She didn’t miss him; she was just feeling bad. And it was necessary. If there was any chance she could deal with the guilt that had crippled her for what seemed like her entire life, she had to betray Paul.
She contemplated starting to work with the device right away. But she decided to go for a run first so she could start with a clear mind. She ran seven miles, their scheduled training distance. Just enough to take the edge off. Though running without the steady rhythm of Paul’s feet next to her, driving her to carry on and go faster, was almost disorienting at first. She wanted to keep going, to run until it hurt, but it was too hot and she had to get started.
Back in the room, she showered and towel-dried her hair while sitting on the bed. Her fingers fell to lips that had been, just a few hours ago, on Paul’s. She tried to vanquish the fantasies of him kneeling in front of her, pulling the towel away, and the heat and press of skin.
She twitched to check her email, to update her Facebook status, to scroll through the incessant thunder of meaningless news with which she had become accustomed to distracting herself. She had always peppered her Facebook page with motivational training quotes, because, sadly, the majority of her friends were clients. She often posted quotes that said that running and training were, like life, a journey with ebbs and flows. Like a river.
But she tried to stay away from river metaphors.
What would she update her status to now? “Just stole a time device from the hottest guy ever.” That seemed consistent with the chirpy climate of Facebook. She could even update her relationship status from “single” to “really really complicated.”
But she’d left her phone and computer behind. Too traceable. Paul would probably know how to find her right away, if he was looking.
What she really wanted to post was her favorite Lance Armstrong quote: “If you ever get a second chance in life for something, you've got to go all the way.”
For herself.
At eleven, she sat on the bed and pulled out the device. Studied it for a few minutes. She would start small. Paul had said that when he went back in time to their run, he could remember doing it the first time. She would go back a few minutes in time, move the channel changer from one end of the entertainment center to the other, and then return.
At quarter after eleven, she entered the date and time with sweaty fingers, hit enter, clicked “yes” in response to the “are you sure” prompt, and then pushed the final red button at the bottom of the device, staring at the red numbers on the bedside clock.
It felt like nothing happened. She remained sitting on the bed. Except that she could clearly see that the time now read eleven o’clock. She moved the channel changer to the far end of the entertainment center. Then she entered the numbers to return to the time she had just left. She pressed the button, and the red numbers on the clock changed to 11:15.
She spent the morning experimenting with going a few minutes back in time. She moved everything she could think of around the room. Sometimes she used the device to return to the time from which she had started, and sometimes she just waited it out. It all seemed fine.
* * *
Over the next two days, she started taking larger leaps: a half hour, an hour. She sat at a table in the hotel sports bar and experimented with changing the timeline in a public space. She knocked her drink off the table, ordered and consumed several glasses of scotch, and made a fool out of herself asking a man to sit with her. And then she undid it all.
She supposed that curing hangovers was probably not the intended use for the device.
It all seemed so shockingly simple that Sarah decided to make a larger jump. She went back to her room, entered the date from three days prior, and—before she could chicken out—pressed the keys required to initiate. She closed her eyes.
This time the air temperature around her changed dramatically, and the hum of the air conditioner vanished. The feel of the bed beneath her shifted. She took a deep breath, risked opening one eye, and nearly screamed. She was sitting in her home office in Portland, looking at her client schedule. Her eyes went frantically to the date on her computer.
June fifteenth. The date she had set. Three days prior, at quarter after two in the afternoon, this was exactly where she had been. After a panicked moment, she registered that she still held the device in her hand. She tried to control her breathing.
So. The device took the user back in time to wherever they had been at the time set on the device. This was unexpected, but not surprising. She supposed Paul had essentially told her this with his talk of temporal merging. Was her present self still sitting on the bed in Vegas? She supposed so, unless she did something now to change the timeline.
Paul was only six blocks away at the university. He didn’t yet know that she had taken the device. She hadn’t yet taken the device.
She punched in the numbers to return to Vegas, to return to the present, although she had to say that the past felt remarkably like the present, and the present like the future, at the moment.
Either way, she felt very uncomfortable being that close to Paul with the device she stole, and she had to fight the urge to run to him and tell him everything.
When she arrived back in her hotel room in Vegas, the power was out. But once she’d checked to make sure everything remained where she had left it, she lay back on the bed and closed her eyes. The power flicked back on about ten minutes later.
She had an actual functioning time machine that allowed for redos. She could correct mistakes. She could go back to the day she had made the biggest mistake of her life—and fix it. And then, perhaps, she could have a normal life, and not have to wake up every day feeling sick to her stomach that she had killed her little sister.
There were the glitches that Paul had told her about. If a person went back beyond the creation date of the device, they could alter the timeline such that the device could cease to exist, which would mean that they were stuck there in that time, living out their life in the past—within that new timeline. A life they had already lived. Except for what they chose to do differently.
It seemed like a minor risk.
She would try a few more jumps. Working up to longer ones before going back to that day. But first, she needed money. And in Vegas, with a time device, that seemed like a remarkably easy thing.
She decided roulette would be the best bet. It didn’t require the skill of poker, and one win at the highest-stakes table would be sufficient. She dressed in the red silk dress she had purchased in the hotel boutique earlier that day, pulled her hair into some semblance of a chignon, and headed downstairs.
She watched the roulette ball bounce from section to section on the wheel. She would lose the first four times, and then on the fifth time, she would watch where the ball went, go back in time, and place all of her chips on that number.
It all went as planned, and the crowd let out a huge raucous cheer at her victory. The man running the roulette table scrutinized her, and finding nothing amiss, gave her the chit to go collect her winnings. She rose carefully—no need to rush—and turned directly into a white-faced Paul. He wore that same checked shirt, open at the neck, and his eyes seemed dark with anger, but the way they quickly flicked down her body in that dress sent a shiver down her thighs. He held another device, a carbon copy of hers, in his left hand. So, he had another one. No need to feel as guilty for stealing the first one then.
“You can’t do this, Sarah,” he said. “You need to give me back the device.”
She forced her voice to be haughty. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She started striding away from him, as fast as she could go on the ridiculous and unstable four-inch heels the boutique woman had convinced her were the perfect match for the dress.
“Please, Sarah. Stop.” He easily kept pace with her. His fingers closed around her arm. She shook him off and broke into a run. Two security guys emerged from the shadows of the casino and approached Paul.
“This man is both
ering me,” she said, and continued her trajectory toward the women’s washroom. The lights in this section of the casino were out, and emergency lights kept the hallway illuminated. She quickly glanced over her shoulder and saw Paul speaking angrily with the two security guards.
In the bathroom, she typed the numbers into the time device. She would go back to this morning. This evening would never happen. Paul would never find her, because she would never be in the casino.
* * *
At noon the same day, or rather the same day repeated, after she had lain on the bed and gotten control of her breathing, she donned a hat and sunglasses and concocted the most unusual outfit she could out of the clothes she had hastily packed. She went to a drugstore and purchased sable hair dye, reading glasses that made her eyes water, makeup, and a paisley scarf. She dyed her hair, applied her makeup with a heavy hand, put on the glasses, and then, shortly after midnight, headed out to a casino in another hotel.
It all went the same as before: the four losses, the small jump back in time, the return to the present, the win… and the arrival of Paul, with a strained and hurt look around his eyes.
She suppressed a cry of alarm. But she was more prepared this time, with the numbers already entered into the device.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” he hissed. “This was not how this device was meant to be used. Please stop. Come back to Portland with me.”
The accusation stung, and tears sprang to her eyes that he would think her so shallow. “Sorry. Can’t,” she said. She darted into a row of slot machines. She was wearing flats this time. Paul followed at a measured pace, trying not to look like he was pursuing her, while he called her name quietly. She wove in and out of the tables—laid out so as to be confusing and repetitive, to draw the gambler in, to make sure they never left. She managed to put a few feet between herself and Paul, ducked behind a half wall in the almost empty casino, and pressed the button on the device to take her back to that afternoon, just after she had dyed her hair. To erase her win, and to erase Paul finding her.
In the cat-and-mouse game of time travel, the mouse always had the advantage. But perhaps only slight.
She collapsed on the bed of the hotel room in frustration. This continual jumping back in time was exhausting. She was living each day twice—three times—and sleeping only once, and she still didn’t have the money she needed to get her mother out of debt and away from Jake, so her mother wouldn’t die.
She had to rethink her strategy. How was Paul finding her?
It must be the size of her wins, she concluded. He was tracking big wins by women, which probably made some sort of news or list, and then jumping back in time to the time of the win. Had he figured her for a gold digger and known to go to Vegas? The possibility cut her to the core. But then again, she had established herself as a thief and a liar, so gold digger probably wasn’t too far a leap.
And now that he knew she was here, he could potentially use his device to be in every casino, every night for the next two weeks. It would be exhausting, but doable.
She could go for small wins, then, or go someplace else entirely. There were other gambling places in the US, or even Europe. She had always wanted to go to Monte Carlo. But she was already running low on money, and using her passport to fly would be too risky. She couldn’t get to Europe. She couldn’t see any way the time device would allow her to rob a bank or jewelry store. She was sure there was probably some way, but her mind couldn’t unravel it. Winning big in the lottery would be theoretically easy, but the check would have to be made out to her real name, and that would result in activity on her bank account—which Paul, or somebody, could potentially be watching.
She couldn’t go back in time to before Paul gave her the device, not yet, as that would take her back to Portland, or all the way back to Maryview, and could result in her changing the timeline such that Paul would never give her the device in the first place. She might only have one shot at jumping a long distance back in time, and she had to make sure it went perfectly. She thought that Paul had seemed to hedge slightly when he’d said he hadn’t worked out traveling to the future yet. Like maybe he actually had, but wasn’t going to tell her about it. But trying to go to the future seemed too uncertain, too dangerous, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to know where she would end up. Permanently alone with her hand weights and running tights, probably.
This time travel thing was giving her a blinding headache.
Horses. She could try horses.
Tomorrow she would go to Phoenix, where she was sure there must be a horse track, determine the winning horse, and then go back in time to bet on that horse. She would sleep first, though.
The next morning she forced herself to apply her makeup even more garishly. Then she withdrew the remainder of her savings—no need for secrecy, Paul already knew she was in Vegas—and bought a Greyhound bus ticket. In the bus station, she checked newspapers and listened to the TV news to see if she had been reported missing. But there was no indication of anyone being concerned. It was indicative of her largely solitary life that nobody—other than Paul—would be alarmed by her sudden disappearance. And Paul probably wasn’t alarmed. He was probably furious.
But she had to do this. For Charlotte.
Charlotte had been so headstrong, even as a three-year-old, but perhaps the brain had a way of changing memories to rationalize, to justify. To excuse negligence. Perhaps all three-year-olds were headstrong. Sarah couldn’t be sure. All she knew was that her stepfather, Jake, had been right: You’ve fucked up so royally that you’ve destroyed everyone’s lives.
And she had. In the wake of Charlotte’s death, her mother had drifted into a grief so deep that she couldn’t be revived, and her stepfather had sunk into a sullen rage that bled through when he was drinking and resulted in more bloodshed. Sarah’s. Her mother’s. Until finally he killed her mother with his fists and went to spend the rest of his life in prison.
She could go back to before her mother even met Jake. Give her mother enough money that she would never consider marrying Jake. But that would negate Charlotte, and Sarah had loved Charlotte with all her heart. No. She would go back and undo that one moment of inattention—no, of negligence—when she ran into the house to answer the phone, thinking it might be a boy she liked—she couldn’t even remember his name now—and left Charlotte alone in her sandbox.
She checked into the Land’s End Motel in Phoenix, her dwindling bank funds now becoming an issue, bought a hideous sunhat and floral dress, and made her way to Turf Paradise.
She had never watched horse racing before, and the pounding hooves made her own calves ache for a hard, driving run. She watched the first race—noting the first-, second-, and third-place finishers—and then went back in time. She tried to decipher the illogical odds, and placed some small bets. She won, pocketed the cash, and returned to the motel, all the time looking over her shoulder. Paul didn’t show up.
She placed larger bets the next day, and collected her ten thousand dollars. On the third day, she waited until the last race of the day, then put the ten thousand dollars for a win on the winning horse—one that had been given long odds. She decided against an exacta or trifecta bet on the second- and third-place horses. Too risky. She struggled to do the math—she had sleepwalked through algebra—but knew that the payout would be big.
Even knowing the outcome, having watched the race twice, her heart was still clamoring in her chest as the first-place horse, her horse, a horse named Vertigo Charlie, thundered across the finish line.
When she turned away from the payout window, shoving her winnings into her purse, Paul stood right behind her, his breath on the back of her neck somehow a cross between a caress and a threat.
“I’m just going to walk with you. I won’t touch you,” he said, falling into step beside her. “Please don’t jump.”
“No way,” she said, picking up her speed. “How are you finding me?”
Paul sighed. “The devic
e pulls a huge amount of energy from the local grid. I can watch for spikes and nearby outages and then figure out where you are. And you’ve obviously established a pattern… of looking for money…” he trailed off.
She had thought that the power failures she had noticed at the MGM were because the hotel was under renovations. “It’s not what you think,” she said. She walked faster.
Paul hastened his pace in order to move slightly in front of her. “It doesn’t matter. I really need it back. I haven’t perfected it. It wasn’t meant for doing multiple jumps in a day. What you’re doing is dangerous for you and for other people.” The disappointment in his voice made Sarah nauseated. All her life, people had been disappointed in her.
She turned, grabbed hold of Paul’s elbow, swung her leg around, and dropped him to the ground. She saw the shock on his face. Then she started to run.
“Fuck you, Paul. I need it. You don’t understand.”
Paul scrambled to his feet and called after her. “Please stop, or I’m going to go back and not invent the device.”
Adrenaline and fear coursed through Sarah’s veins. She ran harder. She had a head start, and she put every bit of training that she’d poured into that Ironman, which was happening that day in Coeur d’Alene, into her pace, as she fumbled with the device.
Paul leapt to his feet and started after her with his tight, efficient gait. She ran faster, and the distance between them narrowed and widened as each of them pulled out bursts of speed, Paul calling her name as he ran. Finally, she was able to fully enter the right date into the device: the day before the date that had been echoing in her brain ever since the moment Paul had first told her about the device.
August 14, 1990. The day her sister died.
She raised her finger to push the button that would take her twenty-two years into the past.
Paul’s hand closed around her arm; his blue eyes seemed to burn her. She shook him loose and her legs automatically launched into an adrenaline-fueled race-finish sprint. “Sarah, wait. You don’t understand. I invented this device because of you. I lo—” Sarah’s finger punched the button, and Paul’s last words were cut off.
Synchronic: 13 Tales of Time Travel Page 13
