Turnabout

  The agency called the day before she was ready to leave. They were trying out a robot receptionist.

  “Ms. Hazelwood,” the robot said in its emotionless monotone. “Your birthday is next week. It is time for your annual checkup. When shall I schedule the appointment? You have not been answering your E-mail.”

  Amy hadn’t even been looking at her E-mail.

  “Sorry,” she apologized automatically. Then, because it was just a robot, she added recklessly, “I’m going on a trip to Kentucky. I don’t know when or if I’m coming back. So I’ll call you about that appointment. I’ll let you know.”

  The robot’s head began spinning around, red lights flashing and buzzers blaring. “Emergency! Emergency!”

  “What did I say?” Amy asked. Before anyone could answer, she panicked and cut off the connection. She stared at the computer for a full minute before she realized what must have happened: They’d programmed the robot to respond to the word Kentucky. They’d think she was violating her promise never to go where anyone would recognize her. But she hadn’t been back to her hometown in more than fifty-five years. Anyone who remembered what she’d looked like at forty-four—the first time around, a hundred years ago—had died long ago.

  She looked nervously out the window, as if daring someone from the agency to come and stop her. She paced, considering leaving early. But she’d sent her electric car to the shop for a checkup and to receive a maximum recharge before the trip. If she wanted to leave now, she’d have to take public transportation or buy a new car. She decided to wait.

  At eight o’clock the next morning, an hour before she was supposed to pick up her car, the doorbell rang.

  Amy sat still at her breakfast table, willing whoever it was to leave.

  “Mrs. Hazelwood!” a creaky old-woman voice called out. “Please let us in!”

  Being called Mrs. Hazelwood once again was all it took. She quickly crossed the room and opened the door.

  The most ancient-looking couple she’d ever seen was standing on her doorstep. The man held a cane but still clutched the woman’s arm as though his legs could never get enough help. The woman looked none too steady herself, all shriveled and shrunken into a fragile little gnome.

  “Mrs. Hazelwood?” the man croaked in disbelief.

  Amy gave a half nod. “And you are . . . ?”

  “Dr. Reed,” the man wheezed.

  “Dr. Jimson,” the woman whispered.

  Amy couldn’t help it: She gasped. She did some quick math in her head: fifty-seven plus—what? Thirty-five? Forty? The doctors were both at least ninety years old.

  “You never took PT-1 yourselves,” she said.

  “No.” The man shook his head, a process requiring such intense effort that Amy found it painful to watch. “And we never will.”

  Amy squinted, trying to see in these ancient creatures some glimpse of the doctors she remembered from a half century ago. Something about the eyes—did eyes change? These people’s eyes were bleached out, ghostly. Maybe eyes did change. Or memory did. When she’d been old, just about all she’d noticed about the doctors’ appearance was their youth and vitality. And now that she was younger, all she saw was their age.

  “You’ve unaged quite nicely,” Dr. Reed said in his eerie rasp.

  “I guess.” Amy shrugged helplessly. Somehow it seemed too cruel to accost the doctors with any of the angry accusations that had been running through her mind lately. Why did you have to keep me alive this long? I’m a freak of nature—what am I good for? Instead she invited them in. They took long, slow steps and spent a good ten minutes easing themselves down into Amy’s living-room couch.

  Amy perched uneasily on her least comfortable chair.

  “Why?” she finally blurted. “Why won’t you take PT-1? You don’t have to live like this.”

  “No,” Dr. Reed agreed. “But we saw—” He looked to his wife, and in that motion Amy recognized him. So some things never changed.

  “We decided unaging was wrong.” Amy could tell that Dr. Jimson wanted to speak as firmly and confidently as ever, but her voice wasn’t up to it. She went on. “You and Mrs. Flick are about our only success stories. That we know of.”

  Amy debated telling them how successful she’d been feeling the last few weeks, but didn’t.

  “But the others—,” she protested.

  “A few have disappeared,” Dr. Jimson said. “They left and cut off all ties with the agency. Several have committed suicide.” She fixed Amy with an unflinching stare, which Amy recognized as well. Dr. Jimson’s philosophy of delivering bad news was like giving a shot: Do it quickly and get it over with. “Others have begged for the Cure, and that still is not effective.”

  Ah, Amy thought, so Dr. Jimson has discovered euphemism in her old age.

  “And the rest?” Amy asked, shivering suddenly. “The others who stayed at the agency?”

  “They are physically healthy.” Dr. Jimson appeared to be choosing her words carefully. “But they are not pleasant people to be around.”

  “Oh,” Amy said.

  “Either they are obsessed with unaging,” Dr. Reed said, “or they are obsessed with the past and the memories they are losing. And that is why we have come to beg you not to go to Kentucky.”

  Amy blinked, not quite sure how they’d got from the others’ problems to her own.

  “Pardon?” she asked.

  Dr. Reed began tapping his cane on the floor.

  “You can go,” he said. “We can’t stop you. And—” he raised his hand to stop Amy from protesting—“I know you can argue that you’re in no danger of being recognized. You will not be violating any of the promises you made when you left the agency. But when you get down there, it’s going to be too tempting for you. You’ll want to start reliving the past. You’ll want to look up all your descendants and find out what happened to them. You’ll find some way to ingratiate yourself into their lives. And it won’t be natural. It isn’t natural for you to be younger than your great-grandchildren. We messed around with nature, and we shouldn’t have. We’ve left you in a painful position, and you would very likely hurt your descendants too. Because before very long you’d have to tell someone. And then people talk.” He paused and chose another angle for his diatribe. “From what we’ve seen, the best way for unaging people to live is for the present and the future. Not the past. You’ve been working as a preschool teacher, right?”

  Amy bit her lip, thinking of all the children she’d taken care of in the last decade. Other people’s children.

  “Yes,” she said. “But I’m on leave. I . . . I can’t do that anymore.”

  “Then do something else,” Dr. Jimson said. “Something like that, that makes a difference in the world.”

  Stubbornly Amy looked away. She pictured once again the scene she wanted to return to: the glorious mountains, the gentle valley.

  Dr. Reed sighed.

  “You’re not convinced,” he said. “I suppose you don’t have to be. I’ll put it this way: Even if you don’t understand, humor an old man. Please. I know what I’m talking about.”

  Amy flushed, suddenly angry.

  “I’m older than you are,” she said bitterly. “I’m one hundred and fifty-six. Remember?”

  “Yes,” Dr. Reed said softly. “But you’re also forty-four.”

  Amy didn’t answer right away. One hundred fifty-six or forty-four—they were just meaningless numbers. She’d been alive longer than Dr. Reed. If he was going to pull that older-and-wiser shtick, she had the upper hand. She glared at Dr. Reed, prepared for another angry outburst, but his gaze stopped her. His rheumy eyes almost looked through her, as if seeing his death waiting near. She remembered that look from long ago, from her first lifetime, when she’d tended her dying mother. She remembered her mother struggling to say, “Death . . . does . . . focus . . . the mind. . . .” Those were the last words she ever spoke. Amy had been forty-two then, and hadn’t understood.

  “All right,” she t
old Dr. Reed now. “I won’t go.”

  Strangely, she and the doctors had nothing to say to one another after that. They were gone before nine o’clock. But instead of rushing to pick up her car, Amy went to her computer and typed in, “Midlife career change. Search.”

  And the next morning when the agency robot called to say that the doctors had been in a terrible car wreck, and both died, Amy accepted the news without the slightest bit of surprise.

  April 24, 2085

  “Well,” Anny Beth said when Melly finished her story. “I guess that explains those fifteen years you spent as a hospice nurse.”

  “Yep,” Melly said without looking at her friend.

  “You could have told me,” Anny Beth said. “I didn’t know you were sad when I married Bill.”

  Sad was such an old-fashioned word. Nobody in the twenty-first century was ever sad—they were depressed, emotionally unbalanced, incorrectly medicated. Sorrow was a disease that everyone rushed to cure. Melly was strangely glad, suddenly, that she’d spent all those weeks wallowing in her misery more than twenty-five years before.

  “I was happy for you,” Melly tried to explain. “But for myself—”

  “You needed to be around dying people to make yourself feel better?” Anny Beth joked.

  Melly nodded, all seriousness. “I worked the night shift, remember? And I’d leave every morning, sometimes still covered in vomit and excrement and the stench of death, and I’d step out on the porch and look at the sunrise, and it was like . . . being born again, or something. I’d think, ‘I get hundreds more sunrises. I’m alive!’ I felt so lucky just to have another day, when those poor people were dying. . . .”

  Anny Beth didn’t laugh, the way Melly had expected her to. She drew her legs up close to her body, perched her elbows on her knees, and leaned her chin on her hands. She peered back at Melly. “So you took that part of Dr. Reed’s advice and it worked—it helped you to help other people. And now you think he was right that you shouldn’t go back to Kentucky?”

  Melly shrugged. “I promised.”

  Anny Beth sprang off the bed and began pacing once more. “Why is it that for the first half of my life I couldn’t find a single honest person to hang around with? My relatives, my husbands, my friends, my kids—all of them would tell a lie as easily as they breathed, and not think a thing of it. A promise was like . . . like spit, something you made and got rid of and didn’t worry about. And now—now when I really need to lie and break promises—I’m stuck with the only moral person in this whole dang century.”

  Melly couldn’t help it. She laughed.

  “You make me sound so strange,” she complained.

  Anny Beth sat back on the bed. “You are. Because a promise you made almost thirty years ago to someone who had no way of knowing what you’d be facing now should not stop you from doing anything.”

  Melly lay back on the bed and stared up at the ceiling.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said in despair. “We can’t hide in Kentucky anyway. Without the agency we can’t get any new ID, so we won’t have social security numbers, so we can’t work. We’ve both got money in the bank, but the agency could probably trace it every time we made a withdrawal. Let’s face it—we can’t survive without the agency.”

  Anny Beth was shaking her head violently. “Didn’t you say some of the other Project Turnabout people cut off contact with the agency? They must have figured out how to survive on their own.”

  “Or not,” Melly moaned. “They probably all ended up dead in some back alley somewhere.”

  Anny Beth gave her a playful tap on the shoulder. “Quit that,” she said. “Think positive. Some of them had to have figured out how to get their own ID, how to take care of themselves. They had to have adapted. Some of them must have survived.”

  Melly groaned, not convinced. “Well, the only way I know how to survive on my own is with a wood-burning cookstove and a well and plenty of flour sacks for clothes. In this century—forget it.”

  She closed her eyes, waiting for Anny Beth’s sarcastic reply, but it didn’t come. After a minute Melly opened her eyes and looked over at Anny Beth.

  Anny Beth was staring off into space, her mouth agape, her eyes wide.

  “What?” Melly asked.

  “You’re absolutely right,” Anny Beth said. “Melly, you’re a genius! That’s how we can hide!”

  “How?” Melly said, mystified.

  “By living the way we know best,” Anny Beth said. “By giving up this century.”

  April 25, 2085

  It’s 3 A.M. Anny Beth and I have been talking for hours, trying to figure out if her plan will work. Now she’s sacked out on the bed. That’s one of the things I’ve always hated about her, that she can stop in the middle of anything—a fight, a conversation, a movie—and declare, “I’m tired,” and instantly go to sleep. I won’t be able to sleep for hours, if at all, for thinking about all this.

  It’s crazy. Even Anny Beth admits that. Sure, we both still remember how to live without computers and automatic cookers, or even electricity and running water. But we sure don’t want to.

  Anny Beth keeps saying that I shouldn’t see this as a permanent plan. She thinks we can hide our car and our computers somewhere and go back to them occasionally. She says this is just buying us time. And right now we do need time to find out how the reporter traced us here, to find out if someone in the agency is out to get us, to figure out how to get away from the reporter once and for all. And then . . . to find someone to take care of us. No matter how worried I am about us now, I can’t forget that problem too.

  I know, if we stay here, the reporter could easily come here—in person—to find us. And someone from the agency is supposed to call back tomorrow, and we have to believe that anything we tell the agency might get back to the reporter. . . .

  The easiest thing would be to give in and do what Anny Beth wants. She’s so sure of herself. But I can’t forget the promise I made Dr. Reed not to go back to Kentucky. It was twenty-eight years ago, and I couldn’t foresee this, but still. Isn’t a promise a promise?

  I argued with Anny Beth that if the point is to live in the wilds, we could live just about anywhere there’s still some protected space. The American Northwest is still beautiful, and now that we’re already in New Mexico, it’s actually closer. But Anny Beth says I’m forgetting how hard it is to survive in wilderness. We know what plants are edible in Kentucky. One wrong bite in the Cascade Range could kill us. I guess she’s right about that.

  The thing is, when I think about breaking my promise to Dr. Reed, I think that I might as well go whole hog and break other promises too. Because it occurs to me that maybe the best people to take care of me when I get younger are my own kin. And where else am I going to find them but in Kentucky?

  April 25, 2085

  They arrived at the woods near Quicksand, Kentucky, just before midnight. Anny Beth hid the car in the trees, and they both stepped out, inhaling deeply.

  “Oh, Anny Beth,” Melly sighed. “It still smells the same. Just like I remember, all that pine . . . and the stars are so bright—”

  Anny Beth snorted. “More like, you’re seeing the glow of the Wal-Mart Universal parking lot on the other side of the preserve.”

  “Oh.” Melly looked at Anny Beth questioningly.

  “I looked it up,” Anny Beth said. “I had to do something while the car was on autopilot and you were asleep. I memorized all the area around here.”

  Melly frowned. “Can anyone trace us through the autopilot?” she asked.

  “I hope so,” Anny Beth said. “Because the car has lots of miles left to go tonight. We can’t keep it here longer than it would take to make a pee break.”

  “I thought we were going to keep the car—”

  Anny Beth shook her head grimly. “And have the license plate spotted by satellite? We can’t risk that.”

  “But you said that reporter wouldn’t have access to satellite records—?
??

  “No, but I got to thinking—what about the agency? If they’ve had enough access to change our IDs every year, couldn’t they get into other government records? And if the reporter is getting information from the agency . . .”

  Anny Beth didn’t have to finish her sentence. Melly shivered. She felt like she was traveling in a maze—wasn’t there some route that didn’t lead to the monster in the middle?

  “Aren’t you going to help?” Anny Beth asked. Melly realized Anny Beth had begun unloading the bags of flour, sugar, and salt. She dropped a particularly heavy load right at Melly’s feet. “I can’t do everything around here, you know.”

  Anny Beth’s indignation was just the prod Melly needed. She followed Anny Beth and grabbed the boxes of milk. Better to do something than sit around worrying. After just a few minutes they had everything out that they needed. Anny Beth leaned over the steering wheel and double-checked the programmed coordinates.

  “Wait,” Melly said. “My Memory Books . . .”

  She pulled out her two big boxes, one of her journals since the year 2000, and one of the books full of memories that now existed only on paper.

  “Won’t be fun carrying those uphill,” Anny Beth said. But she, too, leaned back into the car and pulled out two boxes.

  Melly gaped. “I didn’t know you kept those,” she whispered.

  Anny Beth shrugged. “Under this stunning physique I’m just a sentimental old lady. Just like you.”

  Then she pressed the button that sent the car on its way alone. Melly and Anny Beth watched until its laser license-plate glow disappeared over the next rise, a mile down the road. Melly felt a threat of panic at her throat. Without the car their only means of escape would be on foot.

  “Where’d you send it?” she asked

  “Back to our old house. So it’ll look like we just went on a quick around-the-country vacation.”