Unhappenings (10 page)

Our next fix was three months after that, for me, and at least a couple of years earlier for her. We traveled thirty years into the past, to a dog track, where we persuaded a bettor to drop two thousand dollars on a dog that finished fourth. By the time his money was lost, we were long gone.

She whisked me away a total of fifteen times during my years as an undergrad. There was never any explanation given for our objectives, nor any clear consequence of them. I learned not to ask questions, because it was pointless. The purpose of the device in my arm was not clear, although it certainly did something. On our longer trips, I sometimes thought I could feel it tingling.

But with or without any sense of what we were really doing, absolutely nothing could beat the thrill.

All the while this was happening, I was also continuing my association with Young Penelope. She learned not to ask questions as well, which struck me as an extraordinary measure of self control. There were times her future version appeared to me at an age that couldn’t have been more than five years older than she was now. At the time, I imagined that telling her about that would have been hazardous somehow. More to the point, I knew that her career as a time traveler was bound to begin very soon, and I didn’t want to somehow interfere with that by warning her about it.

During her fifteenth visit, that concern became moot. After traveling more than fifty years into the past to steal someone’s taxi, we returned to my apartment. I made a joke about her looking exhausted after such a hard day’s work, and she laughed. Then she said, “You try jumping back a total of a hundred and forty years, and tell me it wouldn’t wipe you out.”

I didn’t laugh. Penelope gasped.

“Oh, shit,” she said. “This is when you find out, isn’t it?”

only saw Penelope—Young Penelope—twice after that. Things between us ended very badly. So much so, in fact, that I had a great deal of difficulty reconciling it with how well her older version got along with me.

Our penultimate encounter happened on a cold December afternoon, just before sunset. I was walking home from a quick trip to the store when she accosted me on the sidewalk, as was her way. For two years, the only way I had ever seen her was by her own initiative. Given that I viewed her less a friend than a co-conspirator, it always seemed appropriate to me that we had no normal social interaction. We never exchanged phone numbers or emails. None of my other friends had any idea she existed. I certainly had no idea where she lived. All of this seemed entirely reasonable to me, in a bizarre, adolescent, fantasy-of-being-in-a-spy-movie way. The obvious, true explanation for all of this evaded me through sheer willful self-misdirection. I was now furious with myself, not only for being so naïve in the first place, but for allowing it to continue as long as it did.

That day, I heard her voice from behind me. “Hey, Nigel,” she said. I looked over my shoulder without returning the greeting, but did pause long enough for her to catch up to me. “What are you up to?” she asked, with rehearsed innocence.

“How old are you?” I asked her. If this non sequitur fazed her, she showed no sign. Instead, she gave me a coy, mysterious smile.

“How old do you think I am?”

We had played this game before, but not for a long time now. I learned early on that questions about her background were pointless. In two years she hadn’t even given me her real name. Her question was meaningless bait.

“Eighteen,” I said.

Her smile faded. This was not going to be a game. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s right.”

The revelation so quickly given was unexpected, but I forged on. “What year were you born?”

She frowned. “Do the math. I just told you—”

“You’re eighteen. Got it. What year were you born?”

The pause that followed was painfully silent, and couldn’t have been anywhere near as long as it felt. “2070,” she said quietly.

I laughed. “You can’t even pretend to answer that naturally, can you? Two years to rehearse that answer, and you still flubbed it.” We had stopped walking at that point. Penelope’s smile was gone, and she wasn’t making eye contact. “What year were you born?”

“I said—”

“I heard you. What year were you born?”

This pause was longer, and quite a bit more painful. Her older self told me she had traveled a hundred and forty years into the past when for me it had been a little more than fifty. That left at least eighty years, minus the twenty-something years old she appeared to be at the time. Rounding, I guessed, “2150?”

“That’s… close enough,” she said quietly.

Hearing her admission out loud was far less satisfying than I expected. And far more troubling.

“Plus 18 makes 2168,” I said. “I’m a hundred years old in your time. Am I still alive?” I meant it as a dig, but its impact as a real question hit me once it was out of my mouth, and I braced myself for the answer.

“Um,” she said. “It’s kind of…” She trailed off, and while I mentally juggled all the reasons she might not be able to answer that question truthfully, she said, “Yeah. You’re alive.”

Wow. “I guess that’s something,” I said. “So what does that make you? My great-granddaughter?”

“It’s not like that,” she said.

“Well, what is it like?”

She still wouldn’t look at me, and her face took on a pained look that might mean she was about to cry, or punch me in the face. Impossible to predict.

“You wouldn’t understand.”

With those words, she backed away from me, then turned and ran. I watched her flee, secure in the knowledge that she would find me again, having already done so many times in her own future. Still, something about this new understanding felt even less resolved than before, and perhaps irresolvable. As she shrank out of sight in the fading twilight, it began to snow.

or several weeks after that encounter, I spent each day expecting a visit from Penelope, although never certain which version I expected more. I did the best I could to carry on with my normal life—at that point I was only a few months away from graduation—but the distraction began to mount, and my schoolwork began to suffer. This was not the first time I had found myself underperforming at school, but it was the first time I could remember that struggle happening in real time, and not as the result of an unhappening. I grappled with the possibility that whatever relationship I had forged with this woman, at whatever various points in her own time, might actually have come to an abrupt halt in my own frame of reference. The thought troubled me in ways both obvious and inexplicable. My primary ostensible concern was the plethora of questions that would now go forever unanswered by her. Underlying that was a sick feeling that a part of myself had been torn away with her.

When she did finally break silence, I didn’t recognize her. She caught up with me in a shoe store, trying on a pair of hiking boots. It was a whimsical purchase, meant as part of a random reinvention of myself. Honestly, I half-expected the shoes to disappear after I got them home, and perhaps even hoped they would.

“Nigel?” I heard the voice as I was tying the second lace, and for a moment could not place it. I looked up into her eyes, and another moment elapsed before her face resolved into familiarity. Her blonde hair was quite a bit shorter than usual, and riddled with streaks of silver. A quiet smile with a hint of exhaustion spread out, and carried with it a collection of lines I had never seen before. This woman was fifty years old if she was a day.

“Penelope?”

She shook her head. “Once,” she said. “Not today.”

I looked at my shoes. “Should I take these off, or pay for them? Are we going somewhere?” I hoped my eagerness was less apparent than it felt.

“Either,” she said. “And no. I’m just here to talk.” She paused there. “Do you know when I was born?”

I nodded. “Circa 2150.”

“How long have you known?”

I shrugged, thinking back. “Two months? About?”

She sighed, audibly. “I didn’t think I would get this close.”

She let that hang, long enough that I felt compelled to take charge, something new for me around her. I stood.

“I’m going to pay for these. You want to go grab a cup of coffee?” She nodded. The stiff leather of the shoes strained against my feet in ways that did not say proper fit. I ignored it. “You okay?” She nodded again, quite unconvincingly. I abandoned my own shoes to pay for these uncomfortable ones. The five hundred forty dollars it cost me to wear them out seemed a reasonable sacrifice.