The Here and Now (13 page)

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not a good idea for me to be too close to you or to …”

“What?”

“To be physically … intimate.” I am suddenly embarrassed. “Not that that’s what you were thinking or anything.” Sitting in this proximity, knowing the feeling of his arms, I am ashamed of the lustful thoughts I had about him when it was all just pretend.

He looks concerned and a little bit rueful. “No. Right.” I can’t tell if he’s teasing me. “But why do you say that? Nobody’s watching us. You’re past the point of obeying. You’re a scofflaw through and through.” He stops himself and smiles. He meets my eyes. “Not that I was planning to take advantage or anything.”

I nod slowly. “It’s not just that, though.” I try to think of how to say it. “Because of where I come from, it can be dangerous.”

“How?”

“Well, certain changes happen in our cells and our immune systems over time. We were exposed to different strains of microbes—you know, viruses and bacteria and all that—than you were. We have different immunities. That’s one of the reasons they won’t let us near any medical treatment here. They say if a lab gets a look at our blood, it could raise all kinds of impossible questions. Our scientists had the advantage of knowing the disease landscape from the past—I mean, from now—so they could give us shots to protect us. They
still give us shots twice a year. And the pills we take are part of that—or at least, they are supposed to be.”

He looks relieved. “So you’re safe.”

“Yes. But you’re not.”

“I’m not?”

“You’re not safe from me. You don’t have immunities to the germs I carry. I come from a place with illnesses you can’t even imagine. Blood plagues that destroyed our families. I am immune to the plague—we all are who came here, because otherwise we’d be dead. But who knows what little shifts there have been in my RNA or whatever that I could pass on to you.”

“Just by being close to me? I don’t believe that.”

“The leaders seem to think very casual contact is safe enough. What they warn us about is anything deeper than that. That’s one of the reasons why the rule about intimacy with time natives is so strict. They say it could be like Cortés arriving among the Aztecs and wiping them all out with European smallpox.” I feel myself deflating as I say it. It’s not a very romantic thing to have to tell the only boy you ever thought you loved.

He looks at me carefully. He is quiet for a while and then he shakes his head. “I’m not scared of that. I’m not scared of you.”

I take a deep breath. “I am.”

The mood as we drive is sober. As we cross from New York State into New Jersey, Ethan reaches out for my hand. I can sense in his face the look of dawning rebellion.

We eventually end up parked at a rest stop off the Palisades. The storage place doesn’t open until seven, and we need to try to sleep. We’ve got a couple of big days ahead.

“Where do your parents think you are?” I ask him, imagining for a moment a more ordinary life.

“Visiting my sister at Bucknell for a long weekend.”

“And what does your sister think?”

“She thinks I’ve got a secret girl.”

He gets a blanket out of the trunk and opens the door for me. “You lie down in the back and try to sleep, okay?” He hands me the blanket.

“What about you?”

He gets back into the driver’s seat. “I’m really good at sleeping sitting up.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, and that way, I can get us out of here quickly if we need to.”

“Do you think they are going to find us?”

“I think they are going to try, but I think we have the advantage. Kenobi said they are good at oppressing their captives, but they have no traction in the real world. I can navigate it a lot better than they can.”

“You think?”

“Sure. They have no real contacts among the time natives, as you say.”

“Not really, no.”

“And you, my friend—you definitely do.”

He locks the doors, and the car is dark and quiet. I see the condensation from our breath on the windows. I hear the cars zooming by on the Palisades Parkway. I have no reason to feel safe, but I do.

I’m so close to Ethan, it’s hard to sleep. I hear him shifting and turning in the front seat. I listen to him breathe.

After a long time of quiet nonsleeping I hear him get out of the front seat and open the door to the back. My heart lifts when he climbs in, though I know it shouldn’t. I sit up to make room.

“No, no, lie down,” he says. “Is there room for me?”

I squeeze over. He lies down next to me. I spread the blanket over the two of us.

“I’m not really very good at sleeping sitting up.”

I laugh.

At first we lie like two sardines, back to back on the narrow seat. But soon Ethan turns over and I feel his arms come around me. I feel his heart beating against my back. “This is casual, right?” he says.

“I don’t think it’s what they meant,” I say. He’s been this close before with no ill effects so far. “But I think it’s okay.”

As I get drowsy his legs entwine with mine.

“Hey, Prenna?” I feel him whispering into my neck.

“Yeah?”

“If it was okay for me to kiss you,” he whispers, “would you want me to?”

I know I should lie. I should make this easier on both of us. But I’ve begun to tell the truth, and I am drunk on it. “The most of anything,” I whisper into the seat.

“Me too.” I feel him kiss my shoulder blade before he lays his head down and goes to sleep.

THIRTEEN

We park in a lot in the Bronx and study the street map on his phone. Or he studies it. My eyes aren’t that good yet. We take a wrong turn before we get our bearings. The streets are rundown and deserted. Most buildings look uninhabited, judging from the broken windows. I don’t really fear the threats they’ve got here in this part of the twenty-first century, but still I am grateful not to be alone.

It’s a cold morning and the wind is blowing Ethan’s T-shirt. He looks filthy and banged up from two nights creeping around a farm. And tired. But he’s jumping around on the sidewalk like a lunatic.

“What are you doing?”

“It’s just, I don’t know. I feel so healthy. Energetic.” He’s a little winded, but smiling broadly.

I watch him jump a few more times. “Oh, you do, do you?” I think I know what he’s getting at.

“Not sick at all in any way.”

I stare at him suspiciously.

He shrugs. “Just saying.”

We find the address, a big square industrial building with a giant well-lit billboard on the roof advertising to cars whooshing by on the elevated expressway above us.

At the desk is a bored-looking attendant with a laminated ID card hanging around his neck. His name is Miguel. He takes his headphones off.

“Card?” he says.

I hand it to him.

“Can I see your key?”

I hand him that too.

“Compartment number?”

I pause. I really don’t want to raise his suspicions. It’s enough that we’re filthy and groggy-looking teenagers showing up at seven in the morning. “Five one seven.” I try not to say it as a question.

He checks his computer and pushes the digital pad toward me. “Sign here, please.”

I sign illegibly, which is not worse than I usually sign on those things.

“Elevator to five, two rights and a left,” he says. He leans back in his chair and puts his headphones back on.

It’s an elevator big enough to drive a car into. I swipe the card to open the fifth floor so the button lights up. My hands are sweating and I can’t keep my feet still.

“We shouldn’t spend more time here than we have to,” Ethan says as we stride along the concrete hallway. I know it’s on both our minds that we might not be the only ones who know about this place.

I nod. There are a few thickly paned windows, through which the rushing lights of the cars on the expressway give a sickening strobelike effect.

I am squinting, trying to keep my hand steady as I turn the key in the lock. The knob turns and I push the door open. I zip the key into my jacket pocket.

Ethan feels along the wall for the light switch and turns on an overhead fluorescent light that sputters and blinks before it comes on.

It’s a room about six feet wide and nine feet deep. There are rough plywood shelves covering two walls, and they are almost entirely empty. Along one middle shelf on one wall there are four file boxes and a red binder.

I step in and Ethan follows. He takes a look behind him at the door. “Leave it open?”

It would make me claustrophobic to close it. The hallway is deserted. “Yeah.”

“Start here?” he asks, picking up the first box.

I nod. I’m working my courage up to touch anything.

“It’s a bunch of newspapers,” he says, and I wonder if I hear a trace of disappointment in his voice. Maybe he was hoping for some mind-blowing technology.

“Not very … futuristic,” I say.

“No. Do you mind if I look?”

“Go ahead.”

I put my fingers around the second box. I cajole myself a little to open it. It’s not just the fear of knowledge, but years of being brainwashed never to invade privacy or look where you aren’t supposed to look. Some emotions, like safety and trust, are tough for us to come by, and others, like guilt and suspicion, are right on tap all the time.

The box is divided into several compartments, and one of them has my initials—my old initials—written in black marker. In the spirit of Ellis Island immigrants, none of us kept our old last names when we moved here.

The first thing is a dry piece of paper with a crayon drawing of a family made crudely and childishly with stick legs and oval feet, large round-fingered hands and lollipop heads. There is a father with straight black hair and a beard, a mother with yellow hair holding an egg-shaped baby in blue, a big girl with dark hair like her father and gray-blue spots for eyes like her mother. She is holding hands with—or overlapping hands with—a little dark-haired boy.

It takes a strange act of relaxation to connect this drawing to myself. To connect the memory of drawing it, which I do faintly have, to my hands, my eyes, my thoughts. I try to connect the little girl in that memory to the person I am now.

Under it is a birthday card for my father, also made by the little girl in my memory—that being me. And another and another, the first one barely a scribble, and my name printed with oversized, uppercase letters, half of them backward, with shoes at the bottoms, as though I’d never written letters before. Me. My name. Writing a card to my father.

I sit on the floor and pull the box into my lap. There are my earliest efforts at forming the alphabet and the numbers up to twenty, spelling tests administered by my dad, half a page describing my new baby brother, my first book report, on
Misty of Chincoteague
.

There are essays I wrote on the creation of the Internet, the water crisis of 2044, the great blizzard of ’72, which dumped over four feet of snow along the Eastern Seaboard in a single night. I remember them more than read them. There is a grade
at the top of each one. I begged my dad to give me grades so I could feel like the real students I read about in books, and not just a kid writing papers in her kitchen.

There is the essay I began on the blood plague of ’87 but didn’t finish. The date under my name is 2095. I remember the excuse I made for abandoning it and also the true reason. The plague was coming back. It wasn’t history; it was hovering and buzzing outside our door. It was better to write essays about things that had ended, I decided, and it was starting to seem like the blood plagues had only just begun.

Another section of the box has a lot of my mother’s stuff: folded college and medical school diplomas, various certificates and awards. It is touching to me that my father saved it all. Her lab closed down in the late seventies, so there’s not much after that. I find a clipping from her college paper, and I wish I could see it better. I can only read the big type declaring her the winner of the intercollegiate debate competition. A debater! I find that pretty impossible to imagine. I look at the picture of her broad, confident smile.
Are you really my mother?
I want to ask that girl in the picture.

I can’t look anymore. The memories in the box connect me more and more to the memories inside of me, each one tying me to my old self like another length of string. Each one is reminding me of my Poppy, who is slowly, painfully edging toward the old man dying in my lap.

This is the past I was ordered to forget. It is here; it happened. It is part of me, what made me who I am.

Just because it hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened. It has. It is real. I am real. I am not some fabrication,
out of nothing and nowhere, floating through time. I had a real family. I belonged somewhere once.