entered into his life. (“I got another one for you. I was on the phone with Rita: I’m in the middle of a sentence and the line gets quiet and you know who cuts in? Yes. The President! ‘Oh, hello, Spivey, this is the President of the United States, and I just want you to know that I appreciate the moral support you are offering your sister as she recovers from her diabetic complications. It’s important to remember that families need to bond together in difficult times.’ Interrupting jackass.”) But most of his monologues eventually came back around to the people in the lab who walked back and forth past him on every shift, his assessments of their true natures and his speculations about their secret lives.
He didn’t like most of them. Dennis was too weird, too in his own world. Philip, in his opinion, “had a stick up his ass.” But the one who bothered him the most, the one he kept returning to like a tongue relentlessly probing the tender gap left behind by a freshly extracted tooth, was Carson. “You know who I can’t figure out?” he’d say to Terence. “Carson. I can’t figure that guy out.” Then, in a rare occurrence, Spivey would trail off into silence, staring with puzzlement into space. Terence would take the opportunity then to knock out another couple of paragraphs of Octavia Butler. But it was clear that Spivey was working through whatever it was about Carson that got under his skin, thinking of a way to talk about it.
Oddly enough, it was Terence’s book that let Spivey find a way into it. “Hey Terence,” he said one evening, right on time, fifteen minutes into their four-to-eight-a.m. shift. “Terence. Whatcha reading? Tell me about it.”
Terence handed the paperback over to Spivey, who peered at the back cover. “Science fiction,” Spivey said, with faint distaste. Then: “Black woman?”
“Yeah.”
“I figured. Otherwise they wouldn’t have bothered to put a picture of a black woman on the front.”
He handed the book back. “Science fiction: never been much for it. Dreams and cartoons is all it is.”
“You don’t say,” said Terence.
“It’s ridiculous,” said Spivey. “Nobody takes that stuff seriously! Even these physicists coming in and out of here know that, and they don’t know much about anything besides machines and numbers! You know what they’re trying to build back in that lab, right? You saw the TV report?”
“A ‘causality violation device,’ is what their boss calls it.”
“Ah hell you know they’re trying to build a time machine back there! And they don’t want to call it that because when you think of time machines you think of science fiction, and if they call it what it is no one is going to take them seriously, and rightly so.”
“But even if that’s true! A lot of good inventions showed up in science fiction first, right? Cellphones? Elevators? Even just the idea of going to outer space?”
“That’s different. Those things are different. Those things, you can see how they would help people, or at least not hurt people. But a time machine? Going back in time? You lost me there. I do not see the point of that at all. I don’t see why you’d spend the time and effort.
“And here is what I don’t get about that guy Carson,” Spivey said. “Here is what I don’t understand at all. For the life of me, I can’t comprehend why any black man with even a lick of sense would have the slightest bit of interest in time travel. Going backward in time? A black man? You have got to be out of your mind.
“Why are you laughing? This is serious business. I am telling you the truth now. You give a white man a time machine and he’s gonna think about going on vacation! He’ll think it might be fun to go check out the 1960s, or ancient Rome, or something. He will jump in that time machine, and start twisting dials, and he will have himself a grand old time. He’ll fit in just about anywhere! But can you imagine some crazy black man doing that? Some Carlton Banks–looking jackass strolling up to this time machine with a sweater tied around his neck, toting a picnic basket, thinking this shit is a joke? Next thing Carlton knows, he’s on the Middle Passage! Hundreds of men chained in the hold of a ship, constant wailing and moaning. The guy on one side of him just died two hours ago; the guy on his other side is saying, ‘When I had land beneath my feet I was a prince. Now I am at sea, and I am less than a maggot. When I am taken up to the deck for food and fresh air, I will throw myself over the side, and I will sink beneath the waves. When my feet touch the ocean floor I will become a prince once more.’ Carlton is all shackled up and ready to shit himself, and he’s going, ‘Oh dear me, the conditions of this cruise are most intolerable! Where is the all-you-care-to-eat buffet? Where is the family-friendly stand-up comic? Rest assured I will be writing a stern letter to the proprietors as soon as this is over.’ Hell with that.
“I’m telling you, Terence: time travel is something only a white man would think is a good idea, and he is welcome to it, as far as I’m concerned.”
The one person in the Steiner lab who Spivey loved without qualification was Alicia Merrill, who he thought was “absolutely badass.” “Weighs a buck and small change, but kick her and you break a toe, put your hand out to her and you just might draw back a nub! My girl, right there.”
And for whatever reason—Spivey’s reasons for his actions were generally inscrutable to Terence—Spivey favored Alicia with his “private” voice when he spoke to her, not his “public” voice: that is, as long as Alicia and Terence were the only other ones around. Why was she granted such honorary status? Terence suspected it was her taste in music: “They all get to choose what they listen to while they’re working,” Spivey said. “A lot of those guys just listen to piano, you know, or bloop-bleep-bloop, but when Alicia gets hold of the mic she takes it back to the old school! Put your hands up in the air and wave ’em like you just don’t care; bang to the boogedy beat. Stuff your mama had on cassette.” Or maybe it was because Alicia liked to take breaks from work sometimes to knock out quick six-mile runs, and when she strutted past the security desk with her small, trim body clad in spandex shorts and a sports bra, she was hard not to look at.
She arrived at seven o’clock: lately she’d been training for a marathon, and she’d been getting up at five to go running before she came in to work. She preferred to get into the office early: she liked to get as much done as she could before others started showing up. She walked past the security desk, wearing a simple outfit of a white T-shirt and jeans, her cheeks still slightly ruddy, her hair damp from the shower, and Spivey beckoned her: “Alicia! Come over here a second. Terence and I are having a discussion. And we require the knowledge of a scientist to help us answer a very serious question.”
Alicia approached the desk. “I’m a scientist,” she said.
“Good!” said Spivey. “I was just talking to Terence, telling him about that time machine you’re building back there.”
Alicia looked around her with a show of slyness, as if to make sure no one else was overhearing. “Go on,” she said.
“And I said to Terence that any black man would be out of his mind to use the thing: if he said he wanted to get in it, you need to take away his belt and shoelaces and put him on suicide watch.”
“This is true,” Alicia said.
“Yes! Now, here is my question. I can see a white guy jumping in there, easy enough. But can you imagine some kind of a crazy white woman thinking a time machine is a good idea? This is a serious question.”
“I’m going to need to do something first before I can give you an answer to that.” Al
icia extended the thumb and little finger of her right fist and placed it next to her face, thumb next to her ear, pinkie in front of her mouth. “Hello?” she said. “Hello. You’re not going to believe this, but I’ve got a code thirty-seven….Yes….Yes! His name’s Spivey….Yeah, that’s him….Yeah. Okay….Okay, thanks. I’ll catch you at the potluck on Tuesday.” She dropped her hand. “I just wanted to get clearance to speak for all Caucasian women on this issue,” she said. “You can never be too careful. Now. First of all, time travel is real: you just have to believe. Second, when we get that machine working, I’m going to be the first one to use it, because you know what I’m sick and tired of? Reliable birth control and the right to vote. Just absolutely fed up.”
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