Laura extended her hands in a triumphant gesture, pitching over a nearly full glass of red wine onto her shirt in the process. Jeff jumped up, napkin in hand, and began patting Laura’s soaked sleeve dry. He progressed from her sleeve to her cheek, and suddenly was less than an inch from Laura’s upturned face. Her eyes were rosy with wine, her mouth soft and parted. He touched his lips to hers, gently at first, then found himself lost in a realm of warmth and darkness…
He finally pulled away. “Well,” he managed, gasping a bit for breath, “no one can ever say that I don’t give my students personal attention.”
“I’d be glad to write you a letter of recommendation,” she said, smiling. “Now you see why I didn’t want to have lunch with you.”
“You found this aggravating?”
“Quite the opposite,” Laura replied.
Still standing over her, Jeff touched her hair with his finger. “I’ve got a lot I need to tell you,” he said softly. “By the way, no one but a record producer would know the exact number on the charts of a record even now, so your test of my knowledge of the future is too demanding.”
They walked hand in hand a few evenings later along groves overlooking the Hudson River. Across they could see the Palisades of New Jersey, carved whole out of stone as if by some supreme civilization, and near them the palette of Wave Hill Park in the late spring. Wave Hill—home of Marie Twain, of Toscanini, and an Easter parade of a notables across a century. In the late 1800s, William Appleton had lived here, amidst his publication in America of Darwin and Spencer. JFK had lived in a house across the street in the 1930s. Recently a British ambassador had donated most of this to the people of New York.
Jeff knew it wouldn’t especially help his larger predicament to get involved with Laura, to tell her what he was about. On the other hand, what harm could it do—set in motion a jagged time-loop which would wink him out of existence? Not likely. And the smell of her neck and his need to talk had been compelling. So he’d told her. And here he was, still around, and feeling fine.
He breathed in slowly. Fragrances real and recalled bathed his brain. “You know, when I was a kid, my grandfather used to tell me about summers he spent on Cape Cod when he was a kid himself. At night, sometimes two or three in the morning, he’d walk along the beach and gradually leave his cottage in the distance. Sometimes he’d turn around and, still seeing the light of the cottage, would walk further until it was completely gone. Then he’d close his eyes and think, there’s no difference between what I see with my eyes open and my eyes closed. He’d sit in the salty water, a foot or two deep, and feel the cold fluid pulse of the cosmos throbbing through his clothes. Then he’d get up and walk again, cold but not shivering, until he made contact with that spot of light that was his cottage. He was never sure until it happened that he would see that light again. But when he did, he’d walk with the satisfaction of knowing that after having gone out to the very limits of his usual reality and beyond, he was about to enter it again. I never really fully understood what my grandfather was saying to me—until now.”
Laura looked at him, stroked his face with the center of her palm. “You’re serious about this, aren’t you?”
“Serious about what?”
“The time travel,” Laura said.
Jeff said nothing.
“I can be with you anyway,” Laura said. “I don’t have to believe it’s real. I can pretend to believe it’s real, play along that you’re from the future, like you say you are. I’m not sure there’s all that much difference between really believing and pretending to believe anyway, if you pretend sincerely enough.”
“You’ve got some philosophy there,” Jeff said.
Laura took his hand, put it to her lips.
“And you’re not worried that I really am crazy—maybe dangerous?” Jeff asked.
“Oh, you’re dangerous all right,” she said, grazing her teeth over his index finger. “And as to your story—my feeling is that whatever the truth of it, you’re a good man. I feel right about that.”
Jeff sighed. “You remember what I said the first day of class about no one really knowing for sure that anything is real—we could well be dreaming all of this, and might even dream that someone pinched us and tried to awaken us and nothing happened—but that we’d all go crazy unless we took at least some leap of faith, and assumed on nothing better than faith that the world is real and we were really here?”
“I was late for that lecture, wasn’t I?”
“No, I’m quite sure you were there,” Jeff said. “Look, I’m trying to say that—”
“I know what you’re saying.” Now she looked at him very intently. “You want me to take that leap of faith with you and your story. You want me to assume that what you’re saying is true, even though I have no evidence for it and it flies in the face of reason. You want me to say, look, I know this is crazy, but I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt, entertain your insanity, see where it leads us. In other words, pretense isn’t good enough for you—you want to make this really hard for me.” She turned away.
“Something like that, right,” Jeff said.
“What is it about me that’s always attracted to lunatics?” she murmured. She turned around and kissed him full on the lips.
“Two papayas.” Jeff held up two fingers to the man at the Papaya King on 3rd Avenue and 86th Street. “One to drink here and a quart to go.” There was nothing like this drink in his century. Whatever the hell it was—whatever its special mixture of pulp and sugars—it was delicious.
He walked down 86th Street, package in hand, towards his place by the East River. His place… he was feeling more and more comfortable in this place, and that made him feel uncomfortable, out of place. There were things he missed from his world—faces on the phone, words on the screen, poles of the planet as easily accessible as the north and south parts of this borough—but he missed them less and less. Especially when he was with Laura.
Still… he picked up a copy of the Daily News. Johnson was on the cover, saying he was going ahead full force on the space program, and on the inside was a picture of Gus Grissom. Jeff had thought about doing something to prevent the fire that would kill Grissom, White, and Chafee in their Apollo 1 capsule on January 27, 1967. But that was still over two and a half years away, and he couldn’t be sure what impact that might have on the Moon landing, which was still the lonely high watermark of human penetration of space. No, he didn’t dare mess with that—better to bide his time, and wait the nineteen further years, almost to the day, for a chance to avert the Challenger catastrophe, and the fatal blow it had delivered, in retrospect, to the space program.
But Jeff didn’t suffer abidances of time very well. What was the point of time travel, anyway, if not to short-circuit ordinary time, make new things happen? It seemed the last thing that should be required of the time traveler was patience. Jeff knew now, ever since his experience with Sarah, that he could change the future—which meant that his existence here could make a difference. But he had to get some word back to his team in 2084. How? He’d even tried taking a page from Asimov—what was that book, The End of Eternity?—and placed small, discreet, but clearly informative ads in a variety of significant journals and newspapers like The New York Times. But nothing had happened. He had no idea whether any of the ads had even come to the attention of the team—1964 was after all well before the age of on-line information, and an ad in a newspaper this old might well have slipped by the Big Scannings in the new millennium.