When You Reach Me

Things That Make No Sense

Marcus and I got to Broadway without saying anything. I was thinking.

“I thought of a question for you,” I said finally.

“Okay.”

“Let’s say I build a time machine.” I waited to see if he would laugh at this, but he just nodded and looked thoughtful. “And let’s say I decide I want to go back to last Wednesday. Let’s say I want to go to the movies while the other me is still in school.”

“Okay.”

I exhaled a big white cloud. “I won’t get to last Wednesday until after I leave, right? I mean, I won’t know if I’m really going to get there until I actually get there.”

“Right. In your experience, you won’t know if you’re going to get there until after you leave. I mean, unless you remember seeing yourself, on the street or something. Or we could ask the ticket guy at the theater.” He was serious.

“What?”

“At the movie theater. Which one are you planning to go to? Because we could ask the ticket guy if you were there. Then we’ll know whether or not you’re going to get there.”

“But I haven’t left yet! I haven’t even built the time machine.”

“So? It doesn’t matter when you leave. It’s just whether or not you get there that matters. Wait, I take that back. It does matter when you leave. Because if you don’t leave for fifty years, even if you were there, the ticket guy probably won’t recognize you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, let’s say you finish your time machine in fifty years. You’d be—”

“Sixty-two,” I said. We were across the street from school, waiting for the green light. I could see kids coming from every direction, all bundled up in hats and scarves.

“Okay, so let’s say you’re sixty-two, and you climb into your machine and go back to last Wednesday, December whatever, 1978. You go to the movie theater. The ticket guy would see a sixty-two-year-old woman, right?”

“Right,” I said. So far everything made sense.

“So if we went over to the theater today and asked him whether he saw you there last Wednesday, he’d say no. Because his common sense would tell him that you can’t be that sixty-two-year-old woman, and she can’t be you. Get it?”

I shook my head. “If we asked today, he couldn’t have seen me anyway. I wouldn’t have been there yet. Because I haven’t gone back yet.”

“Duh,” said a voice behind us. “It’s really not all that complicated.”

I whirled around and saw Julia in a long coat. She was standing right behind us waiting for the light.

Marcus ignored her and looked at me. “Are you still worrying about that book? About the kids, and seeing themselves land in the broccoli?”

I said nothing. I wasn’t going to have Julia hear any more of this conversation.

“Think of it like this,” Marcus said, oblivious to the look she was giving us. “Time isn’t a line stretching out in front of us, going in one direction. It’s—well, time is just a construct, actually—”

“Look,” Julia said, cutting him off. “If you really need to know what he means, I’ll explain it to you.”

This should be good, I thought. Julia is going to explain the nature of time.

I turned around and looked at her. “Fine. Go ahead.”

She pulled off one of her gloves—they were these beautiful, fuzzy, pale yellow gloves—and she yanked a ring from her finger. “I think of it like this,” she said, holding up the ring. It was gold, studded all the way around with—

“Are those diamonds?” I said.

“Diamond chips.” She shrugged. “Look. It’s like every moment in time is a diamond sitting on this ring. Pretend the ring is really big, with diamonds all around, and each diamond is one moment. Got it?”

Marcus was silent, just looking at her.

I laughed. “Time is a diamond ring!” I said. “That explains everything. Thanks.”

“Would you shut up and listen? If you figured out a way to bring yourself to another time, probably through some sort of teleportation—you’d be somehow re-creating your atoms, really, not physically moving them, I’m guessing; that would be tricky….”

“Can we not worry about that part right now?” I said. “I’m freezing.” We were still standing across the street from school, even though the light had changed once already and then gone back to red.

“Okay. Put it this way—we’re kind of jumping from diamond to diamond, like in cartoons where someone is running on a barrel, trying to stay on top. We have to keep moving—there’s no choice.”

“Now we’re in a cartoon, on a barrel?”

She sighed and shook her head. “Okay, forget that. Let’s stick with the ring.” She held it up again. “Let’s say we’re here.” She put her fingernail on one diamond chip. “And we figure out a way to jump all the way back to here.” She pointed to another one, a few chips away. “It wouldn’t matter where we came from. If we’re on that chip, we’re at that moment. It doesn’t matter whether we came from the chip behind it, or ten chips ahead of it. If we’re there, we’re there. Get it?”

“No. I don’t get it, because what you’re saying makes absolutely no—”

“I do,” Marcus said quietly. “I get it. I know what she means.”

“Thank you!” Julia said. “I’m glad someone here has a brain.” And she stomped off through the red light while Marcus stared after her.

I turned to him. “So you’re saying this diamond chip is just sitting there minding its own business, and then suddenly a bunch of kids land in the diamond chip’s broccoli patch—”

Marcus’s face lit up. “Stop—I see your problem! You’re thinking that time exists on the diamonds themselves. It doesn’t. Each moment—each diamond—is like a snapshot.”

“A snapshot of what?”

“Of everything, everywhere! There’s no time in a picture, right? It’s the jumping, from one diamond to the next, that we call time, but like I said, time doesn’t really exist. Like that girl just said, a diamond is a moment, and all the diamonds on the ring are happening at the same time. It’s like having a drawer full of pictures.”

“On the ring,” I said.

“Yes! All the diamonds exist at once!” He looked triumphant. “So if you jump backward, you are at that moment—you are in that picture—and you always were there, you always will be there, even if you don’t know it yet.”

I didn’t understand a word of it. And I couldn’t feel my feet. “Forget it,” I said. “The whole thing is making me crazy.”

He nodded like he felt sorry for me and my stupid brain. “I think that’s probably because of your common sense. You can’t accept the idea of arriving before you leave, the idea that every moment is happening at the same time, that it’s us who are moving—”

Enough was enough. I cut him off. “Why did you hit Sal?” I asked.

“Who?” He looked completely mystified, as if I had just changed the subject from something very normal to something completely insane, instead of the other way around.

“My friend Sal. You punched him in the stomach for no reason. In front of the garage. And then you hit him in the face.”

He nodded. “Yes,” he said. “That’s right. But no—there was a reason.”

“That’s bull. I know he never did a thing to you.” I’d started to really shiver, even with my hands stuffed in my pockets and Mom’s scarf wrapped around my head.

“I did hit him for a reason,” he said. “What you’re talking about is a justification. I’m not saying it was the right thing to do. I’m just saying I did it for a reason. My own stupid reason.”

I stared at him. “So what was the reason?”

He looked down and shrugged. “Same reason I do most things. I wanted to see what would happen.”

“What do you mean, ‘what would happen’? His nose started bleeding, that’s what happened! And he almost threw up.”

“Besides that, besides the ordinary things.” He tapped the toe of one shoe on the sidewalk. “It was dumb. Really, really dumb.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“And did anything happen? Besides the ordinary things?”

He shook his head. “No—not that I could tell.”

I was going to tell him that he was wrong, that other things had happened, like Sal closing the door in my face that afternoon and never opening it again, but at that moment I noticed the laughing man coming down the block behind us. I’d never seen him near school before. He was bent forward, mumbling and watching his feet, with his eyes on the garbage can right next to Marcus.

The laughing man didn’t notice us standing there until he was practically on top of Marcus. When he finally looked up, he cursed, twisted away, and took off in the other direction, sprinting like he was running a race.

We watched him rush all the way back to Broadway and disappear around the corner.

“That was weird,” I said.

“Yeah,” Marcus agreed. “And it’s the second time it’s happened.”