by Alan Averill
At first, all she can see are dark blurs and light blurs, but soon the blurs merge together and form something recognizable. She slides her eyes to the left and sees an IV stand with a saline drip leading into her upper arm. Moving her eyes to the right, she spots a familiar bundle of wires stretching out across a black tile floor. Brilliant sparks of light are dancing on the surface of everything, reds and blues and greens and other, stranger colors that she remembers seeing for the first time not all that long ago.
“M-Machine,” she says finally.
Her voice is raspy and confused, but it gets Tak’s attention. He leans down next to her mouth and holds his ear close. “What, Sam? What did you say?”
“Machine,” she repeats. “The lights.” She pauses for a moment, frustrated at her inability to string a sentence together, then gathers her thoughts and tries again. “Are we at the Machine?”
“Yeah, Sam. We’re at the Machine. We did it. We actually did it.”
He moves away, and soon the sound of clicking computer keys fills the room. Samira lifts her head and looks around, then decides that’s not enough and slowly pulls herself to a sitting position. The sundress has bunched up around her thighs, leaving her exposed legs to lie on a bare steel table. That explains the cold, she thinks as she struggles to adjust the hem. She tilts her head to the side and sees the Machine looming out of the darkness like a giant silver sculpture. Once again, she’s amazed at how truly beautiful it is.
“You should lie down,” says Tak from somewhere across the room. His voice sounds strange, choked almost, and Samira has a difficult time understanding him.
“What?” she asks quietly. The Machine is making a loud, humming sound, and she knows that her voice can’t possibly carry over to where Tak is seated. Sure enough, a few seconds later she sees him hurrying over to her side.
“Sorry, Sam, I can’t hear you. What did you say?”
“I said ‘what,’” she replies. “I couldn’t hear you either.”
“I said to lie down.”
“Oh.” She thinks about this for a moment, then giggles. “This is a stupid conversation.”
Instead of responding, Tak leans over and kisses her. Her mind, which was just in the process of getting organized, immediately flies off in a thousand new directions, but this time she doesn’t mind. It’s a long kiss, a perfect one, and when he finally moves away, she finds that everything is clear again.
“I missed you,” he says.
“I missed you,” she replies. “What happened?”
“I pulled the fail-safe out of your head.” He picks up one of her hands and looks at it with a strange, almost sad expression, then moves back across the room to the Machine’s control panel. “I was worried you’d be permanently messed up, but I think you’re okay. We should probably run some tests to make sure, but there isn’t time.”
“Why not?”
“Yates is coming. I can hear him scratching around on the roof. Him and all his little birdie friends.”
Samira shudders at that thought. She very much wants to walk over to Tak, but her legs are jelly and would most likely betray her. Plus, there’s the little matter of the wire bundle attached to the back of her head. “So I’m free? I don’t have a timeline in me anymore?”
“Um…” says Tak. She waits for him to say more, but he just puts his head down and returns to typing. A few seconds later, soft green light begins to pour out of the control panel and onto his face.
“…Um?” asks Samira.
“Yeah, no. I only pulled the fail-safe out. I’ve got to…I’m going to try and…Goddammit.”
He turns away from her, but not before she sees tears reflected in the green glow of the Machine. This realization leads to another: his face is red and puffy, as if he’s been crying for some time. “Tak?” she whispers. “Tak, what’s wrong?”
When he finally responds, he speaks to the far wall, as if he can’t make himself turn around. “I’m afraid, Sam,” he says, his voice trembling. “I’m afraid. I thought I had the guts to do this, but now everything’s on the table, and I’m just so goddamn afraid.”
Samira is stunned. This is Tak for God’s sake, her friend who slept in jungles and wrestled bears and always had a plan that worked, no matter how crazy it seemed at the time. The face of fear had always been a stranger to him.
“I’m going to die, Sam,” he continues. “Soon. Real soon. Probably before the world resets, I’m going to die. And once it does, I’m going to die again, and I’m going to be alone, and I’m scared.”
“You’re not alone, Tak. I’m here. I’m with you. We’ll do this thing together, we can—”
“No,” he says, turning around to face her. “You’re not going to be here. You’re leaving.”
“I’m what?”
“You’re leaving.”
Samira puts her hands on the edge of the table and slides off. She wobbles in place for a while but manages to keep her balance. She expects Tak to come over and try to stop her, but instead he just puts his head down and begins typing furiously.
“Tak, I don’t understand,” she says as she takes a step forward. Emotions of every stripe begin to bounce around inside her. She feels like crying and screaming at the same time.
“I have to activate the fail-safe,” he says without looking up. The green light on his face shifts to blue as he types. “If I don’t, those birds are going to destroy every timeline that has ever existed or will ever exist. They’re going to turn reality into a giant, smoking crater, and I can’t let that happen.”
Samira takes another step and loses her balance. She falls to one knee and waits for a moment until her head gets a little less swimmy. Behind her, the Machine’s growl slowly turns into a single, haunting chord.
“The fail-safe will reset everything to the way it was four years ago,” he continues. “Before Axon called me, before Yates perfected the Machine, before any of this. But in the new timeline, Judith won’t know me, which means they won’t get their explorer, which means they’ll never be able to make the thing work.”
“But that’s good…. Right?”
“Not for everyone. It’s not good for me, and it’s really gonna suck for you.”
Samira tries and fails to stand, then decides to just pull herself across the ground. “Tak, I don’t understand. I don’t—”
“If you go back, you’ll have to live the last four years all over again. You’ll go back to Iraq. You’ll watch people explode. You’ll see that kid in the chair. You’ll see all of it.” Tak stops typing and looks up at her, his tears replaced by a look of fierce determination. “I decided a while ago I wouldn’t let that happen. So before I reset everything, I’m going to send you to the Beautiful Land.”
“By myself?” cries Samira. “Tak, no! I don’t want to go there if it means that you’re going to die!”
“I have to stay here, Sam. I have to make sure this works.”
“No! Tak, no! I don’t care if I have to see all those things again! I’m not letting you do this alone!”
She struggles to her feet and shuffles over to Tak, collapsing on top of him. One leg snakes out and wraps around him, while the other wedges itself between the chair leg and the console. “I’m not leaving you. Do you hear me? I’m not leaving.”
Tak pulls her close and wraps his arms around her waist. “Goddammit, Sam, don’t do this.”
“You’re my everything,” she replies, as tears begin to come. “I think you always have been, even when I didn’t realize it.”
Tak smiles and brushes his hand across her cheek. “I can’t, Sam. I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry, but I can’t.”
“Tak, wait! Wait, wait, wait!”
Before Samira can do anything, Tak reaches out and presses the enter key. As soon as he does, a massive electrical jolt courses through the wires and into her head. Her legs and arms attempt to spasm, but Tak holds them in place.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers again, his voice suddenly a mil
lion miles away. “But this is how it needs to be.”
He pulls the wires from her head, causing another jolt of pain to flood her body. She wants to scream at him, to beat against his chest and tell him what a terrible mistake this is, but her body is no longer her own. She can only watch, helpless, as Tak disentangles himself from the chair and gently picks her up.
“I just downloaded the Beautiful Land,” he says as he adjusts his grip around her waist. “That’s why you can’t move. Don’t worry, you’ll be better in a couple of ticks.”
“N-no,” whispers Samira.
“I actually activated the fail-safe a few minutes ago, but it takes a while for the Machine to build up power. Which means we have just enough time to get you the hell out of here.”
He carries her across the room and sets her down inside the Machine. She can see a million lights dancing around the interior of the device, but they are just minor distractions. All of her attention is focused on Tak, on trying and failing to say all the things she wants to tell him.
There’s a sudden cracking noise from somewhere above them; Tak looks up and smiles. “I think Yates just figured out what I’m doing,” he says. “Wow. He looks really pissed.”
“T-Tak,” says Samira. She holds up one hand and waves it blindly in the air until he takes it in his own. “Tak, wait….”
“You know how everybody dies, Sam? Well, you’re not going to. You’re going to go to the Beautiful Land, and you’re going to be strong, and you’re going to endure. You’re going to turn it into something amazing. I know you will.”
The lights in the Machine grow brighter and merge into a beautiful pale glow. Samira feels her senses start to overload and shut down, but just before they go, she feels Tak reach out and touch her. He says something then, something she’s been waiting to hear for a very long time, but she’s unable to make out what it is over the hum of the Machine. And then, just as he’s about to repeat it, the world fades away.
chapter thirty-seven
The girl with the curly black hair sits in front of a computer screen and sobs. The monitor floats on a sea of white light, and for a while it seems to be the only thing that exists in this world. But then time slips by, and a few more details emerge: the hum of a generator; the canvas flaps of a military-issue tent; the unpleasant sensation of relentless, overpowering heat.
The monitor contains a short e-mail. Samira has read it again and again until the words have burned themselves in her brain, and now she’s crying too hard to continue. She wants more than anything to read the message one more time, but she can’t get any further than the intro before her tears transform the letters into a shimmering smudge.
Someone comes into view behind her—an anonymous young man with short-cropped hair and a dusty camo uniform—and stares. She feels him there and knows that he finds her emotional outpouring to be a disgusting display of weakness, but she doesn’t care. She has seven minutes of computer time left, and if she wants to spend it crying, she’s damn well going to do that.
Eventually, the man shakes his head and leaves. Alone again, she decides to read the note a final time, no matter how hard such a thing will be. She balls her hands into fists, takes a few shallow breaths, and focuses all of her attention on the screen.
My dearest Samira,
I understand that you could not make it, so please do not worry. Your mother is with God now, and we have celebrated her life as she would have wanted. When you return to me, I will take you to see her. She is buried under a large oak tree that blooms in the spring. I think she would have liked this.
PS—Your friend Takahiro came to see me. I was very moved by this kindness.
More sobs come, huge, wracking things that threaten to tear her small frame apart. She lowers her head to the surface of the cheap folding table and lets herself cry with abandon. In a secret part of her heart, she hopes that something terrible will happen on her next patrol so she doesn’t have to feel this pain anymore. Then she raises her head to the sky and unleashes a heartbreaking wail that continues until the memory slowly fades out like static on a dying radio signal.
• • •
samira sits on the lip of the bathtub and tries to get her giggling under control. The source of the laughter is the bathroom itself; she’s never seen something so authentically rustic in her life, and it’s striking her funny bone in just the right way. The walls are covered in pinewood paneling. There are a couple of black-and-white photographs of a father and son standing around dead deer, and a color snapshot hanging to the left of the towel rack that shows an old man with his sleeves rolled up and a large axe in his hand. But the truly hilarious thing, the one that has her doubled over in laughter and clutching her stomach, is the light fixture hanging above the mirror: a large rack of moose antlers with a small lightbulb fixed on each one. She imagines someone walking into a home-furnishing store, glancing around the Tiffany lamps, and declaring “Actually, I’m really looking for an animal skull with some lights drilled in the top. Do you have anything like that?” Each time she thinks this, she has a vision of a snotty salesman’s face scrunching up with horror, and the laughter starts all over again.
Finally, after nearly five frantic minutes, she manages to suppress the laughter by putting her hands over her mouth and closing her eyes. Okay, she thinks. Okay, okay. Get up and wash your hands, but DON’T LOOK AT THE LIGHT. If you take any longer, Tak’s going to think you died in here.
She manages to wash her hands while staring at the floor, then quickly exits the bathroom while drying them on the legs of her jeans. She can hear the booming voice of Tak’s father from the other room and wonders how a man so slight can be so intense and scary. She’s about to turn the corner and go back into the living room when she realizes that he’s talking about her. Curiosity sinks its claws deep, and so instead of heading back, she huddles against the hallway wall and listens.
“She’s cute,” says Tak’s father.
“Dad,” replies Tak in the kind of exasperated voice that only teenage males can master.
“Well, she is. If you’re gonna make your hay, you could do a lot worse.”
“DAD! Seriously!”
Make your hay? thinks Samira. What does that even mean? She runs a few options through her mind and finds them all awkward, so she quickly banishes the thought before she starts laughing again.
“We’re just friends, okay?” continues Tak.
“Well, it’s a damn shame is all I’m saying. A boy your age should be—”
“Hey!” interrupts Samira loudly as she turns the corner. “Something smells really good!”
Tak spins around in his chair with an expression of mortified shame on his face, while his father just nods. “That’s supper,” he says. “I think we’re almost ready, if you want to stay and—”
Tak leaps out of his seat and throws his hands up. “Yeah, you know what? We really need to go. We got, you know…stuff, so we’ll just—”
“I’d love to have dinner with you,” says Samira. She glances at Tak out of the corner of her eye, sees him glare at her, and has to suppress another laugh. “I mean, if that’s okay.”
“Sure, it’s okay!” booms Tak’s father. “We’d love the company. We never seem to meet any of Takahiro’s friends.”
“Great!” says Samira, throwing herself into a large leather couch. She’s about to put her feet on the coffee table when she notices that a stuffed raccoon is in her way. Instead, she folds her feet underneath her, trying desperately not to look at Tak in case his expression causes her to lose it.
“So I have to ask,” says Tak’s father, leaning in close. “And this is a serious question, so be honest with me.”
“All right,” replies Samira.
“What do you think of our new bathroom light?”
She manages to hold herself together for nearly five seconds before exploding into laughter as Tak sinks even farther into the couch.
• • •
the plane soars
along at thirty-five thousand feet. Samira can hear someone impatiently stomping around the lavatory door, but she’s past the point of caring. The spot on the mirror is much more important because it won’t come off no matter what she does. She’s tried paper towels and toilet paper and even the sleeve of her own shirt, but all she’s succeeded in doing is smudging it around the glass.
“Soap,” she murmurs to herself. “More soap is good. Yeah. That’s good.”
She pumps a huge glob of liquid hand soap into her palm and smears it on the mirror, then begins to clean furiously. Outside, someone bangs twice on the door, but she either doesn’t hear or doesn’t care as she continues to scrub and scrub and scrub.
• • •
a young samira sits on the edge of the water with her father. He holds a long pole in his hands, the end of which slowly bobs up and down in a calm, rhythmic fashion. The ripples created by this action disturbs the otherwise perfect stillness of the lake, sending an eternity of circles wider and wider until entropy finally claims them.
“In my youth, Samira, I used to fish every weekend,” says the older man. “My brothers and I would walk to the river and cast out lines, waiting for something to come along and take our bait. Often we would return with nothing, but sometimes God was good, and we would go home with many fish on our strings.”
She puts her head under the crook of his arm and snuggles close, enjoying the way he smells of tobacco and sweat and aftershave. He takes one hand off the pole long enough to nuzzle her hair, then returns his attention to the water. Up and down bobs the line; up and down and up and down as the sun begins its descent across the horizon and a fiery trail of orange slowly moves over the face the water.
• • •
samira pops her head up through the Humvee’s gunner position and lets the cool desert air blow through her hair. Behind her, the convoy stretches on for miles, the only visible sign that anything is still alive in this harsh corner of the world. She takes a sip from her canteen and watches trucks of every size and shape slowly wind their way down the blasted highway, headlights twinkling in the darkness like a little row of Christmas lights.
