“We’re three-dimensional, right?”
“I’m with you so far.”
“Now look at our shadows,” she said. “Our shadows are flat. Two-dimensional. They’re one dimension down from us, just like in a flat universe the shadow of a two-dimensional being would be a one-dimensional line. Shadows always have one fewer dimensions than the thing that cast them.”
“Still with you. I think.”
“So if you want to imagine the fourth dimension, just imagine something that would cast a three-dimensional shadow. We’re like the shadows of four-dimensional beings.”
“Oh wow.” My flat little mind, like the Square’s, was getting blown. “I thought the fourth dimension was supposed to be time or something.”
“Yeah, that turned out to be a made-up idea. They’ve even worked out what a three-dimensional representation of a four-dimensional cube might look like. It’s called a hypercube. Here, I’ll draw one for you. Although with the caveat that my drawing will be merely two-dimensional.”
I accepted this caveat. She drew it. It looked like this:
I stared at the drawing for a long time. It didn’t look all that four-dimensional, though I guess how would I know?
“Do you think,” I said, “that this whole time loop was somehow created by superior four-dimensional beings with the power to manipulate the fabric of three-dimensional space-time itself? That they folded our entire universe into a loop as easily as we would make a Möbius strip out of a piece of paper?”
She pursed her lips. She took the idea more seriously than it probably deserved.
“I’d be a little disappointed if it was,” she said finally. “You’d think they’d have something better to do.”
* * *
She texted me two days later.
Corner of Heston and Grand, 7:27:55.
I got there at 7:20 the next morning, with coffee. She was already there.
“You’re up early,” I said.
“Didn’t sleep. I wanted to see if anything weird happened in the middle of the night.”
“Weird like what?”
“You know. I wanted to be awake when the world rolls back.”
The crazy thing was, I had never even tried that. I had always slept through it. I guess I’m more of a morning person.
“What’s it like?”
“It’s the weirdest thing ever. Every day has to start exactly the same way, so if you woke up in your bed on August 4th—which I’m assuming you did, unless I’m severely underestimating you—”
“You’re not underestimating me.”
“So if you woke up in bed the first time, you have to wake up in your bed all the other times too, so that the day starts exactly the same way every time. Which means that if you’re not in bed at midnight, it puts you to bed. One second I was sitting on the floor dicking around with my phone, the next the lights were off and I was under the covers. It’s like there’s some invisible cosmic nanny who grabs you and tucks you in.”
“That really is the weirdest thing ever,” I said.
“Plus, when you hit midnight, the date on your phone doesn’t change.”
“Right.”
“I guess that part’s not that weird.”
“So what are we looking for here?”
“I don’t want to spoil it,” she said. “I think that should be part of the rules. You have to see it fresh.”
Heston and Grand was a busy intersection, or busy enough that it had a stoplight. It was weird to see rush hour traffic—everybody heading off to work, so urgent and focused, mocha Frappuccino in the cup holder, to do all the stuff they’d already done yesterday, which would get undone again at midnight. To make all the money they would unknowingly give back overnight.
7:26.
“I don’t know why I feel nervous,” she said. “I mean, it pretty much automatically has to happen.”
“It’s going to happen. Whatever it is.”
“Okay, watch for the break in traffic. Here we go.”
Lights changed somewhere upstream, and the road emptied out. A lone black Prius turned off a side street and rolled up at the red light right in front of us.
“Is that it?”
“Yup. Look who’s driving.”
I squinted at it. The driver did look weirdly familiar.
“Wait. That’s not…?”
“I’m pretty sure it is.”
“It’s whatshisname, Harvey Dent from The Dark Knight!”
“No,” she said patiently, “it’s not Aaron Eckhart.”
“Wait. I can get this.” I snapped my fingers a couple of times. “It’s that guy who gets his head cut off in Game of Thrones!”
“Yes!”
It was Sean Bean. Actual Sean Bean, the actor. Realizing he’d been spotted, he gave us his trademark rueful, lopsided grin and a half-wave. Then the light changed and he rolled on.
We watched him go.
“Weird to see him with his head back on,” I said.
“I know. But so, what do you think?”
“I liked him better as the guy who threw up in Ronin.”
“I mean what do you think? Is it mapworthy?”
“Oh, definitely. Let’s map it.”
We went back to her house to redraw the map and watch Time Bandits, which she still hadn’t seen. Her parents weren’t there; her mom had left for a business trip that morning, and her dad was always away at the same yoga retreat, forever.
But she was exhausted from having stayed up all night, and she fell asleep on the couch five minutes in, before the dwarfs even show up. Before the little boy even realizes that the world he lives in is magic.
* * *
It was like a big Easter egg hunt. Margaret got the next one, too: a little girl who made one of those enormous soap bubbles, the kind you make with two sticks and a loop of string, that always pop after like two seconds, only this one didn’t. It was huge, approximately the same size as she was, and it drifted low over Lexington Green, undulating like a weird, translucent ghost amoeba, farther and farther, past where you could even believe it hadn’t popped yet, before it finally crossed a sidewalk and met its end on a parked car.
I found another one two days later: a single cloud, alone in the sky, that for about a minute, seen from the corner of Hancock and Greene, looked exactly like a question mark. But I mean exactly. Like someone had typed it in the sky.
A full five days later she saw two cars pulled up next to each other at a light. License plates: 997 WON and DER 799. The next day I found a four-leaf clover in a field behind my old elementary school, but we disallowed it. Not moment-y enough somehow. Didn’t count.
That night, though, about eight o’clock, I was biking the streets at random when I saw a woman walking by herself. Thirtyish, heavyset, dressed like a receptionist at a real estate agency. Somebody must have texted her, because she looked at her phone and stopped dead. For a terrible second she squatted down and covered her eyes with one hand, like the news had hit her in the stomach so hard she could barely stand.
But then she straightened up again, raised a fist in the air, and ran off into the night singing “Eye of the Tiger” at the top of her lungs. Good voice, too. I never found out what the text was, but it didn’t matter.
That one was fragile: The first time I tried to show it to Margaret we ended up distracting the woman and she didn’t even notice the text. The second time she got the text but apparently didn’t want to sing “Eye of the Tiger” in front of us. In the end, we had to hide behind a hedge for Margaret to get the full effect.
We wrote them all down. CAT ON TIRE SWING (10:24:24). SCRABBLE (14:01:55)—some guy playing in the park made quixotic on a triple word score. LITTLE BOY SMILING (17:11:55)—he’s just sitting there smiling about something; you kind of had to be there.