ON MY WAY to the ballroom, following the sounds of films I knew too well to want to see again, I passed the men’s room. I ducked in to wash my face, clean my head wound, try to find something in the mirror that reminded me of me. What I found was a flooded floor, blood on a sink, and signs of epic failure on the part of myselves to remember to flush. I stood before a sink with a perpetually running faucet and splashed water over my face and hair for the second time that night. I watched a face I ought to have recognized emerge in the mirror.
The movies started after midnight. Time-travel pictures, both small-budget films and blockbusters, all of them laughable for one reason or another. I watched them in the crowded ballroom, which would quiet down when they started, projected on the wall, the cracks of the plaster adding depth to films that otherwise lacked any. The time travel depicted was spectacular or dangerous. Nothing like time travel actually was in my experience, as banal as moving from one room to the next, watching ice melt, as banal as becoming hungry again, catching a cold, noticing a recession of hairline, a growth of nails, hair, paunch. Time travel was a simple slide sideways instead of forward. It was, I’d discovered when the raft had first hummed to life, no different, in any notable way, from doing nothing. We forget, I think, that we are born to travel through time, to trip into the next moment over the bump of the present, to keep looking over our shoulder to find that bump, understand it, and in doing so trip over the next. And on. And on.
No matter how often I saw some of the films—and no doubt the alcohol helped lubricate the humor—the serious foibles of the travelers, the difficulties they endured in their adventures, never ceased to be absurd. Depictions of traveling through time as if it could be an experience in itself. As if a brain designed to perceive only slow forward progression could magically decipher backward travel, as if color and swirling images, glimpses of moments happened or about to happen danced in a kaleidoscope. As if there were anything but darkness and the roar of blood in your ears, as if there were anything different from the normal panic of living. And so I laughed year after year at the movie heroes, their dangers and discoveries. Threats always came from outside, and in monstrous form. Obstacles appeared as questions of timing, not choice. Logical inconsistencies abounded. How could they not? I laughed most at these, as I do now at my own. Only now do I realize that logical inconsistencies are what allow for us to travel in time in the first place, keep us tripping forward or—like me—sometimes backward or sideways. I was blind to my own illogic and still am, though now by choice. Sometimes to discover a solution is to forget the problem.
Now I entered the ballroom and found an unfamiliar scene.
The room was divided into two groups. The Elders sat as near to the projected image as they could, the bottom of the film on the wall fuzzy with their hair as they reached across one another for popcorn. Behind them circled the Youngsters, rattling like disturbed sparrows. Their number had grown, and behind me came the slap of sneakers on hardwood as more arrived. From the ages of six to perhaps twenty-six, there must have been a hundred. More. Multiples of every age stood in clumps, fought one another over cookies and candy, crunched popcorn underfoot, nudged one another as older Youngsters squealed past. Only the really small ones, the six- and seven-year-olds, seemed worried or frightened. I tried to see if I could spot the youngest one, the one who’d witnessed my “death” in such a shattering way, but couldn’t locate him in their crowds. More children ran past me and found themselves. The noise was unnerving.
“Don’t just stand there,” said a voice beside me. Yellow placed a hand on my shoulder. “They’ve been looking for you ever since they heard you weren’t really dead. Get with the others. At the center.” His face was dirty and his sweater torn. His mouth was bleeding.
“What happened to you?”
“I got jumped. They wanted information.” He nodded toward the children. “It’s not safe to be by yourself any longer. Get with the group.” His hand at my back was insistent.
He escorted me toward the Elders, the floor sticky with spilled drinks. All conversation stopped. Only the whiny dialogue and electronic sound effects of the movie droned on.
I felt conspicuous, a giant target. I regretted visiting the men’s room. I looked less thrown about, less wounded. The Youngsters might excuse themselves for their actions, convince themselves that the damage they inflicted was less than real, that they could get away with more of the same. Or worse. I held on to the gun in my pocket as I walked. I really needed a drink. My flask was gone, fallen down some rabbit hole, but ahead I saw several bottles passed between older hands.
Elders parted to allow me into the heart of their circle. Then aging faces closed in around me and the questions began.
A sixty-year-old in a dark blue blazer shook his finger at me, spit hanging from his lips. “What have you done?”
“You’ve been drinking again?” I asked. I observed. I hoped.
Angry recriminations from all sides, often slurred. Again and again the same question: “What have you done?”
“Nothing that should have come to this.” I closed my eyes briefly to escape their rheumy glares. Beyond the thin wall of gray or graying heads bubbled the growing mass of children, silent, curious, trying to listen in to our conversation. “A Youngster did this.”
Seventy held up a hand. “As I said before, now is not a time for blame. No one is to blame.”
“Bullshit,” said Blazer. “We know who’s to blame. This young shit fucked it up. All he had to do—”
“All he had to do is something we haven’t managed in years of trying.” Seventy’s attempt to smile like a grandfather failed. “You know what we know. And we know nothing. He at least has been trying to find out what happened.”
Blazer and the others waved Seventy’s assurances away. “What has he found, then?”
The Elders waited for me to explain. On the wall above our heads, a large spaceship was shaking itself apart as it tried to return to its own time, the crew hanging on to computer consoles as they pretended to quake with the vessel’s motion. An extra in the back of the shot conspicuously moved in the wrong direction, giving a strong impression of bad choreography.
I took a deep breath. “There was the furnished room.”
Blazer laughed. “We know about the room. We showed it to you.”
Yellow said, “Yes, but he watched the tape.”
Blazer fell silent, his face stone.
I realized I didn’t want to reveal what I had seen on the tape, or the second tape’s existence. “Yes, it was of me. Older. Not much. I was drinking.”
A voice from the back called out, “Where’s the Drunk?”
A murmur ran through the Elders. Elbows and shoulders knocked against one another as they spun to locate the Drunk. Their anger grew by the moment, a storm that builds energy from itself. They no longer snarled only at me but also at each other, a stomped foot leading to a thrown punch, a shove answering a glare. An Elder fell to the ground in front of me. I stooped and helped the old man to his feet. It was Seventy. He looked up at me, a sad smile on his face.
“We all just want to live,” he said. “I wish we deserved it.”
“He’s not here.” Blazer yelled, and others soon joined in. “He’s not here.” Some took this as a cue to go hunting. Groups of Youngsters, somehow better organized, splintered off to follow, even though I doubted they knew who the Elders were looking for. I hoped a confrontation wouldn’t take place somewhere in the hotel’s dark hallways.
Seventy, trying to regain long-lost control, raised a hand. “It doesn’t matter where the Drunk is now. The Body is already a body. What matters is what he, or someone else, has left behind.” This brought silence. In this group no one was as old as Seventy. I wondered what this meant. If he was the end of my years, if there was only him and no further, what had he learned? Sad, I thought, that just when I finally became comfortable with life, as he appeared to be, that would be the end. To me he said, “What have you found?”
All eyes were on me. I had to tell them something of the truth. I relied on the massive paradoxes we were all awash in to keep my next lie from being too obvious. If any of them here had more information than I expected, it wouldn’t take long to find out. “The Youngsters have a gun.”
The group became absolutely still. Eyes left me, searched one another, the same aghast expression reflected back and back and back, each sure that one of the others was responsible.
An elder with nearly white hair licked his lips. “It’s the gun that shot the Body?”
“I assume.”
“And you’re sure it was a gun?”
“It looked a lot like one just before they hit me with it.”
“Good God, they’re armed?”
Children filled half the ballroom now, and I could see clogged hallways beyond the two sets of double doors, children jumping to see what fun was being had in our besieged group.
I lowered my voice. “They are still bound by their expected memories. Unlike you, who know that this is a paradox, they remember only these current events. Remember that. They are not afraid to hurt or kill. They tried to kill me.”
Blazer leaned in. “Why can’t we recall what you’re experiencing? Why are we all untethered?”
They huddled like a flock of terrified sheep. Being untethered from me they had dealt with. Being untethered from one another made them afraid.
“The Body was our link,” I said.
Blazer growled, “We need an observer. Someone to watch the Suit.” This as if I weren’t there. “Someone we can rely on, someone who we know is on our side.” I knew he meant “our side of the death.” At least I think he meant that.
Seventy said, “We don’t want to get in his way. He’s more motivated than any of us. After all, he’ll be the one to feel the bullet. One of us would slow him up and confuse him.”
Voices shouted Seventy down.
Blazer pointed at Yellow. “He should go, too. Everywhere that one goes.”
Yellow was scared. “I don’t think—”
More shouts of agreement. They converged on Yellow and Seventy. Again I was an afterthought. A hand grabbed my elbow, and I was dragged from the center of the group. Screwdriver. He led me to the door beside the bar. On the wall above us, the captain of the time-travel vessel congratulated himself for a job well done.
Screwdriver opened the door. Lily stood on the other side. “Hurry, before they realize you’re gone.” His face was white. He was worried he’d made a mistake.
“They’d kill you to save themselves.” He was staring at Lily, as if he wanted to grab her and hide her away for himself. “And besides, she convinced me.”
I walked through the door. Lily smiled at me, then at Screwdriver, who shut the door behind us.
“Why did he help me?” I asked her.
“I pointed out to him that if they were really all on the same side as you, then they would have your scar.”
“What scar?”
She touched my temple. “This thing. It’s going to be permanent. And I haven’t seen any of them with it.”
I worried about what that might mean.
“Let’s go,” I said. I didn’t know where we would hide but knew we must. The Elders were getting as feverish as the Youngsters. Panic leaked in like fluid through the hotel’s cracks. Lily and I moved along the dark hallway toward the kitchen’s service entrance. Large looping graffiti clung to the dingy walls, piecemeal caricatures, murals, indecipherable turf markers. I had ignored the paint for years. Blindness can be chosen. Not until I ran along the hall with Lily did a word catch my eye. Scar. The word was part of a longer message splashed on the wall in red. It had been painted with a brush instead of a spray can, which gave it an anachronistic urgency the canned messages lacked.
I stopped and read the whole message: A scar is something you can trust.
Lily retraced uneven steps toward me. She looked back the way we’d come, worry evident on her face. I took her cue and moved on.
Farther down the hallway, I spotted another sentence: Can’t move ahead without the Body.
It was as if the dead man upstairs had called to me, reached out through wires and walls to grip my shoulder and whisper into my ear.
I said, “We have to go upstairs.”
“What?”
“We can hide upstairs. I know a room. I have the key.” I reached into my pocket and felt past the gun to the key that Screwdriver had given me. As I did so, I realized that the videotape was missing. “We need to find the room where the Youngsters held us. I dropped something there.”
Her face was pale and clear in the dark hall. “Upstairs. One more trip upstairs. I don’t want to, but let’s go.”
I said, “What are you talking about?”
She didn’t answer. She looked at me with eyes too bright for such a dark hall, and I forgot my questions, questions about why she trusted me and why she accepted so many of me running through the halls of a dead hotel, what it was that made her stand next to me and take my hand and say, “Okay, yes, let’s go upstairs.”
We turned and ran together, the messages lingering in my head. I thought of scars and a body that were part of my timeline now, perhaps always had been, if only I’d paid attention before. Might I have seen them when I was twenty, thirty, thirty-five? Could I have seen them and glanced away, convinced myself that the struggle of an Elder was not my struggle and the suffering of Youngsters beneath contempt? As I ran, I recognized my own sinister nature for the first time, my blindness and my anger, my self-hate, and it scared me. I ran with Lily’s hand in mine. Her eyes flashed in the dark, reflected some light I couldn’t see.
I caught the spare shape of more letters in the dark, more slashes and splashes of the red brush. Words a foot tall covered the walls of the stairway, overlapping so that I caught only fragments. I tried to decipher even a single word but couldn’t make sense of anything except individual letters.
Lily suddenly sagged against me, heavier than her weight. Her eyes scanned the walls, her face tortured by what she saw. My curiosity about what the words said was overwhelmed by my desire to flee. I held her against me. “What’s wrong?”
She whispered, “These messages. They remind me of something.” Her hand was cold and her grip weak.
“What?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know yet.”
I lugged her up the stairs, trying to cover her eyes with my hand, but she pulled it away. We reached the second floor, and she gripped the door’s edge tight, sobbing. She hung from the doorframe, slowly gaining strength as she read, and when at last she turned to me and said she was ready to go, I saw that a door inside her had closed.
I asked, “What did it say?” I knew she couldn’t answer. I may have asked just to make sure she wouldn’t.
She shook her head, tears at the corners of her eyes. She took my hand, and even though she’d been dizzy and sick only minutes before, her grip was strong now, reminding me of our situation. She turned and led the way down the hall to the Body, led me to a room she’d never seen.
Outside the door I searched my jacket for the key, slipped deep into the lining through another hole. I was decaying like the building around us—a little bit at a time, but to an inevitable ruin.
I opened the door, and she stepped in. The Body rested as he should, on the table under the weak bulb, the sheet tucked around him. I shut and locked the door. Lily slowly drew the sheet from the dead man. She wasn’t shocked, not in the slightest, only took his hand and held it, squeezing so tightly that her hand turned white. Her fingers played over the tattoo on his wrist.
“He’s so cold,” she said.
“He’s been there for hours.”
She nodded. “He has your scar.”
Without looking I knew she was right, but I walked to his side and saw the scar, a faded smudge of whiter skin, a crescent above his temple. I looked down at his face, my face, truly mine, at damage I only now realized hurt, and couldn’t look away.
The window paper had been torn off, and the sky outside was turning light. It was the color of mud. I wondered if Lily had ever seen the sky blue, as I had, as I could at any moment if only I boarded the raft.
“I’m sorry you’ve been dragged into this,” I said. “It’s something I should have figured out on my own.”
“You can’t do this alone. That’s why it’s happening this way.” She put the Body’s hand back under the sheet and came to stand near me in the pale light. Before I could react, she had placed her head against my shoulder and leaned her body against mine. It fit as if it had always been there, as if my bones had grown around her figure. Her hands met behind me and reached for the muscles of my back. I returned her embrace and held her tight against me. My urgency scared me. I tugged at her dress, yanked it above her waist, and she pulled at it with me, then worked at the buckle of my belt, tore at the front of my pants to release me so that I could enter her. When I had, we stood against the wall, arms knotted around each other, my knees bent and hers stretched to tiptoe. We stood still a moment, and I searched her eyes for the light I’d seen there before; I felt for it with the part of me inside her and couldn’t find it there either, and I told myself that I imagined it, that it hadn’t really been there at all, even though I knew it had been. The proof was that she looked away from me to lose herself in the moment, pressed herself against me without seeing me. We breathed ragged and tasted each other’s tongue. It didn’t take long. I withdrew from her, smelling her skin on mine, and we both fixed our clothes. We looked from the Body to the pale window and at each other. She raised a hand to me and began to speak, but there was a voice at the door. It was me, probably no more than ten years old.
“Hurry up,” he said. “I don’t like this floor.”
“Don’t worry about it.” The second voice was older. “There’s no one here anyway.” There was a crash of old boards breaking. “See, this stuff is just junk.”
“I still don’t like it.” The doorknob jiggled. “Hey, this one’s locked.”
I took Lily’s hand. We backed toward the window, her palm as wet in my hand as mine was in hers. Between us and the rattling doorknob lay the Body, an artifact, his silence balancing out the panic I felt at the hunting party on the other side of the door. Another voice had joined the first two, a deeper one—a teenager, who immediately took action.
“Wait here,” he said. “Let’s see if we can’t bust it down.”
I whispered to Lily, “Did you see any fire axes or tools in the halls? Was there anything they might use?” She looked at me, her eyes blank and fearful. She might not even have understood the question. I glanced around the room. Behind us was the partly covered window, its thick butcher paper held on with brittle masking tape. I tried the window latch. Years of rust bit into my fingers. I searched the room in growing desperation, and near the foot of the table I spotted a long screwdriver. A gift from Screwdriver. I held it before me like a dagger, pointed at the door.
“What are you going to do?” Lily’s eyes locked on the screwdriver.
I couldn’t attack children, not even if I was in danger. Besides, if I were really going to use a weapon against them, I had the pistol in my pocket. Instead I turned back toward the window, worked the tip of the screwdriver beneath the latch, and started to pry at it, levering it back and forth. The old metal began to give almost immediately, but it was twisted in upon itself enough to keep the window locked shut. “Chances are they won’t get in here anyway.”
At that the door shuddered beneath a heavy blow. I hoped Lily wouldn’t sense my fear as I scanned the window for another way out. Dust and old paint flecks floated in the low shaft of light spilling through the gap of the window cover. A second blow shook the door, a crack appearing from top to bottom. Quiet counting leaked from the other side, a hushed one and two, and with three the third crashing blow came.
Hoping the paper was thick enough to keep the glass from raining down on us, I stabbed the screwdriver through the middle of the pane like a needle into a blister. The window shattered with a jingling crash, and the voices in the hallway stopped. I stepped back and brought my foot up to kick out the remaining glass, and the paper and the tape fell, a soft chiming off the side of the building.
Another crash against the door, and another. They’d heard the glass, and it had motivated them. I grabbed Lily’s hand.
“Ready?” I asked, even though it was more command than question. She had no choice, nor did I. I leaned out the window and hauled myself onto the rusted fire escape. When I was fully outside, Lily followed. It creaked under our weight. Past the abandoned buildings to the east, the sun leaked through a strip between clouds. I looked up and then down. Beneath us the fire escape had rusted away and come off the building. Too far to drop; we had to go up.
We climbed.
Up close, the walls of the hotel were worse than I’d imagined. Acid rain and the slow, gentle impact of debris left the stones porous, like coral or a sponge. I pulled Lily closer to the rusted rail of the escape ladder. Beneath us the window bubbled with faces, all mine, of various ages, and their shouts climbed after us. Most of them were too scared to venture onto the fire escape. The two who did, in their early teens, all legs and awkward elbows, made the entire structure creak and settle. A bolt somewhere burst with a loud snap, and the ladder shifted beneath me. Lily, climbing ahead of me, looked down. “Oh, God,” she said.
The teens on the ladder beneath us were armed. Each carried the pistol, my pistol, the one the Inventor had used to hit me, and they all aimed theirs up. A hand from the window—older, I thought—grabbed the nearest and shook him. Both teens stood back and gazed up at us. The scaffold moaned and began to shift again, and I knew we had only moments of climbing before it freed itself from the building.
“One more floor,” I called up to Lily. She didn’t respond. Hazarding another look below, I saw teens crowding the third-floor platform, fearful of climbing but unaware that they were in danger of collapsing it under their growing weight. The eldest held the others back, as if afraid he might be responsible for their loss. I realized that in fact he was, as was I. I took my own pistol from my pocket and lowered it, aimed at the street far below them, far away from any of them, and fired a single shot. It had the desired effect. The children—for they were just children—fell over one another to get to the window. I wondered for a second after the Body—what might they think. I knew they’d treat him with respect, but only out of fear. He would seem ancient to them and his connection to them tangential at best. I thought of their crowded rooms, their confused plans, the collisions of memories conflicting with new events. Each of them was alone. Each of them fought to be heard in a chorus. I pictured them clogging the doorway, filling the hall, and looking at one another, panic on their faces, worry in their hearts about what a dead body meant to them. How could they return home to a normal life after this? Untethered from one another because they’d been brought here, no longer even tethered to their own days and lives, no longer able to deal with the realities of their childhood after seeing what they’d seen here. They would go back to being children, planted in their normal routines, but they would know of this place and this time, know of the Body, of me, of Lily, and it would taint them and their days. Each of them would think it right to return here again and again, to continue to change events, to muddy their life and memories. A cold realization closed around my heart. I was no different.
The scaffold jolted, and another bolt broke. A red dust speckled down on us. Lily coughed. She looked at me, her eyes dark. “It’s letting go.”
“Get to a window,” I said.
She climbed the steps to the next platform, and I followed. The scaffold groaned. Outside a window black with old newsprint, mildewed to unreadable, we held hands, and I removed the screwdriver from my pocket. For a moment I hesitated. In the window’s imperfect reflection, I couldn’t see how bad I felt. I saw only a man and woman, dressed for a party, holding hands. In the reflection my suit still inspired awe. What if we didn’t need to face any of the troubles I foresaw? The Body might be avoided if I simply hid, ran away, and never returned, ever, to the hotel. My youth might be wasted poring over every room of the hotel looking for me, but that could last only so long. An army of me would eventually limp home in retreat. Lily and I could go anywhere; we had limitless options.
I thought all this in the time I studied a blessed reflection of myself and Lily, and then the scaffold began to separate from the building and I brought the screwdriver into the glass, pierced it with a nearly perfect wound.
“Kick it in.” Lily cried.
I raised a foot and attacked the window. The scaffold’s complaints sounded human. The ancient metal beneath us sagged, abandoned its rigid shape. It twisted like rope. We gripped the railings to stay upright as the floor curved like a lolling tongue. Finally the glass gave, and I threw Lily into the opening just as the scaffold let go. I fell forward to grab the window edge. Glass bit into my arm, and a bar of metal caught me across the back as it fell to the ground below. I screamed, or tried, and held on, Lily gripping my arm. Beneath me the shriek rising from the collapsing scaffold ended, and we were washed in silence. Both of us labored at hard, uneven breaths.
“Help me up,” I said.
We pulled me into the room.