The traffic light changed, Nathaniel started across, but Erica held him back. A milk truck slammed through the red light and continued down the road. Erica smiled even broader. The bomb burst and the atomic age arrived. Quantum theory made real.
Nathaniel said, “Wow, good thing nobody was in the street.”
Erica nodded. She didn’t let go of his arm.
“Pretty warm out, don’t you think?” Nathaniel said.
Erica shaded her eyes. “A bit. Maybe we can go some place out of the sun?”
“Do you have something in mind?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, and they walked toward her house.
In her bedroom, Meadoe held the hand still under her belly, and she walked hand in hand with Nathaniel down Harriston Boulevard. They went in her front door. A brief kiss. A fumbling with buttons and snaps. They laughed in the afternoon’s warmth, nearly stifling in the house, oblivious of heat and atomic bombs and milk trucks.
Meadoe forced her eyes open to the bedroom’s darkness. Their laughter rang in her house, echoey and distant. Moonlight slanted through the window, gathered in a form lying beside her.
His eyes were open, staring into her own across the years. Young eyes, long dead. They blinked.
“I’m not who you think I am,” said Meadoe.
The voice barely made it to her ears. It could have been no more than a breeze outside. Her own heart thudding in her veins. As light as a lover’s touch. “I know, Tokyo Rose,” he said, then the room was empty and twenty degrees cooler.
August 8, Saturday: Final Reel
“So you haven’t seen evidence of the ‘ghost’ since Wednesday night?” Joan pulled her notepad from a briefcase. She was in her therapist’s mode now, harder, more brusque than Joan the friend.
“No. He’s gone.” Meadoe leaned back in her chair.
“How can that be? You didn’t change history. He still died on August 6, 1945. You told me Erica Weiss believed it was her fault, that she still believes it, so why would he disappear?”
Meadoe smiled. “I don’t know, really, but I don’t think I changed history. I changed the ghost. It’s quantum physics, like I told you before—the uncertainty principle. Individual electrons are in all possible positions. History plays itself out in all ways.”
“Parallel worlds?” Joan wrote on the pad, and Meadoe couldn’t tell if she was taking her seriously or not, but she didn’t care. Couldn’t Joan feel it in the house? How much sweeter the air was? How much easier it was to breathe?
“Maybe, but I don’t think it’s that simple. Parallel spirits maybe. The worlds aren’t discreet. Nathaniel intersected here. I just showed him another way it could have turned out.”
Joan tapped her pen against the page. “You sound different. What’s going on?”
“Remember last week when you asked me what I feared most?”
Joan nodded.
“I found out what it was, and I conquered it.”
“In the dream?
“In the dream.” She remembered holding Nathaniel’s hand back. She’d said, “wait,” and he’d stopped. The power was in her then; it was in her now. She had control. “Come on, I want to show you something in the bedroom.”
“What?”
“You’ll see.”
In the bedroom, Joan looked around. “Did you clean the windows? It seems brighter in here.”
Meadoe shook her head. She hadn’t noticed it before, but Joan was right. The room was brighter. She sat on the edge of the bed, waiting. Joan paced the room.
“Look at the collage,” said Meadoe.
Joan contemplated the wall and found it almost immediately. “Where’s Tokyo Rose? And who is that? How did you get that picture under the varnish?”
Meadoe smiled. She’d seen it Thursday morning when she awoke, happy, nearly ready to sing, and she’d lain in the bed in languid glory. Her eyes followed the Life covers to the drawing, only it wasn’t Tokyo Rose anymore. Smiling from the penciled portrait, as stunning as any of the movie stars, a black-haired girl, curls waving around her ears. Erica Weiss. In Nathaniel’s hand, a date, August 7, 1945.
Joan said, “He was already dead.”
Meadoe bounced against the bed’s edge. “Just in this world, Joan. Just one of him.”
TEACHING
William stared at the DeskTop unit for a long minute before sighing wearily and opening it. It was the latest release of the hardware, and its shiny surface felt softer than his old one, like leather, and it opened easier too, popping slightly as the fold vanished into an unmarked screen. The keyboard flopped open and the unit, no thicker than a sheet of cardboard, was ready to go. His earphone squeaked in his ear, then announced that beside the normal traffic of essays, tests, video demonstrations, speeches, and other student work which the DT had already evaluated, commented on and recorded into student profiles, he had received sixty-four messages since yesterday, two which might require his attention. He eyed the three column list: mostly run-of-the-mill correspondence that included a couple of thank-yous from departing students and eight petitions for admission into his class from the retiring Leslie Franklin’s roster. None seemed out of the ordinary, so he okayed the virtual-William’s handling of them and the unit instantly sent pseudo-personal replies that mimicked his style and provided the individualized, educationally appropriate prompts to each student. V-Bill, William thought, a friendlier, more professional, patient and approachable version of myself.
The two flagged messages he put aside for the moment, though a flashing reminder in the corner of the work space reminded him not to forget them.
Eight new students pushed his class list over six-hundred for the second time this month, so he called up and signed a standard request for numbers reduction and sent it to Central Education; as he expected, the reply, with its somber logo of Socrates teaching a group of rapt students, scrolled instantly on his screen acknowledging his request while extolling the virtues of the profession and how “We must each make the sacrifices in these challenging days of tight budgets.”
He ran the numbers over again in his mind. If he spent only five minutes on each student, and he worked ten hour days, he would get to each student once every five days. That was assuming that all he did was contact students, but most days, he’d spend the morning handling unique student problems, addressing paperwork concerns or corresponding with Central Education. Only in the afternoons that he wasn’t sitting in on group hook-ups through the DTs or going on field trips like today’s could he contact his students individually.
William sighed again and let his eyes rest on Leslie’s photograph that sat on the shelf above his table. He thought, she always knew how to handle the load. Her dark eyes focused somewhere to the side, behind the photographer; a strand of red hair blew across her cheek and she was laughing. In the background, a fountain sprayed into the sunlight, each drop catching a glint of brightness. She’d signed it herself and real-mailed it forty-four years ago when they were both students in the first totally DT school to graduate with teaching degrees.