Sara’s at her car, looking over her shoulder to see if Hank will come out and stop her, but the house is quiet. Even Bernard has stopped barking. The quiet at the river had felt so peaceful, yet this one feels fickle and cruel.
She throws open the trunk and stows the suitcase and opens the driver’s side door and notices someone’s inside. She jumps back.
“Me,” says Rodney from the passenger seat.
“What are you doing here?”
“You. Oh. Kay?”
“You need to go,” she says. “I’m getting out of here.”
Rodney nods but doesn’t budge.
“I’m leaving now,” she says.
More nodding.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?” Sara asks.
More nodding.
“What are you doing, Rodney?”
“I’m. Com. Ing.”
“You can’t.”
“Can.”
Sara looks up at the house. Hank hasn’t come outside to stop her. He’s not bellowing Baby Sis from inside. She tries to stifle her sobs, but it’s worse when she sees Rodney, and she surrenders into it, wailing. “He hates me,” she says and crashes into the driver’s seat.
“Shhh,” says Rodney.
He holds his wet trunks toward Sara, presumably for her to use as a hanky, and Sara laughs.
“No thanks,” she says.
“All. I. Need,” he says.
“All you need for what?”
He points out the window, into the distance and darkness.
She’d misread his offering. He wasn’t presenting the boxers as a way to wipe her tears, blow her nose. No, Rodney was suggesting something else entirely: an escape, a copilot, a friend.
“Those are all you need to leave with me?” she asks.
Rodney nods again, and Sara feels a bit better, taking his boxers and running them under her eyes.
“Let’s go find your mom,” she says.
~ ~ ~
They have no haven here, Albert, they are all password-protected, they all have signs on their hearts that say SLIDE TO UNLOCK. But those four-digit codes have been forgotten and so they can’t get inside themselves, locked out and lost, and in their confusion they will hunt through the ones and zeroes for connection, to find out who they are, they will show their naked bodies for all to see, they will look for the people who made them, they will flounder for some sense of decency or self. It’s all the time on their hands, isn’t that a weird expression? Forget hands. It is the time in their brains, racing through neurotransmitters like mice in mazes. Time cannot be stopped but it is not a predator. Time is our friend, and it’s willing to play nicely if we learn how to ask, if we exchange pleasantries, if we shake hands and kiss cheeks, and you and I know the clandestine language to indulge time in dialogue. Only the two of us can articulate this yet-to-be discovered world. I wish we could wait for them, Albert, I wish there were a way to let them figure it out for themselves but thermometers don’t lie, this planet will face the big burn. It’s fate, it’s science, it’s existential mathematics. Unless we save them. My brain sends a signal to your brain and you send signals to my brain and we are connected, we are the only unlocked devices left. We are connected across time, and soon we’ll be able to bridge space as easily, and once we’ve mastered that advancement, you will be able to beam back. The space-time continuum will be tamed. There will be no such thing as pasts. Even the past tense will be irrelevant, archaic, known only in legend. Everyone across time will be alive at the same moment, all of us collapsing into one shining transcendent community, which will know no heat, no pathos. People born before the common era, people in the Middle Ages, the Victorians, the Huns, the ones who clutch technology like oxygen masks, they will all breathe at the same time, they will all pump blood. There will only be now. And you will be here. The two of us will stand in the ugliest Garden of Eden. No one here believes in anything they can’t find in the search engine but our action will remedy that, we will show them the new religion, we will illustrate the perfect convergence of piety and science. No demagogues or deities or dupes. Just a simple way to solve E = mcdespaired. Space and time manipulation means we can remain uncremated, means that so many wrongs might go extinct in the process because people will love their second chances. They’ll love this new life, they’ll rise to the occasion, it’s a way to reenter that passcode, it’s a way to navigate around with a blazing fast connection, to awaken and slough off that residue of cynicism, to reorient their senses of self. We’ll be able to swim through our own nervous systems. Can you imagine? And as we figure out who we are, as we remember that there’s good in our souls, everyone will be fused together into a single bright consciousness and in that moment, we will remember what it is to be happy.
PART 2. RESET
13
“What was he wearing?” asks the cop.
“What?”
“His clothes.”
“What was he wearing today?”
“At the time of his disappearance.”
The two of them stand in the parking lot, in front of the therapist’s office. Paul keeps his phone in his hand, compulsively checking it every few seconds to see if Jake has responded to any of his texts (he hasn’t), while Paul turns in circles every thirty seconds or so to spot his son’s return (no on that front, too).
The police officer is somewhere in his late twenties or early thirties. Barely looks like he needs to shave. It bothers Paul that he’s so young. He wants someone chiseled, battle-tested. Somebody who has worked cases like this his whole career, and yet there’s nothing Paul can do about it. He’ll have to hope that this young man is good at his job.
Paul is, for all intents and purposes, calm. He’s not raising his voice, no cantering heart, no tears, no hysterics. He’s concerned, but he’s having trouble accepting this as reality: The whole thing feels
too blasé, too relaxed to be about a missing child. Jake is missing in terms of no one knowing where he’s at this second; however, it’s temporary — Paul knows this is short-term. His son overreacted, much like taking a baseball bat to his room, but his tantrum will wane and he’ll be back, he has to come back.
There is a suspicion, though, huffing all the air from Paul’s lungs. His breathing grows shorter, so he’s not as composed as he thought. Perhaps Paul wants to collect himself via a flurry of Keep your head and things will all work out platitudes, yet he can’t really nourish himself on those empty calories. Fact: His son is missing. Fact: It happened on Paul’s watch, which plumps him up with blame. Paul has been painted with parental blame plenty of times in Jake’s life. All parents have had this experience, he knows. It’s part of the job. He remembers a time when Jake was two feet away from him — no more than that — and Jake fell down and chipped his front tooth. The boy was only three years old, and the rest of the tooth didn’t fall out until he was seven and Paul had to see the chip, that denunciation, every day for four years, a jagged reminder of his negligence. I was doing the right thing, he always told the chip. I was standing right there. I wasn’t being careless.
That’s the devastating thing about being a parent — the world doesn’t care about your plans. There’s no tally for intentions. Kids fall, teeth chip, and you live with it.
In the parking lot, Paul checks his phone again for texts.