Off Beat

The alarm rang seven seconds late. Martin Poe knew this because he had been awake for all seven of them. He opened his eyes at 6:14am precisely, stared at the gray ceiling above his bed, and waited for the first electronic notes of an alarm he had not actually needed in years.

               One second.

               Two.

               Three.

               By four, Martin was annoyed. By five, he reached toward the nightstand. At seven, the alarm finally sounded. Martin silenced it and stared at his phone.

               6:14am.

               “Well, that’s wrong.”

               The statement sounded ridiculous even in an empty bedroom. His phone was connected to the internet. Its clock synchronized automatically. Martin had no atomic clock hidden in the closet against which to challenge it. But the phone was wrong. Seven seconds wrong. Martin knew it the same way he knew when the microwave had 10 seconds remaining without looking at it, or when the light at North Walnut was about to turn green, or when 30 minutes of his lunch break had passed while his phone remained facedown on the table.

               He simply knew. He had always known. Martin got out of bed. Seven seconds was not enough to ruin a Monday. Not yet. His shower usually lasted eight minutes and 40 seconds. That morning it lasted eight minutes and forty-seven. The coffee maker clicked off seven seconds after Martin expected it to. He stood in his kitchen staring at the little machine. “Okay.”

               The coffeemaker offered no explanation. Martin poured his coffee, added a splash of cream, grabbed his lunch from the refrigerator, and left his house at 7:21am. Or what the dashboard clock insisted was 7:21. At North Walnut, the light turned red. Martin stopped. He took a sip of coffee. The light remained red. His fingers tightened around the cup.

               He knew this intersection. Every weekday for six years, give or take vacations, sick days, and one regrettable attempt at working from home, he had driven through it at almost exactly the same time. The light should change. It didn’t.

               One second.

               Two.

               Three.

               Four.

               Five.

               Six.

               Seven.

               Green. The woman behind him honked. Martin drove. His job was exactly the sort of job nobody understood well enough to ask questions about at parties. He worked in administrative services for a regional medical-supply distributor in Delaware, which meant spreadsheets, purchase orders, invoices, compliance forms, and explaining to people that attaching a document was not the same thing as copying and pasting its contents into an email.

               Martin liked it. Not passionately. People who claimed to feel passionate about spreadsheets were either lying or dangerous. But the work was predictable. Predictability had always suited him. At 9:36am, his coworker Amy leaned around the divider separating their desks. “Did you get the numbers from Harrington? Because if he sends me another spreadsheet with merged cells, I swear I’m going to…” She stopped. Her mouth remained slightly open. Martin waited. Amy didn’t blink. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead.

               “Amy?” Nothing. Martin stood. Six seconds. Seven.

               “…throw my laptop through his office window.” Amy blinked. Martin stared at her. “What?”

               “You stopped.”

               “I what?”

               “You stopped talking.”

               Amy frowned. “You wish.”

               “For seven seconds.”

               “Martin, I took a breath.”

               “No, you didn’t.”

               Her expression shifted from confusion to amusement. “Oh my God. You timed me?”

               “I didn’t have to.” That made her laugh. Martin sat down. Amy disappeared behind the divider. He didn’t laugh.

               Tuesday morning, the alarm rang 14 seconds late. Martin lay completely still until it sounded. He didn’t silence it immediately. Instead, he stared at the glowing numbers and felt something unfamiliar spreading through his chest. Not fear. Not yet. Something closer to offense. Reality had made a mistake.

               Martin was 41 years old. He had watched employers eliminate departments, girlfriends decide they wanted something different, grocery stores rearrange aisles for no discernible reason, and software companies move buttons everybody liked because some designer needed to justify a salary. Things changed. He understood that. Time did not.

               At work, Amy froze for 14 seconds while reaching for her coffee. A truck remained motionless halfway through a turn. A pigeon hung in the air outside Martin’s office window, wings spread, until the world jerked forward again. That evening Martin drove to a drugstore and bought the cheapest battery-powered alarm clock available. “You know phones have alarms, right?” the teenage cashier asked.

               “I’ve heard rumors.”

               Wednesday morning Martin woke at 6:14am. He watched both clocks. The phone remained silent. The cheap plastic clock remained silent. Ten seconds. Martin sat up.

               Fourteen.

               Seventeen.

               Twenty.

               At 21 seconds, both alarms began screaming at once. Martin shut them off. “Well, fuck.” There was something oddly relieving about finally saying it. By lunchtime he had abandoned every reasonable explanation. It wasn’t his phone. It wasn’t the alarm. It wasn’t the electrical grid. It wasn’t sleep deprivation, because Martin had slept seven hours and 42 minutes, which was about average.

               The simplest impossible explanation was also the only one that fit. The clocks weren’t falling behind. Martin was moving ahead. Thursday, 28 seconds. Friday, 35. The discrepancy accumulated with perfect mathematical obedience. Seven seconds per day. Martin began experimenting. He watched traffic lights. Microwaves. Elevators. The second hand of the clock above the breakroom door. Everything stopped according to the same schedule.

               Or perhaps stopped was the wrong word.

               The world did not visibly slow. Instead, there came a point where everyone and everything simply ceased moving until time caught up with Martin. At 35 seconds, there were advantages. Martin stepped backward before Amy dropped a stapler. He moved his coffee before someone bumped the conference table. On his drive home Friday, he watched a silver SUV approaching an intersection and somehow knew its driver was going to run the light. The world froze. Martin sat alone inside silence. A gull hung above the road. The SUV waited motionless 10 feet from the intersection. Martin looked at the red light ahead of him. Then at the SUV.

               He backed his car several feet. Thirty-five seconds after the silence began, everything restarted. The SUV blasted through the intersection exactly where Martin would have been. Someone behind him screamed. Martin drove home shaking. For the first time, he wondered whether being ahead might save his life. Three weeks later, he wondered whether it was going to end it. The gaps had reached two minutes and 27 seconds.

               Martin no longer enjoyed them. Silence changed when it lasted that long. Thirty seconds was peculiar. One minute was disturbing. Two minutes revealed that the ordinary world was never truly quiet. Without engines, voices, insects, wind, televisions, air conditioners, footsteps, water, electrical hum, and the million invisible vibrations human beings stopped noticing because they had never experienced their absence, silence became a physical presence.

               Martin could hear himself swallow. Could hear his heartbeat. Could hear the tiny wet movement of his eyes when he looked from one frozen face to another. Then, one Tuesday afternoon, he heard footsteps. Martin was walking back from lunch when the gap began. He stood near the corner of Northwest Front Street as Milford stopped around him. A man froze climbing into a truck. Two women remained motionless outside a storefront. A child stood with one sneaker several inches above the sidewalk. Martin sighed and checked his phone.

               12:43pm.

               He had approximately two minutes. Then came the sound. Step. Martin looked behind him. Nothing moved. Step. Not loud. Not hurried. A shoe against pavement. Step. Martin turned slowly. Something was walking along the opposite sidewalk. At first his mind refused to understand what he was seeing. The figure was approximately human in size and shape, but every time Martin tried focusing on its face, his eyes seemed to slide away from it.

               Not blur.

               Not darkness.

               Absence.

               As if his brain contained no category for what occupied that space. It moved between the frozen pedestrians without touching them.

               Step.

               Step.

               Step.

               Martin forgot to breathe. The thing passed a motionless woman. For a moment their bodies overlapped. Not collided. Overlapped. The figure walked directly through her. Martin’s stomach tightened. It continued away from him. He should have stayed still. Every instinct told him that. Instead, Martin turned his head to follow it. The footsteps stopped. Martin stopped breathing. Across the street, the figure stood with its back to him.

               Then its head turned. Too far. Not violently. Casually. A little beyond where a human neck should have allowed. Martin saw its face. And this time his mind found something to recognize.

               Eyes.

               A mouth.

               A nose.

               Human.

               Almost.

               The thing looked directly at him. Then the world restarted. A truck door slammed. The child’s sneaker hit pavement. Cars moved. Someone laughed. Martin nearly fell backward. The opposite sidewalk was empty. The next morning, something was waiting in his kitchen. The gap began while Martin was pouring coffee. Everything stopped. The stream from the pot hung in the air. Martin stared at it.

               Step.

               His hand began trembling.

               Step.

               The sound came from the hallway.

               Step.

               Martin put the pot down. A shadow crossed the doorway. Then a man stepped into the kitchen. This one looked more human. Late fifties perhaps. Thin. Gray suit. Old-fashioned tie. His skin seemed slightly wrong around the edges, as though Martin were remembering him rather than seeing him. The man smiled. Martin ran. He reached the front door, tore it open, and sprinted across his lawn. The man did not follow. Martin ran three blocks before the world restarted. He nearly collided with a bicyclist. “Jesus Christ, buddy!”

               Martin kept moving. He ended up beside the Mispillion River without remembering how he got there. His chest hurt. His lungs burned. He sat on a bench and pressed both hands against his face. “I’m losing my fucking mind.” Something snapped. Not audibly. Inside him. Martin opened his eyes. A duck moved across the water. Leaves trembled in the breeze. A woman pushed a stroller along the path. Martin looked at his phone.

               9:17:03.

               9:17:04.

               9:17:05.

               His pulse quickened. He waited. Nothing stopped. For the rest of the day, there were no gaps. The next morning his alarm rang precisely at 6:14am. Martin laughed so hard he nearly cried. Whatever had happened was over. Then he called his mother. They spoke every Sunday, but Martin suddenly wanted to hear her voice. “Mom?”

               “Everything okay?”

               “Yeah. Weird question. Do you remember that cabin we stayed at when I was a kid? The one with the paddleboat?”

               Silence. “Martin, we never stayed at a cabin.”

               He smiled. “Sure we did.”

               “No. Your father hated camping.”

               “It wasn’t camping.”

               “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

               Martin remembered water. He remembered sunlight. He remembered sitting in a paddleboat. But he could no longer remember who had been sitting across from him. Three days later, the displacement returned. Seven seconds. Then 14. Martin went back to the bench. Snap. Normal. The second time, he lost Charlene.

               Not Charlene herself. The knowledge that she had existed remained. He remembered dating her for almost four years. Remembered loving her. Remembered the restaurant where they broke up. But when he tried picturing her face, there was nothing there. Martin opened his phone. No photographs. He searched old messages. Nothing. He found Amy at work. “Do you remember Charlene?”

               Amy looked puzzled. “Who?”

               Martin left without answering. That evening he returned to the river. The bench was gone. Martin stood where it had been. There was only grass. An elderly man walked past with a dog. “Excuse me. What happened to the bench?”

               The man looked around. “What bench?”

               “There was a bench right here.”

               “Been walking this path 12 years. Never seen one there.”

               Martin stared at the empty patch of grass. Reality had not removed the bench. Reality had corrected the fact that there had ever been one. Other places worked. A doorway behind an old commercial building. A particular square of pavement near the river. Once, bizarrely, the center stall in a public restroom. Each reset returned Martin to normal. Each took something. Memories disappeared. Photographs changed. An old college friend vanished from his contacts. His mother forgot a Christmas Martin could still remember. Then Martin began discovering pictures in which spaces remained where he should have been.

               At first, he stopped resetting. That was worse. The gaps became minutes. Then tens of minutes. Then hours. Milford transformed. While ordinary people stood motionless, others walked among them. Dozens. Then hundreds. The figures looked more human every day. Martin understood before anyone told him why. They weren’t changing. He was.

               One afternoon, three hours ahead of the world, Martin sat on the riverbank surrounded by people who did not belong to time. A woman in a wool coat sat beside him. Her clothes looked old. Not costume old. Actually old. She watched the frozen river. “How long?” Martin asked. She looked at him. Her eyes were completely normal.

               That frightened him more than anything else had. “For me?”

               “Yes.”

               “Since 1938.”

               Martin swallowed. “What happened?”

               She smiled sadly. “Same thing that happened to you.”

               “What?”

               “We got off beat.”

               Martin looked behind them. People from different decades wandered the motionless streets. A boy wearing headphones. A man in suspenders. A woman whose clothing Martin had only seen in museum photographs. “Can we go back?”

               “Sometimes.”

               “How?”

               “You already know.”

               “The reset points.”

               She frowned. “Is that what you call them?”

               “I don’t call them anything.”

               “Good.”

               “What happens if I keep using them?”

               The woman looked toward the frozen river. “You get smaller.”

               Martin felt cold. “And if I stop?”

               “You end up here.”

               “How do I fix it?”

               “You don’t.”

               “There has to be a way.”

               She turned toward him. “There is always a last correction.”

               Martin waited. “What does it cost?”

               The woman looked at him for a long time. “Everything that says you were there.”

               The final place appeared beneath a bridge. Martin knew immediately. He felt it humming inside him, a rhythm beneath the rhythm. He stood there while three hours of stolen time surrounded him. The others remained at a distance. Watching. Martin thought about his mother. Amy. His job. Charlene, whose face he had already surrendered. Every birthday. Every conversation. Every stupid joke somebody remembered because Martin had been the one who told it. Everything that proved Martin Poe had occupied space in another person’s life. The correction could put him back.

               But reality required consistency. Nobody could remember someone who had never fallen out of time. Martin closed his eyes. “Do it.”

               Snap.

               Martin woke at 6:14am. The alarm rang exactly on time. He stared at the ceiling. Then he laughed. He showered. Eight minutes and 40 seconds. The coffee maker finished exactly when it should. The North Walnut light changed precisely on schedule. Martin drove to work grinning like an idiot. He held his access card against the reader. Red. He tried again. Red.

               Martin frowned. Amy saw him through the glass. Relief flooded him. He knocked. Amy approached the door cautiously. Martin smiled. She opened it only a few inches. “Can I help you?”

               The smile remained on Martin’s face. “Amy.”

               Her eyes narrowed. “Do I know you?”

               Martin looked past her. His desk was occupied by someone else. There were no photographs of him on the department wall. No nameplate. Nothing. He stepped backward. Amy closed the door. Martin looked at his phone. 10:07am. The seconds changed.

               :08.

               :09.

               :10.

               Perfect. He almost laughed. Then the footsteps came again. Not hurried. Not close. Somewhere behind him, moving through a space that shouldn’t have existed anymore. Martin watched the seconds.

               :11.

               :12.

               Nothing.

               :13.

               Still nothing. He waited. Seven seconds passed where there shouldn’t have been seven seconds. Then something behind him whisp