“I’m just picturing my dad saying over and over that it’s okay if I’m pregnant, he totally understands, he just wants to talk about it.”
“The Tokyo thing’s going to be the weirdest part. Like, where did that come from?”
“I’m going to say it was your idea,” Margaret said. “You were tired of reading imported manga; you wanted to go straight to the source.”
“It’s cool that you’re so supportive of my enthusiasms.”
We were joking, but I knew—really knew right then—that I was in love with Margaret. I wasn’t joking, I was completely serious. I would have run away to Tokyo with her anyway, like a shot, for no reason at all. But I told myself I wasn’t going to say anything, I wasn’t going to do anything about it, till the time thing was fixed. I didn’t want her to feel like she was stuck with me. I wanted it to count.
Also, yeah, I was terrified. I had never been in love before. I had never wagered this much of my heart before. As badly as I wanted to win, I was even more scared of losing.
Gazing out the car window at the black trees against the light-pollution-gray sky, I thought about how much I would miss August 4th, our day, if this worked. Mark and Margaret Day. The pool, the library, the tiny perfect things. Maybe this was crazy. After all, I had time and I had love. I had it all, I had everything, and I was throwing it away, and for what? For real life? For getting old and dying like everybody else?
But yeah: everybody else. Everybody in the world who wasn’t getting to live their lives. They were getting robbed of everything, every day. My parents, getting up day after day after day and doing the exact same things, over and over again. Having their stupid fight about the car. My sister practicing her Vivaldi and never getting any better. Did it matter, if they didn’t know it? I wanted to think that maybe it didn’t. But I knew that it did.
And I knew that, deep down, I’d had enough of living without consequences too. Low-stakes living, where nothing mattered and all your wounds healed over the next morning, no scars. I needed something more. I was ready to go back to real life. I was ready to go anywhere, if it was with Margaret.
And it would be good to see the moon again.
This late at night the airport was almost empty. We collected our tickets from the kiosks and wandered through security. No lines. 3:50 a.m. is the only time to fly. We had no luggage so we breezed through security and just sat at the gate and waited. Margaret didn’t feel much like talking, but she rested her head on my shoulder. She was tired, she said. And she didn’t like flying.
After a while I went off to find us some Diet Cokes. They called our flight. We shuffled down the jetway with a lot of other tired, disheveled-looking people.
We’d gotten seats together. Margaret seemed more and more out of it, sunk inside herself, staring at the seat back in front of her. She felt far away even though we were sitting right next to each other.
“Are you worried about flying?” I asked. “Because, you know, even if we crash we’ve still got the whole reincarnation thing going. And anyway, if a plane crashed on August 4th we would’ve heard about it by now.”
“Don’t jinx it.”
“You know, in a way I hope this doesn’t work, because if it does we’re going to be out a ton of money. Did you book round-trip?”
I was babbling, like I did the day we met.
“I didn’t even think about that,” she said. “Though, on the bonus side, if it works we’ll have saved the world.”
“At least there’s that.”
I closed my eyes. My numberless mosquito bites itched. We hadn’t had a lot of sleep. I liked the idea of falling asleep next to Margaret.
“Though, what if,” I said, eyes still closed, “what if the world is going to end on August 5th? What if that’s what’s happening here? What if somebody made time start repeating exactly because the world was about to get hit by an asteroid or something, and that person had, in effect, saved the world by stopping time forever—albeit at a terrible cost—and if we break the time loop, then actually we’ll be dooming the Earth to certain destruction?”
She didn’t answer. It was a rhetorical question anyway. When I opened my eyes again some Turkish flight attendants were closing the doors. It took me a second to realize that Margaret wasn’t in her seat anymore. I thought she must have gone to the bathroom, and I even got up to check on her, but I was immediately herded back to my seat by concerned Turkish Airlines employees.
After five minutes I had to admit it to myself: Margaret was no longer on the plane. She must have run out just as the door was closing.
My phone chimed.
I’m sorry Mark but I just can’t I’m sorry
Can’t what? Fly to Tokyo? Fly to Tokyo with me? Leave the time loop? What? I started texting her back, but a Turkish flight attendant told me to please turn off all phones and portable devices or switch them to airline mode. She said it again in Turkish, for emphasis. I shut down my phone.
We taxied to the runway and took off. It was a long flight to Tokyo—fourteen hours. I watched Edge of Tomorrow three times.
* * *
After all that, it didn’t work. I waited in the gate area at Narita—which looks surprisingly similar to all other airports everywhere, except that everything’s in Japanese and the vending machines are more futuristic—until it was midnight in Massachusetts and the cosmic nanny reached out from halfway around the world and put me to bed, back in my house.
When I woke up that morning, I texted Margaret, but she didn’t text me back. She didn’t text me back the next day, either. I called her, but she didn’t answer.
I didn’t know what to think, except that she didn’t want the time loop to end and, whatever the reason was, it had nothing to do with me. My entire world was just the little bubble I shared with her, but her world was bigger than that. Maybe she had someone else, was all I could think of, because of course everything had to be about me. There was somebody else and she didn’t want to leave them behind. To me our life together was a perfect thing, and I couldn’t imagine wanting anything else. But she could.
It hurt. I’d had one glorious glimpse of the third dimension, and now I was banished back to flatness forever.
For the first time I wished I was one of the normal people, the zombies, who forgot everything every morning and just went about their business as if it was all fresh and new and for the first time. Let me go, I thought at the cosmic nanny. Let me forget. Let me be one of them. I don’t want to be one of us anymore. I want to be a robot. But I couldn’t forget.
I went back to my old routine, back to the library. I still had two more Hitchhiker’s Guide books to go, and I was nowhere even near done with the A section—I still had Lloyd Alexander and Piers Anthony to go, and beyond them the great desert of Isaac Asimov stretched out into the distance. I spent all day there, except that I went outside at 11:37:12 to watch the skateboarder nail his combo.
In fact I got into the habit of checking in with a couple of our tiny perfect moments every day, which was easy because, obviously, we had a handy map of them. Sometimes I redrew it; sometimes I just went by memory. I watched the hawk score its fish. I waved to Sean Bean at the corner of Heston and Grand. I watched the little girl make her huge bubble. I always hoped I’d see Margaret at one of them, but I never did. I went anyway. It helped me feel sad, which is maybe part of the process of falling out of love, which it was obviously time for me to do. I was getting good at feeling sad.
Or maybe I was just wallowing in self-pity. It’s a fine line.
I did catch a glimpse of Margaret once, by chance. I knew it would happen sooner or later; it was only a matter of time (or lack thereof). I was driving through the center, on my way to see the Scrabble game, when I spotted a silver VW station wagon turning a corner a block away. The classy and respectful thing to do would have been to let her go, because she obviously wanted nothing to do with me, but I didn’t do the classy thing. I did the other thing. I floored it and made the corn
er in time to see her turning right on Concord Avenue. I floored it again. Follow that car.
I followed her out to Route 2 and along it as far as Emerson Hospital.
I’d never known Margaret to go to the hospital. She’d never talked about it. It freaked me out a bit. My insides went cold, and the closer we got, the colder they got. I couldn’t believe what a stupid jealous bastard I’d been. Maybe Margaret was sick—maybe she’d been sick this whole time and just didn’t want to tell me. She didn’t want to burden me with it. Oh my God, maybe she had cancer! I should have stuck with trying to cure it! Maybe that was the whole point of this whole thing—Margaret has some rare disease, but then we work together, and because we have the repeating-days thing we have all the time we need, and finally we come up with a cure for it and save her and she falls in love with me …
But no; that wasn’t this story. This was a different kind of story.
I waited till she was on her way in, then I parked and got out and followed her. Listen, I know I was being a prying asshole, it’s just that I couldn’t stop myself. Please don’t let her be sick, I thought. She doesn’t have to talk to me, she can ignore me for the rest of eternity, she just has to not be sick.
The lobby was hushed and businesslike. Margaret was nowhere to be seen. I read the signs next to the elevator: Radiology, Surgery, Birthing, Bone and Joint Center, Wound Care … After weeks of timelessness it was strange to be here, where so much of time’s damage and destruction ends up. There’s nowhere less timeless than a hospital.
I tried them all. I finally found her in Cancer.
I didn’t speak to her, I just watched. She was sitting on a bench, knee to knee with a woman in a wheelchair who was way too young to look as old as she did. Bald and desperately thin, she was crumpled in a corner of the chair like an empty dress, her head drooping, half awake. Margaret was bent forward, speaking softly to her, though I couldn’t tell if the woman was awake or not, with both her gray, thin hands in Margaret’s young, vital ones.
It wasn’t Margaret, it was her mother. She wasn’t on a business trip. She was dying.
* * *
I drove home slowly. I knew I shouldn’t have followed Margaret to the hospital, that I had no business intruding on her private tragedy, but at least now I understood. It made sense of everything: Why Margaret always had somewhere else to be. Why she was so distracted. Why she didn’t want to escape the time loop. The time loop was the only reason her mother was still alive.
I still didn’t understand why Margaret had kept it a secret, but that didn’t really matter. This wasn’t about me. I thought I was the hero of this story, or at least the second lead, but I was nowhere near it. I was just a bit player. I was singing in the chorus.
I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I stopped in the center of town and bought a map and went home and filled it out. I looked over the tiny perfect things to see what was left. Too late for BOUNCY BALL (09:44:56). Too late for CONSTRUCTION SITE (10:10:34). Still time for REVOLVING DOOR (17:34:19). And good old SHOOTING STAR (21:17:01).
I realized it had been a while since I saw a new perfect thing. Somewhere along the way I’d stopped looking for them. I wasn’t super-alive anymore. I’d stopped living in the now. I’d dropped back into the then.
But what was even the point? Suddenly it all seemed kind of silly. Perfect moments, what did they even mean? They were blind luck, that was all. Coincidences. Statistical anomalies. I did some Googling and it turned out somebody had actually bothered to do the math on this, a real actual Cambridge University mathematician named John Littlewood (1885–1977; thank you, Wikipedia). He proposed that if you define a miracle as something with a probability of one in a million, and if you’re paying close attention to the world around you eight hours a day, every day, and little things happen around you at a rate of one per second, then you’d observe about thirty thousand things every day, which means about a million things a month. So, on average, you should witness one miracle every month (or every thirty-three-and-one-third days, if we’re being strictly accurate). It’s called Littlewood’s law.
So there you have it, a miracle a month. They’re not even that special. I stared at the map anyway, giving particular staring attention to the ones that Margaret had found, such is love. And I did love her. It made it better to understand why she couldn’t possibly love me, not now, probably not ever, but I’m not going to pretend it didn’t hurt.
The perfect moments were surprisingly evenly distributed. There were fewer of them in the nighttime, because nothing was happening and we weren’t really looking anyway, but the rest of the day was evenly filled. There was only one bare patch in the schedule, right around dawn—a bald spot where statistically you would’ve expected a perfect moment, but we’d never found it.
The longer I stared at the map, the more it looked like there was a pattern in it. I played a game with myself: Pretend that the points on the map were stars in a constellation. What did it look like? Look, no one should ever have to apologize for doing stupid things when the person they love has walked out of their life and they have way too much time on their hands. And I had an eternity of time. I sketched in lines between them. Maybe I could make—what? Her name? Her face? Our initials intertwined in a beautiful romantic love knot?
Nope. When I’d connected all the dots they looked like this:
Except not quite. There was one dot missing, down in the lower left corner.
I stared at it, and a funny idea struck me: What if you could use the map not just to remember when and where perfect things happened, but to predict when and where they were going to happen? It was a stupid idea, a terrible idea, but I sketched it in with a ruler anyway. The missing dot was right on top of Blue Nun Hill, which I happened to know well because it made an excellent sledding hill in winter, which at this rate it would never be again. Something should really be happening there, and judging by the rest of the schedule, it should be happening right around dawn.
The sun rose at 5:39 a.m. on August 4th, I happened to know. I waited until time flipped at midnight, then I set my alarm for five, to wake up in time for the last tiny perfect thing of them all.
* * *
I drove over to Blue Nun Hill in the warm summer darkness. The streets were deserted, the streetlights still on, houses all full of sleeping people resting up so they’d be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready to sleepwalk through another day. It was still full night, not even a hint of blue on the horizon yet. I parked at the bottom of the hill.
I wasn’t the only one up. There was a silver station wagon parked there too.
I have never actually seen a Marine or any member of the armed forces take a hill, but I’m telling you, I’m pretty confident that I took that hill like a Marine. There was a big boulder at the top, dropped there casually by a passing glacier ten thousand years ago, during the Ice Age, and Margaret was sitting on it, knees drawn up to her chin, looking out at the darkened town.
She heard me coming because I was doing a lot of un-Marine-like gasping and wheezing after running all the way up the hill.
“Hi, Mark,” she said.
“Margaret,” I said, when I could sort of talk. “Hi. It’s good. To see you.”
“It’s good to see you too.”
“Is it all right if I join you?”
She patted the rock beside her. I boosted myself up. The hill faced east, and the horizon was now glowing a deep, intense azure. We didn’t talk for a while, but it wasn’t awkward. We were just getting ready to talk, that was all.
“I’m sorry I disappeared like that,” she said.
“It’s okay,” I said. “You’re allowed to disappear.”
“No, I should explain.”
“You don’t have to.”
“But I want to.”
“Okay. But before you do, I have a confession to make.”
I told her how I’d followed her to the hospital and spied on her with her mother. It sounded even worse when I said it
out loud.
“Oh.” She thought about it. “No, I get it. I probably would’ve done the same thing. Kind of creepy, though.”
“I know. It felt that way even at the time, but I couldn’t stop myself. Listen, I’m just really sorry. About your mom.”
“It’s okay.”
But she choked on that last word, and her face crumpled, and she crushed her forehead into her knees. Her shoulders shook silently. I rubbed her back. I wished more than anything that I could spend all of my monthly one-in-a-million miracles at once, forever, to make her sadness go away. But things don’t work like that.
“Margaret, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Birds were twittering joyfully now, tactlessly, all around us. She busily wiped away tears with the back of her wrist.
“There’s something else I have to explain,” she said. “The day before this whole thing started I went to see my mother at the hospital, and the doctors told me they were stopping treatment. There was no point—”
She squeaked that last word, and the sadness strangled her again, and she couldn’t go on. I put my arm around her shoulders and she sobbed on my neck. I breathed in the smell of her hair. She felt so thin and precious, to have all that grief inside her. She’d had it this whole time, all by herself. I wished I could take it from her, but I knew I couldn’t. It was her grief. Only she could carry it.
“When I went to bed that night, all I could think was that I wasn’t ready.” She swallowed. Her eyes were still red, but they were dry now, and her voice was steady. “I wasn’t ready to let go. I’m only sixteen, I wasn’t ready to not have a mom. I needed her so much.
“That night, when I went to bed, all I could think was that tomorrow cannot come. Time cannot go on. I am pulling the emergency brake of time. I even said it out loud: ‘Tomorrow cannot come.’
“And when I woke up that morning, it was true. It was the same day again. Time had stopped for me. I don’t know why; I guess it just didn’t have the heart to keep going. Somebody somewhere decided that I needed more time with her. That’s why I ran off that plane to Tokyo. I was afraid it would work, and I wasn’t ready.”