by Chris Eaton
Probable.
Has actually happened.
Is actually happening.
In fact, perhaps our imaginations are just a link to a collective unconscious, so that the thoughts we happen to stumble across while holding the hand of a dying lover, or staggering from the cafeteria to the bathroom, or tossing spoiled food into the furnace room because there’s nowhere else for it to go and throwing it outside just attracts more wild animals and looters, are really just pinhole exposures into actual events somewhere else on the planet.
Stylized. Washed out. Blurred at the edges.
She hadn’t eaten in days, perhaps even a week. The food in the cafeteria had gone bad two days after the power went out. Then someone broke in at night and ransacked the candy bar dispenser. Then there was no one. And she began tugging an IV drip from room to room because it was the only thing that hadn’t yet gone bad.
She knows she, too, will soon die. Soon they are all going to die. It’s only a matter of time. Of course, the other thing about growing older is that you stop being afraid of these things. Because you know they are inevitable. Because you have already experienced everything there is to experience and there is nothing worse than the boredom that accompanies that. When you’re young, you can’t imagine death. It’s only when you start to accumulate things, or fall in love, that you start to fear it. They are replaced by new fears: having people discover that you’re essentially deaf, and going blind in one eye, and often forget what day it is; that you have several cases of light beer hidden under your bed because they help with digestion, purchased by one of the triplets down the lane who is no longer a child but has a child of her own; or that you sometimes wake up in the middle of the night to discover you’re standing in the middle of the hallway, or the driveway, or even worse decked out in front of the television because that’s how you spend most of your daily hours too.
But still you fight on. Because that’s what life is: an accumulation of fear. Or rather, even: constant fear, reminding you at every moment of your life and love and unattained desires. And with the joy of each new love comes more fear. With each false love: fear of it being false. With true love: fear of the truth, that all life ends and this particular life may end before does your love. You ignore these other lesser fears because they are mere reminders that you are alive and that, one day, you may also love. Like someone pinching you to prove you are not dreaming, or a bedside alarm that will not expire. You persevere.
But then all the things you ever loved are gone, and in the vacuum of their rending, all your real reasons for living disappear.
Did she have regrets? Would she have passed up love, and the birth of her children, if only to avoid everything that came after? Before Walter, she’d been happy to be alone. She didn’t need anyone. Didn’t like anyone. But he was so in love with the world, and his love was contagious. And she was so happy to be swept up in it, if only so there was someone else to blame for the work she didn’t complete.
Looking back, her largest regret was having made him feel bad for the times he asked to spend time with her. When she should have been playing with the girls on the floor, watching them experience the world, she was thinking about her typewriter, about citric acid and artificial flavors and monosodium glutamate and most of all salt. At the time, her studies had seemed so important, had defined her, she thought. But when she’d given up all hope of finishing her degree after the third was born, she’d still maintained a sense of being. Because of them. They were never her kids and her husband; she was their mother and his wife. Without them – Walter and the girls – she was nothing. She’d forgotten what it was like to be on her own, forgotten the sound of an empty house, a peaceful bath, how to cook for one, forgotten what it was like to date, to smile, forgotten what it was like to be.
We are forged of sadder memories, and to move forward we must forget. She’d been introduced to the theatre through Ian and Pauline, whom she’d met at the local gym doing circuit training to get herself back in shape. Her doctor had raised concerns about her sedentary lifestyle. She was already at risk of osteoporosis without lying in bed all day long, not to mention the strain she was putting on her heart. Take it easy, he said. Don’t be a hero right away. But if you don’t get out more, I can’t promise you how long you’ll still be around. Ian and Pauline had moved to Lincoln from Haverfordwest, having just spent the last five years biking around the world, and were looking for some sort of new challenge. Before that, Ian had been a technician for the Royal Air Force while Pauline worked in the offices of the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, programming events, workshops and nighttime entertainment. In their travels, they had managed to gather photographs with countless celebrities, typically by calling the respective agents and claiming they were cycling around the world to raise money for cancer research: actors, pop divas, politicians, multiple rugby and football players, and perhaps the most decorated Tour de France cyclist ever, who’d recently been accused of taking steroids to enhance his performance, left his wife for a pop singer, and was then murdered by his new mistress with the same gun his ex had used to kill herself. While the story was still being featured on the covers of most of the supermarket magazines, Ian and Pauline featured their photo of him on the wall immediately opposite the front door. Then, when tabloid attention shifted to another celebrity adoption of a Third World child, it was moved to the back with the stage actors, cinematographers, drummers and bass players.
As soon as they heard about the new community theatre, they immediately auditioned. Chris Eaton was not bold enough to audition for a speaking part, so she helped out where she could, fundraising, painting sets, makeup, driving children to and from rehearsals, running lines with them, stitching old rags to the beggars’ costumes, blacking out teeth, fetching water, fetching take-out, cleaning up vomit, cleaning up worse, taking tickets, dressing wounds, stage managing, prompting applause, and even wrote a review for the Echo. But Ian and Pauline went for it, Ian landing the understudy role as Jack Foster in Giles Cooper’s British re-envisioning of Edward Albee’s Everything in the Garden, and Pauline, after realizing she wasn’t included in the cast list, sitting home and fretting a hole in the floor. In the following years, though they both settled into their strengths and took a more behind-the-scenes part in things, they not-so-secretly harboured a desire to take the troupe in a “more contemporary” direction, and in Chris Eaton they saw the opportunity to bolster their ranks. Somehow, Ian and Pauline had managed to dig up the script to that movie they’d seen shooting in Panama, Sloth vs. Manatee, and had transformed it into a stage play about humanity’s struggle to find its place, trying to decide between the warring creatures of the trees and of the sea, performed almost entirely underwater and/or with wire-work special effects, which they hoped might rival the shows in London on roller skates or horseback.
What they needed was a star for the marquee, which naturally led them to consider Jim Broadbent, the son of the theatre’s founder and current president. Every time he returned to Wickenby, it was like the entire town lit up. And he always remembered to provide the theatre with passes to his big openings in London.
Jim, they felt, could play the politician.
They were hoping to get Ema Hesire back to play the nun.
Chris Eaton, they said, would be perfect to play the retired nurse.
PART 9
If she could do it all over again, would she? If there were a way to go back, and make different decisions, and set a new path for herself, would there be things she would try to avoid? Or would she seek out her old mistakes like comfort food? Or a fire behind glass? Somehow, despite doing everything to fight it, she’d ended up as a Phys. Ed. teacher back in Cartwright where, for some reason, the kids repeatedly performed well below state and national averages. The kids were dumb as cattle, as a rule, but several of them were particularly challenged:
•The first was really just a home-schooler, over-educated, over-protected and suffering from extensive maln
utrition of his social skills. His mother had returned to work after ten years as a real estate agent, which was unnecessary but made her feel useful. He wanted to be part of the group so badly, but alienated himself at every opportunity. He asked other kids why they were fat. He corrected their grammar. One year, because all of the other kids were doing it, he decided he wanted a Cowboys and Indians-themed birthday party, and the mother came in to supervise and made them all sign new treaties with one another.
•The second was like a walking germ factory, blowing snot at the other children on the playground as a means of self-defense or humour, she was never sure which.
•The last refused to associate with any of the other children directly, preferring to sit at the front with her on any class trips, and claimed to be a traveler from the future.
***
Although he was registered at the school as Henry Code, his real name, he claimed, was Henri Costa, the son of a Spanish meteorological scientist who had moved to Florida in the early-nineties to study the effects of global warming on the increased frequency of Atlantic cyclonic-scale storm systems. In only a few years at the National Hurricane Research Laboratory in St. Petersburg, Faramundo Costa was able to improve predictive systems dramatically via multiple reconnaissance missions, including research flights into some of the most notable storms of that decade, like Hurricanes Celeste and Emily (both 1992), Julie (1993), and Opal (1995). In 1996, Faramundo was selected to go to Antarctica under joint American-British funding to measure the effects of electrified particles on the atmosphere, in addition to seasonal temperatures, atmospheric pressure, wind speed, solar radiation, the usual. The job was largely comprised of rising each morning to recreate identical tests from the day before, not terribly interesting, if one had to admit it, almost like an old Greek penance meted out by the gods, and one of the other scientists – a Cajun American from Louisiana with an accent Faramundo could sometimes not follow – joked that it was almost as though they were the real experiments, like rats kept in mazes, which was not so different from real life, no? Indeed, said another, whose name was Garcia and came from California, all of life, and not just our work, is like being a rat in a maze, working hard for pellets and trying to avoid being electrocuted. Pointless. And although the solitary isolation at the South Pole was so difficult on their mental stability that their conversations were often like this, still they knew, deep down, that they were performing something worthwhile, something that might better the world for all of humanity, something that might give their lives definition and meaning. So they completed their tasks dutifully and with some joy until the day of the accidental event, which is the word young Henri Costa used to describe it, that lead to their deaths.
On the morning of January 27, Faramundo noticed a beautiful grey fog hanging over the South Pole. It seemed at first no more exciting than the smoke from a campfire, yet it was remarkable how something so ordinarily uninspiring could break up the monotony of so much blank space. He told the Cajun, who was supposed to be working with Faramundo on collecting core samples. And the two of them stood still for most of the day, like insects pinned to plastazote, and soaked it all in.
The next morning, it was still there. Faramundo and the Cajun pointed it out to their cynical colleague from California, who initially brushed it off. Then, on second, third and fourth glances, Garcia confirmed the obvious, that the fog wasn’t moving, just hanging in the sky like a smudge on a lens, which even he could admit was curious. So the three of them suited up, grabbed some of their equipment and headed towards it. After one further cycle, the Californian returned to fetch a weather balloon, capable of registering wind speed, temperature and air moisture, seeking to prove it was some sort of optical illusion, possibly something like an astronomical mirage, light reflecting back and forth between the ice and an approaching comet, creating a vision akin to staring at two facing mirrors, a dull, southern brethren to the myriad-coloured northern lights. And on the morning of the 29th at precisely 10:13 AM (Coordinated Universal Time –4 hrs, the same as Chile), Faramundo, Garcia and the Cajun released the balloon, which soared upwards and immediately disappeared.
The men were frantic. Almost immediately, they began to argue about whose fault it had been. They began to pace. They began to argue about the best ways to hide it. They began to despair. Almost immediately, they began to argue about who would take the fall. So as not to jeopardize their funding. And this immediacy monopolized so much of their thoughts that it took some time to realize the balloon wasn’t gone at all, or at least had to be up there somewhere, just out of sight, because the rope holding it was still taut in mid-air, attached to nothing, but taut, which was definitely empirical evidence of a sort. The Californian breathed a sigh of relief and turned on the mechanical winch. When the rope still didn’t budge, all three of them added their body weight as leverage. And only then did the Cajun sound the alarm, rousing the entire beast of the camp to wrestle the device back to earth.
None of the data seemed particularly out of the ordinary. But whatever forces had managed to so violently resist the winch must have somehow damaged the balloon’s equipment, because the chronometer still displayed the same day, but the year had been jarred forward three decades.
According to Faramundo’s reports, this phenomenon was repeated several times over the next few days.
They reported their findings The White House.
And no one was allowed to visit the South Pole again.
***
For the scientists, it seemed impossible that the government could ever cover it up. The Cajun went public first, going about it all wrong by first approaching his local newspaper, run by failures and the embittered, who tackled the issue from the angle of a disgruntled employee, upset at being wrongfully dismissed. So Garcia sought help through a friend at a cable news show and arranged a real press conference, with representatives from all the major networks in attendance and a clear message that the government was working on a secret weapon. For nearly a week it seemed a hot topic. But The White House merely spent the next year ignoring the question, hoping it might be relegated to the portion of their daily briefs devoted to other conspiracy theories. Thankfully it was an election year and the first Republican caucuses in February took complete hold of the media’s centre stage, particularly when Louisiana jumped the gun on Iowa’s right to be first. To put the icing on the cake, TWA Flight 800 exploded just south of Long Island on July 17, and just over a week later, a home-made bomb went off during the Summer Games in Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta. That’s when the last remnants of public interest in the fog and time travel dissipated entirely. No one even covered the strange death of Garcia, who was allegedly mugged one night on his way home from a movie, stabbed when he put up a fight over his wallet even though his wife claimed he never carried more than twenty dollars in cash on his person at any time; or the equally fishy end of his colleague Dr. Shane Caravito, who checked into a random B&B in Cape Cod, unpacked all of his clothes, made reservations for one at the seafood restaurants he’d read about in the in-flight magazine, and then drowned himself in the ocean nearly sixty-three miles away. Within the course of five months, a total of nine scientists from the project met with curious ends. One died of poisonous mushrooms, most of which were still in his mouth, on a well-used trail in Oregon. Another in a car explosion, while parked, overlooking the Grand Canyon. Several simply vanished off the face of the planet.
***
By the time these deaths and disappearances had become news, Faramundo Costa had already made great inroads into solving the mystery of the grey fog on his own. Before boarding the plane home from Antarctica, he’d assembled all of the data he and Garcia and the Cajun had collected, as well as any relevant research on electrified particles, and copied it in code into the margins of the only book he’d brought with him for pleasure: Notae, a book of lists kept by famous scientists and other notables throughout the ages, from total birds killed by Audubon for his drawings to a diar
y of breakfasts by Darwin (mostly soft-boiled eggs, with a ranking system out of five), Daniel Rutherford’s original suggestions for naming nitrogen, the bones of the Elasmosaurus, as well as a surplus of grocery lists, sometimes enlightening, more often hilarious and reaffirming, compiled by Rich Savard. The code was not complex, replacing letters with each other in a rather predictable pattern, but all the CIA men did when they searched him was hold the book by its spine and shake to see if any floppies fell out.
For years he kept up appearances, accepting his old job back at the National Research Lab, buying a home and a dog, volunteering for as many storms as possible, even getting married to a woman named Celeste from Quebec who he met at a truck stop near Flagstaff, Arizona, proposing on the spot because he considered her name – the same as his first storm – to be an important sign. Very soon she was pregnant. To everyone on the outside, they seemed the happiest couple alive. Then one night when he was supposed to be chasing a storm on the East Coast, he woke her with a hand over her mouth. Pack your things, he said. Trust me, he said. And she did. People were watching him, he said. They kept breaking into his computer at work. He’d even tried changing his password every hour, and still his co-workers made sly comments that could only be references to what he knew, what they knew he knew, and what he knew they knew he knew. He was on the verge of something so big, he told her, that men were surely coming to stop him. Three nights later, Faramundo delivered the baby himself, in the bed of a stolen pickup, with nothing to clamp the umbilical cord but a set of jumper cables. Their child asleep in his arms, he thought momentarily about smothering him, worried that the boy might hold them back, convinced in his mind that he could one day return, after he’d unlocked time’s secrets, to stop himself from doing it. But the boy looked so much like him that he couldn’t carry through. Plus, he didn’t think Celeste would understand. So the three of them existed together on the lam for nearly nine years, until Faramundo died and little Henri was forced to take over where his father had left off.
