“It’s hard to explain,” you say. “It’s better if I show you. Do you trust me?”
She narrows her eyes at you. “Why don’t people ever seem to understand that saying something like that makes everyone trust them less?”
“It’s nothing dangerous,” you assure her. “I’ll be right there along with you.”
“You’re serious?”
“Just watch,” you say. “Take my hand.”
Still holding back, she extends the fingers of one hand. You clasp them lightly, reach up to touch the key around your neck
and night changes into day, and you’re five blocks back down the street.
“What the hell –? Where are we?”
“It’s earlier this afternoon. We’re on our way to the restaurant for dinner.”
“We’re what?”
And then it’s night again, back where you started.
Inez looks all around her, down at her feet, and then back up at you, her eyes wide.
“Let’s go get some coffee,” you suggest.
* * *
“So you’re not the one doing it?”
You shake your head. “It’s the House. It all comes from the House.”
“And the reason you can do it even though you’re away from the House....”
“Is because I have one of the house keys. Yes.”
She leans back in her seat. “Okay, it’s obvious that there’s something going on here. I can’t deny the night-to-day-to-night thing. But —” she leans forward again. “You and I … we’re married?”
“It would seem that way, yes.”
“But we’ve just met one another.”
“You’ve just met one another, but I’m from about twenty years in the future.”
And she leans back in her seat again. “Now I know you’re shitting me.”
“Wait here a second,” you say
and you’re back in the House again, in the bedroom you and Inez had been sharing.
You pause for a few moments, sitting down. Inexplicably, your hands are shaking. You’ve never, ever told another living soul about the House before. Father, you know, would be furious.
“It’s okay,” you tell yourself. “She’s your wife. All in the family.”
Your engagement picture is sitting on the bed just where you left it. You pick it up gently and
you’re back at The Slice, with Inez sitting across from you. She’s gaping down at your hands.
“What did you just see?” you ask her.
“That picture frame,” she answers. “It just suddenly appeared.”
You turn the photo towards her and hand it over. Her eyes go wide.
“I mean, this is obviously me,” she admits. “And obviously from the future.” She squints, bringing the picture right up to her nose. “Is that crow’s feet?”
You shrug, but she’s too engrossed in the photograph to see it.
She stares for a long, long time, and then slowly hands the picture back to you, her eyes peering now somewhere off into space. You give her time.
“Okay,” she says at last, “assuming I believe you, now what do we do?”
“We keep moving forward until something happens that puts history back the way it was.” You put your hand on the coffee cup in front of you, but it’s gone cold. “Honestly, I thought that it would happen when I told you about the House.”
“How so?”
“That proving to you that I’m from a future where we end up getting married would make that future begin.”
She grins. “If you’ve been married to me for twenty years, you should know by now that I’m not that easily swayed.”
“But I’m from the broken history, remember?” you explain. “The one where we don’t get married.”
“Broken...” she repeats, thoughtfully.
“From my point of view, I’ve known you as long as you’ve known me.”
“Which means…?”
“Which means we keep going forward and see if this relationship can turn into a marriage.”
“Just like everyone else.”
“Just like everyone else,” you agree.
She glances down at the table, and then back up at you, side-eye.
“Challenge accepted,” she says.
* * *
The next day is Thursday.
Inez stops by your dorm room after class, as usual. “Hey,” she says, “I just had a pop quiz in my Biology class. Think you can take me back in time so I can prep for it?”
“I don’t think that would be a good idea.”
She holds her hands up. “Just joking,” she says, but you’re not sure she was.
“I have a better idea,” you tell her.
You take her back to the summer after high school graduation, to the night when you camped out solo up in the Appalachian Mountains. You enjoy the sunset together, and then smoke some weed by the campfire. You doze off together in the tent – there’s only one sleeping bag, of course, but you let her take it. You wake up in time to watch the sun rise. Then you’re back in your dorm room.
“What day is it?” Inez asks. “Did we miss Friday?”
You grin. “No – it’s still Thursday. We left only 5 minutes ago.”
“Okay,” she says, “that is totally amazing.”
Friday evening, you take her back to the night you got to see Yo Yo Ma live in concert. Father brought you there when you were ten: an intimate recital with just fifty people in the audience, arranged on folding chairs in a circle around the cellist.
This one’s a little more dicey. You have to stick with Father and play the part of ten-year-old you – otherwise, he’ll suspect something. Meanwhile, Inez lurks in the back row, glaze-eyed and grinning throughout the entire performance.
When you bring her back to your dorm room, it’s almost like you can feel the electricity tingling through her skin. She gives you a kiss – the first one you’ve shared – and then pirouettes out of the room.
She shows up at your dorm room first thing Saturday morning.
“My turn,” she says. “I have all sorts of places I want to take you back to.”
“Oh, we can’t do that.”
Disappointment and then suspicion and then anger flash across her face in quick succession. “Why not?”
“It’s too dangerous.”
She scowls. “You don’t trust me?”
Your mind flashes to the house key she’s going to steal and the odd scavenger hunt she’s going to arrange for you twenty years from now. But that’s not the same Inez, you remind yourself.
“It isn’t that,” you assure her. “The key is what brought me here – what’s keeping me here. If I change something and end up in different history, I’ll take the key with me. If you lose the key, you’ll be stuck wherever you landed.”
She huffs out a sigh.
“I’ll make it up to you,” you assure her. “I think we’ve gotten just about as much fun out of my past as we’re going to get. Let’s have some fun in the present.”
“What do you mean?”
“Let’s go see a movie.”
You do, and when it’s over you zip back in time and see another one. And another. Only after you’ve seen half the movies playing at the multiplex, including two of them twice, do you let time carry you forward at its normal pace again.
“Okay, that was fun!” she admits.
You grin. “By my count, we just watched 20 hours’ worth of movies and it’s still early Saturday afternoon. What do you want to do next?”
She leans into you, her eyes glinting. “The Powerball drawing is tonight.”
You chuckle. “Oh, Father really wouldn’t like that.”
“Well he’s not here, is he?”
“We can do it on one condition,” you tell her. “Keep the jackpot small.”
“Why?”
“If we stop some random guy from losing a couple hundred bucks, nothing much changes,” you explain. “But if we take someone’s $500 million jackpot away from him, Lord only knows how much history we could scramble.”
“How about five hundred bucks?” she suggests.
You rock your head back and forth, considering. “I guess that couldn’t hurt anything.”
“And then we’ll go to Vegas.”
You convince her, instead, to settle for dinner at the most expensive restaurant in town. The steak is a good one. You’re just not sure whether it’s $200 good.
“I’m starting to get the hang of this,” she says over her $35 crème brûlée.
And so you romp your way through the entire weekend. Through all of these hijinks, though, neither one of you mentions the elephant in the room – the question of whether or not you’re falling in love. Except for that one kiss after Yo Yo Ma, everything has been completely Platonic between the two of you.
It was all right when you were the only one who knew that it was supposed to happen. Then you were like a person playing a video game. But you and Inez both knowing complicates things. If you’re going to make a move on her, suddenly it becomes a bilateral decision. How do you even broach the subject? And what if she says no?
And even if the two of you are falling in love, that doesn’t solve everything. Then you’re left with the question of whether you fell in love because of genuine feelings or you fell in love because you knew that you were supposed to. How would you even tell the difference? Is there a difference?
You know Inez well enough by now that you’re pretty sure she’s wrestling with this question too. It’s easier just for neither of you to bring it up.
The upshot of all this is that, while sharing the secret of the house key is bringing you together, the specter of your lost marriage is keeping you apart.
* * *
Moving into the next week, your tinkering with time gets a little more mundane. You relent on your earlier resistance, letting Inez take her bio midterm a second time. At the cafeteria that night, the chicken is a little dry, so he takes her back so she can choose the spaghetti instead. On Wednesday, you pop back to the start of the day and text Inez that she should bring her umbrella.
The next big idea is Inez’s. But since you’re the one with the key it’s got to be you who does it.
Eating dinner at The Slice Thursday night, you suddenly announce, “I’ve developed psychic powers.”
Kathy starts giggling. Jim just looks back at you expectantly.
“Here,” you tell them. You pull a penny, a nickel, a dime, and a quarter out of your pocket and lay them on the table. Then you cover your eyes with the crook of your arm. “Put one of the coins under your coffee cup, hide the other three, and I’ll get it right every single time.”
“Bullshit,” Kathy says. She’s more than a little drunk.
“Okay, go,” Jim says.”
You uncover your eyes, and then focus on the coffee cup, making a big show of creasing your brow and frowning with intense concentration.
“Dime,” you say finally.
“Nope,” Jim says, lifting the cup to reveal the quarter.
You uncover your eyes, and then focus on the coffee cup, making a big show of creasing your brow and frowning with intense concentration.
“Quarter,” you say finally.
Jim lifts the cup to reveal the quarter. “Okay, that’s one.”
But then you rattle off each coin in quick succession, never getting one wrong – including the time that Jim thinks he’s being clever and doesn’t put down any coin at all.
He turns on Inez. “You’re feeding him signals somehow.”
Inez lifts her hands up in the air. “You want me to go sit across the room?”
“It’s got to be some kind of a trick,” Jim says.
“Who cares?” Kathy shoots back. “Real or not, it’s pretty amazing. Do it again!”
Eventually even Kathy gets bored with the trick. The dinner conversation turns to other subjects and eventually just peters out.
You and Inez stumble, tired and gigging, back to your dorm room. You unlock the door and then, on impulse, you turn to face her, standing on tiptoe...
…and your noses collide.
At first, Inez just stares back at you, her face a mix of shock and confusion that lifts into a grin. And then, with a very unladylike snort, she breaks into nervous laughter.
Laughter wasn’t your hoped-for reaction. But it’s infectious, and soon you’re laughing too.
“I think I can do better than that,” you tell her with a grin.
You take the two of you back sixty seconds. This time, when you turn in the doorway, you hit your target, planting a soft kiss squarely on Inez’s lips.
“There,” you murmur. “Much better.”
But when you pull away, there’s no laughter in Inez’s eyes. She looks startled. A crease appears between her eyebrows.
“I, um – I just remembered. I have some homework I have to do,” she says. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Inez – what?”
But she’s already halfway back down the hall. You stand there in your doorway trying to reason out what just happened.
* * *
You wake up the next morning to someone banging on your door. After a good two minutes trying to ignore it, you finally drag yourself out of bed. You’ve got a sinking feeling you know who it is, and you’re right: It’s Inez, and she’s got a determined look on her face.
“I need to talk,” she says without greeting. You step aside and she strides into the room.
“Sit,” you offer, gesturing towards your desk chair with one hand while struggling to hold your blanket around you with the other.
But she’s too restless to sit. She makes a quick circuit around the room, but you can tell that her mind is somewhere else completely.
“Inez, what is it?” you ask. “You’re starting to scare me.”
“We have to stop playing around with the House,” she tells you. “I have to.”
“What? Why?”
She holds up the object she’s carrying in her hand. It’s a slim paperback copy of her favorite book – Lao Tsu’s Tao Te Ching. She’s got one knuckle tucked between two pages and she opens the book to them now. “Since –” she glances up at you, struggling for a word. “Since last night, there’s been one chapter in particular keeps running through my head.” And she reads: “‘Do you want to improve the world? I don't think it can be done. The world is sacred. It can't be improved.’”
“Of course it can,” you say. “I mean, thanks to the House you got an A on that Biology midterm.”
She shakes her head sadly. “That’s not an improvement. It’s just a change. I’ve always thought of myself as a Taoist, and Taoism is all about accepting the world as it is, going with the flow.” She turns back to the book again. “‘If you tamper with the world, you’ll ruin it. If you treat it like an object, you’ll lose it.’ That’s why I need to stop. We need to stop. The way we’ve been carrying on – it’s dangerous. It’s vandalism.”
“It’s just a bit of harmless fun –” you begin.
“No,” she says firmly. “We’re not treating the world like the world anymore. We’re treating it like a plaything.” She falls, finally, into your desk chair, turning a tearful, pleading face up to you. “I don’t want to ruin the world. And I sure as hell don’t want to lose it.”
“Well, we don’t have to,” you assure her, taking a step towards her. “I promise. We’ll stop using the house key. Hide it away. We don’t have to even think about it anymore.”
“But you can’t promise that,” she says. “In fact, the only reason you’re here is to tinker with history.”
“Fix it,” you correct her. “Putting things back the way they were.”
She turns back to the book again. “‘The Master sees things as they are, without trying to control them. She lets them go their own way.’”
“What are you saying?”
“That this isn’t right,” she answers, waving her hand back and forth between the two of them. “We’re swimming across the current. It’s unnatural.” She’s crying openly now. “This is not my path.”
“But it is your path,” you insist. “You and I –“
She’s shouting now. “Stop treating the world like it’s a god-dammed movie you can rewind and watch over again. That’s not how it works. Each time you come back, you’re watching a different movie.” Suddenly she’s back on her feet again, almost nose to nose with you. “Life isn’t supposed to be trial and error until you get it right. Life is supposed to be random and unpredictable and messy. I know it sucks sometimes, but that’s just the way it is.”
“But it doesn’t have to be,” you tell her.
“But it should be,” she says. “Anyway, that’s the world I choose to live in.” And she thrusts the copy of Tao Te Ching into your hands and leaves the room without another word.
It’s only after she’s gone that you finally register what emotion was driving her. At first you thought she was just angry. But that wasn’t it. She wasn’t sad either.
She was scared. Terrified.
Once you realize this, you get the sinking feeling that – in this version of history at least – it’s the last time that you’ll ever see her.
You settle down on the edge of your bed, crushing the tiny volume of theTao Te Ching in your fist. You decide
to keep moving forward with this timeline, finding a way to get a second chance.
to go back to the day you and Inez first met, determined to give it another try.
pull out Inez’s note to try your hand at solving the puzzle.