“So you said. Jewish magic.”
“You got it.”
“Never heard of that.”
“Neither have most people, but that doesn’t make it any less true. How many people know a proton is made of two up quarks and one down quark? Just because it’s not common knowledge doesn’t make it fantasy.”
“Hardly the same thing.”
She didn’t reply to that, making me feel that they were exactly the same thing.
“How would I go about trying it?”
“Concentrate and feel the faith within you. Don’t worry that you think it’s not there. It is. You just hide it. The Shelljah is easily found when you look for it.”
I had no faith at all. Don’t believe in that. I believe in cause and effect. I believe in gravity, and the first law of thermodynamics, and I believe people write their own histories by their actions. I didn’t believe in mysticism.
But I had to try. If my grandmother had given me some weird kind of farewell gift, well, even though it made no sense at all, I had to try it.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I wasn’t quite sure how I was supposed to do this, so I tried to close my mind to everything else.
I’d learned various calming exercises during a photo-shoot in Tibet years ago. They had helped me many times to remove stress. Physiology, not magic.
Eyes closed, thoughts of Ariela moved to the side, no worries, no concerns, just emptiness. Deep breaths, in and out. I thought of the beautiful mountains surrounding Tibet, the peace of the monks, the soft music that had surrounded me there.
I love meditating and made a mental note to not let so much time pass before doing it again. The last time I could remember was when I was going through the tough times with Karen Anderson, who was floating in space, 250 miles above me.
As with everything else, I tried to move my fragmented memories of Karen to the side. Empty my thoughts. Nothing about Karen. Nothing about Grandma. Nothing about death or funerals, nothing about Hebrew magic. Nothing about the photos I had to get to my editor.
Just peace and serenity.
At first, nothing happened. I felt relaxed, like I always did when I meditated, but then I could feel a warmth radiating from deep within my soul. I concentrated on it and felt myself moving toward that invisible heat, as if I was on a Los Angeles beach and some clouds parted to let me feel the warmth of the sunshine raining down on me.
The sensation grew and I was overfilled with a rush of feelings: fear, awe, love, jealousy, anger, and excitement all pinged as they circled around my mind. It was a wild ride of conflicts and enlightenment.
It was all the emotions of my life, mixing together.
“What the hell?”
My eyes were still closed, and I shocked them open to find myself moving backward. I had no conscious feeling of wanting my body to move, but it was, completely, without me helping.
Backward in time as well as space.
There are no words to explain how stunned I was, an observer riding as a passenger in my own body.
I felt myself retracing the steps I had most recently taken, looking at the items Ariela had left, sleeping, waking and drinking and reading the material, and then backing out of her apartment and re-tracing my steps further back in time. I was now thirty-six hours earlier and finding myself in the hospital as she died.
This time, though, she gasped herself awake from death and stared at me with a grin. I knew, even before she said anything, what was going to happen.
“David, you must go to my home. Everything is waiting for you on the dining room table.”
Everything was going at super-speed, so her voice sounded like she’d sucked a helium balloon. I imagined driving a car going too fast and used my mind to press on an invisible brake pedal to stop my traveling.
Time returned to normal.
“Grandma?”
She nodded. “It worked, didn’t it?”
“How is that possible? How can you be alive again?”
“You mean still. I haven’t died yet, but I’m about to. Thank you for taking care of everything. I knew you would.”
“It’s not possible!”
“Of course it is. You’ve just proven that yourself. A scientist who doesn’t trust his own eyes is pretty useless, isn’t he?”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I think my mouth hung open.
“Now you need to hurry,” she said. “In your true time, I’m getting closer to my burial, and you’ll be back to normal. The magic won’t leave my grave. Don’t waste your chance.”
She closed her eyes and took her last breath, again.
I looked for a doctor or nurse, but I knew they would be here in a moment, and there was nothing they could do.
“Good-bye. Again.”
I relaxed and felt my consciousness being drawn back to my true time. My body raced forward, pulling me back where I belonged. I allowed myself to spring back, moving a hundred times normal speed.
Occasionally I pushed my imaginary brake and watched as the world slowed to normal speed. I pressed harder and… everybody stopped moving.
“Frozen in time…”
I had been walking down a street near my grandmother’s home. There were a dozen people nearby, and they were all locked into whatever they were doing.
I had pressed the Pause button on my life.
A young woman was talking on her iPhone, her mouth open and a tear falling down her cheek. Her long dark hair was half-blowing in the breeze, but she didn’t care. I wanted to brush the tear away and ask what happened, but I knew if I started time going forward again and asked her, she’d be freaked out and frightened at this strange man who had suddenly appeared out of nowhere. I wanted to, though. I wanted to tell her everything was going to be all right. I wanted to hug her and take her fears and anger and send them flying to the wind.
I could do nothing, though.
An older man leaned on a cane, and it looked like an impossible pose, as if he should fall to the ground any second. I watched him. The man’s eyes were staring directly ahead and his lips were pursed together. The walk was a struggle for him, but he was determined to complete whatever task he had set for himself, pain or no pain.
A car had driven though a puddle and a wave of water was rising from the road. It was going to splash onto a dog walking nearby. The collie was starting to turn its head toward the sound, its mouth open and tongue lolling.
From what I saw, it was like I’d been transported into a wax museum. Part of me wondered how it was remotely possible to stop time like that, but I knew I’d never find the answer to that puzzle, so maybe it was best to put that thought aside for now.
I moved time forward by using my imaginary gas pedal, and everyone started to grind into motion again.
The girl cried, the old man puffed, and the dog barked when it got soaked from the splashed puddle.
Everybody had a story, every day.
I stared but found myself moving along with the other people, moving toward Ariela’s apartment building, where I would find the will, the family tree, and the book of Jewish magic.
I sped time up and raced through everything, and then it felt like I’d hit a sponge wall. Time snapped back to its normal speed.
Looking around me, I knew I was back in true time. I checked my watch. No time at all had passed since I had left.
Chapter 7
A thousand miles to the east of David Abelman, a 19-year-old black girl sat in her bedroom and looked at her reflection in the mirror.
Her name was Erika Sabo.
Erika lived in a small town called Aynsville in upstate New York. Most of the people who lived there thought Aynsville must be the place farthest from any other place in New York State. Not close to Buffalo, let alone the Big Apple, it was hidden away where nobody knew about it.