Unhappenings (4 page)

ne day, halfway through my second year at MIT, something unhappened to me twice. Or, perhaps more accurately, two completely different things unhappened simultaneously. They effectively neutralized each other, and I would not even have been aware of them if I hadn’t almost been arrested for one of them.

I was in the library when the police came for me. Sitting alone, as always, and engrossed in my reading, I honestly didn’t see or hear them until I heard one of them speak my name.

“Nigel Walden?” A loner by choice, I wasn’t used to being sought out, much less by a stern looking man in a uniform. I can only imagine the expression on my face as I looked up. Standing beside me were two police officers, one male, one female. For a fraction of a moment, I allowed myself to perceive them as campus security, but the guns on their hips snapped that image into proper focus. Behind the woman stood a man about her height, rotund, with a comb over that drew far too much attention to his hair loss. This was Dr. Ainsley, a professor I had the previous year. His lips, barely visible through his excessive mustache, were pursed, and his eyes narrowed. Broadening my field of awareness, I could see dozens of students, most strangers, taking an interest. One caught my eye for a moment. She wore a charcoal beret, and in the fraction of a second it took me to realize that I recognized her but couldn’t quite place her, she ducked into the stacks out of my line of sight. Her identity immediately dropped to the bottom of my list of priorities as I refocused my attention on the trouble I was apparently in.

As I said, I have no idea what my face looked like in that moment. I do remember the look on the face before me, and whatever shock I was feeling was somehow mirrored there. His mouth hung open, an unfinished idea (probably involving my rights) perched on his tongue. He turned to his partner, whose expression went from bored to confused, then he looked at me again. Dr. Ainsley continued to stare daggers.

The male officer addressed Dr. Ainsley. “This is him?” There was an edge of impatience to his voice.

“That is he,” said Dr. Ainsley with slow deliberation.

The officer looked at me again. His shock morphed into a frown. Confusion, laced with irritation. “You’re sure?” he asked, maintaining eye contact with me.

“Quite sure.”

Still looking at me, he pulled a tablet from a holster on the hip opposite his gun. He began to manipulate the screen. “What time did you say the break-in occurred?”

Dr. Ainsley audibly sighed. “1:15.”

“1:15 a.m.,” confirmed the officer.

“Yes, of course a.m.!” blurted Dr. Ainsley.

The officer turned on the professor and held the tablet about ten centimeters from his eyes. Ainsley lurched back startled, then slowly leaned forward, squinting at the screen. After a few seconds, he asked, “What am I seeing?”

“Security feed. From four angles. That’s a convenience store about five klicks from here.” He paused. “Please note the time stamp.”

Ainsley’s jaw dropped. “Surely,” he sputtered. “Surely that can be faked.”

The officer took back his tablet. The thump of his finger tapping the screen in rapid sequence was the loudest sound in the broad chamber where I sat. He held it out again. “The five witnesses I count will probably say otherwise. These three I have already IDed by facial rec, and this one,” he said, leaning in closer, and gritting his teeth, “is me.”

Ainsley opened his mouth, shut it, opened it, seethed, spun on his heel and stormed from the building. The female officer watched him go, then, wide eyed, shrugged for some sort of explanation. Her partner put his hand up gently to ward her off for the moment.

He crouched down next to where I still sat and said, “Mr. Walden, I apologize for troubling you.” Then, more quietly, almost a whisper, “And it’s nice to see you sober for once. Try to keep your nose clean, okay?”

I nodded dumbly.

“Good man,” he said, patting my back. Then they walked out, two dozen silent stares following them.

At that moment, I was certainly the least confused person in the building, and even I had no idea what was really going on. But this much was clear: at some point in my recent past, I had been in two places simultaneously.

At some point in my near future, I was going to travel through time.

have never been especially fashion conscious. With respect to my own appearance, I have always preferred to keep everything simple, tidy, and generally unnoticeable. Add to that natural inclination the fact that for my entire time as an undergrad I actively shunned the company of women, lest I grow fond of one and end up inadvertently and retroactively causing her death. As such, I invested absolutely no energy in what it meant to be visually interesting. Similarly, I took no notice of what women wore, how they styled their hair, or anything else even remotely connected to how they chose to present themselves to the world at large. So, it is no trivial feat of observation for me to state with confidence that in 2087, nobody—and I mean
nobody
—wore a beret.

It’s not something that would ever have occurred to me had I not been confronted with it, but much like a background noise that is undetectable until it stops, that one charcoal beret threw the global absence of any of its ilk into sharp relief. And, once seen, it could not be unseen.

From that moment in the library, not a day passed that I did not catch sight of that beret somewhere on campus. It was always from a distance, and never for any length of time. At no point did I consider that suspicious; there were, after all, undoubtedly many students whom I encountered every day without a second thought. The fact this one wore a beacon on her head made her obvious, but nothing more. I never made any attempt to engage her, nor did I have any such desire. But I always noticed her. Apart from that one time in the library, when an entire floor of students and staff couldn’t help but notice my brush with the law, I had no reason to suspect she ever noticed me. All else being equal, simply as a matter of her own safety, it was for the best.

And so, when I inevitably encountered her, it was with no small degree of apprehension.

It was a lovely spring afternoon, several months after my first glimpse of that beret. I was outside, enjoying the sun and the breeze, my head buried in a novel.

“Hi,” she said.

Again, not a lot of people interacted with me socially, so it took a moment to register that someone wanted my attention. I bookmarked my tablet, and looked up. There she stood. I was seated on the ground, against a tree, so right away I felt at a disadvantage. She looked at me, neither smiling nor frowning, and apparently unable to sustain eye contact for more than a second or so.

I weighed my potential responses. It was not unusual for complete strangers to approach me and talk to me like they had known me for their entire lives, which, from their frames of reference, was in fact true. This girl could be trying to introduce herself for reasons not yet clear, or she could be a classmate come by to ask why I missed a study session, or she could be my roommate. There was no way to know. My safest course in these situations was a meticulously practiced neutrality.

“Hi,” I said.

There was a pause, whose awkwardness value was not yet measurable. Finally, she said, “You… don’t know me.”

True, to be sure, but curiously unhelpful. Was she clarifying this was our first encounter, or expressing disappointment that I did not recall her? Impossible to say. Given my penchant for revisionist disasters, she could easily be a day I spent innocently in my room, unhappened into an ill-advised one night stand I wouldn’t even have the benefit of remembering. Up close, I could see, at last, how young she was. College age, perhaps, but if so, only barely. Visions of an irate father intruded on my peaceful day. As I tried to compose a cautious but probing response to that, she forged ahead.

“Um…?” she began.

“Nigel,” I said, guessing she was trying to remember my name. It was a shot in the dark, but it seemed like a safe way of moving this discussion in a less confusing direction. It backfired.

“I know,” she said. Then her eyes flew wide as she caught herself. They were blue, striking, and inexplicably familiar. “I mean… I know… that you’re Nigel.” Apparently realizing this explanation did not count as a recovery, she winced. More possibilities began to shape in my head, not the least of which was that I had a stalker who had finally worked up the nerve to approach me.

“Okay,” I said. I powered off my tablet and set it on the grass beside me. “Why don’t we start over?”

“That’s not funny!” she snapped. She immediately clapped her hand over her mouth, appearing shocked all over again. After a beat, she said, in a weak voice, “This was a mistake. I… I’m sorry.”

Then she ran. In her haste to flee, she stumbled and fell. I heard a cry, and then she picked herself up and tore away.

I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples. There was no clear avenue now. If this represented some sort of unhappening, following her might make it worse, but letting her go might be an even greater danger. If this wasn’t an unhappening, pursuing her would just draw attention to me, which was always my last resort. I counted to ten in my head and opened my eyes, preparing to stand. Directly in front of me, I could see her bleeding knee. I looked up into her eyes. She held my gaze with a new steadiness, in an obvious and difficult act of courage.

“Things happen to you,” she said. “And then they don’t.”

To anyone else, this surely would have been gibberish. To me, those words were the end of a nightmare, or so I thought. “You too?” I asked. She nodded, and as she crouched down to bring her eyes level with mine, she wiped away a tear.

“How long?” I asked.

“Most of my life,” she said. “You?”

“Ever since I was fourteen. Maybe earlier.” This girl had been going through the same disorienting reality reboots that I had, but for substantially longer, apparently. Setting aside my cascade of relief that I finally had someone to talk to about this, it was also likely she understood it better than I did, especially given that she sought me out. “Is this going to unhappen?” I asked.

She shook her head. “It can’t. You and I share variable frames of reference. We can’t lose this.”