Anyway, if I said something stupid she’d just forget about it tomorrow.
I watched her for a while first. One of the evergreen features of August 4th at Paint Rock Pool was that every day at 2:37 one of the kids playing catch with a tennis ball massively overthrew it, so that it was not only uncatchable but also cleared the fence at the back of the pool, at which point it was essentially unrecoverable, because beyond that fence was a perilously steep and rocky gully, and then beyond that was Route 128. Nothing that went over that fence ever came back.
But not today, because along came Margaret—just casually; I would even say she was sauntering—wearing a bikini top and denim shorts and a straw sun hat, and when the kid threw she reached up on her tiptoes—flashing her even paler shaved underarm—and snagged the ball out of the air with one long skinny arm. She didn’t even look at it, just pulled it down, flipped it back into the pool, and kept walking.
It was almost like she knew what was coming too. The kid watched her go.
“Thank you,” he said, in a weirdly accurate impression of Apu from The Simpsons. “Come again!”
I saw her lips move as she walked: She said it too—“Thank you, come again”—right along with him. It was like she was reading it off the same script. She plopped down on a deck chair and reclined it all the way back, then changed her mind and hiked it back up a notch. I went over and sat down on the deck chair next to hers. Because I’m smooth like that.
“Hi.”
She turned her head, shading her eyes against the sun. Up close she was even prettier and more string-plucking than I’d thought, with a spray of freckles splashed across the bridge of her nose.
“Hi?” she said.
“Hi. I’m Mark.”
“Okay.”
Like she was granting me the point: Yes, fair enough, your name might well be Mark.
“Look, I don’t know how to put this exactly,” I said, “but would you happen to be trapped in a temporal anomaly? Like right now? Like there’s something wrong with time?”
“I know what a temporal anomaly is.”
Sunlight flashed off sapphire pool-water. People yelled.
“What I mean is—”
“I know what you mean. Yes, it’s happening to me too. The thing with the repeating days. Day.”
“Oh. Oh my God!” A massive wave of relief broke over me. I didn’t see it coming. I fell back on my deck chair and closed my eyes for a second. I think I actually laughed. “Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.”
I think up until that moment I hadn’t even understood how deeply freaked out I was, and how alone with that feeling I’d been. I mean, I was having a perfectly fine time, but I was also really starting to think that I was going to be stuck forever in August 4th and that no one but me would ever know it. No one would ever believe it. Now at least somebody else would know.
Though she didn’t seem nearly as excited about it as I did. I would almost say she was a little blasé.
I bounced back up.
“I’m Mark,” I said again, forgetting that I’d already said it.
“Margaret.”
I actually shook her hand.
“It’s crazy, right? I mean, at first I couldn’t believe it. I mean can you seriously believe it?” I was babbling. “How messed up is this? Right? It’s like magic or something! Like it seriously doesn’t make any sense!”
I took a deep breath.
“Have you met anybody else who knows?”
“Nope.”
“Do you have any idea why this is happening?”
“How would I know?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know! Sorry, just a little giddy here. I’m just so, so glad you’re in this too. I mean not that I’m glad you’re trapped in time or anything, but Jesus, I thought I was the only one! Sorry. It’s going to take me a second.” Deep breath. “So what have you been doing with yourself this whole time? Besides going to the pool?”
“Watching movies, mostly. And I’m teaching myself to drive. I figure it doesn’t matter if I mess up the car because it’ll just be fixed in the morning.”
I found her hard to read. It was weird. Granted, I was hysterical, but she was the opposite. Strangely calm. It was almost like she’d been expecting me.
“Have you?” I said. “Messed up the car?”
“Yes, actually. And our mailbox. I still suck at reverse. My mom was pretty pissed off about it, but then the entire universe reset itself that night and she forgot, So. What about you?”
“Reading mostly.”
I told her about my project at the library. And about the curing cancer thing.
“Wow, I didn’t even think of that. I guess I’ve been thinking small.”
“I didn’t get very far with it.”
“Still. Points for trying.”
“Maybe I should scale it down and just go after athlete’s foot or something.”
“Or pinkeye maybe.”
“Now you’re talking.”
We sat in silence for a minute. Here we were, the last boy and girl on earth, and I couldn’t think of anything to say. I kept getting distracted by her long legs in those shorts. Her fingernails were plain, but she’d painted her toenails black.
“So you’re new, right?” I said. “Did you just move here or something?”
“Couple of months ago. We’re in that new development on Tidd Road, across the highway. Technically I think we’re not even eligible to come here, but my dad fudged it. Look, I gotta go.”
She stood up. I stood up. That was a thing I would learn about Margaret: Even with an infinity of time available, she always seemed to have to go.
“Can I have your number?” I said. “I mean, I know you don’t know me, but I feel like we should probably, you know, stay in touch. Maybe try to figure this thing out. It might go away all by itself. But then again, maybe it won’t.”
She thought about that.
“Okay. Give me your number.”
I did. She texted me back so I’d have hers. The text said it’s me.
* * *
I didn’t text Margaret for a few days. I got the impression that she liked her personal space, and that she wasn’t necessarily overjoyed at the prospect of spending forever with a person of my undeniable dorkiness. I’m not one of your self-hating nerds or anything; I’m comfortable with my place in the social universe. But I get that I’m not everybody’s idea of the perfect guy to spend an infinite amount of time with.
I lasted till four in the afternoon on day five A.M. (After Margaret).
Four o’clock was about when the repetitiveness of it all started to get to me. At the library, I watched the same old guy clump up to the circulation desk with his walker. I heard the same library flunky walk by with the same squeaky cart. The same woman with hay fever disputed a late fee while having a sneezing fit. The same four-year-old had an operatic meltdown and got dragged out of the building.
The problem was that it was all starting to seem less and less real—the endless repetition was kind of leaching the realness out of everything. Things were mattering less. It was fun to just do whatever I wanted all the time, with no responsibilities, but the thing was, the people around me were starting to seem slightly less like people with actual thoughts and feelings, which I knew they were, and slightly more like extremely lifelike robots.
So I texted Margaret. Margaret wasn’t a robot. She was real, like me. An awake person in a world of sleepwalkers.
Hey! It’s Mark. How’s it going?
It was about five minutes before she got back to me; by then I’d gone back to reading The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams.
Can’t complain.
Getting dangerously bored here. You at the pool?
I was driving. Jumped the curb. Hit another mailbox.
Ow. Good thing time is busted.