THE BOY WAS in the water. Thirty years in the past. His best friend, Jenni, floated beside him. He was thinking about the hole they would dig, and how deep it might go. If they could dig down beneath the dunes. Tunnel under the storm-gray house. Beneath the island, to the freshwater bay beyond. He was thinking how maybe in the future they would have a high-speed submarine pod that traveled through their tunnel, maybe all the way to the center of the earth—
Then the boy was in the water, submerged, ensconced in a bubble of pearly green. Like a force field. Like a flesh-made submarine that he steered by thought.
“I don’t understand,” Jenn said. “What was it? How did you get there?”
Timmy shrugged.
Time didn’t work the way she thought. He didn’t get there so much as he was there. It all happened at once.
“Are you…still there?” Jenn asked.
“Does it look like I’m still there?”
They stared at each other, as if they both could see the translucent sheath of green between them, the underwater world glazed in luminous moonlight.
The boy was in the water, waist-deep, sun on his face. On the shore, his mother. She wore a white one-piece suit, high cut at the neck. A wide-brimmed hat. Movie star sunglasses, too big for her face.
On the shore, a streak of red. A red flag. The red suit of a lifeguard, running, waving.
In the surf beside him, his friend called out. Timmy? Timmy! Her face was a picture of the future and the past. As if she had seen, already, what would happen. As if she had just remembered this moment, long ago forgotten.
He saw a green shape, like a feathered wing, a branch, green lace rippling beneath the water’s surface. He saw it through his scuba lens. He wanted to touch it. It snaked away. He came up for breath. I’m right here.
The lifeguard plunged into the water. Swam out. Tossed her float to the man who had swum too far from the shore.
It was there already. Circling the lifeguard. Gliding beneath the drowning man. Peering past their tenuous earthbound bodies, into their brains.
It was in a dark spot, and Timmy was there, too. He wondered: Is this an abyss? Is this the view from down at the bottom of the ocean’s deepest trenches? Is this how it looks in the farthest depths of space? All around him swam tiny silvery fish. So tiny. Pinpricks of light.
They were traveling very fast, but he felt no speed or motion. They were hearing the thoughts inside each other’s minds.
“Telepathic,” Jenn said, back in the present, on the deck.
“Yes,” he answered. “Or something like that.” He was eating gummy worms. Where had all the candy come from, she wondered. She had bought a single bag, and yet the gummy worm supply was never-ending.
“The monster is telepathic.”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“You said—”
“It’s not the sea monster.”
He tried to describe it. Its soft green plumage. Its ephemeral form. It shifted from one moment, one dream, to the next. It was solid and lurking. Scaled and slippery. A writher. A beast. A queen. No, he didn’t know what it was or where it came from, because its thoughts didn’t move in linear fashion. He saw where it was going, years or decades or centuries from murky now, all its possible futures, faint and brittle, like a dragonfly’s wing. He saw places it had come from, and those places made no sense to his brain. He was just a boy beside it, gazing through its eye, under its wing, drifting.
He was in the water under a fat yellow moon. The waves were black, licked by stars. They lapped at his legs. They felt colder than he remembered, from that hot August day, moments before. The world looked different. The world had changed, and he had stayed the same, except for his head and the thoughts inside it.
He knew that time had passed but he didn’t understand how. He knew he had a mission. He sank beneath the surface. He let himself float and glide, acclimating to this different view in space-time.
“So, this thing time travels,” she said. “It lurks. It slithers.”
He nodded.
“It’s shifty and slippery,” she went on. “It pulled you under. It dragged you thirty years into the future. And it’s not a monster.”
“Nope.”
“What is it?” Jenn was incredulous. This thing, whatever it was, had stolen her best friend. It had snatched him from clear shallow water, while she and his mother and the lifeguard stood feet away, powerless to save him.
“A squidoodle.”
“A squidoodle.”
“But I called it Baz,” the boy said. “For short.”
“Is that its name?”
“No.”
“Its species?”
“No.”
“Then why?”
“I had to call it something.”
“So it took you from there, or then. And it brought you here.”
“Yep.”
“To complete some mission?”
“Um, I think so.”
“And did it tell you what next?”
“Well, no. But…I feel like I’ll know when I know, you know?”
“That’s optimistic. You think we need to call in the air force?”
“Maybe. There is a sea monster out there.”
They looked out across the sea, silver now in the waning light. Its placid surface belied the mystery beneath it. But this mystery monster, if it existed, was a sea monster. It couldn’t reach them here on dry land. They were safe here.
“I know your parents are, well…but you have two sisters,” Jenn said. “I looked them up. They’re both still alive. I’m sure they’d like to know that you are, too.”
“Yeah, except they wouldn’t believe that it’s really me.”
“I don’t even entirely believe that it’s really you.”
“They’ll think I’m just some charlatan who’s trying to get all their money. My dad, he always used to say how we had to be careful of charlatans. And if I was them, and I showed up alive, that’s what I’d think.”
“Point.”
“And besides, I…I’m not sure why, but I feel like I’m supposed to stay right here for now.”