We downloaded the audiobook and spent hours listening to all 1,322 pages, curled up under mohair blankets, drinking tea as the narrator—some young British actor from the Royal Shakespeare Company with an opera baritone and a schizophrenic ability to sound like completely different men and women, young, old, poor, aristocratic—told the futuristic tale of love and loss. It was a bewitching story, one of the best I’d ever heard, a heart-pounding mystery unfolding against a future world, fascinating and terrifying plot twists you couldn’t see coming.
The book took place far in the future. The main character, Jonathan Elster, was a bumbling, absentminded professor at a university for outcasts in Old Earth. He taught a popular alternative philosophy course, Intro to Unknowns, which covered, among other things, the nuts and bolts of time travel. For years, Elster had been in love from afar with a mysterious woman named Anastasia Bent, who taught in the history department. When she accidentally stumbled upon a cover-up about the history of the universe and vanished—a fisherman witnessing her wandering a cliff walk suggested she committed suicide, though her body was never recovered—Jonathan set off on a perilous quest across space and time to find her.
All of us grew silent and sullen as we listened. The violence at the Warwick police station had brought us all together, opened up the roped-off rooms in the sprawling, lavish mansion that had once been our friendship, flung the sheets off the furniture, turned on the lights. Now it seemed Martha’s disclosure had us taking refuge in our separate rooms again, disappearing up winding staircases, holing up behind closed doors, the only hint of company an occasional creak of the floorboards overhead.
I didn’t know what they worried about. They chose not to confide in me or, it seemed, in each other.
My own anxiety had everything to do with Martha. Those bombshells she’d dropped—J. C. Gossamer Madwick, the physical laws of the Neverworld being tied to each of us—had prompted me to scrutinize her every knowing glance and comment even more closely than I had before. To my shock, I realized that somewhere in the time since I’d found her at Brown with Professor Beloroda, she’d managed to quietly seize control of the entire group. For years, her status had been peripheral. She was the tagalong sidekick, Jim’s friend, the oddball you could count on to react to PETA commercials with some jarringly cynical comment like “Such propaganda,” or, when any couple ended up together at the end of a romantic comedy, “Another horror movie with a high body count.” Martha had always made us roll our eyes and chuckle. Now, incredibly, impossibly, she was the one the others looked to for guidance, for expertise and reassurance. A few times I tried confiding in Kip, Whitley, and Cannon, hinting that I didn’t trust Martha or this new direction she was urging us toward. They didn’t share my suspicion.
“What do you mean, she’s up to something?” Kipling asked me, frowning.
“I don’t know. It’s just a feeling.”
“But it’s good old Martha. Rain Man. She’s not conniving. She’s too honest and goofy.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Oh, come on.”
“I’m serious. She knows more than she’s letting on.”
“Does it really matter?” whispered Kipling. “What else can we do, Bee? I don’t know about you, but I need something to change. Anything. Even if it means…”
“Even if it means what?”
He shrugged, his expression bleak, the meaning behind his unfinished sentence obvious.
Even if it means we never get out of here.
Our evenings passed in heated discussions about how to change the wake and get to the Masons.
In The Bend, Jonathan Elster discovers time travel accidentally when following in the footsteps of the missing professor Anastasia Bent, who the police believe committed suicide by jumping off a seaside cliff. As Jonathan follows suit, jumping from the exact spot where Professor Bent was last seen, plummeting a hundred feet toward certain death, he finds himself crashing not into the rocky cliffs, but into the Thames in London in the year 2122.
“The open train compartment window for time travel always exists on the verge of death,” said Martha, “which is why so few people ever find it. You have to think you’re facing your death in order to reach it. So how do we find it here, in the Neverworld? I know I already asked you guys this, but have any of you ever tried to commit suicide?”
Again, we all shook our heads.
Martha seemed perplexed by this response, though she only nibbled a thumbnail thoughtfully, saying nothing more.
Another critical fact to remember was that for everyone to arrive at the right place and time—the same train compartment in the past or the future—we had to make sure it was the final thought in our heads right before the moment on the verge of death.
“We’ll aim for Villa Anna Sophia on Amorgos Island one day in the past,” Martha announced. “Yesterday. August twenty-ninth. That’s where we’ll start.”
“Why the past and not the future?” asked Cannon.
“You never know what tomorrow will bring. The future could hold a natural disaster, terrorist attack, alien invasion. The past has already happened, so we know what to expect.”
“But if we’re going into the past,” I asked, “why not just go straight to Vulcan Quarry on the night Jim died? Then we’ll know everything.”
“She’s right,” said Cannon.
“No,” said Martha, shaking her head. “No way. We’re not ready. In The Bend, the train gets shorter and shorter with each leap in time. That means our wakes will get shorter. It’ll cause too much instability. It could mean we won’t have enough time to come to vote with a consensus. We have to start out slowly.”
I didn’t buy her explanation—she seemed too quick to condemn my suggestion—but the others appeared to accept her answer. So I decided not to challenge her. Not yet.
No one had been to Amorgos except me. Only I had visited Jim that summer. So the others could vividly envision the time and place, I showed them photos from the trip on my phone and told them what I remembered: The island’s scalding brightness. The open-air Jeeps the Mason family drove around the island, tearing down the dirt roads like an occupying army. Edgar Mason, shut away at all hours in his space-age office, from which he’d abruptly emerge like Zeus coming down from Olympus (if Zeus was tanned to the color of whiskey, had spiky hedgehog hair, and rose every day at four a.m. to practice Ashtanga yoga while whispering into an earpiece). Jim’s younger siblings and their respective friends stampeding up and down the house’s staircases like herds of antelope. Jim had two younger twin sisters, Gloriana and Florence, and two adopted brothers from Uganda, Cal and Niles. Much to my amazement, they had a Swahili tutor living with them (“A cultural attaché,” Jim said). Jim and I had spent most of our time alone, reading aloud from John Lennon biographies, diving off the dock, exploring the coastline in a blue skiff called Little Bird. We snorkeled and ate grilled fish doused with lemon that squirted into my eyes and stung. We fed dinner rolls to the packs of wild dogs that patrolled the night streets like gangs, and stayed up into the early morning at drunken family feasts at gangplank tables under a blue night sky, chains of yellow paper lanterns bobbing overhead.