Ricochet Joe

5 WHERE THE WATERS OF TIME FLOW

The house was just a house, white stucco under a red clay-tile roof, cozy and well kept, but not what would be wanted for a feature in an interior-design magazine. Yet there was something about the place that enchanted Joe, that made every ordinary thing seem to be special. He supposed the magic was only that this was where she lived, where she slept and woke and cooked and ate and shared her life with her father, and where perhaps she sometimes sat at a window, gazing out at the walkway that her mother had followed to the white Mercedes.

She brewed a pot of coffee. She put on the kitchen table a small pitcher of cream, two mugs, two spoons, two napkins, and two bottles of brandy. One bottle was full, the other empty and lacking a label.

“Do you drink at all?” she asked.

“A little.”

“You’ll need a little,” she said, but did not explain herself.

“What will your father do if he shows up?”

“Pour some coffee and spike the hell out of it.”

They sat at the table, catercorner to each other. She poured a little cream and a lot of brandy in her coffee. He poured a little brandy and a lot of cream.

For a minute or two, she stared at the empty bottle. Her silence was strange, her expression troubled.

Joe thought he should ask about the empty bottle—why it was there, why she regarded it with evident anxiety, whether it might symbolize something for her. Her silence was so profound, however, that his questions seemed inadequate to break the quiet. He feared that they would make him sound ordinary to this extraordinary girl.

“We experience time,” she said, “as flowing from the past, from the moment of the big bang, through the present to the future, but that’s not how it is at all. Do you know quantum mechanics?”

Joe only meant that she continually surprised him, but what he said sounded like the disappointment of a guy hoping for a make-out session. “The last thing I thought we’d talk about is science.”

Still gazing at the empty bottle, she said patiently, “What we’re talking about is life and death. Your life and death.”

He regarded the bottle with interest. “Tell me about time.”

“Everything in the universe was once condensed into something smaller than a pea. Which is why, thirteen billion years after the big bang, atoms at one end of the universe still have an eerie connection with atoms at the other end of the universe. Set up the same experiment in a lab in Los Angeles and one in Boston, run them simultaneously, and events in one lab instantly affect the outcome in the other lab three thousand miles away. It’s called ‘spooky effects at a distance.’”

“Time,” Joe reminded her.

“Getting to it. In some way not easily comprehended, every place in the universe is the same place, so that some physicists think what we perceive as distance is a misperception, an illusion that we require to make sense of it all.”

A thin stream of water issued from the air above the table. Winking and rippling with reflected light, but silent as time is silent, the water drizzled down into the empty brandy bottle.

The water had no apparent source, so it shouldn’t have taken Joe more than an instant to be astonished to his feet, but he gaped at the glimmering stream for three or four seconds before he pushed his chair away from the table.

Portia reached out, took his hand, and said, “Don’t be afraid. You’re only remembering what you’ve always known but forgot when you were born.”

Joe looked from the magical water to Portia. She was still a beautiful girl, but if she’d been slightly mysterious before, she was deeply so now. He didn’t fear her. But he was disturbed in mind and heart in ways that he could not have explained to her, that he could not define even to himself.

He said, “How… ?”

“How is always less important than why.”

“Then why… ?”

“Why is for later, Joe.”

Hesitantly, he drew his chair back to the table and remained seated, though it seemed to him as if the floor under him yawed ever so subtly, like a ship’s deck.

The stream continued to pour forth from midair. Two inches of water had collected in the empty bottle.

She said, “We’re as confused about time as we are about distance. We think time flows from the past through the present to the future. But time doesn’t flow. All time—past, present, future—existed in the first instant of the universe’s creation. Textbooks will tell you so. Time is not a river. It’s an invisible ocean encompassing the universe, with tides that run in all directions simultaneously.”

“My watch,” Joe said, hoping to quiet his heart and stop the floor from moving. “Time only goes forward on my watch.”

“Clocks are human inventions. We made them to measure time as we need to perceive it in order to function as we do. Watches and clocks measure our perception of time, not time itself.”

“We grow old and die,” he argued.

The once-empty bottle was more than half full of the water from nowhere.

“Time is ours to use,” she said. “But we fail to understand it, and so we ride it always in one direction, straight to the grave.”

Joe reached for the full fifth of brandy to add an ounce to his coffee, but he snatched his hand back when he saw that the bottom quarter of the bottle now seemed to be filled with water on which the spirits floated. Just then, a stream of brandy, forced out of the neck of the bottle, rose slowly two feet into the air and then vanished at a spot parallel to the point at which the stream of water issued and fell into the first container.

He thought perhaps he’d had enough brandy, anyway.

“There are some scientists who believe that the universe is in fact an infinite number of parallel universes, and that perhaps we never die. If the forward motion of time is only our perception and not true, then perhaps when we appear to age and die, we actually continue in a parallel universe… and so on and on.”

Mesmerized by her lips, but this time because of the words that spilled from them, Joe had turned his eyes away from the bottles. When he looked at them again, he thrust to his feet, knocking over his mug of coffee. Thirty or more bottles stood on the table, some with labels and some without, some with golden spirits silently exiting them, some with the same elixir silently drizzling into them from thin air, others with water entering, and still others from which water exited.

“They’re only bottles, Joe. Or worlds, if you will.”

After everything that had already happened to him on this fateful Saturday, he felt foolish for being frightened or even startled. No matter how he felt, he didn’t want to look foolish in front of Portia.

He sat once more, and he saw that the coffee mug he had knocked over… had not been knocked over after all. The coffee that had slopped across the table was in the righted mug, and the table was dry once more. He checked his wristwatch, but time for him had moved forward, separate from how time dealt with the mug and its contents.

Earlier, after the encounter with the purse snatcher and after the events in the pool hall, an inexplicable calm had poured through Joe, a serene acceptance of those impossible pursuits and the danger that they entailed. Such a tranquility quieted him now. He supposed it was a gift from Portia, conveyed into him by psychic injection, although a still, small voice suggested that the soother of nerves might be someone other than her and perhaps someone less pleasing to the eye.

He saw now that brandy and water were not just entering and exiting the mouths of the bottles in vertical flows but were also transferring from one container to another in horizontal streams that pierced glass without cracking it. Each of the myriad bottles held water and brandy layered like parfaits.

“All time—past, present, future—existed in the instant the universe came into being, but also in all the infinite number of universes that exist alongside one another. Time is one big ocean encompassing all those possible worlds. And so for those who truly understand time and the uses to which it can be put, not only the past and future can be visited, but so can universes floating far, far away from theirs in the sea of time.”

Joe began to discern the shape of what she meant to tell him, and though it surely would be as terrible as it would be grand, his calm did not desert him.

“Here in Little City,” she said, “lives a traveler who didn’t come from this world. Or perhaps it came from a million years in the future. Or from outside of time, from before this universe or any other was created. Either I am thought incapable of understanding the fine details—or I am thought to be safer not knowing them. Or maybe knowing them would destroy my sanity. In any case, I call this traveler Parasite, because its real name is nothing I can pronounce. This vile thing invades a human host and lives secretly among us, and by our definition, it is pure evil. It infects others, not with its substance but with a controlling poison, and those it infects eventually infect still others. It is a parasite but it’s also a puppeteer, and it pulls a million strings, ten times a million, all over the world.”