I keep my theory about the role grief played in remembering to myself. “You said you’d tell me how we got back here,” I prompt.
“So I did. We don’t have time to cover the extensive background information now. It will have to suffice for me to say that our presence here is thanks to a discovery we call the Nipigon Chute. In 2044 a U.N.A. archivist uncovered a case study about an American man named Victor Soto in an Australian mental hospital in 1963. The man claimed to have fallen out of a boat on Lake Nipigon in northwestern Ontario in 2041. His doctors performed electric shock therapy until they considered him cured and he’d come to look upon his experience as a delusion.”
My head’s reeling but I don’t have time for awe. I need to stay focused.
“But he knew too much about the future for it to be a fiction,” the director continues. “And the U.N.A. began researching Lake Nipigon itself. Eventually we learned the exact location of the phenomenon. We’ve still barely scratched the surface in beginning to understand it but we believe the Nipigon phenomenon is as natural as gravity. It’s possible there are more of its kind on the planet—so far undetected—and that others who were intellectually ahead of their time at various points in history may have traveled through similar chutes.
“That’s only theoretical as this point but one thing we do know is that the Nipigon Chute is strictly a one-way journey through time. A jump back seventy-eight years, seven months and eleven days into the past with the physical end point of the journey being a large salt lake in Western Australia, Lake Mackay. Victor Soto was lucky to have arrived in Lake Mackay after heavy rain; otherwise he would’ve suffocated in the salt and none of us would have been aware of the amazing opportunity nature seems to have bestowed on us.”
The director tilts his head, his eyes shining with reverence. “It’s incredible, isn’t it? A second chance for the entire world.”
It is incredible; there’s no denying it. The place and time I’m from desperately needs another chance. No wonder the director wants to make sure I forget. We thought there were no more real mysteries left on earth, that the only major changes we’d see would be made through our own technologies. I’m speechless.
But if the director thinks this will be enough to make me give in and go with him, he’s wrong. I want my second chance in the here and now, not reserved for some future Freya that may never be born, depending on how history is rewritten. And I want a second chance for Garren too. I want us to stand on the shores of the Pacific Ocean and be free.
“How many of us are back here?” I ask, stalling again.
“I think I’ve satisfied enough of your curiosity,” the director replies. “We have to go, Freya.”
I can’t put him off a second longer. The future’s only steps away and I begin walking, closing the distance between us and the security men. My mind is absolutely clear. No new visions. I can’t wait anymore. I wasn’t a foot nearer than this when I heard the shot in my premonition.
I leap ahead of the director, my weight on my bent left leg to the rear of me. In one fluid action I lift the knee of my right leg and whip out my right foot, kicking into the director’s abdomen with the ball of my Doc Martens boot.
I’ve never done anything like this outside of gushi. I’m stunned that in real life the action works almost as well.
As the power behind my strike propels him backwards into the air, a single gunshot rings out. Then another. Roughly thirty feet ahead of me, both security men buckle. One of them’s taken a shot to the thigh and the other to the hand. I scan desperately for Garren as I sprint forward and to the right, towards the set of doors that will dump me onto Yonge Street with the pedestrian crowds.
The two security men in my wake have raised their weapons and are running after me. As I begin to turn again I catch sight of Garren behind me. He’s pointing his gun at one of them, yelling at me to go.
The security guy nearest me, the one with the hand wound, is reaching for his weapon with his good hand. I careen towards him and launch my right foot solidly at his groin. He crumples to the floor, bullets flying around us. My eyes zoom back to Garren. He’s almost made it.
“Go!” he shouts again.
I watch a bullet rip into his sleeve, midway between his elbow and shoulder. His hand flies to the point of entry but he barely slows down. Then he’s with me and we’re tearing out the door and onto the sidewalk, directly into the midst of a group of chanting Hare Krishnas.
Their pace slackens, a vision of halting orange confusion, but the chanting doesn’t stop.
“Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare.”
I fight my way through a sea of orange robes, Garren next to me, doing the same. We run south to Queen Street, the sound of the bullets and the Krishna chanting ringing in my ears. I don’t know how close the director’s men are. I don’t know where we’re going. We just run and run and run, not stopping for traffic lights, not glancing over our shoulders to gauge the position of the men who are chasing us.
“In here,” Garren cries, pointing at the revolving door to Simpson’s department store. The store’s enormous and occupies an entire city block. We race inside and weave through the shoppers, exiting again on Bay Street where my eyes land on a taxi across the street. I wave my hand like someone in danger of drowning as I shout, “Taxi! Taxi!”
The driver pulls over for us and waits. The pedestrian symbols flash a caution sign, telling us we’re about to lose the right of way. Garren and I speed across the walkway. On the other side, with the taxi, I hazard a quick look back across the traffic and see the director and one of his men exiting the department store.
Our eyes lock. The director points at me as I throw myself into the cab, Garren a second behind me.
“Start moving!” Garren shouts.
“Where to?” the driver asks, eyeing us in the rearview mirror.
“South,” Garren says. “We have to hurry.”
We’re cruising down Bay Street before the director and his security men have even made it across the street. I lean forward in my seat to study Garren’s right arm where he was hit. He moves his left hand to cover the wound just as I open my mouth to ask how bad it is.
Garren flashes me a warning look, shifting his gaze to the driver.
I understand and stay quiet.
“If we keep going south we’ll end up in the lake,” the driver quips. “You want to give me a more specific destination?”
It’s only then that I notice Garren doesn’t have either of his bags. Mine’s gone too. I don’t know when I dropped it but the important thing now is Nancy’s envelope. As Garren tells the driver that we want to catch up with the commuter GO train somewhere after Exhibition Station I dig into my pocket for it and peek inside at the collection of fifty-dollar bills. By my count there are twenty-two of them.
Eleven hundred dollars.
I’m not sure if Nancy was telling the truth about not knowing that she was followed today but the money will help. It will take us both all the way to Vancouver and give us something to live on while we look for work. We’re still almost three thousand miles from where we want to be and seventy-eight years away from where we came from but I have the answers I was looking for and the single person in the world who I can trust is sitting next to me, injured but safe.
At this exact moment in 1985 it’s the most I can hope for and I sit back in my seat and exhale for what feels like the first time since leaving Cranbrooke Avenue this morning.
TWENTY-ONE
After the taxi driver drops us off at Mimico Station, Garren disappears into the bathroom to examine his arm and I ask about the next commuter train from Toronto. The woman at the ticket counter tells me it’s due in seven minutes and quotes a platform number.
I buy two tickets to Oakville and hover nervously around the men’s room, hoping that our taxi driver doesn’t listen to the news and doesn’t suspect we had anything to do with the Eaton Centre shoot
ings once he does inevitably hear of them. I won’t be happy until we’re moving again, putting miles between us and Toronto.
With two minutes to spare Garren emerges from the bathroom. I tell him that we need to get onto the platform in a hurry and hand him his ticket. “How’s your arm?” I whisper as we veer towards the platform. His right sleeve is torn and wet where he must’ve washed the blood from it.
“The bullet barely grazed me,” Garren says under his breath. “But it’s like a shaving cut—won’t stop bleeding. I had to take off my socks and tie them around my arm.”
I stare down at Garren’s feet but his jeans are long enough to hide the fact that his feet are bare inside his shoes. I throw my arms impulsively around his waist and hug him close, overcome with relief that we’re okay. His arms fold around me. We stand in a tight knot on the platform, neither of us saying a word until we hear the train’s approach.
I release him and stand back, sinking my hands into my coat pockets. The train screeches into the station, Garren staring at me with his eyes full of questions. On the train to Oakville we choose the loneliest seats we can find and I tell him about the contents of the envelope and everything the director revealed to me.
“I couldn’t ask about your mother still back in the U.N.A.,” I say, knowing he’ll be disappointed. “I told him I hadn’t seen you in days, that you’d taken off somewhere on your own. But she must be with the survivors in the north.” She was one of the top physicists. She’d have important connections.
“From what you’ve said I think she was probably one of the key people researching the chute,” Garren tells me. “She was always taking trips to Ontario. She told us she couldn’t talk about the project she was working on there but that must be how she had the influence to have my mom and I sent back.” His eyes are dazed. “Time travel. It’s insane. I know we’re living proof of it but to think there’s this thing that’s natural to the planet that makes it possible, it changes everything, doesn’t it? It’s like when they used to think the world was flat or that the sun revolved around the earth. This is a different place than we thought it was.”
That falling sensation overcomes me again. Forever falling. Never hitting solid ground. Down and down and down, tumbling weightless but dizzy.
“Everything feels different,” I agree. “And the weird thing is that it’s always been this way. We’re just now catching up. It must’ve been so hard for your mom knowing something like that and not being able to share it.”
The sudden sadness in Garren’s face makes me reach for his hand. “She must be okay,” I say again. “They need her.”
Garren nods, his thumb running along the edge of my hand. “But they’re both alone now. Both my mothers. They wouldn’t have wanted that.”
“They’d both want you alive. They did what they thought was best, like my parents did. No one could’ve known it would turn out this way.”
Garren stares down the length of our near-empty car. There’s an elderly couple sitting at the other end of it. The man has his eyes closed and the woman’s staring dreamily out the window, although there’s not much to see. Fields brimming with snow-covered weeds. Cookie-cutter subdivisions. Salty roadways.
“Maybe it’ll turn out better this time,” Garren says in a faraway voice. “And then it’ll all have been worth it.”
“You think they’ll be able to change the course of U.S. politics? Slow environmental change enough to make a real difference?” I hope so.
Garren smiles faintly. “We’re going to be around to see what happens, aren’t we?”
“We are.” It’s a strange thought. We’re here for good now. Home is 1985.
“Shit, if we live long enough there might even be two versions of us kicking around for a couple of years,” Garren says, his eyes coming to life.
We start tracing back our family trees, calculating which of our ancestors would be alive now, and come to the conclusion that some of our grandparents would currently be toddlers. Then we freak ourselves out with thoughts of disrupting the timeline, somehow leaving messages for our future selves.
“That must be how they communicate with 2063,” Garren says. “Leave messages in newspapers or books for them to read. Bury them even.”
“Near Lake Nipigon maybe. And they must have people working for them down in Australia too, dragging the people they’ve sent back from that salt lake in Western Australia.”
“They must.” Garren glances out the window and into the cold. “And I bet they send us through unconscious because there’s a gap in my memory after being taken. The real memories only start up again in Sydney just before we flew back here.”
“Same here. Who knows how many people they have working for them? That’s at least three different countries they have people stationed in. I bet they send us through in some kind of submarine. Otherwise, according to the director, we’d either be suffocated by the salt or, if the lake happened to be full, I guess we could drown.”
It’s crazy to imagine the scale of such an operation and I begin to worry that Vancouver isn’t far enough away from their reach. If they want to find us so badly, what could possibly stand in their way?
I share my fears with Garren and suggest maybe we should think about leaving the continent once our trail has gone cold and we can get false identities and put our hands on enough money.
“Or go farther north,” he says. “Hide out in the Yukon or the Northwest Territories.” There are countless options ahead of us but I can’t see which one is best. There are no hints from my second sight to help.
“But, you know, maybe once they figure out we’re really not going to say anything they’ll stop looking for us,” Garren adds. “What happened at the Eaton Centre is the kind of visibility they wouldn’t want.” His hand lands on my thigh. “Obviously they didn’t think you were going to be that much trouble today.”
My lips twitch into a grin. “Or that you’d be there doing a James Bond impression.”
We’re both caught in an intensely bizarre intersection of emotions—giddy at being alive while still buried up to our necks in shock at our profound losses and the unbelievable situation we find ourselves in. I wish we had more time to sit still and process everything that’s happened over the past two days. I feel like I can’t get a grip on any of it and as Garren smiles back I realize I’d almost forgotten about the gun itself.
“Do you still have the gun on you?” I ask, my voice low.
“Yeah, but it’s empty,” he whispers. “Most of the bullets were in my bag. I dropped it when I had to start shooting. Do you think we should dump it somewhere?”
“Maybe.” If the cops stop us, having it in our possession would be bad news. On the other hand, would dumping it be leaving a breadcrumb for the police or the director? And what if we find ourselves in a situation where having a gun could be the kind of threat that keeps us safe (in that case no one has to know it’s not loaded).
We’re still trying to decide what to do with it when we arrive in Oakville. In the station parking lot I spot a guy about my age in an Edmonton Oilers hat tapping ash from his cigarette to the pavement beneath his feet. I slow down and ask him if we’re anywhere near a shopping center. Having left the bags behind there are things we need. And Garren’s being stoic but I can tell by the way he’s holding himself that his arm’s sore. We have to get him some aspirin and real bandages.
The guy in the Oilers hat gives his cigarette another tap before raising his hand to point to the left of us. “Right across the street there, but be warned that it sucks. If you want a good mall you have to go that way.” He shifts his hand to indicate the direction of the superior shopping center.
We head for the closer mall and as soon as we get inside Garren wants to make the research calls to figure out the fastest way to reach Parry Sound. It’s safest to collect all the info over the phone so no one will be able to recognize us and match our faces to our travel plans. I make Garren sit down while I place the calls and c
ommit the bus times to memory.
First, we’ll catch a bus from Oakville to downtown Hamilton. The next one leaves from the station back across the street in about forty-five minutes. Hamilton’s only about an hour outside of Toronto—a worrying proximity—but it’s a city in its own right, one I remember Ms. Megeney referring to as Steel Town.
There are only two buses from Hamilton to Parry Sound every day—one leaves at five-thirty in the morning and the other at two in the afternoon. I plop down next to Garren and quote the information, both of us with gloomy faces because we were hoping to make it up to Parry Sound today and now we’ll have to spend the night somewhere in Hamilton.
“We’re lucky we have the money to do it,” I say, trying to look on the bright side. “Let’s go get you some aspirin.”
We slip into Woolco—a discount department store—and pick out a backpack each, several changes of underwear and socks, toothbrushes, toothpaste, deodorant, a bar of soap, a hairbrush, hair dye, disposable razor blades, a couple of pairs of super-cheap jogging pants each, some tops, a sewing kit (to fix Garren’s coat), aspirin, a package of large adhesive bandages, antiseptic ointment and two cans of soda. After paying for all that with Nancy’s money I tell Garren I want to have a look at his arm. Ahead there’s a unisex wheelchair access bathroom we could slip into and I’m worried that his injury is worse than he’s letting on.
“There’s no time,” he says. “We have to get the bus tickets. Besides, I think it’s better to leave the pressure on it for now.”
The part of our Bio-net that promotes fast healing must be turned off, just like the fertility controls, otherwise Garren would already be starting to feel better. I watch him swallow three aspirin and chase them down with soda.
Yesterday Page 24
