One Second Per Second Read online

  “Think it’s okay if I get out?” I ask.

  “Better not.”

  I want to run over to her. Hug her. But she probably wouldn’t take that well. We watch them play for a while, then without warning Joad looks my way and our eyes lock. What can he be seeing? Then the sprinkler spray hits him and there are peels of laughter. I laugh too. But when I exhale, the air takes the joy with it. “She’ll be dead within five years,” I say, not really to Gallie.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispers.

  “Not a happy life. You’d never know it looking at her now, would you?” We sit and watch for a few minutes longer before I ask Gallie to drive on. I thank her and we sit in silence as I stare out of the side window to conceal myself.

  “Joad,” Gallie says eventually, “there’s a lot you don’t know.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “Your TMA team are alive,” she says. “And we need to get them back.” I turn to her.

  “Back from where?” She hesitates.

  “Centuries away, but we can get them.” Centuries away?

  “What–”

  “You’re right to be cynical about temporal logic, Joad. It is a dark art, but we know a lot more than we used to. We know that when things get messed up, there are some strategies to fix them that aren’t going to work without making everything worse, and there are others ways with a better chance.” I now remember the cluster of green lights centered on southeastern Washington just before the wall map shattered into a thousand shards and rained down. Those green lights were the TMA team being flung–centuries away.

  “Tell me what’s going on Gallie,” I plead.

  “Soon,” she says. “I can’t yet. I’m sorry. I just can’t.” I look back out of the side window. “But hey,” she says, “I’ve got a suggestion. You must be going slightly crazy in your jail cell. How would you like to move out?”

  “Where to? And yes, whatever your answer is.”

  “Well, Boris has offered you his spare bedroom.”

  “Zhivov?”

  “Yes, he has a nice little house down on the Yakima River with plenty of room. What do you think?” I think back to Joe Alvarez’s house down on the Yakima where I hid out after the site explosion. “Hey, don’t embarrass yourself. Rein in your excitement.”

  “I didn’t think he liked me.”

  FIFTEEN

  Zhivov’s home becomes my home. It’s in surprisingly good taste for a man I’d assumed lived under his parents’ stairs. At first the routine didn’t call for us being in much contact. Day at TMA, pick up a carry-out on the way home, eat mainly in silence then retire to our respective rooms. I tried to probe for information a couple of times but he’s airtight. I guess you don’t get to become the TMA Director without being a good corporate man. And the new fact that has entered my fog of bewilderment seems to subtract from, rather than add to, my grasp on the situation–that my TMA team are centuries away. Centuries away!

  It’s a Friday night and it’s after a couple of store-bought beers that Zhivov crushes his empty can and suddenly looks like a man who has something to tell me.

  “Would you say TMA does a good job?” he asks. Okay, a weird question that did not follow-on from the topic of noisy geese. “How many green lights would you say we get a day?”

  “Up to twenty. At least where I’m from. Here, a couple a day maybe, at most.”

  “And do you think we’re detecting all acceleration events?”

  I nod. “That’s the idea, isn’t it?” Zhivov pops another beer.

  “Say you wanted to mask an event, conceal it from detection, how would you do it?”

  “I guess I’d try to confine the tachyon blast–attenuate the tachyon emission beyond the inner blast radius.” Zhivov nods.

  “How?”

  “Reflectors. Absorbers. But who the hell would know how to configure that? You’d need to be TMA. A tackychemist, and a pretty good one. Hands-on type.”

  “Maybe,” says Zhivov. “So, do you think that TMA is airtight enough that that would never happen? That it hasn’t happened? Maybe deliberately. Maybe through technology leakage? And that the green lights on the map don’t account for every acceleration?”

  “You’re saying it could be going on and we can’t see it?”

  “I’m saying it is going on.” I cut short a gulp and stare at Zhivov.

  “Who? Why?”

  “Why? Isn’t it obvious, Toad?” This had become Zhivov’s name for me during our growing detente. I still called him Boris, not having been able to think of anything funnier. If there’s any silver lining to my situation it’s being able to insult the man who will one day hold such power over me.

  “Who’s insane enough to think they could profit from screwing around with acceleration when outcomes are completely uncontrollable?”

  “Well, that brings us to the other factor.” Zhivov says. “Sheer craziness. Someone who wants to violently shake up everything just for the sake of doing it. Time vandals.” Time vandals! “Assholes,” Zhivov clarifies.

  “Kasper Asmus is an asshole,” I say. “His headshot is in the dictionary under ‘asshole’. Is he a time vandal? Is that what’s going on?” I shake my head. “No, that’s too insane. Someone who’s a time vandal is running the risk of destroying themselves, no?”

  “That’s why ‘asshole’ doesn’t come close. They generally just don’t care. The power is the thing. Don’t get me wrong, Toad, TMA does a good job. But TMA is all about prevention–stopping acceleration before it can get started–and you know what they say about an ounce of prevention. The reality is, we still need to have a cure.”

  “Cure?”

  “Yes. Human acceleration does happen without TMA detecting it. That’s just a fact. Then the cure is whatever it takes to undo whatever our vandal does. Mend the damage.”

  “How?”

  “You know how. We need to accelerate, too,” Zhivov says in a whisper.

  “But–”

  “But that would break our own rules?” Zhivov says. I nod. “The rules handed down to us by the temporal logicians? By the way, I think you’re too hard on those guys, Toad. They were just following orders.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning once we knew that masked accelerations were happening, we needed to shut down acceleration technology. Ban the whole fucking thing. And the logicians came in handy. Dumb as rocks, I know, but they were useful. The reality is, we had to improve acceleration technology to administer the cure.”

  “TMA did?”

  “Well, yes and no,” Zhivov says. “Not TMA. At least not all of it. Not officially.”

  I shake my head. “Not all of it? Then ... who?”

  “A few of us.”

  “A few of you.” I digest this. The few among the few. And whatever happened in 2021 is something we need to cure?”

  “Damn right we do.”

  “You know I had a plan,” I say. “I traveled back to give my own cure a shot: warning the site staff and preventing it all from happening in the first place. But my piece of shit accelerator–”

  “We know that, Toad. You were trying to cut it off at the pass so it never even happened. But we’ve discovered a few things. Some things just won’t work.”

  “And mine won’t?”

  “Yours didn’t. What we know is that you need to follow the timeline, not prevent it. That’s where the cure lies.”

  “Follow it?”

  “Yes, recover from what’s been done.”

  “And how do we recover from what’s been done?”

  “We find your team and we rescue them.”

  “Rescue them? Rescue them from what?”

  Zhivov pulls something from his pocket and hands it to me. It’s a round, silver-framed photograph about the size of a drinks coaster. I look closer, and under cracked glass it’s a black silhouette on white of a woman with long eyelashes, receding chin and stacked hair. Marge Simpson is what I think. “Found it. Beautiful isn’t it?” he says
. “Shame it’s damaged. When would you date that to?”

  “I don’t know. The days of yore,” I reply. “What is it?” Zhivov shrugs and then shuts down as suddenly as he had opened up. It’s then I realize that every word he’d uttered had more to do with Prasad than with the beer.

  SIXTEEN

  Tonight I have the dream again. It’s one of those dreams that you know is a dream. And in it, every time, I remember that I’ve been having this dream all my life. How could I have forgotten it? Its familiarity is overwhelming, as if it’s more my world than anything I’ve experienced awake - as if leaving the dream is always just an excursion, a temporary escape from this reality. Or perhaps believing that the dream recurs is just part of the dream–this single dream for a single night that pretends it has known me for a lifetime. And when I wake up I know it will be gone. It always is.

  The dream is sepia, colored in faded browns and reds like a vintage photograph. Movement in the dream is not fluid and smooth, but stuttered like thousands of tiny, barely perceptible adjustments. I see people. Sometimes they look familiar, but that may be an illusion of the dream. And these people shift. From one thing to another. Fat to lean, straight to hunched, shiny to ragged. Sometimes they shift from being to not being, completely vanishing in front of me. And sometimes the opposite, appearing out of nothing. Yet these shifts don’t have the feeling of change–not of one thing transitioning to another, but more like one thing replacing another. A woman now. But then empty space. Here was X, but now here is Y. Sometimes Y is similar to X, similar enough to know that X is what it’s replacing. And with these shifts, these annihilations, these creations, there’s no sense of destruction or pain or tragedy. It’s just benign replacement. It all seems so fundamental to the nature of things, so much at the core of what’s natural. And it isn’t just people. Other things shift, too. I sense it, know it, more than I see it. The scale of shift can be colossal–cities appearing, forests vanishing. And it can be microscopic–an electron that flips its orientation.

  And I know the dream will be gone when I wake up. No memory of it. I’ll just need to wait until the next dream, tolerating my temporary illusions until I’m pulled back into reality.

  SEVENTEEN

  In Zhivov’s kitchen, I suck on a melting popsicle which is all I have the stomach for. Too much to process, too much to rationalize. For example, there’s acceleration technology available in 1996 that I knew nothing of a quarter of a century later. Asmus, an irritating prick for sure, but a ... time vandal? My mother and me and Tom laughing in the water sprinklers, oblivious to the feckless disease that will take her from us–did take her from us. And Prasad is so bloody secretive. I must be critical to his ‘cure’; otherwise, why am I in the loop at all, if I can call this being in the loop? And why am I being hidden away in Zhivov’s home?

  Zhivov is out at the site right now and I’m alone. Prasad says I need to stay put. Gallie says I go nowhere without Zhivov. Zhivov tells me to not even think about leaving the house. All a good case for staying put. But the other side of that argument is Fuck Them! The keys to Zhivov’s truck are right in front of me.

  A car clutch is Satan’s work, but I jog my way across town. What I’m looking for is the Big Red. It’s not far from where there will one day be either a strip mall, or a park, or who knows the hell what.

  I enter and it’s dark inside, thick with cigarette smoke swirling under the dim, red-tinted ceiling lights. The wood-paneled bar is long and lined with high stools and brass foot rails. Behind it there are glass shelves of liquor with mirrors that double the bottle count. Only a couple of tables are occupied, each with a small candle lantern that doesn’t threaten the anonymity of the drinkers. There are four or five men sitting at the bar looking at the baseball game and exchanging opinions. I sit at a table. The waitress, a young but worn woman in jeans and stained T-shirt takes my order.

  I squint at the small TV screen as I sip my beer. It lasts me thirty minutes during which I contemplate how stupid my plan is. I stand to leave. And it’s then that he walks in. I fall back into my seat. He walks with confidence to the bar without looking around him, sits and exchanges a few words with the bartender. Jesus, look at him. Dapper, slim, loose white open-necked shirt, pressed blue jeans and Docksiders. There sits the mighty manager of the Pacific Hardware South Risley Store. There sits my father.

  He makes a joke with the bartender and the hunched, gray-hair sitting closest. I see him only in profile. His face is mine. Or would only I see that? It’s the face I shave each day. The face that gave my mother the life she had. So, are you going to slug him? Is that the plan? To do something the ten year-old Joad couldn’t? I wave over the waitress and order a second beer. He’ll be dead in–I do the calculation–thirteen years. A shelf of cherry lumber will topple and he’ll be right under it. A quick death. Nothing like my mother’s.

  On impulse, I take my beer and seat myself at the bar. There’s no plan. Getting here was the only plan. He sips his beer and glances my way. He does a slow motion double take. We lock eyes for an instant but then there’s a loud cheer from around the room and we look up at the TV. I keep watching the TV but sense eyes on me.

  “This is Rodriguez’s year,” he says in a voice I’d forgotten but now floods me with the familiar. I nod without looking. A pause. “Have you worked at Pacific Hardware?”

  “No,” I reply. I look directly at him. What do you see, Father? I realize that over the years my memory of him had adjusted to make him look more like me than he really did. He’s no twin, but all the features are there and arranged the same. Hairline thin on the temples, jawline that juts, aquiline nose. And he must be about my age.

  “I know you from somewhere,” he says with the crooked smile I’d forgotten.

  “It’s a small town.”

  “Yeah, small town.”

  He looks down at his beer and I look at mine. From the corner of my eye I sense that he is now looking up at me but then looks back down at his beer. He does the same again. What to say?

  “Shit week. Good to get away from it.”

  “That’s what beer’s for,” he says. Now I sense him looking directly at me. “Nothing too serious, huh?”

  “Well, is your wife fucking someone else serious?” He seems to be considering this.

  “Depends if you like your wife, I guess,” he replies with a grin.

  “That’s a solid point. Do you like your wife?” I ask. His smile fades.

  “I do,” he says and I nod.

  “Do you fuck around on her?” I ask. He shifts on his chair to face me. It’s not indignation in his face but bewilderment.

  “What kind of question is that?” he says. I shrug.

  “Want to hear about my wife?” He turns back to his drink.

  “Sure, if you want to tell me.”

  “Her name’s Bess. And the problem is I’m pretty sure she’s seeing someone else. Do you know how that feels? It feels like absolute crap, every day, every minute. With me all the time.” He stares at me. “At least we have no kids. That makes it better, right? Just one victim. Two if you count Bess.” I point to order him another beer.

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  I smile and keep smiling as I ask “would you ever cheat?” He stares at me.

  “You sure we haven’t met? You look real familiar.”

  “Well, give it some thought,” I reply. “Maybe it’ll come to you.” He does seem to be giving it thought. Then he asks me about Bess, maybe showing some sympathetic interest in a sad drunk. So I tell him. How we met, how beautiful she was ... is ... will be. I tell him about the winery, about Den. How it all fell apart. I pretty much tell him our story. It lasts for a couple more beers. Then I ask him about his wife but he doesn’t have much to say.

  Our conversation wanes and we focus on our beers. What I want to shout into his face is stop fucking around because your wife, my mom is desperately sad about what you’re doing and you need to make the last five years of her life happy o
nes. But I don’t. Of course I don’t. Then a petite, raven-haired woman in a flowing summer dress breezes up, puts an arm around him and kisses his cheek. He smiles awkwardly, more at me than at her.

  “This is ...” he says to her, raising his hand in my direction. The pause is long.

  “Joad,” I say and smile at her. She beams back at me. I don’t look at my father. She tells me her name but I don’t hear it. Then there’s the screech of chair legs on wood and I turn to see someone walking toward us. He’s big, heavy, bald, yellow-bearded, dressed like a lumberjack, and there’s violence in his face.

  “Whore,” he shouts, and without a pause swings for my father. It seems my father is fast and he steps backwards before the punch can land. Then he brings his foot up squarely between the lumberjack’s legs who crumples to the ground, taking a chair with him. I look down at him as he struggles to catch a breath. My father has a useful skill for a man with the hobbies he has chosen.

  I can’t get caught up in this. I make for the door, hearing my father call my name above the rantings of the woman.

  EIGHTEEN

  The Big Red’s parking lot is bathed in dull yellow light from the street lamp. I take out my keys but drop them and have to fumble under the truck’s running board to find them. I recover them, squint to pick out the right key, and prod the lock with it until it enters.

  “You!” I hear. I turn to see a figure approaching me. Oh no, this’ll be the cuckhold’s brother or friend. But then the figure extends an arm and I see a gun pointing at me, closing-in. Oh shit. This is it. The figure stops. It’s a man, short, unkempt long hair, unshaven and looking as scared as me. He takes something out of his windjammer pocket. It looks like an iPhone. It takes me a second to digest that there are no iPhones on this calendar date. His face illuminates with whatever image he’s looking at. “Would you be Joad Bevan?” he asks in a shaky voice. I look around me and there’s no one. I hear the thud of music from a passing car.