by Alan Zendell
Back in my room, I checked the recorder. It had activated properly at the sound of my voice, even in the bathroom, and stored both phone messages. I considered staking out the parking lot and watching for Rod’s car, but a leisurely dinner at a Moroccan restaurant in Georgetown sounded like a better idea. Not wanting to tempt fate, I went back to pick up my recorder before 11:00 and was back in my hotel room in Maryland before midnight.
***
Living days out of order had become so routine, I didn’t bat an eye when the TV anchor said, “Good morning, it’s Wednesday, July 30th.” I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous, though. I had every intention of keeping my promise to Ilene, but I wasn’t taking anything for granted.
I got to the Home Stretch Motel at 9:30, driving about a hundred feet past the murder scene and the adjoining room before parking. There was no one in sight. I assumed Karminian was in his office but I didn’t look in that direction.
There were only two cars parked in the general vicinity, both of which I recognized as belonging to the two Arabs who would be shot in a little more than an hour. Henry had said there was no one in the adjoining room when the bullet pierced the connecting door; it hadn’t been rented on Tuesday night. Now, on Wednesday morning, it was almost certainly empty. I strode purposefully to the door and knocked, trying to seem unconcerned to anyone who might notice me.
Making sure my body blocked the view of anyone in the rental office, I set to defeating the lock. The motel had been built in the 1950s, and it still used locks opened by metal keys. I had the door open so quickly, anyone watching would have assumed I’d simply had to work the key into a sticky keyhole.
Inside, I reprised my Thursday night act at Rod’s hotel. I had to be more careful, this time, but the double connecting doors made it easy. I opened the door on my side and used my drill to widen the space between the other door and its jamb, two inches above the floor, careful not to cut all the way through. The microphone wouldn’t be quite as effective with a thin veneer of wood covering most of it, but there was still a narrow air space that would transmit sound. I placed the recorder on the floor and left the room, making no effort to be furtive, then walked to my rental car and got in.
I’d affixed the telephoto lens to the camera before checking out of my hotel that morning. Now, I experimented, taking pictures at different zoom and lens settings to see which worked best, trying to look like a tourist about to set out for a day of sightseeing.
Waiting has never been my strong suit. I tried reading the Post, but couldn’t keep my mind on it. A little after 10:00, a large van pulled up, parking between the Arabs’ room and my vantage point. A gaggle of housekeepers got out and began wheeling carts loaded with linens, towels, and bathroom supplies out of a storeroom. I had a moment of concern as they dispersed to their cleaning assignments, but since it had been vacant Tuesday night, the room in which I’d placed my recorder wasn’t on the cleaning schedule.
My expectation that no one would be around at mid-morning was proved wrong again a few minutes later, when a vending truck arrived to refill the snack machines. Karminian came out of his office to talk to the driver. He looked curiously at me sitting in my car but didn’t approach me. A Pepsi truck pulled in as Karminian was reviewing his invoice with the first vendor. When Karminian looked back and saw that I was still there, he looked pointedly at me, clearly suspicious. Not wishing to confront him, as the time neared 10:30, I started my engine and drove across Route 1 to a shopping center, parking in a spot with a view of the motel’s lot. It wasn’t ideal, but I had a clear view of the Arabs’ door through the telephoto lens.
The Pepsi truck was still there when a jeep pulled into the lot and parked next to the two Arabs’ cars. Damn! I should have been closer. I began taking pictures on maximum zoom, as a tall man wearing dark sunglasses and a floppy yellow hat pulled down over his forehead got out and knocked on the Arabs’ door. From the way he walked right in when the door opened, I had to assume he’d been expected. Unable to stay back any longer, I drove back to my original spot to wait. And wait.
They were in there for almost twenty minutes. Despite badly wanting to see into the room, I dared not leave my car. There was nothing to be gained, and besides, I’d promised Ilene. Recalling the speculations I’d read in the Post, I tried to imagine what would cause shooting to erupt after so long. A dispute between rival criminal or terrorist factions? Maybe the newcomer was an undercover cop whose cover had been blown.
If the Glock used by the killer was also equipped with a silencer, I wouldn’t hear any shots. In the absence of sound, I might have missed the door opening and the visitor hurrying out, one hand clutching his Glock and pressing a bloody towel to his face, the other fumbling with the keys to his jeep. His hat was missing and he looked straight toward my camera lens as he got into his car. Strangely, I wasn’t surprised. For the second time in two days, I’d caught Rod Burdak in the middle of something very messy.
I waited until he was gone, then hurried from my car to recover my recorder from the adjoining room, taking my Walther after a second’s hesitation. I pulled the mike free, gathered up the recorder and slipped them into my pocket. The bullet hole I’d seen on Thursday from the other side of the connecting door was there, almost shoulder high. I stooped to peer through.
The victims lay motionless on the beds, soaked in blood. The room looked pretty much as it had when I’d been inside with Henry, except for a bright flash of yellow on the end of the bed near the window – Rod’s hat, which hadn’t been there when Henry investigated the scene, or I was sure he’d have told me. I knew what I had to do.
The lock on the connecting door was easily compromised and I took three quick steps into the room, fighting a wave of nausea from the stink of death and blood. I was reaching for Rod’s hat when I heard a noise. Reflexes I’d forgotten I possessed threw me into a dive and roll behind the covering bulk of the bed as a bullet whizzed by me and struck the wall near the front door. My gun was in my hand as I bounced up, the image of the badly wounded Arab lying on his bed clear in my mind. It was just like a training exercise I’d done a hundred times, except this time the target wasn’t a dummy. Bracing my Walther with both hands as I rose and fired in a single motion, I put one bullet low into the neck of the man who’d tried to kill me.
I grabbed the hat and ran back through the connecting door, pulling it closed behind me. Cracking open the front door, I looked carefully around from the adjoining room to see if anyone was reacting to what happened. The parking lot was empty. I walked quickly back to my car, stealing a glance at the rental office. Karminian was at his window, watching me.
I drove out of the motel’s parking lot and wound through a residential neighborhood until I was sure I hadn’t been followed, then pulled over to the curb and let the violent trembling that had been trying to take over my body have its way. When I could breathe again, I reached for my untraceable agency cell phone and placed a 911 call to the police. It was 11:05.
26.
I felt no remorse about putting the fatal shot into the Arab who’d tried to kill me, but hours later, as my train pulled out of the station, I still reeled from knowing that terrorist or not, I’d killed someone. I knew the shooting was justified, but I was still buffeted by waves of guilt-driven anxiety. It only occurred to me later that it might not be guilt I was reacting to. I’d literally dodged a bullet myself; if his aim had been better the corpse might have been mine.
I let the gentle, soothing motion of the train dull my senses, calming me. I couldn’t afford to give in to emotion right now. I needed my head to be on straight.
My reaction to killing the Arab was like a kid who shatters his mother’s favorite vase and thinks if he lays low, no one will notice him. That might have been possible if the principal shooter hadn’t been Rod, but my inquiries about him and the identification of the Walther bullet made it inevitable that my name would come up. I also couldn’t be sure Karminian wouldn’t give me up under pressure,
and I’d left for Maryland Tuesday night with no way to account for my time on Wednesday. I had to tell William before he found out some other way…but not yet.
Questions about free will plagued me as my train sped northeast to New Jersey. I’d worried earlier about being trapped in a causation loop – doing things because Ilene told me I’d already done them. My head ached thinking about it, but I had no choice.
Karminian told me, on Thursday, that he’d seen me at the motel Wednesday morning, but I believed going back there Wednesday morning hadn’t compromised my free will because I’d decided to go back before I knew that. Viewed in the harsh light of uncertainty, I wasn’t so sure. After meeting with Henry Thursday afternoon, I’d confronted Karminian purely on impulse, because I sensed there was a piece of the puzzle missing that he could fill in. Was it possible the impulse hadn’t been mine after all? Maybe I had to confront him and learn that he’d seen me on Wednesday to reinforce my decision to return Wednesday morning.
And what about Henry telling me the second shooter fired a Walther? Had that ensnared me in a loop, in which I was compelled to be at the motel on Wednesday and enter that room at just the right moment? Going through the connecting door to retrieve Rod’s hat had been another mindless impulse. I could claim that I did it because the hat was covered with Rod’s DNA, but who was I kidding? I went in because I knew Henry wasn’t supposed to find it.
On Thursday, I’d concluded that staying in Maryland instead of catching my train home to fulfill the prophesy of waking up next to Ilene Wednesday morning was proof that I still had free will, yet the very act of staying raised the issue two more times. In terms of preordination versus free will, Ilene remembering me in bed beside her, Karminian seeing me at the motel on Wednesday, and Henry finding the bullet from my gun were equivalent events.
My thoughts spiraled out of control with theories and questions feeding each other endlessly. The only thing that would break the logjam of confusion was having an actual outcome to match against my speculations, and I would have one in a few hours.
It was Wednesday. Ilene didn’t know anything about her interactions with me on Thursday because for her, they hadn’t happened yet. She didn’t even know that the questions we were about to resolve were the ones she had raised. When I told her I was staying in Maryland Thursday night, she’d asked what I thought would happen to her memory of waking up next to me on Wednesday. Would she come home tonight intending to follow through on the plan we’d made Tuesday night as if nothing had changed?
I called her from the train, and she greeted me with a perfectly routine, “Hi, Dylan.”
“Hi, Hon, I’ll be home around 8:00.”
“Oh…right, you said things might be backed up at work.”
I’d said that on Tuesday, when I was expecting to be in my office Wednesday morning after I got back from Maryland. Ilene retained that memory, but she seemed to be struggling with something.
“Is 8:00 a problem?”
“No, I guess not.” There it was again. She seemed puzzled, like she was trying to work something out.
“Where should we have dinner?” I said, not wanting to influence her response.
Sounding like most of her mind was elsewhere, she picked an Italian place near the commuter station at Journal Square. I’d be arriving at the Amtrak station in Newark. She still thought I’d been in New York all day.
“Okay, I’ll meet you there. I have a lot to tell you.”
Ilene got there first. She was sipping a glass of wine and reading something she’d brought home from work. She jumped up when she saw me and hugged me fiercely, as though she was pinching me to make sure I was real. “You’re not usually this late,” she said, when we were seated. “Where were you, anyway?”
Had it suddenly occurred to her that Wednesday might not have turned out as planned?
Instead of answering her directly, I reached across the table and took her hands. “Ilene, I need to you to focus on something, okay? Remember what we said, Tuesday, about my trip?”
“About having to be there Tuesday night so you could meet John Thursday morning?”
“Right. Anything else?”
“You said you’d try to get back here tomorrow night so you’d be home this morning.” She stopped, obviously befuddled, a behavior she only exhibited rarely. Ilene wasn’t easily confused.
“I need you to think hard, really focus. Was I there this morning?”
“I…I want to say ‘Yes,’ but…shit, Dylan, what’s happening?” Then, that wonderful brain of hers kicked in. “It’s some causality thing, isn’t it. I feel like I have two sets of memories but only one of them is real. You weren’t here, were you? You’re only now getting back from Maryland.”
“Yes to both. A lot happened on Thursday. In the reality you remember, I came back Thursday night and I was here this morning. I went to work, came home, and we had dinner like we are now, except our conversation is different. From what you told me Thursday morning, we must have decided, together, that you shouldn’t tell me anything specific about Thursday. When you talk to me tomorrow morning, you’re going to be totally noncommittal…”
“…because,” she broke in, “you’re about to tell me something made you change your mind about coming home tomorrow night, but you didn’t want to find that out from me because you wanted to be sure the decision was entirely your own.”
“You’re amazing. I’ve been trying to get this straight all the way back from Baltimore, and you got it just like that,” I said, snapping my fingers. “I’ll tell you all about it, but first I need to know exactly how you feel, what you think you remember.”
“If I concentrate, I can remember you being there this morning, but the memory of waking up alone is there, too, as if the two memories are fighting for supremacy. Actually, it’s more like one of them is fading, the other growing stronger. It’s a struggle to retain seeing you this morning, being so happy you were there – I was worried about you Tuesday night. You held me when we woke up this morning. I can still feel your arms around me. But I have the sense that if I don’t fight to keep them, both the memory and the feeling will disappear.”
“I’m betting you’re right. Eventually you won’t remember I was there. It’s what I expected to happen after I thought about it for a while. You know how when you sew something the thread sometimes snags and you get an extra loop hanging out, and you try to pull the stray thread through so everything’s smooth again? I think space-time does that, somehow. The extra memories, the causation loops, the potential paradoxes, they’re all like stray loops of thread.
“Every time I live days out of order I create a snag in the trampoline, but the threads have enormous elastic tension. They’re relentless, constantly fighting to self-correct, but it doesn’t happen instantaneously.”
“Why does it force my memories to be consistent while you retain contradictory ones?”
“It isn’t doing that. I don’t remember being here this morning. In my reality, being here this morning is just a hypothetical possibility, an unrealized expectation. What I remember is you telling me I was here.”
“One more thing – how do you know I’ll tell you the same thing you remember me telling you tomorrow morning?
“Because for me, it already happened. It’s like when I was injured in the explosion.”
“I’m sorry, Dylan, that sounds crazy.”
“It sounds crazy to me too but the rules I always took for granted have changed. The entity you called the Übermensch is a lot smarter and more powerful than we are. It has the ability to fuck with reality and change the rules of physics, though it’s usually benign, doing its thing invisibly and letting us do ours.”
“What do you think changed that?”
“I have a theory. What if it sees humanity heading for a precipice but it has rules of its own that prohibit gross intervention, and it’s only permitted to temporarily bend the rules of our universe to give one of us the leverage to influence events. Inst
ead of intervening directly, it gives that person a tool he can use to pull the world back from the brink.”
“The precipice being what might result from the release of radiological materials in American cities?”
“Right. Our track record since nine-eleven doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.”
“And you’re the person who’s going to pull us back?”
“It’s not about me, it’s the situation. The Übermensch thinks I’m in a position to apply the leverage he gave me, but I have to figure out how.”
“If your living Thursdays before Wednesdays is a lever, this point in time is a fulcrum. What does that make you, Archimedes?”
“An involuntary one, yes.”
“I kind of like that,” she said. “I don’t enjoy feeling like a prop, though. The Übermensch has no right to tamper with my memories.”
“You’d prefer to remember all the conflicting realities?”
She nodded affirmatively.
“We could get Jerry to help work out a way to preserve a record of them. I thought about doing it myself, but I think it would be more useful if the two of you did it.”
“Aren’t you afraid space-time will find a way to erase it?”
“I’m hoping the antidote to space-time’s ability to self correct is will power. We might find it’s permanently malleable if we work hard enough at it.”
27.
Friday morning, I called Samir. We agreed to meet in William’s office at Federal Plaza so he could analyze the messages and conversations I’d recorded. I felt as though I was betraying Gayle, but until we knew more I had to keep her in the dark. I had no idea why Rod was involved or whether Gayle knew things she hadn’t told me. She was my friend, but there was too much at stake to let that determine my actions. I didn’t relish having to tell her I’d instigated an investigation of her husband, either.
