No, really.
He looked at her steadily, sitting up now, elbows braced on his knees, his hands folded together and his head resting on top of them, like some kind of solid Buddha, as if he knew everything that was going through her mind.
Then her thoughts raced, as though a tiny chink in a dam had grown huge, and a tumult of feelings rushed through her. Her mind did a wild flip, and her anger flowed out of her. “I understand.”
The lines of his face loosened, moved from tension to deep relief. He let out a breath and bowed his head. “Thank you. Thank you, Jill.”
Whens
FUN WITH TRACY AND ELMORE
July 22
WHENS DID NOT LIKE the room he stayed in when he was at his father’s. The color of the wall was like a gloomy day. His mother had helped him pick out the colors of his room at Halcyon House. It was bright yellow and bright red, and he had painted part of it himself, so parts were also a very pretty orange color.
Also, at home—what he thought of as home, though his father was saying now that this would be his home—no one cleaned his room. It was his job, his mother said, and sometimes he did and sometimes he didn’t. Walking into this room was always kind of depressing, because it was always exactly the same, like no one really lived here. No matter what he did, he couldn’t make a dent. The bed was always made, and before he cuddled into it he had to move the fancy pillows and bolsters and pull down a heavy fancy quilt that he was not allowed to do anything on, including color pictures, eat, or drink. By the time he finished with the work of getting his bed ready, he was all woken up.
He was not allowed to leave his room after he was officially put to bed by Lavender Lady, which meant that she came in, pulled the covers up around his neck, kissed him on the cheek, and turned out the light. She had just done all that, and now he was lying here in the big bed with nothing to do but watch the light from car headlights on the street ebb and flow across the ceiling and race across his desk before disappearing.
He wasn’t sleepy. But he had to stay in his room. He wasn’t allowed to wander around the house or go into the kitchen and get something to eat. His father and Lavender Lady were very strict about this. They kept saying that his mother was crazy to let him eat whatever he wanted no matter what time it was. In fact, they often talked about how crazy his mother was, which made him mad.
It made him mad right now.
He rolled off his bed and reached for the light switch, but then stopped. When he turned the light on, Lavender Lady always seemed to know it, and came right away.
It wasn’t very dark anyway. He knelt beside his pack, which rested against his desk. He opened a zipper pocket on one side and poked around. His phone wasn’t there. In the third pocket he opened, his fingers touched the smooth surface of his phone and he pulled it out and called his mother.
She answered right away. “Hi, honey. How are you doing?” She sounded very glad to hear him.
“I hate it here,” he said.
“I know, but your father really loves you and he wants you to stay there with him for a while. Tracy said she had the room specially fixed up for you. It looks really nice, doesn’t it?”
“No.”
“I hope you are being polite about it?”
“I just want to come home.”
“You can’t, not right now. I wish you could. I really miss you. I’m coming to lunch at your school tomorrow.”
“Why can’t I come home?”
“Because of the fire,” she said, but he knew that it wasn’t just that. “There are a lot of people working here now, with saws and things, and it can be kind of dangerous. Are you reading anything fun right now? I’ll bring you some new books tomorrow.”
“Okay. Can you come over now?”
“No, honey. I’ll see you tomorrow. I love you!”
It was not even dark yet and here he was, alone in his room, in his pajamas. He liked to read big books with hardly any pictures, like the grown-ups. Well, Winnie-the-Pooh did have some pictures, but not on every page. He wasn’t supposed to read books at night here because it would hurt his eyes—they had taken his flashlight away—and Lavender Lady said that he was too young to read and that it would hurt his brain. He had laughed at that and told them that he couldn’t feel his brain; brains didn’t have feelings. His father and Lavender Lady had then looked at each other with The Look, and his father just said, “Well.”
He went to the window and yanked on the window shade. He was not allowed to open the shade himself because when he did it rolled up all the way to the top, flap, flap, flap. This really made Lavender Lady mad. She had to carry his desk chair over and pull it back down perfectly halfway. All the shades in the house had to be that way. Until she went around and pulled them down for the night. There were a lot of strange rules here.
He yanked on the shade, and it went flap, flap, flap, and he looked down on the street, with its fat green trees. A few cars drove past, but he couldn’t hear their whooshing sound. Some people were out walking their dogs, and there were even children playing across the street in the park. He couldn’t yell at them because another rule was that the windows had to always be shut because of the air-conditioning. Also, there were alarms on them.
He went to his dresser and got out his old shorts and his old T-shirt, which he’d put back in a corner after his dad threw them in the trash, saying that his mother was dressing him like a ragamuffin and they were too worn out to wear. He liked them. They were soft and cool. He put them on.
He then opened his pack and considered what to put in it. His treasures were few but essential. A smooth swirly stone he’d found in the creek that most certainly was magic. He could feel it. He just didn’t know how to use it yet. He got it out from the bottom of a drawer where it was hidden and plunked it in.
The Hobbit, which his mother had been reading to him, went in next. It was a bent-up old paperback. He had shiny new books here, all perfect on a shelf, but he had to be very, very careful in handling them and even sit in a special chair and not sprawl on the bed. Lavender Lady had deeply insulted him by telling him not to color in them.
And the checkerboard on which he played with Grandma, which his mother had rescued from the front yard after the fire and given to him.
“Whens, Whens, Whens. My name is Whens,” he chanted in a whisper as he packed. Maybe that was the worst thing here. They refused to call him by his name. They didn’t even know who he was.
Finally, he was packed.
It was a little bit darker outside now. The streetlights were on.
Lavender Lady and his father were watching television in the special theater room right now. He wasn’t allowed to go in because of what might be on the television. The door would be closed.
He put a pillow under the covers to make it look like he was there. He had read about that in a book. He turned off the light in his room and then went down the hallway, past the closed door of the theater room, where there was a loud noise of machine guns, and went down the steep, long stairs.
At the front door, he pushed the button to turn off the alarm, went out onto the front porch, and closed the door quietly behind him.
Sam Dance
July 22
SAM HAD WANDERED the same nexus-shot London underground for what seemed weeks, searching for Bette, surfacing occasionally to a London of half buildings and bomb craters, or dull office buildings in the fifties, then trying another dead end. Trying to get back to D.C., 1991, where Jill was in the hospital.
One night, as he slept underground on his bedroll, he awoke to exquisite violin music. Gypsy violin.
He stood and packed his stuff, then tracked the source. Was it a musician in an echoing entrance, one of many who roamed at night, keeping spirits up and playing for food? Maybe.
But it bore a strange resemblance to the music that, for him, had always signaled a nexus—the odd, aural flavor from a distance, or as if he had some kind of neurological disturbance. He walked down the platform, stepping over sleeping Brits, following it as it strengthened and then shifted to—yes!
“White Heat”! But not like any “White Heat” he had ever heard before—which for him, was the stamp of true jazz. Originality. His excitement grew as a train roared down the tunnel.
He got in.
He was just getting settled, and “White Heat” was filling his brain and his entire body, reaching its crescendo, pulling up memories of the Squounch Club, the Perham Downs, the Army reunions during which timestreams merged and he and Wink could meet, when a voice announced that the next stop was Union Station, Washington, D.C.
He picked up a discarded newspaper on the seat next to him. It was 1991. In the blink of an eye, confluent and then congruent with London, 1944, the two timestreams blending then parting, coming in from infinite angles, close enough to touch and step into, from one side and cross to the other, if one knew how, if one’s being was infused with enough of Hadntz’s blend of quantum physics, neurobiology, and … in his case, luck.
He was in an orange, plastic Metro seat. Opposite him, a stylized grid map of the Washington Metro butted against an ad for George Washington University.
Stepping out of the car as soft lights flashed along the platform, he took the up escalator. Ignoring the splendors of Union Station, he headed through it and emerged into the golden light of a late afternoon in full summer, which kindled the impatiens and daylilies in the park across the street to a blaze.
He headed unerringly toward Halcyon House, hoping to find Bette there. When he was only a block away, a familiar figure hurried toward him, waving.
“Sam!”
“Wink?”
He and Wink met, embraced, stepped back. “Well, old man, glad to see you back again,” said Wink.
“Old man, eh? You’re not looking so hot yourself. Is Bette here? I’ve been—”
“She’s not with you?”
“Do you see her?”
“Calm down. I’m sure—”
“Don’t tell me to calm down!”
“She left to look for you last week. But listen to me. Listen! You need to stake out Elmore’s town house in Georgetown. Here’s the address.”
“Elmore’s house? Isn’t Jill there too?”
“No. They’re getting a divorce. She’s here. But your grandson, Stevie, is there. I’ll call you a cab. I’ve been keeping an eye on Halcyon House, and I saw you from way, way down the street. Brian and his family are here now, so I’m heading out to Megan’s.”
“Just tell me what the hell is going on.”
“That Perler Device. Remember? He stole it from us in Mönchengladbach, and then the Russians got it. Somebody here in D.C. has it, and we don’t know exactly who, or where it is.”
“It was no good, though. It didn’t work. It was a failure.”
“That was way back. In another timestream, even. I believe, and Hadntz believes, that it might activate.”
“I got the impression from you that Q was self-healing, incapable of doing wrong, like a new improved God almighty, only better, so if that’s true—”
“The Perler is still a prototype of the original, primitive Device. Hadntz has been looking for it too, and can’t locate it— Look, Sam, she is just exactly one step ahead of this game, that’s all. Even if she’s echoed and magnified through a zillion timestreams and even if she isn’t blindsided by her own humanity, she is still human.”
“Okay, so why isn’t this goddamned Q-stuff fixing everything?” Sam threw his duffle on the ground and glared at Wink.
“I don’t know. All I know is this: Someone is targeting your family, and I’ve been keeping an eye on all of them for months, and it’s all going haywire, and you need to get your ass over there and watch your grandson, okay? Here’s the cab. Here’s the address. Here’s my Q. Try to call Bette.”
Sam’s heart felt like lead. “Is this all I can do?”
“I think so, right now. Grab something to eat on the way. You look like hell. Here’s some money. But hurry. Something’s going down. I’ll call you soon.”
Sam didn’t stop for food. He watched Washington, a Washington not a whole lot changed from when he’d left, thirteen years earlier, but with the vehicle charging kiosks he’d predicted on every other corner, and tried to forget that he was, after all, seventy-two years old and numbed by everything happening so fast, after so many years of lulling calm.
Sam had just settled himself on a picnic table across from Elmore’s town house, a dressed-down renovation that screamed Money and Good Taste from every understated detail, and was examining the Q device Wink had given him, when the door opened, and a little boy slipped out and closed it ever so carefully.
Whens!
The boy looked around, then hurried down the steps. It was a wonder that the huge pack on his back didn’t pull him over backward.
Sam stood, thrusting the device toward his pocket, not noticing when it missed his pocket and fell out, and left his heavy duffle on the ground.
He side-leaped the fence, which was not very high, just meant to keep children from running into the street, and landed with a clump! as his scratched combat boots hit the sidewalk, and felt silly because he now had a hell of a pain in his left knee.
He wondered if he should just grab Whens, risking arrest, or follow him. He reached for the Q, so he could ask Wink, then searched every pocket. Gone. Crap.
The boy’s blond hair shone beneath a street lamp then darkened as he moved past the light. The boy moved in a determined and fierce short-legged jog. Sam drew closer, deciding: He would simply pick up his grandson and let him scream for help. He didn’t want to frighten him with pursuit, though—he could easily get away from an old man. Sam was thirty feet away when a car pulled up next to the boy, then moved in tandem with him.
“Whens!” Sam broke into a run, feeling like a very old man, wheezing and puffing with the sudden effort.
A short, fat man in a suit, wearing a ridiculous homburg, jumped from the car and seized the boy. The hat fell to the sidewalk.
Whens indeed screamed and hollered. And kicked.
Sam punched the fat man in the face. He staggered backward. Whens bit the man’s hand, which covered his mouth, and the man let go.
Whens darted down an alleyway, his pack bobbing behind him.
Both men took off after him.
Wilhelm
WILHELM’S EVENING
July 22
IN WILHELM’S SANCTUM, a slight breeze rattled his plastic window blinds as he patiently tried to put together the material he had. He’d thought the books he’d taken from the Dance library would help.
But apparently, he still did not have enough information.
He shoved the books away from him, and took a few swallows of fake German beer. He’d been very disappointed to read, on the label, that Löwenbraü was manufactured in the United States.
Everyone, everything, had failed him.
The only helpful thing had been a very strange note, just a jot on the endpaper of What Is Life? The book itself was piffle, of course. Schrödinger was not a Jew, but he’d left Germany because he did not like Hitler’s anti-Semitism campaign, so he was obviously not very intelligent.
The jot said, “Game Board?”
His spies—helpmeets and friends he’d cultivated over the years—had been keeping a close watch on the Dance family, and on their house. They understood the import, the majesty, of his quest, and that they would share in the outcome. They also agreed to wear old-fashioned homburgs, but he wasn’t sure now that that had been a good idea. The brims could disguise them, somewhat, if they were pulled down low, but the hats made them stand out. The real reason was that he was sentimental about homburgs; his father had worn them; many men at that time wore them, in Germany. Everyone would wear them again, once the right people were in charge.
Setting the house on fire—that was another mistake. He’d let his anger get the better of him, but he thought the house would go up like tinder. It might have killed Jill. But Jill had gone to the market with that colored man, according to his compatriot, Adler, his Eagle—short though he was, he was far-seeing—and it was then he began to suspect that her respect for coloreds, and all her work for Africa, which he had assumed that someone as brilliant as Jill could not be sincere about, might be sickeningly real. Maybe he was mistaken about her. But no—later, at the house, she had actually allowed the colored man, Kandell, to touch her … his stomach roiled.
Yes, he had been stupid. He might have killed her. Maybe that was what he had wanted, at that moment. But he had endangered the big plan. That was what happened when you let emotion overtake you. Without Jill, he might never know the secrets he must learn. And he might have left clues at the house.
At any rate, Eagle had seen, on the seat of Brian Dance’s truck, a metal board, covered with … games. Just games. A small checkerboard. A racetrack. Things of that nature. The Game Board of the scrawled note? He had wasted time calling to ask Wilhelm if that might be something he wanted.
Wanted? Yes!
But it was too late. Brian had surprised Eagle when he was trying to break into the car, and to escape pursuit, he drove to the German embassy, where he worked as a janitor. He kept an eye on things there too. It was terrible, the things he saw and heard; Germans had forgotten their great mission altogether. They had lost their soul. Wilhelm knew, though, that he only needed to find out how to empower the Device, or build one himself.
The plans. That was all. He’d broken into the truck himself, later that night; no need to leave it to amateurs, and the board was no longer there.
It didn’t matter. The plans were what mattered. And now, he could think of only one way to get them. It was desperate, yes, but once he had the Device, or the plans, he would have the power—the power that Jill didn’t even seem to know she had.
He Q’d Eagle: “Time for Bip.” Bip was a useful thug—white, of course—with connections to other thugs. “Yes, that’s right. I’ve made the decision. I know it might take some time. Be alert, though. You never know when an opportunity might arise.”
He looked back at his security screen. Now what?
He had hacked into the condo’s security system when he moved in, ten years ago, and enjoyed keeping an eye on things. He always knew what his neighbors were up to. Right now several police cars were pulling up in front of the building.
He picked up his poor, twisted Device, then, in a split-second realized that if indeed they were after him, and he had it on him, or if they found it here …
Opening the hooks on the window screen, he pushed it out the window, and rehooked the screen. He was only on the fifth floor; there was nothing but a small, unused grassy verge behind the condo.
He locked his office, ran out his front door and down the hallway, toward the emergency exit stairway. Once through the door, he left himself a slice of vision. The police got out of the elevator and knocked on his door.
Gently pulling the door closed, he descended the stairway. They wouldn’t realize he had known they were coming until they got into his locked room, so if he was lucky he could get out of the side exit before they surrounded the building.
When he reached the ground floor, he listened. No shouts, no unusual sounds. He opened the door, looked out, saw no one, and walked away, swiftly blending into pedestrian traffic. As usual, there were plenty of strollers and window-shoppers in Georgetown this evening.
He would come back later, after they had left, to retrieve his artifact. No one, walking by casually, would find it remarkable enough to even pick it up. It looked rather like a rock.
His phone rang. It was Eagle. “What? Excellent news. I will give you a new address. Bip must take him there immediately. There is a key over the doorjamb. No, I won’t be there until tomorrow afternoon. I must prepare … things.”
He increased his pace. Luck was on his side at last.
Lev
KOSLOV’S TALE
July 22
JILL WAS AT THE BOOKSTORE. Whens had just called from his father’s, sounding forlorn. She gathered some books to take to him when she visited him at school tomorrow during his lunchtime. She agreed with Elmore that he should not be at Halcyon House right now. As she resumed her place at the counter and began looking through the books, Koslov walked in.
She tried not to freeze, and wondered if she should call 911.
The store was full of customers. She tried the Golden Arrow of Breath, but still her heartbeat quickened.
He walked quickly to the counter. “Jill, there is something I must tell you.”
She looked him in the eye. “What?”
He looked around. “Not here.”
“Here. Now.” Koslov stepped back while Jill sold a stack of books, and then returned to the counter. His deep-set eyes were worried. Even concerned? she wondered.
He pulled his wallet from his back pocket, opened it, pulled a photograph from behind his driver’s license, and laid it on the counter in front of her.
It was a black-and-white photo of three people standing on the wide front steps of a stone house; behind them, the doorway looked regal, and on both sides of the door were potted palms and wicker chairs. On the left was a middle-aged woman, possibly from the 1930s, judging from her clothing. Next to her was a young woman, whom Jill recognized, instantly, as Hadntz. And the third person—
Koslov put a nicotine-stained finger on the young man. “Me. I was twenty. I was a friend of Rosa Koslov. I also knew her daughter, Eliani, a very talented woman. She had an M.D. like her mother, and a doctorate in physics, like her father. I have been trying to—”
Another customer approached. Koslov whipped his photo from the counter; Jill chatted with the customer and sold a paperback mystery. The customer left.
Koslov said, “I know what happened to you, Jill. The same thing happened to me. I’ve been tracking down a … valuable artifact, for years. I know it is in Washington. I met your mother, long, long ago. I am trying to help you. You are in danger. Please meet me in”—he looked out the window—“that restaurant, there, across the street, when you close. You don’t have to be afraid. There are plenty of people there.”
Jill watched him jaywalk across the street and enter the C&O Restaurant. The door closed behind him.
Jill called Daniel. There was no answer. She left a message: “Koslov asked me to meet him in the C&O Restaurant when I close. I think I should. Maybe you could sit at the bar and keep an eye on things? Call me.”
Only ten minutes until closing time. There was only one customer in the store, browsing. Jill turned off the lights in the back. The customer looked up. “I thought you were open till nine.”
“We are. Just getting ready to close. Do you want anything?”
She shelved the book she’d been reading. “No, not tonight.” She left.
Jill locked the door behind her, put the cash in the safe instead of in a deposit bag, which she usually did, grabbed her purse, and locked the door behind her.
Daniel wasn’t there. Koslov was in a booth in the back, nursing a drink. Jill ordered chowder and wine on her way over, then slid in opposite him. Koslov lit a cigarette.
“I don’t have all night,” she said.
“You’re a bit like your mother, you know. Businesslike.”
Jill absorbed this information with a mental check! Aloud, she said, “How did you meet the Hadntz family?”
“Eliani’s father is Russian, as is a great-aunt on her mother’s side, which is how they met, when they were young. I’d always known their family. I visited whenever I was passing through Vienna. By the time this picture was taken, Eliani had developed many interesting theories about the brain, physics, consciousness, and her thoughts about ending war, which she shared freely with me.”
Jill dug into her clam chowder and sipped her wine. She was hungry. “I’m listening.”
“Eliani went to colloquiums with the luminaries of the day. Bohr, Dirac, Pauli, Meitner. Meitner got her a job with Rutherford, in England, and she worked briefly with Fermi in Chicago but was disgusted. She wanted nothing to do with the atomic bomb. Instead, she went her own way, invented her own use for the powers of quantum physics.”
“Her Device.”
Koslov nodded, apparently unsurprised. “During the war, a version of the device fell into Russian hands, through a man named Perler, who sold it to them.”
Perler again. “What did you do during the war?”
“I was lucky. I had a heart condition that exempted me from military service. It was fixed by surgery about twenty years ago, but”—he glanced ruefully at his cigarette and shrugged—“I was teaching at what was then Leningrad University, as a graduate student; history was always my passion. The university was evacuated during the siege, but I stayed there; I had formed a close attachment to Rosa’s mother-in-law, who was elderly. I helped her, and many others, survive. There’s a story in that, but no time for it now. We managed to get out during one of the evacuations, and spent the rest of the war in Saratov, at the evacuated university. I actually taught; made a little money. During that time I had ties to an anti-Stalin organization. Late in 1944, a packet with Rosa’s poems came to us, and several more arrived thereafter. I think that Eliani’s father died during the war, either in Germany or Hungary. Eliani’s grandmother died too, before him, perhaps; she was quite elderly, weakened from the siege, and I believed that grief from the war was the final cause of her death.
“By the end of the war, everyone knew what Stalin was doing; he was a murderer on a much grander scale than Hitler. My underground ties strengthened, and I lived, quite dangerously, in St. Petersburg, which was renamed Leningrad, and a time of purges began. Kosmopolitanism, of which I had always tried to be guilty, was a crime, for which you could be arrested.” He laughed.
“After the war, your mother sought me out. She was trying to track the Perler Device, and also those plans. I was astounded at the breadth of what my childhood acquaintance, Eliani, an older woman whom I admired from afar, had accomplished. Bette recruited me for the OSS, and I agreed readily. I was always sure death was around the next corner, anyway. She worked out my emigration, and procured a teaching post for me. When your parents moved to Washington, I was a frequent guest at their house, and I remember you when you were young, Jill. Ah, I’ve finally elicited surprise!” He smiled. “One day, you and your brother and sister recruited me to play a game on what you called the ‘Infinite Game Board.’ I told your mother, afterward, the strange effect it had on me, and I believe she took it away.”
“I found it again.”
“So I gather. The Perler Device was tracked, solely by your mother, who took pains that the CIA not know the extent of her involvement, to another expatriated Russian, whose name was Mikhel, but by the time she found him, he had passed it to someone else, and he died without revealing who that person was. And so it was left hanging.”
“So—why do you suppose you remember both histories?”
“A very good question, Dr. Dance. After—the change, in 1964, both your mother and Eliani Hadntz came, separately, to visit me.”
Jill didn’t bother to try to hide her astonishment. Tears filled her eyes. “My mother was—here? In Washington? And she didn’t…”
Koslov said gently, “Yes, but not for long, and it was months after the original event.” He tilted his head. “Eliani, you see, had visited me fairly often over the years; we could reminisce about her mother, her father. She loved to hear stories about her grandmother. Because I knew so much, she freely confided in me the powers of the Device, her concern about what she had unleashed. She talked about her progress in other timestreams—about how, in one, she had won a Nobel Prize, and how she wished, once and for all, for the change she had envisioned in humankind would sweep through them all, via some kind of physics event that I was not remotely qualified to understand. So I knew that this Device, which changed people on a genetic level, at a … quantum level, I suppose, whatever that means, enabled her own ability to exploit what she called the nexes. Your mother took her leave of me most tearfully; she had already met with your father and told him of her decision. She felt that even in this timestream scrutiny would follow her, would attach to her family, and further endanger you and your brother and sister. They made the decision together. He would stay behind and raise you. But at some point, I think, even he lost track of her, and even your mother could not find her way back. I did not even see Eliani for a number of years.”
Jill grabbed a napkin and mopped at her tears.
“But when you began taking my classes, I felt … hope, somehow, that this could all be resolved for your family, for Eliani. This hope was enhanced by the fact that I had met the son of the man who had the Device. His father’s last name, originally, was Konrad, and he worked for the CIA under the name of Anderson.”
Jill stared at him. “So Bill—Wilhelm—”
“Yes. I had, eventually, been able to trace Mikhel’s contacts, and Wilhelm’s father was one of them. I tracked possibilities down, one after the other, slowly, over the years, discarding one after another, and finally focused on Wilhelm, though his father was dead. It seemed worth a look. I took pains to meet him; I joined one of the anti-American societies he belonged to, briefly, in his late twenties. I convinced him that I was a secret Nazi—he was surprisingly gullible on that matter, considering that I was Russian, but I had no shortage of historic knowledge. Even if he had tried, he couldn’t have tricked me into involuntarily admitting that I really belong to no country. He simply couldn’t believe that, given his insane devotion to a fable. I cannot give my heart to nationalistic dreams, because they are always, in the end, just so much dust, after much suffering. If I have any religion, it is Eliani’s vision.” He signaled for another drink; lit another cigarette.
“I convinced him we were brothers, of a sort, and he eventually revealed everything to me. I helped him with his education, helped him come to Washington, where he formed another circle of friends with like goals, and insinuated myself into becoming their old, wise, learned leader. Your sister heard all of that during the night of your party.” He smiled. “Oh, yes, of course I knew she was there, listening.”
“So where is the Device that he has? Does it have any sort of value at all?”
“He has tried to analyze it, he has wormed his own way into the past, he has his own CIA contacts, thanks to his father. He hinted that he had something extraordinary, early on, but no, I don’t think it does work as intended. Without Eliani to verify it, I could not have known, anyway. I don’t believe that it does, because he has always been intent upon finding the original plans. But because I have no specialized knowledge, I have no idea of its potential.
“His CIA contacts led him to suspect your mother. He might even know more about you than you know about yourself. In fact, he is obsessed with you. I have broken my silence to warn you: He is a dangerous man.”
She shivered, but anger immediately replaced her fear. “I knew there was something weird about him. But I don’t know what to do about him.”
“I’m not sure either, but this is something you deserved to know.”
Daniel, who had slipped into the booth behind Jill without her noticing, joined them, holding a cold beer. Koslov nodded at him.
“Oh,” said Jill. “Hello.” She slid over to give him room, and he sat next to her. She was comforted by his presence.
Daniel said, “One thing we can do is arrest him for arson. That’s why I couldn’t answer your message, Jill. I connected the dots this afternoon, finally; all the evidence was at hand, I got a warrant, and we went to arrest him at home.”
Koslov exhaled with a long stream of smoke. “Excellent news. Excellent. After all these years. But—arson?”
“Someone set my house on fire a couple of days ago.”
Daniel said, “It’s not that excellent. We went in, but he wasn’t there.”
“Damn.” Jill put her hand over her heart. “What now?”
“We staked out his condo. If he doesn’t come home, I hope he’ll show up at work tomorrow.”
“No matter how close Wilhelm and I became, he would never admit me to the locked room in his condo, and I suspect he had—” Koslov paused and looked at Jill.
“He knows everything,” Jill said. “This is Detective Kandell. My history professor—”
“Lev Koslov,” he said, reaching across the table and shook hands with Daniel.
Koslov said, “I suspect that Perler’s Device was there. Was it?”
Daniel shook his head. “We’re inside, doing a search. We found lots of Nazi memorabilia there, as well as detailed information about Jill on his Q. He was, apparently, totally consumed with knowing everything about you. Wall of photos, the whole stalker thing, textbook. I didn’t have time to read much, but he dreamed of creating a new superrace. You’d be the lucky mom.”
“I might have nightmares for quite some time.”
“When we get him, what with the Nazi stuff, and the threats on his Q to many people in public life, including detailed plans, he’s in the pokey anyway. Oh, Jill, I forgot: The books you said were stolen from your library were there too. The exact same ones you thought were taken.”
“You sound surprised that I was right.”
“Actually, I am. He bookmarked places that someone had annotated in the margins, and in one of his files it looked like he was trying to piece the information together, somehow.” He asked Koslov, “What would this Device look like?”
“I don’t know.”
“Brian has a picture of it,” she said. “An early incarnation of it, actually. The catalyst, maybe. It’s in the attic.”
“Then,” said Daniel, “I move we adjourn to your attic.”
Whens and Bip
July 22
WHENS WAS NOT AT ALL pleased with this development. He had been heading home, and now he was in a stupid apartment with two really stupid people. They wanted him to watch the same dumb television shows that Tracy and his father watched, shootings and sirens and stuff.
There had been little improvement.
However, they did not hesitate to provide him with Slingers.
All in all, though, he would rather have been at his father’s. He was a little bit afraid, especially after that punching fight … all right, he was a lot afraid. At least that really mean short fat Eagle man was gone. He had spit in the man’s face as he struggled to get away in the car, and the man had thrown him against the side of the car, yelling in a strange language.
He had known, in the back of his mind, before he even left the condo, that it was not a good idea to try and get home, especially after dark. But sometimes it wasn’t easy to think of everything that might happen.
One of them threw his phone out the window as soon as he took it from his pocket. To his surprise, they gave him his classbook. Before he asked for it, though, he threw a stage-ten meltdown purely on purpose.
After he started screaming, one of the men, the short fat one named Bip—“Bip?” Whens had asked, when he said his name. “Really?”—said, “Shut that kid up, will ya?”
“Shhh,” said Bip, putting a finger to his lip.
“No, not like that,” said Tall Thin Man, who was trying to talk on the phone. So far he had no name. “Belt him one.”
“We’re not supposed to. All he wants is something from his pack. Some kinda game.”
“Give him the goddamn thing. Just no phone.”
So, Bip gave him his pack. Whens took out his classbook, turned it on, and Tall Thin Man kept talking on the phone, saying, “Yeah? Where?”
But just as soon as Whens got to the emergency band of the classbook, Bip came in and said, “Let’s move. They’re takin’ us somewhere.”
Tall Thin Man grabbed Whens’ hand and yanked him along. Whens looped one arm through his pack strap.
“You can’t take that,” said Tall Thin Man.
Whens writhed and screamed and tried to bite him, and Tall Thin Man hit him in the face. Then Whens started to scream for real.
He managed to keep hold of the classbook, though, and his pack, as Bip hauled him down the stairs and out into a waiting car.
Bette
BETTE COMES HOME
July 22
BETTE HAD BEEN GONE for four days—or decades, depending on how you looked at it, which she hardly even tried anymore. When she returned, she had the information and equipment she needed, stashed in her bag, taken from a more technologically advanced timestream, no help from Hadntz, thanks. She was terribly upset. Sam was truly not to be found. He had probably tried to follow her, and he was not at all good at it.
She returned as her “real” age: seventy-two, so this time she was clearheaded and prepared—although a bit stiff. None of this had been easy; her emotional as well as her physical self had teetered on the brink of rushing darkness more than once.
She arrived at Union Station unscathed, with her new tools, and hurried back to the house. Halfway down the block, she paused. It was dark. And it smelled of smoke.
She ran to the house, and studied it, terrified.
The streetlight illuminated a blackened screened-in porch. She recovered some presence of mind and pulled her bags off the sidewalk, into some bushes. Then she walked slowly past the house, surveying it closely. Other than dark licks of burnt wood above the porch, it appeared to be intact. She went up the sidewalk and around the library side of the house. The rest of it seemed intact. Just chillingly empty.
She was surprised that a fire had even gotten started. This house probably had the most sophisticated residential fire protection in the city, thanks to Sam. It must have been arson.
Had anyone been hurt?
A darker fear invaded her. Perhaps she was in the wrong place, had made a mistake—
Then she heard Manfred barking inside and let go of her breath. They were still here.
She knew that all her sensitive equipment in the attic had been particularly protected; steel doors would have slid over it and an inert gas, or whatever the government was using to protect its data when Sam had left, had filled the compartment, protecting it from heat as well as fire. He had designed those systems.
Returning to her bags, she carried them around to the back, and opened her secret door.
Slipping upstairs, she found her room intact. And dry. Puzzling. Why hadn’t the sprinklers gone off?
Opening her electronics room, she saw that everything had functioned as Sam had planned; the equipment was sealed beneath a metal cover.
That was Sam, all right. He thought of everything. She sank into her chair, cradled her head in her hands, and blinked back tears, sucking in deep breaths of fire-soured air.
She had failed Sam. She had not found him. She had left, and encountered Megan in the train station, to search for him—again, at the high cost of what Hadntz called “splintering,” although she probably called it something else, now, damn her. The “update” she had given Bette at the party, down in the grotto—her neuroplasticity augmentation substance, which Bette had taken—had done nothing to enhance her search.
Bette stood, flung open the window, and found the switch that opened the electronics bank. Settling down to work—and now she wanted to work very fast—she went through the equipment, testing. Everything worked. Naturally.
Ripping open the zipper on one of her bags, she pushed aside the original Game Board, which she had gotten in Dallas and retrieved from Mönchengladbach on her timestream jaunt. She found the small, cushioned box holding the interface she had brought back from another timestream—one that did not contain Sam, her children, her grandchildren, or, she thought, even Hadntz. In that timestream, war was indeed just a memory. Something had gone right. She hoped that she had adequately described her antique system. If she had, this would interface between it and Q.
First, she slid the interface, which looked like a floppy disk, circa 1991—small, encased in square plastic—into a drive, heard the machine whir, and took the disk when the machine spit it out.
Flipping open a tab on the disk cover, she found another disk the size of a child’s fingernail, paper-thin, glowing green. Taking her Q from her pocket, she pasted it onto the Q’s screen, where it seemed to melt.
“Not Enough Information,” said the screen.
She almost screamed. All that timestreaming—fruitless! She’d returned to a burned house, without Sam—with nothing. She was too old. She couldn’t do this anymore. She needed help. But where could she turn? She had always depended on herself. Hadntz was absent, as usual.…
She let her mental tantrum play out. She opened the window, breathed fresh, untainted air, sensed, though she could not see, the new dome growing, the new school, the new International Teaching Environment, the Q-School …
She extracted the original Infinite Game Board from her bag. Infinite, my ass, she thought. Prove it.
She went through the pink room and walked out into the attic. From there, she walked down the regular stairs until she got to the ground floor. Manfred ran up to meet her, and she patted the big dog’s head.
The lights were off, but the house was not really dark. Streetlights threw shadows across the old wood floors and Oriental rugs. She breathed in memories of all the years she and Sam and her family had lived here, the Thanksgiving when Jill insisted on working in the soup kitchen, Megan splashing to school in oversized galoshes, Brian growing up much too fast—
In the library, she turned on the desk light and ran her fingers over a row of books on a lower shelf behind the desk. Her books of Chinese poetry. Read and reread, it seemed, hundreds of times.
Her fingers touched the ragged cloth spine of the book she had carried through most of the war, and had given to Sam after their first night together, after their foray into Berlin to buy those vagrant plans from the Russian in the wild, terrible days of late May 1945, when the blasted city was filled with bloated bodies, and she had photographed the plans.
She pulled out the volume, turned off the light, and left a disappointed Manfred inside when she closed the back door behind her.
She descended the path to her grotto. She knew it by heart. Sam had placed every stepping-stone.
Curling up on her bench, she watched the creek, below, flash silver back at the rising moon. The roar enveloped her, isolated her in time and space.
She lit a cigarette. The book fell open to her favorite “On Hearing That His Friend Was Coming Back from the War.”
Yet I never weary of watching for you on the road.
Each day I go out at the City Gate
With a flask of wine, lest you should come thirsty.
Oh, that I could shrink the surface of the World,
So that suddenly I might find you standing at my side.
She could almost hear Sam’s voice speaking the words.
She touched the board. It came to life.
After all this time, all these times, she still remembered that seminal night. After meeting Hadntz at the Opera House on what later became known as Kristallnacht, Hadntz had taken her through the burning city. In the course of that night, Bette had shot a German officer, for which she was later reprimanded by Dulles, and Hadntz had gone with her back to her Ringstrasse hotel and showed her the embryonic plans for the Device. That was the night when Hadntz had, basically, recruited her from the OSS, on Kristallnacht in Vienna, 1938.
It was as if she were there.
That was what the board did.
The memory, precise and powerful, flowed up from her fingers and flowered in her brain.
Once again she was on the balcony of the Imperial Hotel, in 1938, in the dawn after Kristallnacht. The memories were precise, crystalline. She smelled the smoke, witnessed one planned stage of the destruction of a civilization bound by laws, respect, and decency.
She once again felt the lines of AE’s poem ring through her:
Out of a timeless world, shadows fall upon time.
Then, she was assailed—later, she could think of no better word—by memories. But they were not her own.
She was Hadntz, doctoring in a small German hospital on the front in WWI, realizing that the gassed man dying of pneumonia was her former fiancé; witnessing also the horrific, futile deaths of thousands of men whom she had not the power to help.
She was Hadntz, twelve years old, with her feminist mother in Berlin, at the first International Women’s Congress in Berlin in 1896, which seethed with Communists, Utopians, Socialists, radicals of every possible stripe, hearing Maria Montessori’s rousing speech declaring that all women had a right to equal work for equal pay, feeling the joyous, fierce, imperative to join the battle for human rights dawn within her.
She was Eliani Hadntz, first mastering the timestreaming capabilities her device had opened within her mind, accessing other quantum possibilities, uniting scientific disciplines, dropping in knowledge from other timestreams, growing infinitely old, infinitely sorrowful, infinitely dedicated to helping humanity, through science, past its self-destructive stage.
She was Eliani Hadntz, shepherding her own chain-release mechanism through World War II and finally, now, finding the strength to relinquish it, to bequeath it to humanity to do with it as it willed, no matter what might unfold.
She was Pandora, Shiva, and Buddha, riven and tattered, surrendering.
I climb by a phantom stair to a whiteness older than time.
Each step was laborious, infinitely painful, a struggle against a part of human nature that flooded time with death, blood, and sorrow.
Finally, Bette could stand no more. She threw the board from her, fell to the stone floor of the grotto, and wept.
* * *
When she finally stirred and sat up, she found that the memories had ceased, leaving her cleansed and clearheaded. The stream, below her, moonlight-filled, was the same stream of her other life, yet different. It ran through both timestreams, as did her children and their children.
Other, darker things ran through this timestream as well.
Those children and grandchildren were in danger—the danger she’d tried to draw from them by leaving, with so much heartbreak, decades earlier.
She had climbed the phantom stair. Here was the fruit of her labors, in her lap—the Infinite Game Board, the first, basic, and tremendously effective interface of the Device with humanity. It was one of Q’s precursors.
This was what had started it all. There had to be a lot of them in this timestream, except—
Perhaps, when she had retrieved it from Dallas, she had thwarted its continued evolution. Perhaps. This board, this incarnation of the Device, was like a wild horse, a collection of possible futures, constantly averaging the next possibilities. Q, the next incarnation, was more refined and elegant and focused on what most people would believe were positive goals—the cessation of war, the increase of free knowledge and of Hadntz’s original vision, wrought through the rapidly advancing sciences foregrounding the central mystery of consciousness in all its manifestations.
But this board—this surely could, thought Bette, find its ancestor with ease, wherever it was.
This time, when she touched it, she seemed inoculated against its deepest horrors. When she touched it, the old stories arose—Sam’s war stories, both hidden and secret, including Hadntz’s plans. Those plans branched from the original, skipping through timestreams, touching some lightly, sinking deep into others, transforming them.
Lightly, quickly, she touched, touched, touched again, wrenching herself from the personal stories, coaxing the board to show its own history, where bits of its self were now lodged.
And yes, there was one botched Device, on the trembling verge of coalescence, of transforming into a useful Device, much like the connection between brain and eye might be completed, in Georgetown.
She wondered—what would this timestream, with Q, have to fear from it. Surely Q could absorb and transform any possible negative consequences—
Bette looked up, aware of a presence, and saw Eliani Hadntz standing on the bank of the stream, barefoot, but otherwise dressed as Bette had first seen her—vibrant, her long black hair catching moonlight in its waves, wearing a red dress. It was like the Hadntz of Kristallnacht, of the war, and later—vast, though tiny; brilliant, aware, committed. Not a person, but a force.
Q personified.
She turned toward Bette and walked up the stepping-stones. Gently, she took the board from Bette, without speaking. “Get out your Q,” she said. “Set it on the board. It’s ready.”
Bette took her Q from her pocket, set it on the board.
It became translucent, glowing, shot with colored threads, with universes.
At the same instant, Hadntz—the brilliant, ever-young, Hadntz, a force barely contained her slight body, vanished in front of Bette’s eyes.
At first, Bette thought it was a trick of moonlight. “Eliani?”
There was no answer. A blinking light on the board caught her attention.
An address in Georgetown flashed on the small screen of her Q, which was restored to its previous density.
Bette stood. “Eliani! Dr. Hadntz!”
The night was far from still. Cicadas whirred; the moon reappeared as a cloud blew past; coneflowers ranked before the stream on the low bank bowed before a breeze, then stood upright again.
Flooded with relief, Bette headed through the garden. When she reached the car kiosk on the next block, she slipped in her pass, unlocked a car, and plugged her Q into the dashboard.
It said, “Turn right at the next corner. In twenty-five feet—”
Good grief. She knew where she was going. This would rot her brain. She snatched it from the dashboard and sped toward Georgetown, careening down alleys and little-used side streets.
When she got close to the address, she parked a block away. A few police cars were out front, doors open, blue lights flaring. She left the car, taking her Q.
A good distance from the building, she turned onto dew-damp, neatly mown grass to avoid setting off any motion detecting lights, alert for any other people, following her Q’s signal. A guard stood at the building’s side door, scanning the street; he didn’t notice her.
The signal led her behind the building, a brick wall broken by regularly spaced windows, patios, and, above, a few balconies. The patios were deserted. Most of the windows were dark. A tall fence backed the property about thirty feet back, faced by bushes.
She advanced slowly as the frequency of the flashes increased.
There! She’d almost stepped on it.
She picked it up.
Finally. It had not changed in forty-five years; at least, she couldn’t see any changes in her cursory examination by the light of her Q.
What was it doing out here? She’d expected to find it stashed in someone’s basement, or locked in a Langley lab. The dad-blasted Perler Device, a loose end that had plagued her for decades, was just lying on the ground for anyone to find.
She dropped it in her bag and returned to her car.
* * *
Back in her room, she turned on the voice-activated tape of what had taken place while she’d been gone.
Many things had happened, but not anything she had expected—discussion of the party, the fire.
Instead, there’d been a break-in, an investigation, something that sounded like a budding romance, multiple Game Boards, and general uproar. The fire seemed like the least of the problems.
When Jill began to cry in the course of her confession, Bette turned off the tape. She’d left her daughter a terrible burden. But of course she’d known she would on that bleak Washington day in early 1964 when she’d met Hadntz at the Peoples Drug store on Connecticut Avenue and realized that staying here might well bring death to her family.
Jill had blamed herself for what seemed, essentially, her mother’s death. Bette wept as well, for a long time.
It was always so hard to be a parent, to know what to say or do or tell. It was, simply, hard to be human, to make the right decision.
Cars pulled up, doors slammed. She stumbled to the front window and saw Jill and two men she didn’t recognize file past the flowers. She hurried back to her room, hearing footsteps on the stairs.
She heard a commotion in the attic, then whoever it was went back downstairs. A few minutes later, her microphone picked up their exclamations, their discoveries.
Daniel Kandell. She’d investigated and discovered that she knew him, although she remembered his little brother, Truman, better, and their father Gerald. Gerald had been involved in intelligence; he’d been there in Germany, and it was natural that he’d be back in D.C. It was his home, and home base for the agency, and the intelligence world was small. That past was the same in both time lines, except at the very end, when the Americans took Berlin instead of the Russians.
She was surprised to recognize the distinctive voice and accent of Lev Koslov, who said, “I’ll call a mutual friend. Hello? Yes. It’s Lev. Have you seen Wilhelm? No? I have an important message for him; have him get in touch with me immediately if you hear from him.” Then, to Daniel and Jill, “No luck.”
Wilhelm Konrad.
Bette understood everything in a flash. Wilhelm was the son of Anson, whom she’d shot in Dallas; she knew his background well. Anson’s other son, who had died in Berlin, had been a Hitler Youth, a Werewolf. Someone an impressionable boy would worship; emulate. A martyr.
Apparently, Wilhelm was the man who had so conveniently left the Perler Device lying on the ground under his window, so she hadn’t even had to bother with the elevator. She could see now how it had made its way from Russia—through Anson, who probably kept it as a bargaining chip he had waited too long to use—and how it had languished so long, unfound and undetected.
Wilhelm, she heard, as they discussed the evening, was also the person who had set the house on fire.
It was a wild night of revelations downstairs—among the participants, and for their eavesdropper. As she listened, Bette was deeply thankful that no one had been hurt.
So far.
In the meantime, she considered the problem of Wilhelm. Her first thought was to just shoot him and throw him in the river.
She lit a cigarette and sat back in her chair.
After a while, she again got out the Game Board.
She touched it on and set to work, loosing its energy, fully linking it to Q.
By the time everyone retired, she was ready. She took what she needed and left the house. Picking up another car at the kiosk, she drove to Wilhelm’s condominium with the windows open, enjoying the scent of the damp night air.
No police cars, but of course police were there, watching and waiting. They might not be quite as alert as they had been earlier. She was hoping that Wilhelm would think along the same lines.
She returned to the spot at the back of the condominium where she had picked up the Device, retreated to the inky shadows, sat on the damp grass, leaned against the stockade fence, and waited.
She waited for hours, and would have waited much longer, but at around 5:00 A.M., he arrived like German clockwork, before a new, sharp police shift would come, poking his head around the side of the building.
He zigzagged across the grass. He was the type of person who would be on the condo board; he probably knew where the motion detecting sensors were. Beneath a window she assumed was his, he looked back and forth, then fell to his hands and knees. Bette stood as he inched his way forward, making wide arcs through the grass with his hands. He didn’t dare risk a flashlight; Bette supposed he surmised that someone was posted at one of the upstairs windows.
When he got close to Bette, she said, “Is this what you’re looking for?”
He jumped to his feet and reached for, surely, his gun.
She stepped forward and before he could move, she cuffed his hands, in front of his waist, in plastic restraints. Then she pulled him at gunpoint past the building’s end, past the sleepy guard. His upper arm shook as she held it with a firm grip. “Here’s the deal.”
He stared at her in the faint light of the coming dawn. “You’re not a cop.”
“I have what you want. And I’m going to give it to you. First, drink this.” She held up a disposable plastic-lidded fast-food cup with a straw sticking out of the top.
He spat at her, which she had anticipated, stepping back before he even tried it. She slapped his face and said, “Now, let’s try again. Don’t bother to spill it; I have plenty.”
“What’s in it?”
“Wilhelm, you should rejoice. It’s your holy grail, the Hadntz Device, fiftieth incarnation. A powder.”
“I don’t believe you. Who are you? How do you know about—”
“Drink it.”
After a bit of expert persuasion, which Bette assured him would not cause permanent damage, he fully complied.
Jill
July 23
JILL WAS GETTING DRESSED for work when Elmore called.
She’d had a very late night. They’d found the photograph of the Perler Device. Daniel and Koslov had perused the notebooks all night in the library.
She went upstairs to sleep at four. When she returned at six, Daniel was asleep on the couch. Koslov snored in the rocking chair.
She had awoken Daniel and told him she wasn’t going to work. She didn’t want to see Wilhelm there. He had convinced her she had to go; he had a man outside the house, dressed in a suit, with a Bank entrance pass, waiting to follow her to work for her safety. He would follow her inside. “Wilhelm might be watching to see if you go into the building,” Daniel said. “We could nab him. Depends, I suppose, on how obsessed he is.”
Now, as she gathered her briefcase and keys in the foyer with unsteady hands, her phone beeped. Elmore.
“Jill,” he said, then said nothing more.
“I’m right here.”
“Is…”
“Is what?”
“Is Stevie with you?”
“What? No. What do you mean?” Her voice rose. “Isn’t he with you?”
“He’s run away. He turned off the alarm and left. I don’t know when.”
“What are you talking about? When did this happen?”
“I’m not sure. We put him in bed at seven, and—”
“Seven? Seven? He doesn’t go to sleep until at least nine.”
“Tracy—we think that he should get more sleep. He seems kind of cranky.”
“He was there at eight. He called me at eight. He sounded really lonely. I got some books for him—” She made herself stop. This can’t be happening, she thought. “Did you look everywhere? He likes to hide. Look around outside. Isn’t there a park across the street? Maybe he’s playing there. Maybe he just left a few minutes ago.”
“I looked everywhere.” Elmore sounded despairing.
Don’t panic, Jill told herself. “So you’re saying that he’s been gone for twelve hours, maybe?”
“We checked on him—”
Now she was screaming. “Twelve hours, Elmore?”
“Yes.”
“What did the police say?”
“I haven’t called them yet. I just found that he was gone. I went to get him up and—I was hoping he was with you.”
“Oh, right, it might get in the paper. I’m calling them right now.”
“I’ll call now. I just wanted to check—” His voice caught. “They’ll want to come here.”
“Maybe I should wait at home,” she said. “Maybe he’s on his way here. Or maybe I should call someone to stay here. I’ll do that. I’ll go out to look for him.”
“The police might want to question you.”
“I’m going out. Where would he go? Can Tracy check the school? It’s not far from you. Maybe he just walked over there.”
“Tracy’s, ah, in court.”
“Right. Court. Okay. I’ll let you know.” She hung up, furious, afraid, and at her wit’s end.
She called the school. An aide was there, setting up, and Jill listened as she combed the school, calling his name. Finally, breathless, she said that he wasn’t there.
“Call me immediately if he shows up.”
She hung up the phone. Dread, she thought. This feeling is pure dread.
Daniel was at her side. “Whens is missing?”
“I can’t stand it,” she whispered. “I just can’t stand this anymore.”
Zoe
SOMEWHERE THERE’S MUSIC
July 23
ZOE HAD BEEN WORKING in the ballroom since seven in the morning, when everything got so crazy. She sat on the floor next to a tall window and slanted light blessed her scorebook, propped on her knees. Her markers were scattered around her.
Zoe’s Dad and Mom and the Crazy Aunts were in the library when Zoe got finished, around nine. Some of them were talking on phones. There were other people there she didn’t know. Crazy Aunt Megan was putting on her running shoes. Her dad picked up his car keys.
Zoe handed Brian her scorebook. “This is where Whens is.”
Brian looked down at the familiar-looking manuscript, the interesting spatter of color that Zoe’s bits of music always were, as if the colors were as much of a pattern as the tones that were simultaneously represented. Except—
“Okay. You have extra lines down here. Not five staff lines, but seven.”
“I put those in when I do people.”
“Okay,” Brian repeated, as he always did when he was trying to be extra patient with his kids. He continued to study it.
“What do you mean, when you do people?” asked Crazy Aunt Jill. “Can I see that?”
Brian handed it over.
Zoe frowned. “You didn’t know that I do people?” She sounded hurt.
“I’m sorry, honey.” Jill reached over and hugged Zoe to her. “No, I didn’t. What do you mean?”
“All of you have sounds. Can’t you hear them?”
“We’re not as gifted as you, sweetie.”
Zoe stepped away from Jill and looked around at all of them, puzzled. “Well,” she said finally. She paged through her book. “Mom sounds like this.” She held up the notebook briefly. “And Bitsy looks like this.” She held up another, more antic-looking page, with colors and notes scattered wildly.
“Can you play them for us?” asked Jill. “Can you tell us what they mean?” She sounded very crazy today, but Zoe understood. She shook her head. “These notes aren’t on the piano. The extra ones.” She sighed. “The violin is better, but there’s just too much space when I play it. I fill it in with my head. It’s—kind of behind things, or in front of them.” She brightened. “I just need to invent a new instrument, that’s all. Anyway, now we can find Whens. I’ll just have to show you.”
“How?” asked Jill, her hands white and clasped to her chest.
“We can drive there,” said Zoe. “Don’t you see?”
Her dad and Crazy Aunt Jill looked at each other. Detective Kandell was there too, but looked like he was getting ready to leave. Zoe liked him; he was kind and never acted like he thought she was nutsy.
Then Brian said, “I don’t think we can go right now. We’re—really busy. How about tomorrow?”
Zoe stared at them, one by one. Then she walked away in silence.
* * *
Zoe stood on the front porch, uncertain, for a moment. She thought she might cry, but she didn’t.
Instead, she looked at her score. Then she turned left and turned left again at the corner, where the bus stop was.
The bus trundled up just as Aunt Jill’s car came around the corner. Jill and her dad were in the front seat. They did not look at the bus as she climbed into it and showed the driver her Metro pass.
The driver nodded and pulled the door shut; the bus lurched forward.
Zoe sat in the front seat, straining forward to see out better. She looked at her score. At one stop she started to get up, and then sank back into the seat.
Finally, when they were at the George Washington University stop, she got off. She waited until the walking light came on, crossed the street, and went into a side entrance of the hospital.
It was getting a little tricky. She was glad the adults weren’t with her; she knew they wouldn’t follow her through this.
She got on an elevator and went to the fourth floor. A nurse at the station glanced at her when she got out of the elevator, then looked back at her computer screen.
Zoe walked briskly down the hall. She missed Whens so much! She blinked away tears and took the stairway down two floors, walked down another corridor, and took the elevator to the basement, where she went to the cafeteria.
She walked through the kitchen, which smelled like mashed potatoes. She felt like she was in a movie! This was where people always ran to get away from someone who was chasing them. However, she didn’t feel quite strong enough to smash over the big chafing dishes on wheels, or push the shelf of glasses over behind her to slow people down. It was kind of boring when nobody was chasing you. Then a thin woman carrying a stack of napkins said, “What are you doing in here?” and she broke into a run. Much more fun!
She burst through some double doors and was on a big concrete delivery bay. Two men were there, loading boxes onto a dolly. She rushed down the stairs and shot out onto Washington Circle.
A streetcar was coming around the circle. It was connected to a wire up above the street and ran on a track. The cars all looked funny. Zoe closed her eyes and listened. The clanging of the car grew louder, then stopped.
The streetcar door was open in front of her. A woman pushed past her and got on. She was dressed in a different way too. She wore a kind of tight dress and a round, little blue hat that matched her dress.
The woman sounded like the bottom note on her score, which was kind of like a drone note. Everybody here did.
The driver looked at her. “Getting on, girlie?”
Zoe reached into her pocket and the driver said, “Kids ride free.”
Zoe stared out the window. Washington looked the same, but different. It was fun, but scary. She knew she wasn’t dreaming. The perfume of the woman next to her burned her eyes.
She closed her eyes, listening. Sweeter in this direction …
She leaped from the streetcar on a quiet street lined with trees and ran past some picket-fenced yards until she got to the one on the corner.
Whens was in the front yard, playing with a big white dog. The dog fetched a stick and then Whens took one end. They pulled. Whens let go and fell down backward. The dog ran off, tossing his stick in the air and catching it with great joy, looking at Whens with a laughing sideways glance.
“Whens!” Zoe ran up to him. “Everybody’s looking for you!”
“My name is Stevie,” said the boy. He stood up.
“I’m Zoe.” She was taken aback. This boy looked exactly like Whens. But Whens would never say that. “Don’t pretend. We have to get back right now. Come on!” She took the boy’s wrist.
The boy yanked it away. “I really don’t want to play with you.”
A woman came to the door. She looked kind of like Crazy Aunt Jill, but different. She wore a cotton dress with a big wide skirt.
“Hi,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron. “What’s your name?”
“Zoe,” she said. The sounds were so strong. She looked down at his music in the notebook, and the colors glowed and matched. Most of them. This was Whens. But it was a different Whens. “I’ve got to go.”
She walked back down the street, thinking. She wished very hard that she had her colored pens. She realized that she needed to make yet another line on his staff. The music was getting really complicated.
She took the trolley back to the hospital, and went through the various floors, in a bit of a daze. She paused at the gift shop window and looked longingly at a set of markers there, then hurried away. Maybe she could get home before she forgot this new part of the music.
She got on a bus and was home by eleven.
She turned onto the front walk and her mother came running out the door. She grabbed her and hugged her close. “Where were you? We were worried sick! Oh, I’m so glad you’re back.” Zoe watched her send a message to her dad.
In a moment, Brian pulled up in his truck and jumped from the cab. “Zoe!” He knelt in front of his daughter. “I’m so sorry. We’ll take you to look for Whens now.”
Zoe said, “That’s okay. I have to work on it a little bit more.” Her father looked so upset that Zoe gave him a hug, then walked into the house, thinking.
Across the International Date Line