Timestream Two
1991
Jill
THE CRACK-UP
March 21, Washington, D.C.
THE WORST THING was that Jill Dance couldn’t talk about what had happened when she was seventeen. Not with anyone.
Their mother had vanished, history had flipped to a new path, her brother and sister had no memory of the years Jill had stolen from them, and the tragedy was entirely her fault. She had been reckless and impulsive, like any teenager, but the consequences had been so shattering that words, explanations, and many memories had been swept from her and her family with the force of a hurricane scouring away homes, historical artifacts, even entire lives. Hurricane Jill.
She had kept it inside until she was forty-one, a doctoral student in political science at Georgetown.
The tall, wavy-glassed windows in the old classroom stood open. A cool, page-riffling breeze, the distant cries of children, and the first sunlight in weeks encouraged students to think of little else. Certainly, no one but Jill was paying attention to their professor, a Soviet expat.
A slow and measured speaker, Koslov framed his English precisely. His pause after “In this case…” seemed to last forever.
Jill said, “I disagree.”
“On what grounds?” Koslov responded, his normally placid expression roused to interest. One of the undergrads sighed loud. Koslov, a seasoned debater in his seventies, was Jill’s doctoral adviser, and they often got into long, obscure disagreements.
Jill stood, and leaned forward. Her palms pressed against the desk. “After the Soviets took Berlin—”
“Would you mind repeating that?” Koslov’s eyes narrowed. He pushed his shaggy gray hair from his forehead and waited, hands on his stocky hips.
“I…” She paused. Everyone was looking at her with great interest.
Wait a minute. The Soviets had not taken Berlin. The Allies had not handed East Germany to Stalin on a silver platter. Instead, Patton, ignoring orders, forged through Germany and took Berlin before the Soviets could get there, which dramatically changed postwar politics and territories.
She said, “I mean, after Patton argued with Eisenhower about taking Berlin and finally obeyed Eisenhower’s orders—” That was right, wasn’t it? Yes. That was what had happened, here … or was it there, before?
Damn.
She stopped speaking. Somewhere, a bell rang.
Relieved, she stuffed her Q, an all-purpose computer and communicator, into her pack and hurried toward the door, tired and wondering what the hell had gotten into her. It was the last class of her last day at Georgetown—a makeup class, actually, to satisfy her doctoral requirements, one that she would have ordinarily taken when working on her master’s degree. She worked part-time at the World Bank, and the full-time job she had taken a hiatus from awaited her, with near-doubled PhD salary. She also worked part-time in her bookstore, Serendipity, and took care of her five-year-old son, Stevie. She didn’t have time for this, or much of anything else either.
Koslov boxed her in by the door as the other students rushed out behind him. “Jill?”
“I have to get to an appointment.” She tried to get past him. He stepped sideways, blocking her exit.
“Please.” Lev Koslov, tie askew, as usual, and his brown suit rumpled, moved in a perpetual haze of acrid cigarette smoke. He favored a Russian brand with a wolf on the package, and did not care if the ashes fell on the floor, on his suit, or on a student’s desk as he strutted past, waving his arms and expounding. With a reputation for being blazingly intelligent, he had little patience with idiocy. Several students, all much younger than Jill, glanced back in surprise as they left, having expected, no doubt, a more barbed approach to her outburst. Like other professors at Georgetown, he frequented her nearby bookshop, Serendipity, so she was not at all intimidated by him.
However, she did not want to discuss her lapse.
He fished his classbook from his jacket pocket. “This is not the first time that you have mentioned such … ideas.” The book-sized screen lit with print when he touched it. He found what he was looking for and handed it to Jill. “Last week’s test.”
“I already checked my grade.”
“Yes, I gave you an A. As usual. It was the extra-credit question, which you did not need for the grade, as it turned out. I didn’t take off for your answer.”
She read, “‘Since the assassination of John F. Kennedy…’ Oh.” She gave the reader back to him. Kennedy had not been assassinated. Not here. He was an international statesman, a celebrity, the father of the space program, as well as the father of several children born to women not married to him. “I’m sorry. I think…” She tried to imagine how to gloss over her idiotic outburst, and failed. Either she could say she was going crazy, which she didn’t think would cut much slack with Dr. Koslov, or …
“I’m writing an alternate history,” she said.
“A what?”
“An alternate history. I used to write comic books when I was in high school, and…” Damn. Worse and worse. She still had to defend her dissertation before this man. “Well, I must have been thinking about it when I wrote this.” She smiled briefly, and, she hoped, disarmingly.
“Mmm.” Koslov’s long look, from deep-set pale blue eyes beneath tangled gray eyebrows, was one of keen appraisal. “And in this alternate history, what happened after Kennedy died? I seem to remember that Franklin Roosevelt died too, in his fourth term, before the war was over, instead of completing two years of his fifth term and negotiating the settlement with the Soviet Union that made them relinquish Poland, Hungary, and Romania. What did that difference lead to, in your alternate history? I’m just asking in theoretical terms.”
“I’m sorry, but I have to leave.” Angry to hear herself apologize for the third time in five minutes, she pushed past him into the now-empty hall and hurried down the stairs.
* * *
Jill unlocked her bike, adjusted her helmet, and coasted off campus, disturbed and distracted. Lost in thought, she turned left onto M Street from Wisconsin Avenue instead of right, as she had intended. She passed a rare diesel-powered Metrobus and coughed in the cloud of exhaust. Mostly, the streets swarmed with tiny electric cars, and the new fleet of smaller electric and alternate-fuel Metrobusses. As charging kiosks became more plentiful, it was easy to use a prepurchased pass or a credit card to pick up a car, bike, or scooter, and drop it off at another kiosk, but Jill preferred her own custom-built bike.
But riding through the city was sometimes unpleasant, especially when she was tired. Stress removed some filter, so that the landscape of the city appeared as it was before, when the city, and time, and everyone’s history, was, sometimes subtly, and sometimes starkly, other. She saw the old streets, before a particular overpass was built, before a block was razed for offices. She saw houses, for seconds at a time, which were no longer there. Of course, everyone did, to a certain extent; cities were in constant flux.
Except that Jill saw some houses, she was sure, that never had been here, in this history. Instead, she saw a District of Columbia that was different than the one she lived in now. Different in its past, and therefore changed in those textural details, great and small, that belonged to her previous historical reality.
She saw houses of people who no longer seemed to exist, whom she could never find, even with Q. For instance, she sometimes saw the house of Bridget Donnally, she of the long nose, pale face, and superior attitude who regularly made pronouncements such as, “Dance, if you don’t do your best, you won’t get anywhere.”
Bridget’s house, which Jill had often visited, was in a neighborhood that had never existed in this world. For a year or two, Jill had done a lot of research, trying to reconcile the discrepancies, but there was no evolution of land use from residential to commercial. There was only stark difference. The old plat in City Hall showed the Donnally home site as the location of a small hotel for the past hundred and fifty years, in a commercial area presently quasi-bohemian. In Jill’s childhood, the same corner held a welcoming old-fashioned single-family house surrounded by oaks and spilling over with Bridget’s siblings, also nonexistent in this world, on a block of houses built to order, in a time when that was the norm.
Bridget had always called Jill by her last name. Even in sixth grade, Jill found this odd, coming from another sixth-grader. Jill had been surprised and somewhat gratified to see normally dauntless Bridget immobilized down in the creek bed one day when they were gathering sand to enhance their cardboard Egyptian school project because she suddenly noticed the snake Jill had leapt over without even thinking about it.
“It’s just a rat snake. It won’t hurt you.” Jill grasped it behind its head to show Bridget, but Bridget trembled, all color drained from her face, and insisted that Jill lead her back upstream and uphill to the safe, snakeless sidewalk. This chink in Bridget’s intellectual detachment was Jill’s first deep awareness of the difference between persona and hidden emotional triggers.
Bridget was real as real could be. But there was no trace of her or her six siblings on any records Jill found. No one by the name of Donnally had ever attended Jill’s school.
So, the hard question she asked herself constantly, was: Did I kill them all? Did they never exist?
Did the potential nuclear holocaust that hung over the world back then actually happen? Did Vietnam worsen and consume the United States, as it did in my alternate past? Or are they all happily living, somewhen, each with their own six children, in that world in which Kennedy actually did die in Dallas in 1963, twenty years ago?
The mere fact of Kennedy’s living had unfurled a new history. The history she lived in shared many aspects with the one she remembered. But not all. It was keeping the details in place, some to one history, and some to another that was so damned hard.
She cut down a cool, leafy avenue, reflecting that she’d been a fool to go into political science, given this very large problem. But then, history had become like a puzzle to her, one without a solution, only different resolutions, or a kaleidoscope. If you moved one piece, turned the tube one click, the whole picture might change. She wanted to think she was studying the pivots of history, the real world-changers, but she had discovered that every major historian had her own opinion of what such pivots might be.
Jill remembered, as clearly as if looking down one of those lost streets, that Sam Dance, her father, had marveled at the swift miniaturization of computer components, the internationalization of communications satellites and the like, once Kennedy and Khrushchev achieved their historical 1965 alliance. The great scientific and technological minds of the entire world were free to work together, and they had enabled the sudden emergence of Q in 1983.
She knew that, along with her, Sam could look down the other road of the sixties that they had also lived through, the one with massive Soviet crackdowns, the American assassinations, the Vietnam War, with its ten million Asian and sixty thousand American casualties, and attendant, deadly international student riots.
She also knew that no one else in the milieu in which she lived now—she had taken to calling it a timestream, which elicited the sensation of precarious fluidity that sometimes overwhelmed her—could do that. If they existed, she had not heard from them. She was enveloped by a world that seemed more peaceful, more cooperative, more focused on communication and education, and less focused on aggression. She hoped this was just the beginning of a huge change in human history, which was almost entirely a history of wars.
But her father had vanished. Perhaps, when Sam had disappeared, five years earlier, he had just taken another road, one newly opened. Perhaps he had found an avenue to Bette, Jill’s mother, who had vanished in November 1963. She too went on a trip, as far as Jill’s brother and sister knew, and never returned. Kind of like going to the corner store for cigarettes, leaving your family to gradually realize that you might be gone for good. But perhaps Bette Dance, née Elegante, had not had much choice.
Jill had to think so. It was wrenching to think that your mother would willingly abandon you. But she had a more precise idea of what had really happened, and all of that was because of the Infinite Game Board.
She downshifted, with a smooth click of her gear-changer, to climb a small rise.
She’d had no warning that her father was leaving. Why hadn’t he spoken about what had happened? Why hadn’t she asked? It always seemed like there would be time for that later, when she would somehow be able to formulate questions about the enormity that had occurred, or even venture to mention it. Maybe he had felt the same way.
A horn blared to her left. Jill, startled from her reverie, veered out of the driver’s way and became aware of her surroundings.
She was on a busy street and not anywhere near Serendipity Books, across from where Key Bridge traffic flowed onto M Street. Instead, she was only about a mile from her old family home, Halcyon House, which was in a completely different Washington neighborhood.
Damn! She wiped sweat from her forehead as she braked for a red light. Traffic whizzed past in front of her. She was falling into these fugues more and more often, and was screwing everything up. Elmore was expecting her to take over in their bookstore after her class today so that he could work on one of his important cases. He didn’t actually work in the store any longer, but she’d implored him to open this morning when Jane called in sick, so she could attend this last class. No doubt he’d been calling her frantically, but she had not heard her phone over the roar of traffic, the roar of her own thoughts.
All his cases were important—much more important than what she was doing, it seemed. Elmore had been complaining for three years that she was doing too much. Translation: Suspend your doctoral work so that I don’t have to take care of Stevie. Or at least, if you’re going to go to school, get a useful degree. In law.
His complaints were wearing her down, but he’d get over it. He’d have to. She loved Elmore. Loved her bookstore, in a town house they’d bought for a song, which was actually a fortune to them when they’d first married. They’d finished the gutting that time, neglect, and a leaky roof had begun, then built it into their dream: a home upstairs, a bookstore downstairs.
Now, they had moved to a finer address, one with more cachet, one that would impress the partners in Elmore’s law firm. New dreams.
Just not, exactly, hers.
But she could not actually say what her dream might be anymore.
Sometimes, when she perched on a stool behind the counter, studying as customers browsed, she might look up and see a different store, one filled with counterculture freaks. Young men with long hair and beards. Young women wearing brightly colored skirts, Mexican huaraches, or bell-bottom jeans. And then, on her shelves, other titles wavered: Steal This Book, The Whole Earth Catalog, Howl. Instead of the classical music her customers preferred, she heard lively, lovely, humane rock ’n’ roll with lyrics decrying war.
Jill knew she was insane to long for that world, that history. It was like wanting to revert to dysfunctional, emotionally stunting, but comfortingly familiar family behaviors, wanting to slip back into patterns of pain instead of living the new, happy life years of therapy had wrought. Yes, she thought, the ancient human familiarity with war, the straight lines in which one must march, the submersion of one’s own will to that of national intent, were all so much better than peace. The new, spreading peace sprang from positions of strength, not from appeasement. People chose peace because, strange and simple as it might sound, people now knew better. With more education, with greater understanding of the costs of war, and of what the results of various actions might be, people worked to find solutions less expensive than war.
This different world had wars, of course. Obscure, distant, small wars.
The problem still was that her small, obscure war was another person’s holocaust. Any war was. But what was the solution?
In Jill’s opinion, education was the solution.
Radical peace groups distributed classbooks imbued with Q all over the world. Each classbook contained all languages and adapted to the one it heard when the first person picked it up. Q constantly assessed and challenged each user, meshing with individual learning styles. Anecdotal stories about a child walking through a field or a slum, picking one up, and having it talk to her, show her pictures, shapes, games, anything that would get her moving her fingers and thereby her mind, abounded. Jill had heard rumors that an international children’s pidgin, like Esperanto, was evolving, but from the bottom up, instead of being foisted on adults, so that it actually worked.
Before the age of eight, the manipulation of concrete, physical objects was necessary to lay down neural pathways, but once those were in place, learning could become more abstract. Classbooks taught everything, from reading to calculus and beyond. The content was so broad that every age, from preschoolers to adults, could benefit from it. Enhanced communication was changing everything rapidly, facilitating the integration of information previously isolated. It was like atomic fission, generating enormous energy, except that this energy was intellectual, artistic, and completely of the human mind. Naturally, many people and organizations were against internationally distributed classbooks, and even free-access classbooks, on various grounds, and destroyed them whenever possible. But Q was everywhere; classbooks were unstoppable. Those who wanted one could get one.
Across the circle from Jill, the light changed. She should turn around and go back to the store, but that seemed too difficult. She should call Elmore, but didn’t feel up to an interrogation or scolding at the moment. Desperately thirsty, she looked around for a place to buy a bottle of water, but traffic compelled her onward, through the intersection. Had she eaten breakfast? She couldn’t remember. Her legs shook as she pedaled, and then there were only nine more blocks, eight. I can make it, I know I can …
She flung her bike on the overgrown front lawn when she reached the old house, pushed her way through the towering bushes that hid the sidewalk. Bleeding from brambles, she gained the rickety steps of the front porch. Her leg went through a rotten board. She yanked it out, leaving a deep gash she barely noticed, and stomped onto the porch, with its mold-greened, cobwebbed wicker chairs, and an antique, rain-ravaged rocker. Hands trembling, she went through her keys. Town house, bookstore, apartment upstairs from the bookstore, car, storage shed, a friend’s house when cat-sitting, Elmore’s office, storage shed—where was the key to this house, the house of her childhood? Had time swallowed that too?
She flung the keys into the empty clay pot that once held her father’s geraniums and grabbed the heavy wooden rocking chair by both of its furled arms. Lifting it chest-high with astonishing ease, she smashed it through the picture window, where scenes of her other life were obscured by closed, wooden venetian blinds.
She did not feel the gashes the broken glass made on her arm, her chest, as her momentum carried her through the window, onto the dusty old carpet of her childhood, taking the venetian blinds down with her with a crash.
Brian
March 21
BRIAN DANCE, Jill’s younger brother, was in his air-conditioned office trailer going over the plans for a new office building with Phil Fenster, the District Fire Marshal.
Fenster advertised the burden of his responsibilities, as well as his self-vaunted experience in the field, with a worn expression of “I’ve seen it all,” which had deepened this afternoon into a definite scowl. His suit was rumpled, his tie stained with food, and he had even asked Brian permission to smoke a cigarette, which Brian granted.
When Brian had seen him that morning, the suit had been impeccable, as if newly stripped from a dry-cleaning bag. After being called away for an emergency meeting, Fenster had returned in a far worse mood than when he’d left.
Brian said, for the second time, “We can do this with fewer sprinklers.”
Dance and Associates, Brian’s engineering and construction company, was picking up quite a few new, prestigious jobs lately. With prestige came more scrutiny, sometimes flowing from the friends of those who had not gotten the contracts. Fenster was not immune to such influences.
In a belligerent tone, Fenster said, “You need every one of these sprinklers. Maybe more.” It was a threat. He had the power to make Brian’s clients pay much more than necessary for their building, thereby undercutting Brian’s bidding credibility.
“Look at our test results.”
Fenster waved his hand. “Young man—”
At thirty-nine, Brian was indeed younger than Fenster, but quite well seasoned. He’d benefited tremendously from his father’s guidance, and also from his father’s large footprint and reputation as the best fire protection engineer and systems designer nationwide for some years before he vanished. Keeping his expression impassive with difficulty, Brian braced for the inevitable. It came, right on cue.
“Why are you arguing? Your father developed these codes.”
“We didn’t have Tensano then.” That’s good. Voice calm, reasonable. “This is a completely new material. It’s been extensively tested. Did you get the files I sent you? We did our own tests too, as usual. I have all that information there. Ignition time, burn time, all that. As you can see, if you’ll take the time, we have worked with the architect to use it extensively—”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter. Keeping costs down is what fire protection is supposed to do. Reducing costs means that fire protection will become more widespread.”
“Until there is a code upgrade, we go with the code we have.” Fenster stood. His sour expression belied his outstretched hand: Don’t tell me what my job is, young man.
Brian stood as well, and shook Fenster’s hand. “You’re the boss.”
“Damn straight.”
After Fenster shut the flimsy door, shaking the trailer, Brian leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. That was a wash. Even though he’d kept an even keel this time, he’d lost his temper with Fenster before. That episode kept coming back to bite him. He’d have to think of another approach. It was a delicate matter. In D.C., where many of his jobs were, they used his father’s reputation and work to keep him in check.
If Sam were here—
Brian smiled. If his father were here, he would be quite excited about Tensano and its fire-retardant properties. The difference was that he’d have been able to schmooze Fenster into thinking that less sprinklers was his idea.
Brian shared his father’s unusual height, but was more filled out, his short, sandy hair curly rather than straight and dark. Unlike his father, he was prone to bad-tempered outbursts. He liked to think he was improving on that count.
Time to wrap it up for the day. He wanted, badly, to take a swig from the bottle he used to keep in the bottom drawer of his desk.
But the bottle wasn’t there, now. Couldn’t be. That was all there was to it. A drink now and then wouldn’t send him into a tailspin, but no sense keeping it handy. In his opinion, alcohol was a harmless sedative, one that opened his mind to musical dreaming, during which he doodled on his electric guitar, at home, and in all-day Sunday jam sessions at various hole-in-the-wall blues and jazz clubs in D.C.
Several years ago, Cindy, his wife, had pointed out that with two children to raise he needed less dreaming and more focus—as well as more money than a musician made—and gave him an ultimatum. Stop drinking, get in gear, expand your company, grow up. Or live alone.
After Brian had met Cindy in the Peace Corps in Africa, they managed to get posted together on the little island of Tonga in the Pacific. There, they built houses together and taught. Well, Cindy had done both; Brian was quickly bounced from teaching and put into building, full-time. Cindy could wield power tools, carry lumber, and drive a nail into a roof she was shingling with two strong blows. She could also keep kids in line while teaching them something at the same time. Almost as tall as Brian, Cindy moved with enviable grace in body and in mind. She was just about perfect—except for her maddening ability to almost always be right, and her insistence that he lay off strong liquor.
They’d been married for fourteen years. Together, they juggled her teaching job, his company, and their kids—Zoe, thirteen, and Bitsy, four.
Zoe had wild blond hair, a lovely complexion that tanned easily in summer, and was immersed in music no one else could hear. She obsessively carried a notebook of blank music staffs in which she inscribed her compositions. Just as obsessive was her need to keep a set of broad, music-nibbed markers with her, in an array of hues, for her notes all had colors.
She didn’t talk much.
Zoe had taken over their piano when three, but it was in storage while they lived in a cramped apartment. Just before Brian’s business had scored a marvelous array of projects that took full advantage of his design, contracting, and fire-protection strengths, he and Cindy had found their dream home, a beaux arts gem in the District—sound, but in need of extensive renovation. They figured it would take a year, sold their house to finance the work, and took the first apartment they could find. As soon as they gutted the house, Brian was flooded with accepted bids, the fruit of reputation-building years. It didn’t hurt that he’d assumed the name of his father’s firm, Dance and Associates. Sam had taken him to his jobs when Brian was a teenager, and walked him through all aspects of fire protection, which drew from many engineering and scientific disciplines. When Brian finally got going he had a tremendous head start in skill, practical knowledge, and contacts. He took every new job that came down the pike—a prestigious, challenging office building, or a mundane kitchen remodeling.
Cindy was increasingly anxious to get into their house, and Brian was hardly ever home. Zoe was without her beloved piano and refused to use the electric model they’d bought for her. At least she had her violin, but neighbors’ complaints strictly proscribed her playing hours.
Luckily, Bitsy was forthright, uncomplicated, and happy as a lark no matter where she was. After the difficulties they’d had with Zoe, who’d been diagnosed variously with Asperger’s syndrome (soon discarded), a very high IQ (true, but so what), and OCD (no, just extremely particular about every little thing), Bitsy was somewhat of a relief.
Cindy and Brian were far too compulsive to pull their crew off paying projects to renovate their beaux arts find. Paying projects could vanish overnight, leaving them high and dry and penniless. They were stuck in the apartment.
Cindy worked for the city. She had begun a project called Free D.C. Montessori, and convinced the D.C. City Council that she could get property owners to donate space for Montessori classrooms in return for tax rebates. She had pioneered Pan-Pacific Montessori for the Peace Corps. She had also set up workshops where local people manufactured precise, beautiful Montessori materials fashioned of renewable bamboo, print shops where the artist-created matching cards that ran the gamut of the natural and man-made worlds were made, and created scholarship programs to help train teachers. Just a week earlier, Brian and the kids had watched her on the local cable channel, talking to the D.C. City Council, which wanted to replace the rather expensive Montessori bells with cheap electric pianos.
Every well-equipped Montessori classroom had two sets of twelve bells—two identical-sounding diatonic scales, representing the twelve tones from middle C to high C on the piano. Each bell looked like a six-inch-tall lamp, with a rectangular wooden base, a stem, and a wooden finial holding a hemispheric metal bell perfectly tuned to one note. When gently struck with a small, round mallet, it filled the air with a pure, resonant tone. The bases of one set, the control, were painted white and black, to correspond to piano keys beginning with middle C, and were labeled by note. The bases of the matching set were plain varnished wood. They were not labeled.
Cindy set up the bells at the meeting, the labeled set on one side of the room, the unlabeled set on the other. She then had a three-year-old ring one labeled bell, to which he had to find the match. The boy crossed the room, which took about thirty seconds. During that time, he had to hold the sound of the first bell in his mind. He rang one unlabeled bell, rejected it, rechecked the original, and, after testing four more, found the matching bell. She challenged the board members to do so. The three that tried failed.
“You couldn’t remember the tone for as long as it took to cross the room,” said Cindy. “You missed your sensitive period, obviously. Children who work with these bells often develop perfect pitch.”
“What good would that be?” asked one member.
“We’ll just have to find out in fifteen years when we have a whole lot of young adults with perfect pitch walking around in D.C.”
They all laughed, and gave Cindy what she wanted.
As had Brian. He stopped drinking hard liquor. The alternatives Cindy presented were disagreeable, and he now had to admit that she had been right. He could still be manic, depressed, disagreeable, irascible, and spin out lovely, effervescent skeins of music without the aid of strong drink.
He could still and ever more sharply after discarding his trusty nightcap dream that his plane, struck by Vietcong missiles, plummeted ablaze through jungle canopy, and wake screaming just before the crash.
He had never been in a plane crash. He had never been to Vietnam. Hardly anyone in the U.S. had. Kennedy, in December 1963, had refused to Americanize the war. Yet, the nightmare persisted, real enough for Cindy to regularly shake him awake.
He could still desperately, and ever more sharply, miss his father, and still wonder if he had somehow precipitated his disappearance, though that made no sense. His father had left home years after their mother, Bette, had vanished, presumably in search of her, though he had told no one that he was leaving or when he would be back.
Perhaps Sam had not known.
If only, Brian sometimes thought, he hadn’t lost his temper with Jill that time they’d tried to track Dad down in Germany. But there were more if-onlies that he couldn’t quite pin down, lurking in nightmare and shadows, and even within bright spring days like this. Was his father waiting, somewhere, somehow imprisoned by forces within or without him, for his children to find him, to bring him home? Had he been injured, was he languishing somewhere, brain damaged? Brian sighed, and grabbed his jacket from a hook next to the door.
When Brian stepped out onto his plywood porch, a gust of wind flapped the tie he’d worn for Fenster, much good it had done. As he strode to his black pickup, obstinately and almost proudly powered by gasoline, Brian loosened the tie with one hand. He climbed into the truck, whipped off his tie, and tossed it onto the seat, where it fell across an empty barbecue potato chip bag, empty foam coffee cups, a camera, a hammer, and a pipe wrench, all of which rested on three or four dismembered Washington Posts. He turned up the news on the radio and was headed up D Street when his phone rang.
Brian turned down the radio, which was telling him about the election campaign. The story, heavy on history, referenced the 1978 election, when Richard Nixon challenged Robert Kennedy after Robert’s first term, and lost. The two Kennedy brothers, Jack and Bobby, had hogged the presidency for sixteen consecutive years.
“Brian?”
“Hi, honey. What’s up?”
“It’s Jill.” Cindy’s voice, calm yet firm in almost all circumstances, was unusually sharp. “Elmore just had her committed to St. Elizabeth’s.”
“What?” Brian was silent for a moment. “That sounds like him, doesn’t it? What happened?”
“Not much, really. Instead of riding her bike to the bookstore after class, she rode over to your old house.”
“Halcyon House?” That’s what they’d always called it. The house was close to their apartment, and they’d considered living there instead. But, though Brian never said so, Cindy understood that, for him, it would be like living in a very disquieting past, the past that had caused him to drink to excess.
Cindy continued. “Yes. Her keys were on the porch by the front door, but she broke the front window with a chair. She got cut on the glass, pretty badly. A neighbor called an ambulance.”
“When?”
“Around one.”
“Huh. Fast work, even for Elmore. So, she should have just gone to the emergency room, and now she’s in the nuthouse, courtesy of her own husband.”
“I just can’t figure out why you don’t like Elmore.” Cindy’s default mode, humor, often shaded into sarcasm. “What do you want to do?”
“Are the kids home?”
“I can take them to Delia’s.”
“I’ll swing by and pick you up. Did you call Megan?” Megan was their sister, the youngest of three.
“I tried, but I don’t think she has her phone on.”
“See you soon.”
Brian sighed as he closed his phone. He’d seen this coming. He just hadn’t had any idea of what to do about it.
Megan
MEGAN GETS RILED
March 21, Northern Virginia Suburbs
MEGAN THOROUGHLY ENJOYED riding the Metro. She loved surrendering to motion; motion without attention. It gave her two extra hours a day to read.
She read, with great enjoyment, things that few people enjoyed reading: scientific papers. Her field was memory research. Unlike her sister Jill, who had taken years to finally buckle down and finish her doctorate, Megan had gotten on the fast track while still in high school.
Why memory? Because that was all that there was.
Everything that you think is happening now already happened. You’re processing something that happened a few seconds ago. Our reactions are slow. We live among wavelengths. We are wavelengths. Wavelength is all there is. All right, I know I just said that memory is all there is, but now we’re getting down to the physics of it. All the bits and parts of us, the fabulous multiplicity of us, is what I want to know about.
Try using those lines at a cocktail party. She usually just said, “I’m in research.” When pressed, she said, “Scientific.”
Thoughts flowed randomly, which she found stimulating, as the Metro car glided next to, over, and below traffic. She liked the physics of sound, the change in pressure as they went into a tunnel. She liked how quiet everyone was. She liked to look at the clothes people were wearing and think about their lives. The woman sitting across from her, reading the latest literary best seller, carried a canvas bag that proclaimed WETA; black high heels were crammed in the top of the bag. She had exchanged them for purple running shoes, because walking, and sometimes running, were a part of using public transportation. Megan was fortunate. Her job did not require much dressing up.
She usually kept her Q-phone—most people just called them phones—off while she was on the Metro. It was her thinking time.
She couldn’t imagine life without Q. It was a portable, always-accessible brain. After JFK and Khrushchev negotiated détente, much to the dismay of hard-liners everywhere, who still tried to stir up trouble, much scientific information was rapidly declassified. Satellites now provided access to public information. Q—short for “quantum”—was a new form of communication built on ever-changing but always-there particles. They flashed in and out of existence rapidly, a form of energy capable of holding and transmitting vast amounts of information.
Megan had heard rumors, generally from slightly drunk physicists at parties or out-and-out geeks, that an early variation of Q—a very strong, consciousness-changing form—was embedded in the cereal-box space toys they’d all played with as children. Whenever she tried to track down more information about that esoteric conspiracy-type twist, she found nothing.
She’d gotten hold of Bette’s war records—it was no secret that she had been in Europe, in the Women’s Army Corp, but exactly what she had been doing was not clear. The huge stack of paper from the Army was mostly black with redactions. The CIA did not admit that Bette had been an agent. Out of the bits and pieces of information that Megan had acquired privately, from old letters, or remembered snatches of conversation she’d been too young to understand, she’d put together a rather surprising tale: her mother, Bette Elegante Dance, and father, Sam Dance, had helped develop Q—a more radical form of it than was now used for daily communication. Megan called it Strong Q—a form of Q that promoted neuroplasticity. Strong Q could rewire brains, accelerate learning in adults to preschool speed, and mess with the very stuff of memory. Strong Q explored and used the quantum-physics basis of mind and consciousness to its own advantage, as if it had a personality, an agenda. It was really kind of frightening, so it was no wonder that this deep basis of the Q that everyone—well, most everyone—knew and used and loved was not public knowledge.
Megan had very little idea of how this had come about, though she had tried very hard to get to the bottom of it. Oh, there were standard histories of Q’s development, but strange physics shrouded its depths—the physics that people had heard of, mostly related to Einstein, but about which even those who had worked on the theories disagreed. Through dogged research, Megan had found papers authored by Rutherford and Hadntz, and Meitner and Hadntz—except that no one seemed to know who the mysterious Dr. Hadntz might be. One rumor had it that she had died in a concentration camp during WWII.
Presently, the great leap in communications fostered by Q was explained by the Synergistic school of thought, and various esoteric mathematics, new ways of looking at phenomenon; but when you got right down to it, as Megan had tried, one encountered a maze of human thought that rivaled that of early quantum physicists—in fact, it was based on those stunning, early twentieth-century revelations by Curie, Einstein, Dirac, Born, Heisenberg, Meitner, Planck, Schrödinger, and many others. But the legend that drunken physicists shared at parties was that Q had something to do with the basis of human consciousness itself.
Which brought Megan back to memory research. The questions What is memory? What is consciousness? seemed pedestrian, even meaningless, to most people, but, to Megan, they burned more brightly than magnesium.
Classbooks using Q were embedded with an altruistic baseline able to evaluate the intent of the user. Q could not be used for injurious purposes. It made decisions drawn from a wide philosophical, biological, and moral database. It was able to discuss decisions and argue with users, and was a vast, consensus-based network.
Q readily passed the Turing test. This pleased some, frightened some, and angered many.
It delighted Megan.
When questioned, Q declined to answer questions about its own development. Megan assumed that it had decided to lie. For altruistic reasons. She assumed that Q was engaged in a constant hacker war in its nether reaches. Despite this, the world had accepted Q as a necessity, like electricity. Electricity could be dangerous and deadly, but tamed by engineers, it made modern life possible.
* * *
If Megan tried to talk to Brian and Jill about their parents’ possible role, they shrugged it all off—Jill, most vehemently, and Brian because how could his little sister know more than him? At least, that’s how it seemed to Megan. But there was a lot that Brian just plain wouldn’t talk about. Just like most people. At least he didn’t drink all the time anymore.
Megan had decided that it might be best to keep her thoughts to herself unless she could prove them beyond a doubt. And the only reason she wanted to prove them was to find her parents. If they were even findable.
But why would they stay away from their family if they had a choice? That was the heartbreaking question she had to face and try to answer, if her theory was true. If they were alive, where were they? Couldn’t they at least leave a clue? What might they be afraid of?
As a parent, she realized that her child, and protecting her child from assault or injury, was her most primal underlying concern.
So, if her theory about their mother was correct, what were she, Jill, and Brian being protected from?
Abbie, her five-year-old, would be home with Jim by now after a day at Montessori school. Jim was a political commentator, and worked at home. Megan was thirty-six. Jim was fifty. His curly black hair was graying at the temples, and his beard was almost white. Of medium height, and a bit too heavy, his blue eyes twinkled through old-fashioned round glasses. Once-divorced, he was tickled to have another chance. He was astonishingly kind, adored Abbie and Megan, and had the wicked sense of humor Megan was so used to in her family, though he usually kept it sheathed except when writing. They lived in a forty-year-old suburban neighborhood, Tall Oaks, nestled beneath a canopy of deep-breathing trees.
Megan might be too involved with her pursuit of information; she might appear to be completely absentminded, and sometimes even cold, to her brother and sister, but she was busy. She tried to connect to people. Really, she did. Jill was much more outgoing. Megan preferred to sit back and observe.
She transferred to a local bus, which soon trundled through her neighborhood.
Every few blocks, a grandiose monstrosity hulked over the modest split-levels and ranch homes that had housed a generation of postwar children. Less-kempt yards, here and there, contrasted with smooth, glowing green lawns. The tall-grass yards were often those of people who bought there when the houses were new, although one young man maintained that he had a right to have a meadow, rather than a lawn. In true Tall Oaks spirit—different than more restrictive outer suburbs where 1984 was reality—no one had challenged that right.
When she passed the tall-grass homes, Megan missed her parents. Halcyon House, her childhood home, was empty now, enveloped in the wild evolution of her father’s famously inclusive one-acre flower garden, and ever-smaller areas of grass irregularly mowed by a succession of local kids. Megan mostly missed her dad. She had lost her mother in 1963. Mom went somewhere and never came back.
That was probably why memory interested her so much. She didn’t so much want to look at a photograph of her mother—which were strangely few—as feel the touch of her hand, smell her hair, hug her legs, as Abbie hugged hers, and be drawn into her tight embrace. Take the drug that would reactivate experience.
She wanted her childhood back.
All that was long, long gone.
New leaves shimmered in late-afternoon sunlight, and kids on bikes shouted and waved to one another. The bus passed Rathbone Place. Jim occasionally expressed thanks that they didn’t live on such an ominously named street. Megan mentally said hello to her closet doors, which were somewhere on that street. She had seen an ad in the community newsletter asking for original cupboard and closet doors. The little row houses built for commuters had transmuted into fifties chic. The Rathbone folks had probably bid on her unrepentant never-renovated house in the first place. She and Jim had outbid a couple of other buyers to snag it.
Because she felt oddly happy in small, confined places, she had removed the doors from the upper closet in her study when they had moved in, and stored them in the attic until she saw the ad for AUTHENTIC ORIGINAL TALL OAKS HOUSE PARTS, and those plain closet doors brought her a hundred bucks. A few pillows, a lamp, and books—all things from her parents’ old house downtown—furnished her tiny Megan loft.
In fact, thought Megan, she was oddly, but blessedly, happy with just about everything in her life. Everything was in order, unsurprising. She liked it that way. The only thing not perfect, right now, was the state of her research. She might well lose her funding if she didn’t come up with the more focused chimera she had pursued all of these years: What is the neurobiological foundation of empathy? and Can it be dependably, pharmacologically or otherwise, replicated? Memory, including the phenomenon of false memory, and the ability of humans to create stories and share them, was a vital part of her theory, and her colleagues took these astounding abilities for granted. Memory was not sexy; no one threw money her way, money with which to hire, set up research, and enable experiments. This did cast some darkness on her life. It seemed so damned important. The spread of true empathy, disseminated via carefully thought-out vectors, might well unravel the world as everyone knew it. Such a change would be as momentous as the other great watersheds of human history: the invention of printing; the development of science. Perhaps, Megan often thought, she was just not very good at convincing others that she was on the track of something important.
At other times, she thought that maybe she was too good. Maybe she was on the track of something that many people feared: a power shift from the few to the many.
Revolution, pure and simple, and all the blue sky and heartache that revolution might bring.
From deep in her purse, her phone emitted a muffled beep. A message.
* * *
Instead of going home when she got off the bus, Megan called Jim, spoke with him briefly, and then headed down the service road bounding a creek that ran into a small, marshy lake. This was where she always went to think.
But first she rummaged deep in her bag, where she kept her pack of cigarettes. Yes, she had stopped smoking when pregnant with Abbie. Yes, she never smoked at home, and in fact, hardly smoked at all. She did, though, buy a fresh pack of Chesterfields every month and give the old, usually unopened pack to the first bum she saw when she came out of the drugstore.
She ripped open the cellophane, took out a cigarette, and had it match-lit in record time. Clamping it between her teeth, she hoisted her bags, headed down the wide gravel path, and took deep, mind-sharpening drags as she moved with long strides into the preplantation, Revolutionary War–vintage forest. Braddock’s famous road was just a mile away, and she liked this living vestige of the past, wise and restful, her refuge.
Two boys poked at something in the creek with sticks. Hundred-year-old oaks towered overhead. Geese honked, harsh voices rising in eternal goose argument. A bike swished past.
It was hard to believe. Jill, committed.
Then again, sometimes Jill let fly with odd comments that revealed she was in what could be charitably described as another reality.
Megan trudged along. Her shoes got muddy. Her briefcase and purse weighed heavily on one shoulder. She turned things over in her mind as the road dwindled to a path and the smell of thawed earth grew stronger. She stored her spent cigarette butt in a little metal pillbox and lit another.
Brian was at St. Elizabeth’s now, and said they had Jill on lithium. Why were they using such a big hammer?
In Megan’s opinion, Jill’s life was much too demanding. She was completing her dissertation and working at the World Bank and in her bookstore, as well, to pay for what Megan thought of as Elmore’s Folly. What she really needed was a vacation from her life. Elmore’s insistence on his showy Folly had forced Jill to leave her full-time job at the Bank, predicated on the promise that when she finished her languishing doctorate, her pay would double. Jill’s schedule had been manageable before she went back to Georgetown. The Bank paid for Jill’s doctoral work, but Elmore was incensed about the temporary loss of income, saying that she could go back to school—not poli-sci, but law school, which assured one of an income—as soon as he made partner. Everything in life was supposed to sync with his internal schedule of How His Life Would Move Ahead, presumably trailing Perfect Spouse and Child in his wake to display when necessary. At least, that’s how Megan saw it. She knew that Elmore and Jill had ferocious arguments about whether or not to sell the bookstore property, which had appreciated tremendously in value, to pay for the Folly—either that, or transform the store into living space. Jill would simply not let go of her store, even though, as Elmore often pointed out at family gatherings, it didn’t do a whole lot more than break even and took up too much of their time.
Their new home was certainly a fine town house, on one of the best streets in Georgetown, although, to twist the knife, Elmore often mentioned that the bookstore, with its commanding view of Key Bridge and Rosslyn, would have been the perfect place from which to trump everyone who was anyone. D.C.’s hottest designer, who had categorically excluded Jill’s garage sale finds, decorated Elmore’s soulless triumph. After a battle, Jill had angrily stored her own things at Halcyon House.
Add to all that Jill’s concern about five-year-old Stevie, whom everyone thought was more than just childishly dotty, particularly since he’d begun insisting that his name was not Stevie, but Whens.
Megan lit her third cigarette and the gnats fled. The budding greenness of the forest enveloped her. She turned down a little-used path lined by starry spring wildflowers. Two kids in a rowboat struggled with oars far out on the lake.
Megan dumped her bags, sat on a rock next to the water, and stretched her legs out in front of her. She and Brian and Jill should really do something about the old house downtown. It would free up a lot of money. Their parents had left a mysterious trust, held by a secret trustee that even Elmore, who considered himself a legal wizard, could not track down. The taxes were paid on time; checks were sent to Jill, the oldest, for bare-bones maintenance, and all three children got a small monthly stipend. Since neither parent had been declared dead, Megan knew that Elmore frequently raged that various time limits were up and that they needed to sell the property and divide up the money, but none of the Dance kids wanted that. Elmore’s latest feint was to attack the very legality of the trust, but, since no papers were available, he was having a difficult time doing so. The property had not been in the best location when their parents bought it, but now, it was worth a bundle, and their tax bill reflected this. Halcyon House, bordered by a park much like this one, was bound on one side by a strong, fresh-running stream. Just try to find another house like that downtown. But the old mansion had fanciful turrets and odd roof junctures that made leaks hard to find, and was monstrously huge. Elmore thought it a wasteful hobby that the sentimental Dance brood needed to cash in on.
The emotional turmoil Elmore seemed bent on maintaining might have something to do with Stevie giving himself a new name. A new identity called Anyone but me! Elmore’s wearing bid for partnership, which seemed to have permanently warped his once easygoing personality, might last years. Jill had jumped hand-in-hand with Elmore into the maelstrom, so it wasn’t as if she hadn’t known what might happen.
But maybe Jill’s deepest problem was that she missed their father.
Megan did too; fiercely. Megan, Brian, and Jill had gone to Germany, his last known destination, but they had not found him. Jill’s screaming fit, a month into the search, convinced Megan and Brian that it was time to quit. Brian had hired a private detective, who showed up one day at Brian’s house looking frightened and returned the retainer. He refused to say why, just cited family problems that kept him from traveling.
So now they were left with this double hole in their family. The Vanished Parents.
Dad had not gone to look for Mom in ’63, even though her body was never found. He had held no funeral. It seemed very strange to Megan, now that she was grown. You’d think he would have done both, but he did show them the letter from the State Department that said Bette Elegante Dance was missing, presumed dead. Megan had been too young to question Dad as she should have during those years before he too left. Or died, somewhere, undocumented, maybe even under a different name. Megan was now positive that her dad had known all along that Bette was still alive, and was furious that he had withheld that information.
Obviously, the Dance lines of communication were not as clear as they ought to have been. Megan was sure that Jill knew something she was not talking about—something about why both parents were gone. But, if so, why not tell her and Brian?
Megan stood, rehoisted her bags, and headed out of the woods. She passed through an empty ball field and emerged from the woods many blocks from home—if the meandering streets of the Tall Oaks could be said to contain blocks. Regaining the sidewalk, she continued to muse, admiring the gardens of her neighbors in spite of her worry. Crocuses, yellow forsythia. Lovely front porch, with those wicker chairs. Jill always enjoyed this walk, and exclaimed about everything she saw, along with Whens. Stevie, Megan told herself firmly.
Megan suspected that Jill’s hardcore medications were the result of Elmore’s fears, which he’d no doubt communicated strongly to the doctor. These were drugs for schizophrenia, and, perhaps, from Elmore’s point of view, that was Jill. Schizophrenic. Seeing things, hearing voices, needing to be controlled.
Megan walked faster. Her role was suddenly clear. She would have to meet the doctor, have a talk with him. Jill probably didn’t need drugs at all. Not her Jill! She needed something. But not drugs. Megan knew a lot about pharmacology—not that M.D.s were inclined to listen to anyone else. She’d give them all a talking to, raise hell. As she walked, she got more and more fired up.
She called Jim and asked him to pick her up at the corner. “Take Abbie to Beth’s. I know; tell her that I love her and that I want to see her. But I think we need to get over to the hospital.”