The Quiet

Five.

The number hung red above the platform. The sun had just set, that cool blue tinted the air. A woman stood on the platform holding her purse in both hands, the way people stand when they’re waiting for a bus they’ve already paid for.

Four.

She had done her hair. That was the part I never learned to sit through. Curled, pinned, and sprayed stiff against an evening wind that had no opinion about it. She’d done it for whoever she was going to see.

Three.

Her lips moved. Not a prayer, I don't think. A date. Some say the date at the end, the way a man says a name in his sleep.

Two.

The attendent, a kid of maybe seventeen in a paper hat, put his elbow on the sill of the service window and studied his shoes. He’d learned that much already. You don’t watch. 

One.

There was no sound of thunder. Only a white so complete it printed the whole parking lot on the back of my eyes, followed by the smell of hot pennies and a struck match. Who would have known time travel was quiet. 

The kid didn’t come out until the fourth customer to sweep the dust. That was the rule and he kept it the way boys keep rules, exactly and for no reason. I sat in the truck through three more countdowns to watch him do it. A man in a suit. A girl with a backpack half her height. An old woman who needed the hand rail. 

Then out he came with a push broom and moved the grey line off the platform in four strokes. The wind took most of it. He stood a second looking at the place where it went. 

The sign relit itself in friendly yellow letters. YOUR YESTERDAY AWAITS. NO RETURN TRIP NECESSARY.

***

Before all of it. 

I fixed the world eleven times. 

I could go, without the lever I made. That's all I’ll say about it here. The how was never the part that mattered. 

I made a phone call in late August that got listened to. Instead of a city being torn apart, it came and went like any other morning. I watched the lights come on at dusk from across the water and felt something I’d call joy if I still trusted the word. 

I took a young painter out of the world before he was anybody. They still needed a draft, and got sent further east. 

I turned a rifle an inch and the war came regardless. Bullets got made, bullets got fired. 

I had one shipment turned around at a border and took a pandemic off the board before it ever had a name to be afraid of. 

I pulled a boy out of a river for no reason except that I was passing and he was in it. 

Eleven times. I kept count, and not because I wanted to. Every time I came to I'd feel an ache before I'd spit a bloody tooth into my palm. The first one surprised me. After that I learned to hold my hand out.

Strangers, all of them. I had a rule about that. I want that on the record, because I never broke it, even when I wanted to. 

The ache never changed size. Not by a hair. In every one of those worlds a man still sat at a kitchen table at two in the morning wanting a Tuesday back. I handed them a century with fewer graves and they stood in the middle of it looking over their shoulders. 

They didn't know they lived in a better world. The past was what they wanted, and the past, I could give. 

***

Eight billion people. I made the one lever that would move them all. 

Not forward. That’s what surprised me at first, and then it didn’t. Nobody wanted to see what was coming. They wanted the porch light on in a house that’s been torn down. They wanted to walk into a kitchen and see a woman standing at the sink with her back turned. To say the thing they didn’t say. To be forgiven. To go left that one time they went right. 

I heard it a thousand times through a drive-through speaker box, in a hundred lots, in the flat voice people use for the truest thing they own. 

I didn’t invent the wanting. I just had the one thing nobody else did. I gave it to them, and they took it out of my hands. 

***

It started expensive, the way everything starts. 

What it sold was the past, and it sold easy. You could stand in a crowd and watch a man trot by that half the world spent two thousand years arguing about. You could watch the pyramids go up. You could stand in a wet valley and listen to something enormous stomp through the trees. 

And you couldn’t come back. But that didn’t stop anyone. 

It went from retreats to conventions, to cruises. You’d sail out of Port Canaveral with a band playing on the promenade while the stewards folded towels into swans. And on the last night, after the champagne settled, they’d walk you down to a white room below the waterline. The ships came back into port loaded to the rails with luggage and empty of passengers. The ship’s crew unloaded the luggage in silence; I didn't need to ask why.

By the ninth year it was drive-thrus. Two lanes. Eras backlit on a fast food board like flavors for a milkshake. RIDE WITH GENGHIS KHAN. STACK STONEHENGE. RIG THE LOTTERY. Ninety-nine down and the rest financed. 

It got rid of the homeless pretty quick. There were programs first, then vouchers, then nothing so formal. Just a lane at the end that didn’t charge. A second chance, the ads called it, and I suppose it was, sort of. Time travel can’t kill your demons. Not unless killing means leaving.

***

I had 29 teeth when Mary left. 

She waited until after the cruise ships, which I’ve always taken to mean she gave it real thought. She told me at the table on a Tuesday with her hands flat on the wood. She wanted 1972. That porch light on in Mendocino, the green chair and the one beside it, her mother in the other one with a glass sweating on the armrest. Not saying anything in particular. An hour of that would be worth it. 

So I drove her. It rained on the way down and quit the last few miles. She wore the blue coat. She had done her hair. 

She kissed me on the jaw and told me not to wait in the lot. I said I wouldn’t. I did. 

Five, four, three, two, one, and no thunder. 

I stayed for three more. 

***

The world went out like a town at bedtime. Not all at once. House by house, block by block, county by county. The highways emptied first, then the farms. There was a strange grace period in the middle years where everything still worked. Somebody was still at the plant. I've thought a lot about who stays. 

I ate in a diner outside Hagerman after calling the nightshift at a plant to double check the readings. I want to be careful here, because it was not a remarkable evening and I’ve spent a long time trying not to make it one. 

There was one waitress, one cook and one other customer. The waitress had stopped writing the orders down like she always does around 11 at night. The cook came out and sat on a stool at the end of the counter with his apron still on, which I understood to be a thing he had recently started doing. The other customer was a heavy man in a canvas jacket who had driven up from Phoenix. He showed us a photograph of his father without anybody asking to see it. 

They talked. The waitress said her sister had gone in the spring, to 1968. She’d known for a month. Drove her down herself. Didn’t cry until the car was already back in the driveway. The cook said he wasn’t going, on the grounds that he’d already been to 1968 once and it was overrated. 

The four of us laughed at that a good deal longer than the joke earned. 

“How about you,” the waitress said, topping me off. “You got people?”

I said the pie was good. And she let it go. 

She filled the cup again without being asked. The heavy man started on about a boat he’d owned, and the cook disagreed with him about the boat. The coffee maker ticked on its burner, and none of it was about anything at all. 

The four of us made a kind of family for ninety minutes, and I have thought about those ninety minutes more than I ever expected to. 

There was no moment in that diner that a man would sell his life to stand in again. And it was the only stretch of time in a very long life that I can remember not wanting to be somewhere else.

I had 21 teeth left. 

***

Home was a lake nobody had ever heard me mention. A whitehall that leaks a little. A dog I didn't choose so much as failed to discourage. 

I was born in a world that didn’t have it. Nobody had it, nobody had thought of it, and then I found that I could, the way a kid finds out he can whistle. 

Eleven times after that I went back to set something right, and eleven times I stayed to see what I’d made. They grow the same. Give one eighty years, a hundred. Somebody works it out. Me, or a man in a lab, or a woman who never told a soul how she did it. Then the lanes go in, and the lines form, and what felt like a door becomes a drain. 

I stopped telling myself the next one would be different after eleven. 

This is the twelfth and last time I’d spit a tooth into my palm. That was the fare. One tooth per round trip, however far, whenever. 

This is where I stop. The water, the quiet, all looking up at the hills behind it.

***

Rook will ride the bow, or he won't. He’ll take the granite shelf, or he’ll swim out after nothing and make me row him down. He has no yesterday to go back to and no interest in getting there. He arrives brand new every day, ruining it, doing the wrong thing, being alive in it. 

He’s gone grey at the muzzle in the time I’ve had him. Nothing else around here has. There’s nothing in a dog to sell to. The whole of what I built doesn't work on a dog. 

This morning he took the last of my sandwich off the seat while I was trying on a lure. He looked at me with the whole thing in his mouth, shameless, waiting to see what I’d do about it. I laughed so hard I had to sit down in the bottom of the boat. 

He’d never done it before. Nine years, and he’d never done it before. 

I knew the sound of my own laugh from somewhere. It took me a while. A stool, an apron, a bad joke about 1968. 

Nothing was happening, and I let it run. 

The sun went down and kept going down, into an evening I have never seen, on a lake that is mine and nobody’s. The cold came up off the water. The mallards flew off somewhere out past the shoreline. Every hour after that was new. 

There will be a tomorrow here. And I don’t know one thing about it.

20, that’s what’s left. I could go back and stand in the diner again if I wanted to. Nobody there ever learned my name. It wouldn’t break the rule. But it would cost another tooth and for reasons I can’t name, the memory seemed worth more than the visit. 

The lure is on. I set my feet and go through it in a new way. The count is the same. Everything after is a we’ll see. 

Five. 

Four.

Three.

Two. 

One.

The line breaks the surface with a small, clean sound. The ripples go out and out and out, and nothing flashes, and nothing burns. Rook is barking at something behind me that I haven't turned around to see, yet.