Wednesday's Child

by Alan Zendell

  “Did you see that?” I said to Jim.

  “Just some crazy kid. Don’t let it upset you.”

  “Shit, Jim, that’s…” I was going to have to be more careful.

  “What, Dylan?’

  “Nothing. Kids like that just infuriate me.”

  Jim let it drop and lunch was uneventful after that, except that the rain finally stopped. Water had pooled everywhere. Traffic and transit were a mess. By the time we got back to the office I’d forgotten about the phone message from Romanelli.

  Early afternoon was as routine as lunch had been, so I let the thoughts I’d been avoiding surface. I didn’t believe Thursday had been a hallucination. I didn’t think my head was about to burst, either, but I knew I might be one misstep from a meltdown.

  Part of being a life-long agnostic, someone for whom blind faith was a non-starter, was trusting the evidence of my senses, which in this case, was too compelling to ignore. CyTech aside, every detail of my out-of-sequence Thursday remained crystal clear well into Wednesday afternoon. It couldn’t have been a dream.

  I’d been gunnysacking questions for two days; now, I needed answers. I’d wondered, on Thursday, why no one mentioned that I’d been missing on Wednesday. That mystery, at least, was solved. Hardly any of them had been here to notice.

  The real puzzle was why some things were occurring exactly as they had on the Wednesday I’d skipped, but not others. Could my absence or presence be what made the difference? If Gayle had called me on the Wednesday morning I’d skipped, not reaching me might have caused her to make a different decision about going to work. In a way, her accident might have been a consequence of my living these two days out of order.

  Would Jim have gotten in earlier if Harald told him I wasn’t here on the Wednesday I missed? Would that have affected what I experienced on Thursday? Maybe not. He might have spent the morning playing solitaire or doing something equally insignificant.

  A light went on. Significance must be the key. My existence on Wednesday was insignificant with respect to the stock market, and not being able to reach me hadn’t significantly affected Ilene’s plans. But answering my phone when Gayle called had made a very significant difference to her. I felt like I was on to something, but it was too complex to penetrate at that moment. I decided to let it sit for a while.

  Off in my own space again, I glanced at the time: 1:55. CyTech had peaked, and I was bored and restless, wishing something would happen, anything to snap me out of the doldrums. I should have been more careful about what I wished for.

  I heard someone yell, “Shit!” from the direction of Jim’s office. It sounded like Harald. Then a door banged against its stop. A second later, Jim shouted, “Come with me, hurry,” and he was off for the elevators, with me close on his heels. Jim couldn’t run and talk at the same time. Actually, he could barely run even when he wasn’t trying to talk.

  In the elevator, I said, “What?” just before we heard a faint sound like a siren dopplering to a stop. It must have been right outside the building, and the sound must have traveled up the elevator shaft. For the tenth time in less than two days my heart raced wildly. I knew even before Jim spoke.

  “It’s Gayle. She’s injured, downstairs. Security called for an ambulance.”

  It wasn’t unreasonable for me to look upset, though I’m sure I looked greener than I should have. Jim didn’t notice.

  As I learned later, the storm drains had cleared when the rain let up, the twins’ camp re-opened, and Gayle decided a half day of mommying was enough. She’d hurried into town and typically, was in too much of a hurry to queue up behind the people who were climbing the marble stairs on the no-slip runners that had been laid. If only she’d called to let me know she was coming. If only the gods hadn’t chosen my life to toy with.

  Gayle was in terrible pain and clearly in shock. It seemed like an hour passed before the ambulance had her on her way to surgery. For most of that time I knelt by her side, and she gripped my hand. She had the helpless puppy look that I remembered from Thursday, but this time her eyes were pleading with me to make her leg stop hurting.

  Later, I sat at my desk, bewildered and more than a little frightened. I tested what had just happened against my budding theory, The Persistence of Significant Events. My presence on the scene changed things, but not enough to prevent Gayle from being injured. Thus, her injury must be significant enough that more than my mere presence was required to change it.

  There were other things, too. Thursday morning, under the influence of painkillers, she’d behaved with very un-Gayle-like seductiveness. Her reaction to me this afternoon was completely different but equally intense. What hadn’t changed was the depth of trust she placed in me, so it was the trust that mattered, not the seductiveness.

  If significant events tended to persist, my own persistence might be the key to changing them. What if I had decided that my only priority, today, was preventing Gayle from coming to work? Would she have injured herself some other way? What if I had gone to her house and stayed with her all day, taking her arm whenever she walked up or down a step?

  If I was right, every significant event I observed on my Thursday would occur again tomorrow. Roger would still be struck by the red sports car, and the surgeon would still be injured, unless…could I prevent them from happening? I didn’t know either the doctor’s name or that of his assailant. I could hardly call hospital security and report that an unnamed surgeon was going to be attacked in the cafeteria about 12:30 tomorrow by an unidentified, disgruntled woman. Maybe I could get to the cafeteria a little earlier tomorrow and keep an eye peeled, though I didn’t relish the idea of tackling an angry, murderous woman by myself. On the other hand, maybe I could intercept Roger before RED ZEEE showed up.

  The day grew late, and as on Thursday, the ebb and flow of adrenaline left me exhausted. I leaned back and closed my eyes. Drifting, half asleep, I became ensnared in one of my favorite nightmares, the one in which I lose Ilene or one of the kids in a crowded airport or railroad station. I run frantically from place to place, searching, catching sight of them briefly but they disappear into the crowd before I can reach them. And all the time my panic and hopelessness grow, until I jerk myself awake in a cold sweat.

  Again, my disorientation was interrupted by the phone. It was Ilene calling to say she was catching an earlier flight to Chicago and I wouldn’t have to take her to the airport when I got home. I restrained myself from saying, “I know.” I said goodbye to her, remembering her words on our voicemail and again on the phone Thursday morning. Neither would happen now.

  The analytical side of my brain assigned Ilene’s call to the growing pile of events relative to which my presence was insignificant. Likewise, the arrival, an hour later, of an express package addressed to Gayle from Romanelli.

  Of course, it was different this time. Because I existed in this version of Wednesday, Jim’s first reaction when the package arrived was to yell for me. So instead of waiting to read Romanelli’s letter during Thursday morning’s tempest, I took it home Wednesday night, and wrote a proposal for Gayle that was virtually identical to the one I’d written Thursday morning. Too bad I hadn’t kept a copy of that one.

  Had any of that made a significant difference? No. I’d still deliver the proposal to Gayle in the morning. Jim would be less stressed, and Gayle would be spared an hour of thinking I wasn’t there for her when she woke up, but the outcome would be the same.

  I climbed into bed Wednesday night in an eye-of-the-hurricane sort of calm, even with Ilene gone. I didn’t understand what was happening, and terror still lurked in the wings, but the universe didn’t feel completely out of control, and I no longer felt like a helpless victim of circumstance. I was convinced that I could make Thursday turn out better than the one I’d already lived through.

  I don’t remember another thing until I awoke with the sun in my eyes.

  ***

  Actually, that’s not quite true. Even now, I can recall bits
of my dream: it was morning and I didn’t know what day it was. Since dreams have their own rules, there was no way for me to be sure, and I had to figure it out. That made me angry, because I’d gone to sleep with such high hopes for making the world better on my second chance at Thursday. The problem was that I wasn’t sure it was Thursday – there were two other possibilities, and my dream kept cycling among all three.

  Projecting from two data points, never a very smart idea, might lead one to conclude that I was now living my days backwards, which would mean today was Tuesday. Another possibility was that I was trapped in a kind of Groundhog Day reality, in which I had to relive Wednesday until I got it right. In my dream, I shuddered whenever that came up. Round and round I went, as often happens in nightmares, with nothing resolved until either the sun or the worsening chaos in my head woke me. But this time, I knew I’d been dreaming. I knew because the dream felt like a dream was supposed to, and I only vaguely recalled the details.

  I took two lessons from the dream: don’t take anything for granted and don’t waste time thinking about it, but my hopes for a better Thursday were quickly dashed by the sight of Ilene sleeping beside me. I’d just ruled out taking anything for granted, but it seemed safe to assume that if she was in bed beside me, either she hadn’t left for Chicago yet or she was already back.

  Resisting the temptation to wake her and ask what day it was, I flipped on the TV with the sound muted. Whoever was narrating my life must have howled with laughter when I realized how wrong my three-pronged dream analysis had been. I’d forgotten that we live in a universe that loves conservation laws: Conservation of Energy, Conservation of Angular Momentum…you know. There was apparently also a Conservation of Weekdays law that prevented me from living the same day twice. Today was incontrovertibly Friday, July eighteenth, a day late to help either Roger or the doctor, and to see how Gayle reacted when I brought her the proposal I’d written on Wednesday.

  7.

  I must have lain there in a fugue. I didn’t notice when Ilene awoke and turned toward me, leaning on her elbow, apparently intent on waking me with a kiss, until she noticed my ghostly countenance and virtual paralysis. I know this because I was suddenly aware of her hovering over me, shaking me, her face inches from mine.

  “Dylan, what’s wrong? Talk to me.” Less diplomatic than she’d been in Pho Nam, but effective. I snapped out of my trance in time to prevent her from resorting to other means of rousing me. For Ilene, our conversation in the restaurant had occurred a few hours ago; there’d be no hiding reality from her now, but there wasn’t time for full disclosure, so I temporized with a partial truth, reaching for her hand.

  “I’ve been waking up not knowing what day it was, convinced that it couldn’t possibly be the day it turned out to be. It’s happened three times, and it has me kind of spooked.”

  Ilene just looked at me. “Today’s Friday. Last night was Thursday. You picked me up at the airport, remember?” I interpreted her gently mocking tone to mean she was trying to decide whether to take me seriously.

  “I know. I checked on the TV.”

  “What day did you think it was?”

  “I spent the night dreaming I was trying to decide whether it was Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. I felt like I was running in circles chasing my tail.” It wasn’t until she winced and jerked her hand away that I realized how tightly I’d been clutching it.

  “What do you make of the fact that all three of your choices were wrong?”

  I didn’t have an answer, so I shrugged. “I’m just trying to figure out why it’s happening.”

  Ilene favored me with a skeptical half-smile, then seemed to reach a decision. “We’ll talk more about this tonight.” She was too smart and knew me too well not to realize there was more to this. She must have concluded it was safe to let me out of the house alone. Not incidentally, she wasn’t about to stay home and miss basking in the adulation she’d earned in Chicago.

  I desperately wanted to believe that today being Friday meant the world was back on track, and Thursday preceding Wednesday had been merely a bump in the road. I had no idea why it had happened, but my concern on Wednesday, that I had lost a day as a result of a neurological event seemed silly now. I felt fine, physically. If I was delusional, it was a damn convincing illusion.

  Confident that I didn’t constitute a danger to myself or anyone else, I would take one more day to figure things out on my own and tell Ilene about it tonight, but this morning, I had an agenda to attend to. First, was finding out whether Thursday had turned out the way I remembered it.

  Instead of a sticky note on my monitor, there was an email from Jim in my inbox dated Thursday at seven p.m. “Dylan – I never thanked you for dealing with the Romanelli thing. With Gayle, too. I went to see her after work and she was glowing through her painkillers. Rough couple of days. You all right?”

  He might have been looking for me on Thursday and left the note when I didn’t turn up. On the other hand, on my Thursday, I’d holed up in my office most of the afternoon, sending clear signals that I didn’t want company. Maybe he’d just decided not to disturb me.

  Item two on my list was the irrational guilt I felt about not being able to prevent injuries to the courier and the surgeon. I went over the whole thing in my mind, needing to be certain there was nothing more I could have done. My absolution was tempered by feeling like I’d been scolded by my second grade teacher. All right, young man, I’ll let you off this time, but I’ll be watching you in the future.

  There were so many outraged witnesses to Roger’s hit-and-run that the police had made a quick show of assigning an investigator to the case. He sounded sullen when I reached him on the phone.

  “Did you see it happen?”

  “Not exactly. I was upstairs in my office.”

  “I hope you didn’t call just to tell me you saw a red sports car speeding away.”

  “Well…”

  “Figures. I have ten witnesses who saw the car but not one can tell me anything else about it.” It was clear he’d rather have been chasing criminals than tracking down an irresponsible driver.

  “Would the license plate help?” I said, trying not to sound like a smartass. I didn’t have the slightest doubt that RED ZEEE was the right car. Gregg had told me there was a six month waiting list for new red Z-cars, and only ten had been delivered in all of New York.

  The cop thanked me profusely for breaking the case, then asked if I’d be willing to testify. I had a sudden flash of standing before a judge, explaining. Yes, Your Honor, I recognized the car that caused the accident the day after it occurred, though it might have been the day before, depending on your point of view.

  One of Gayle’s team leaders, a bright young guy named Wilson, came in and stood fidgeting like a kid who had to go to the bathroom as I was finishing with the detective. He had my proposal, complete with Gayle’s annotations. “Can I go over a couple of things with you, Dylan? I tried Gayle, but the nurse on station wouldn’t put the call through.”

  “Sure,” I said, trying too hard to sound casual, and told him what I thought Gayle had been trying to communicate with her scrawled margin notes. I had to restrain myself from ripping the papers out of his hand. “Can I get a copy of that?”

  I’d written the first proposal on Thursday morning, the second on Wednesday evening, saving that one via remote connection to my office computer so it could be printed there the next morning. If Wilson had Wednesday’s version, it must have somehow replaced Thursday’s. If he had Thursday’s version…my head spun.

  The word processor’s date/time stamp on the copy Wilson dropped on my desk said 9:21 am, Thursday, July 17. Since I didn’t complete Thursday’s until after eleven, Wilson had to have been holding Wednesday night’s version. Who had printed it and what had happened to the one I’d written on Thursday? I searched, but it wasn’t on my computer.

  ***

  On beautiful summer Fridays in New York, the office emptied out after lunch,
especially since many of the people we dealt with were in parts of the world in which the work week had ended already. The resulting inactivity allowed me to reconsider my suddenly shaky world view.

  However much I might have wanted to believe the last few days were an aberration, I was certain they weren’t. Neither were they symptoms of an illness. I thought they must signal something whose purpose would reveal itself over time. Events as momentous as days occurring out of order couldn’t happen for no reason, could they?

  That made perfect sense until I imagined saying it to Ilene. She’d give me frown number three, the derisive one. “Why would the universe single you out that way? I love you, Dylan, but face it, you’re not that special.”

  I was still feeling chastened by my imaginary dialogue with Ilene when she called to ask how I was doing.

  “Maintaining my equilibrium. It’s no big deal.” She seemed to buy that, but I knew I was going to have to spill my guts later. I’d need my head on straight when I did.

  Instead of obsessing about the whys, I concentrated on trying to infer the rules of my new reality and figure out how the proposal Wilson was working from fit my significant event theory. Perhaps Wednesday’s proposal had been able to replace Thursday’s because it hadn’t altered Thursday in a significant way, which enabled me to live Friday without worrying that I’d missed anything important.

  By two o’clock, I felt like I’d been through a wringer. I decided to visit Gayle.

  8.

  Forty-eight hours after her accident, Gayle seemed to be her old self, rejecting medication, snapping at nurses, demanding to be discharged. I heard her from fifty feet away: “Damn it, I want out of here now! Where the hell is he?”