There might've been one in every neighborhood, concealed amidst the other houses: a place to change yourself in time. Each would look different, of course. One might be a brick cottage with a severe roof, another stucco and wine, others might be adobes or apartments or abandoned gas stations or hospitals.
Ours was a house atop a hill, across train tracks that never got used. A plain sky-blue house with two stories, plain windows, plain doors, everything in good repair. It was bigger than it looked on the inside. The sunrise always caught it at just the right angle, and from the porch, you got to see the light marching out over the rooftops for morning. Everyone in town thought the house had a different owner. The bills always got paid, the mail answered. No one asked after it much.
I always remembered the train tracks were never used because of the pennies and dimes and half-dollars that collected across the irons, the children and bigger kids and even adults setting them to the tracks whenever they passed to brave the hill and the house. The coins lay there like offerings to the house, or maybe just to times gone by. Habit had a way of turning to tradition fast in a town like ours.
Our group of friends was small.
I was the writer.
Paul was the artist.
Colter was the confidence man.
Lisa was the soldier.
Lilly had taken responsibility for us all.
We were the bravest in the neighborhood. We flew up and down the streets on chilly Halloween nights in hand-stitched costumes: river monsters and chupacabras and king rats and mountain men. We were the very best scares every year: ghost lights and ghouls and crones and moss horrors, writhing and growling and hooting and laughing. We bounded the stone steps of the hill in twos and threes toward that big, stolid house, and we braved the front porch a little further every year. Soon, we even pushed the front door open to get at the inside, the bolts screeching like anyone's nightmare.
We were the bravest. Everything has a cost.
"Do you remember the last time you were without obstacles?" Paul had yelled out, arms thrown akimbo in the sun on the hillock behind the house. "When you had everything going for you, every atom, every moment, every part of yourself, past, present, future, pointed in one direction?" Head back, he was laughing. "You will! You will! We will!"
That's how it started.
Let's say the house is a vessel, everything a person is, was, or ever will be, contained within. Now, open a door and see some old memories: skinned knees, tall trees, bicycles, friends for life. Now open another and see new memories, ones that haven't happened yet: autumn leaves along the college grounds, first love, stacks of rejection letters, a rickety table to sign the publishing agreement, old regrets, and new worries.
Now pluck a bit of it out, a mote, a memory, to use in the present. And now you have the gist of how it worked.
We took things slow, testing and retesting. We were young, not stupid. We'd all been forced to read those awful science fiction novels in school. We'd learned the lessons they had for us.
I learned how the house worked much slower, over months of weekend visits and after school. Paul and Colter caught on much quicker. They came up with the idea of motes, of controlling how much of our futures we took out. We didn't know what it would do to us if we passed through a piece of time that we'd plucked, so we tested that too. We found moments close to us and plucked them out and waited, the others watching.
Paul did it first. He sat in an old wicker chair on the porch, drinking a soda. We held a group conversation, sitting around him on the steps, the porch wood, the chairs.
"I bet it's aliens," said Lisa while we waited. "Telling us something, you know?"
"You're probably wrong," said Lilly. "Besides, why do aliens always have to be trying to say something meaningful anyway? Why can't they just be making conversation like everyone else?"
"Maybe it's just an accident," said Paul. "Time's hiccup, like those three-headed bullfrogs they've got in cages in Mr. Jakeson's room."
"Probably wrong," we all said, rolling our eyes at Lilly.
"Could be someone planted it here," I said. I wasn't quite sure why I used those words: planted, someone. They felt right, though.
"Probably not," Lilly said. "Are we going to assume—"
That's when it happened. Paul's body went slack, eyes glazed, slouching down in the chair. It only happened for a second, but we all saw. It scared us more than we admitted, even Colter. After, Paul said it was like film skipping off the track at the movie theater (he'd worked there a few summers now, saving to leave town), aware of things but always off center, life in the peripherals. Or, as Lisa liked to call it, Your head's a gutter ball for a while.
We tried it ourselves, the same results every time. We didn't go back to the house for a few years after that. But time, like it does, dulled the fear of that day, and soon enough we crept back up the hill again to find ourselves.
Lilly came up with the rules. We voted, too, but most were unanimous. We took them down in a big leather-bound book we kept in the hallway, always displayed.
1. Nothing can be plucked while in dangerous or career-ending situations (driving, giving a performance, in a bar fight, taking a bow).
2. Nothing too close to the present. The farther away, the more acceptable.
3. Nothing from the future but experience. No lottery tickets, no stocks, no profiting from our future selves. Knowledge outside our future selves is best forgotten.
Lisa was already in ROTC by the time we hit our senior year in high school, and we made an odd couple, the Kerouac-wannabe and the grunt girl. She told me over beer and pizza of what she'd plucked from boot camp and into her first deployment. I told her of the insurance office I worked in, and the coffee table I wrote on, back always bent over the pages.
We pulled only little notions from our futures. I plucked from the back mostly, but sprinkled a little closer in. It seemed right to do it that way, a bargain rather than an addiction. Everything has a cost, especially the future.
We'd sit out on the porch, all of us together, and drink wine and beer and lay the pieces of our future out, of who we'd be, piece by piece. We assumed the pieces would connect. Paul took Polaroids of us, laid them out on a wall in the kitchen. Lisa and Colter cooked dinner most of the time. It was a good time.
The most important pieces we kept for ourselves, though. Even with Lisa, I withheld my worst failures and ideas. A defense mechanism, I supposed. But in all of them, in every glimpse at the future, there was always the unspoken truth cast over it that we would drift apart soon, and never fully come together again. Some of us took it harder than others.
I didn't dream anymore, just caught glimpses of the past when I slept. A common one was riding my bike as fast as I could, but never as fast as Colter. He'd drift ahead every time. The green of the forest blurring around us, we'd pedal beside the tracks on the beat dirt, the sun jangling off the gathered coins like afternoon wishes, breath thumping in time.
Colter had started entering the rooms more often than the rest of us. Lilly found him sleeping at the house one time, figured out he'd been doing it a lot. He was chewing through his future at a rate we could only guess at.
"We need to do something," said Lilly one night. She'd called a meeting while Colter was in the rooms. Hints of winter already lay in the October breeze coming across the porch.
"What can we do," asked Lisa. "It's his choice."
"It's not that simple," I said.
"No," said Paul.
"No," said Lilly. "But what can we do?"
"We could restrain him," Paul said.
"We could." Lisa had said it like, I could.
We were silent, something rare at those gatherings. (The beer and wine were always out and flowing in those years.)
Lisa then said in a low voice, staring at the wood below her, "What if you looked into your future and saw a person you didn't want to be? What would any of you do?"
She trembled, not from the cold.
The idea of Colter and Lisa sleeping together crept into me then, slowly, and stuck. It was a quiet wound. Easy to let it in.
Lilly said, "He could change things."
Paul said, like he'd prepared, "Hell, it's hard enough changing a person's mind. I think changing the future's mind is damn well impossible."
We thought that didn't make much sense, but it was an answer, if nothing else.
Lilly said after a time, "If you had every bit of you, past and future, concentrated into one moment, what couldn't you do?"
I stayed in the rooms for a long time after that, looking in on my past self. Sometimes I yelled. Called myself names. Tried to throw things around. But most of the time I just watched, and thought of the people moving in front of me as far away, movie stars out on a big screen, loop after loop of dead life.
I thought about Colter a lot. He was sacrificing his future, gathering together all the experience he needed for his big trick. What was I doing? What was my life worth?
Summer came round again. This time, though, it was our graduation invitations crowding mail lines. Our speeches to write. Our thoughts on the future.
It was a small neighborhood; most came out. The ceremony lay in the center of the football field, despite the coaches' protesting every year. Speeches came and went in waves, lofty and noncommittal. And we looked and felt like sea creatures on display in our robes. Cameras flashed. After, hugs and smiles and plans were conducted in small groups across the field. The impressions that the chairs had left in the earth faded after only a few weeks.
Colter's trick took place on the Fourth of July. He used the coins that'd built up on the tracks over generations in the trick. Somehow he'd gotten the operator to send a train through those tracks in the afternoon, just as the parades started up. It was just the right speed, just the right pressure. Some combination of things. The coins shot out from the wheels, sailed over the neighborhood, and landed in a field across the highway.
Someone had a camera in the crowd and filmed it. They still play the video on display TVs in the TV store every Fourth, on a loop all day. It shows the street, the crowd, the parades. The POP that first comes from the train tracks mixes in with the fireworks and fire engine horns. Some hear it, some don't, some even see it through the trees, pointing and gasping. It happens fast, and slow at the same time. Soon the coins come, and it's as if the sky has turned to water, all the light from the sun curling in on itself and blooming outward, curling and blooming, curling and blooming. An ocean of fire breathing over them. You can spot shapes in the coins. Different people see different things. Sometimes it's rolling hills or mountain ranges or flower gardens or waves at sunset. Sometimes there's a house amidst the images, and sometimes there's not.
A year after it happened, a crew came out to do a special on the trick. They brought scientists and explorers and experts and stage magicians and tried to recreate it. The train, the coins. They never could.
The cameras took crane shots of the neighborhood for the intro. More shots down on the street. Faces, shops, two diners. They interviewed the people that'd been there. My mother and father are in it. So is Paul and Lisa. Everyone has a grin on their face, as if prouder than any other time in their lives.
Next, the cameras went to the train that had been used in the trick. It'd been the first, and the last to use those tracks. It'd been decommissioned for its service. Its engine decorates the twenty-fifth exhibit of a nearby train museum. The rest was discarded to a train yard in Minnesota. The driver had carved "Adsum et Cetera" into the visor.
The special never aired. The station ran out of money and folded up. They put their old equipment up for auction. I bought a copy of the tape, and another was bought by the train museum.
The neighborhood still remembers it. They tell stories, they assign essays, they make official documents, stamped and approved. They tell their kids that this is what you can do if you put your mind to something.
Colter was gone by the time the cameras came for him. His parents checked him into a mental hospital when he went catatonic, unsure what to do.
The hospital was nice. It sat out by a cliff overlooking the ocean. They thought the movement helped. I wheeled him out to watch the waves whenever I got time. There were others there like Colter, the same look on their faces, some old and some older than old. I wondered how many of them had used the house before us.
Sometimes Colter would come out of it. His robbery of his future wasn't complete by any stretch. He'd left holes here and there.
He asked after everyone.
"And Paul?" he'd ask.
I said, "He's got an art exhibit in the city. The magazines say he's going to be pretty big some day. He wears eye-liner and controls those shows like a carnival man. It's really something.
"I'm managing the transport of some of his bigger pieces. Even had to book a ten ton crane to set one on a truck, a muscled arm that rotates and crushes a family living in it, a full living room scene inside, complete with fake family around the TV." I checked my watch. "They'll be loading it tonight."
Sometimes he'd say things like, "Do you want to know how I did it?" and, "Is life measured by what you lose, or is there something more?" and, "Trick isn't quite the right word for it," and, "How many people saw the coins? Did they like it?" And we'd go on from there.
Lilly made sure the house got its bills paid. She looked after it, and didn't move from the neighborhood her whole life. Just two vacations to Alaska every year. She didn't step inside any of the rooms again.
Lisa deployed to Afghanistan and worked her way up to sniper quicker than anyone in the history of the platoon. Some of her buddies called her the Demon and Top Gun and other, less flattering names, and though she had a habit of spacing out at odd times, she had razor-sharp focus when it mattered. She saved a lot of lives on overwatch.
Paul got his deals and recognition and soon followed Colter into the wheelchair. They have adjoining rooms. They play tricks on the nurses when their awakenings coincide.
I bought a house as far west as I could go, in California. It's a little cottage by the ocean, away from everything. I pump out a few books a year which turn in middling numbers, enough to live on, but only. It's not a bad life.
This is how it starts, my trick: little changes, little impossible things, little miracles, stacked atop one another.
Sometimes I think about the future of the impossible, what it'll look like if Colter's trick is only the start. How far could it go? How strange could it get? These things keep me up at night with the possibilities. I go into the kitchen, get myself a snack, walk back to my office. I pass guest rooms that're never used. Will never be used. Some rooms have the past in them, and I can hear the chanting of the crowd at football games, or the laughter of my friends behind the door. Others have the future.
Some have sheet rock cut from the old house. Others have floorboards or wiring or PVC. The old grafted to the new. It's very expensive, moving only pieces of a house across the country, to each location.
Sometimes the kids of the neighborhood brave the winding path to my cottage. Spacemen with Apemen, junkyard monsters with giant spiders. Their costumes are sharper than ours had been, more manufactured, but at the same time lesser, utterly without effort.
I live Halloween to Halloween now. Soon, it'll be here again. I'll set the metal chair with rust on the bottom out on the porch and put the plastic pumpkin filled to bursting with candy on it with a note that says, "Take what you will." Soon I'll close the door behind me, and let the house do the work, and let the brave ones come. I'll set everything to autopay and take the last flight out to some other place. I made my choice a long time ago. Colter sacrificed his future for a trick in the present. My trick is longer. Years upon years. One house in every neighborhood, concealed amidst the rest. Little miracles, spreading, blooming, changing things.
I take my time. I read the new science fiction novels, the new short stories, year by year. I learn the lessons they have for me.