“Uh-huh.”
“And does it mean anything to you?”
The date? I look back at my Chaser to confirm. May 16, 2009.
May 16, 2—
I stop walking. Marie looks back at me.
“Oh, my God,” I say.
“Hold that thought.” She pushes the GO button again.
The change from darkness to a blink of the gray mist to sunlight is so abrupt that I have to slam my eyes shut.
“We don’t have much time,” Marie says. “Come on.”
She grabs my arm, pulls me to the left. Through narrowed eyelids, I see we’re in a field. Weeds and wild grass brush against my legs and I almost trip on what I at first think is a rock, but realize it’s the edge of the old foundation for a long destroyed building.
As my vision continues to adjust, I see we’re headed toward a group of brick buildings that look to me like old, abandoned warehouses.
“Still Chicago?” I ask.
Marie nods. “Southern industrial zone.”
When we reach the end of the field, she crosses the street and races over to one of the warehouses. As I follow, I once again have the feeling this is a place she knows. The feeling is reinforced when she jogs up to a set of metal doors and pulls them open like she already knew they’d be unlocked.
On the other side of the doorway is a staircase, but I don’t catch up to Marie until I reach the top landing, and this is only because she’s stopped to wait for me.
“We’re here for one purpose only,” she says. “This place gives us a good vantage point. Whatever else you see here is not important. Okay?”
“Sure,” I say. “Got it.”
She opens the door and we walk onto the sunlit roof of the warehouse. The weather-protection material that once covered the roof is torn in several places and missing altogether in others. There are at least half a dozen spots where the wood beneath has rotted away, leaving holes that offer a swift trip down to the concrete slab four floors below.
I’m so focused on avoiding these traps that I don’t realize we aren’t alone until we almost reach the raised lip at the edge. Looking around, I spot four other pairs of people scattered along the roof and immediately note a disturbing similarity. In each group, there is one person who looks to be around my age. That’s not the crazy part, though. The second one of each pair is Marie.
The same woman who brought me here.
Counting the one I’m with, there are five of her.
“Focus,” my Marie hisses at me.
I turn to her, and though I’m sure she can see the shock and confusion in my eyes, she ignores my unspoken questions and points toward the city.
“You see it? The tallest one?”
I have to force myself to look toward downtown.
“Yes,” I say, picking out the infamous Dawson Tower. From here it looks like a sparkling finger pointed at the sky.
“Just a few seconds now,” she says.
So much is running through my mind that I almost miss the very thing she’s brought me here to see. From this distance, we’re unable to see the exact moment the twenty-third floor begins its collapse, but we can’t miss the hundred-plus floors above it beginning to tilt. One of the others with us on the roof shouts in horror as the giant structure breaks into pieces, and a part of me is surprised I haven’t yelled, too.
It was supposed to be the tallest building in North America when it was finished, but on May 16, 2009, less than a month from completion, the tower collapsed onto the city, taking several other structures with it and killing thousands. That bit of history from five years ago is happening now right in front of my eyes.
“We could have saved some of them,” I say as a great cloud of dust rises. “We could have saved all of them if we wanted to.”
“And if we did?” Marie asks.
I know what answer she wants me to say but I find it impossible to voice. Who cares what happens after? Who cares what changes would occur to our present? We could have saved them!
“Suppose we did,” she says when I don’t answer. “Perhaps we convince a worker who would have been on the seventy-sixth floor to stay home. What if, in his relief for not having been in the accident, he gets drunk and causes the death of someone who wasn’t in the tower, someone who, in our home time, was still alive when we left? Now that person is not. Babies will be born who shouldn’t have been, and others who were born will cease to exist. Relationships with husbands and wives and lovers and friends and enemies and business partners will all play out differently. There’s no way to predict what will happen, except to say that our time will be forever altered. All this because we save the lives of those who were already dead. As much as we all wish it were different, a Rewinder is not a god. A Rewinder is an observer, who keeps his contact with those in the time he’s visiting to a bare minimum.”
“I get it,” I say. “I just…”
“It’s human nature to want to help,” she says.
I nod. That’s it exactly.
“I feel the same way every time I watch this happen,” she says.
“How do you keep from acting?”
She’s silent for several seconds, then says something that sounds more like she’s reading it from one of the institute’s manuals than feeling it in her heart. “By doing nothing you are serving the greater good of humanity.”
I have a hard time believing that but don’t know how to respond, so I quietly watch the dust cloud grow. When I can take the tragedy no longer, I look over at the others along the lip.
“More of your students?” I ask.
“Three of them are. One is someone I haven’t met yet, but I see him here every time.”
I look at her. “You’ve seen me here, too?”
“I have.”
My brain is starting to hurt. “Everyone’s in the same position?”
She nods.
“Doing the same things?”
Another nod.
“Did you notice us having this conversation before?”
“I’m watching us right now.”
She nods past me, and I look back to see the second Marie over looking in our direction.
“What if you do something you haven’t seen before?”
She looks uncomfortable. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. What if you wave? Have you waved at the others before?”
“No, but I’m not so sure that’s a good idea.”
“You mean it’s kind of like if we tried to save those people?”
After a silent moment, she suddenly raises her hand above her head and waves at the other groups. A few respond in kind.
“Whoa,” I say, surprised. “Do you now remember seeing you do that?”
“It doesn’t work like that. My memory doesn’t change.”
“So what does that mean?”
She looks back toward the city. “What’s your understanding of what caused the Dawson Tower disaster?”
I’m actually glad she’s changing the subject, because any answer she might give would undoubtedly lead to more questions and my head is already overfilled. “Disgruntled workers sabotaged the project,” I say, following her gaze. “They were led by a guy named, uh, Wendell something, I think.”
“Wendell Barber,” she says.
“Right.”
“They were scapegoats,” she says. “He and the people who were executed with him knew nothing about what caused the disaster.”
I get the sense this conversation is turning political, and as an Eight who was taught long ago what should and shouldn’t be discussed, it’s not a comfortable direction for me.
“There was sabotage, all right, but not by disgruntled workers,” she goes on. “The building was brought down by budget skimming through the use of inferior materials and bribed inspectors. The true causes are the same ones that invade most aspects of our society — greed and corruption.”