Never Enough Time, page 9
But, you know, the ring is probably worth a few bucks, and I may need it later on. Especially since I don’t have a bag or a wallet or a credit card or apparently a computer, none of which I could find in the Minimal Palace that is, I guess, my home.
I’ve progressed, I tell myself. I’ve gone from denying ownership—the dorm room, well, my dorm room—to accepting it—the Ludlow Street apartment—to rejecting it—the Apartment That No Human Apparently Lives In.
Very proud of myself for honoring both myself and my friend, I get in the elevator and ride the three thousand storeys down to the street. It shouldn’t take me that long to get to Ludlow, I think on the ride down down down. But, fuck, Jae’s probably at work. I should have thought of that.
Never mind. I’ll go to the library and read up on the last seven years. That should entertain me for most of the day until he gets home.
Meanwhile, though, I think I should stop by the building on Ludlow and see if his name’s still on the buzzer downstairs and refresh myself about the building’s number so I can research him in case he isn’t still there.
Good. I have a plan. And for once, at least, I have no term paper or thesis or report to write, thank the fucking god of deadlines.
It’s an idyllic spring day. The trees have those not-yet-fully-burst leaves on them, there’s the smell of ionized air hanging about, and I seem to be in a really optimistic, let’s-get-this-done mood.
But I have no fucking idea where I am.
Chapter 29
I go back up in the elevator. I need time to think. Or just time, what little there may be of it. I’m not sure I know how to think anymore.
I mean, it’s not like I thought my way into this predicament. I don’t think. Ha ha ha. I slay myself.
The elevator rises so fast that I think I’m going to puke, but I’m pleased to report that I do not. When I was a kid, I used to puke every single morning. But one thing I will say for the last three mornings—no puking. Although I hadn’t been at the morning-puke routine for a decade anyway. What I mean is three decades.
The apartment lets me back inside. I guess it recognizes me. But it does it all without my having to say a word or press my hand to anything or give a blood sample or look into a monitor. Nothing. I touch the handle and the door—which was most definitely locked when I left the joint a few minutes ago, back in the halcyon days when I was all determined and optimistic and had a plan, unlike now—opens. If you can remember back to the beginning of that sentence.
The door just fucking opens. Very convenient. No wonder I don’t need a bag. I can probably pay for a new phone just by smiling at a salesperson or something. If I can find a store, that is.
New Jersey, I think. I must be in New Jersey. That’s why everything looks so unfamiliar. So not New York City, New York State, not even horrible awful dreadful Westchester, or even wherever-it-was that I went to grad school, which, come to think of it, I don’t know where that was.
Good. New Jersey. That settles it. This is how big a sellout I am—shortly to be rectified when I set everything to rights in the next few hours—but at the moment I’m still that despicable sellout who gave up the purity and goodness and truth of philosophy, got an M bloody B damn A, analyzes finances so they—that is, I—can live in the most beautiful yet also most cold, sterile, empty-feeling apartment on the planet, stole my best friend’s boyfriend, lover, and soul mate, and moved to New Fucking Joisey.
It fits, doesn’t it? All of it.
But just to make sure this is New Jersey, I think I should turn on the television and find the local news.
Except there’s no television.
What kind of a person have I become? Someone without a television? Well, really, that’s actually the only thing that kind of makes sense. Television is so passé. But, you know, don’t my stolen husband and I ever, like, watch a movie or something? Don’t tell me they don’t have movies anymore!
Dear gods of the cycle of sevens: If you have any decency at all, you will please restore movies to the world immediately. Because as long as you’re going to completely ruin my life, the least you could do is let me be entertained sometimes. Or even just once. Kay?
The gods of the cycle of sevens are, as usual, silent as a fucking silent film. Silenter. Because there’s no sound track, no organ playing, no audience chewing popcorn, no people in the seat behind me carrying on a running commentary about every damn scene in the movie. Nothing.
I guess I’ll have to go back outside. There’s nothing at all to find out in here. There’s practically nothing at all in here, not counting the giant bed, the tasteful, spare living room, and the ultraclean kitchen.
I go to the bathroom again for good measure, since for all I know not only aren’t there televisions and computers and bags and maybe not even movies anymore, but perhaps there aren’t bathrooms anymore either.
Amazingly, there’s a little trash can in the bathroom—and here I was thinking that trash was a thing of the past—so after I pee, I open it up. Just for kicks, you know, since the two people who live in this apartment, me included, seem to have made so little impact on it that it’s as though they’re ghosts and the apartment is just humoring them.
Which might be the case, since #16, visible spirit, has not yet been eliminated from the possibility list. Not that any of the other possibilities have been eliminated.
They have not, although I’m feeling pretty confident about not being the female Jason Bourne, since over the past twenty-fucking-one years I’ve shown absolutely no aptitude for or inclination toward any weapon of any sort—handheld, remote controlled, lethal, semilethal, or, you know, like a lightsaber or something.
Yeah. I’m avoiding writing this next thing. Because in the trash can were what now, here in the Hell of the Future, passes for at-home pregnancy tests. Yeah, tests, plural. Although I doubt I gave a party and passed out the adorable little confetti-ish strips to my vast collection of friends.
All of the colorful confetti indicating that the person who licked them is pregnant.
Now would be a good time to puke, I think. So I do.
Chapter 30
The orange definitely tasted better going down. But vomiting is, well, you know, cathartic. And if anyone ever needed catharsis, it’s me.
I find the box of test strips—a clever little container that looks like it could have mints or rolls of lavender-scented bubble gum inside. It’s just sitting there in the minimalists’ medicine cabinet, which also contains two toothbrushes, one toothpaste, one tube of shave cream, a razor, and a bottle of some kind of pills that’re maybe today’s equivalent of aspirin. Or heroin. I’m not sure and don’t try them out.
Lick strip and count to seven. So, okay, I’m pregnant.
I didn’t invite anyone over who then used my bathroom as a pregnancy testing ground. Although in my weird world, I was holding that out as a possibility. Not an alternate-reality-level possibility. More like a witness-protection-program-level possibility. What I mean is, an idea only. Nothing more.
At first I feel pretty upset. I’m pregnant, I didn’t even get to enjoy the fun part, it’s probably Ryan Fitzgerald’s baby and I have to give him back to Sara today if I’m to be the upright good person I was intending to be twenty minutes ago and honor her, me, and our friendship, and I’m not even seventeen years old yet. Except that I’m thirty-fucking-seven years old.
Aren’t I too old to have a baby? Well, I guess not. No. Even though thirty-seven is horrendously old, it’s not too old to be pregnant. I don’t think.
I ride down in the elevator again. I have to go out into New Jersey and find Sara, talk to her, confess everything, and then, I don’t know. Do something.
On the ride down, I cheer up. Because tomorrow when I wake up it’ll be seven years from now and I will have missed the labor pains, delivery hell, crying, diaper changing, screaming, breast-feeding, bawling, waking up at two in the morning and again at two thirty and again at three, and the kid can’t even talk or tell you what’s really wrong.
Fantastic! I’ll wake up tomorrow and the baby will be a seven-year-old person who I can have a conversation with and play games with and who can go to the bathroom all by his/herself and yeah—sounds much better.
If there’s something about this that could be said to sound better. If there is, this is it, and I found it right away. I’m very proud of myself for this insta-discovery.
Back on the street, I realize this isn’t New Jersey. Unless they’ve started driving on the left side of the road in New Jersey, which I guess they could have—those Jerseyites are a contrary lot—but along with this oddity they’ve also adopted the kinds of license plates they’ve got in London.
Which is where, as it turns out, I am.
Checking out the old digs on Ludlow Street is hereby canceled indefinitely. Well, everything is indefinite. I must’ve studied that sort of stuff back when I was an idealist, before I became the wretched specimen I am today.
I’ve never been to London, but I always thought it’d be fun to go to the British Museum and see the Rosetta Stone, and today this idea has a special appeal, because a Rosetta Stone–ish thing would be just the ticket for me. Something to break the code that’s causing me to jump forward seven years every day.
If there is a code, which there must be. Because there’s a pattern. I just don’t know what’s causing it. Or how to stop it.
There’s a tube station right on the corner. Of course. No one who can afford a hoity and toity apartment wants to live far away from a tube stop, do they?
I waltz right in, ride the escalator down down down down, consider that I could be entering hell—the place, not the concept—any moment now, and just kind of breeze along. There aren’t any turnstiles or ticket takers or booths or machines or anything.
Is the subway free? Maybe it is. Or maybe they just know me, like my apartment knew me, and I paid up my fares for the decade already. How the fuck would I know?
But I do notice something right away. It’s not just me—no one else is carrying a bag around with them either. No one.
I smile at a couple of people in my train car, you know, practicing to see if I still know how to engage. They smile back and nod, which should be reassuring but it isn’t.
Holborn. I get off and wonder what the fuck is the matter with me. I’ve got exactly a day—well, not even a full day, because if today goes like the other days have gone, I’ll spend a few hours asleep and won’t be able to find out a thing while I am—and I’m going to spend part of it at the British Museum. As though it’s the holy grail of finding things out.
As though I’ll find out something useful here.
Which I guess I do.
Chapter 31
The museum is fucking huge. Reminding me of the Met in New York, where I’d be better off altogether, since there I’d have a hope of finding Sara or Jae or something and maybe I’d go to that Yankee game after all, since I seem to be flailing about. Probably because of my out-of-whack pregnant hormones.
I’d say I don’t feel pregnant, but I don’t feel thirty-seven or in London or like I’m a financial analyst either. Yet I’m all these things. Somehow.
Ah! Here’s the Rosetta Stone, which is much fucking smaller than I thought it would be. I was imagining something the size of a small cabin or a large armoire. And it’s in a case, so I can’t touch it like I wanted to.
You know, get some magic energy from it and transport myself back to a life I recognize and can deal with. As though its occultish powers would cure my situation. Reverse my situation is more what I mean.
I learn that His Majesty the King of the South and North possessed a divine heart which was beneficent towards the gods . . . and he has forgiven the prisoners who were in prison—and released them from their punishments! What a guy. I need this guy right now.
I stare at the stone, loving the hieroglyphics, wishing I could really read them, wishing I’d spent that wasted year getting that goddamned business degree learning how to read these gorgeous symbols instead.
Fortunately, no one else in the entire museum gives a shit about the Rosetta Stone, and I’m left alone to contemplate it, to stand next to it and hope that maybe it’ll give off a signal or something, I’ll be freed from my punishment of the cycle of the sevens, and, well, I’ll have more than a few more days of life left, because right now I have less and less time every fucking day. Every fucking second.
I like standing here. I feel comfortable here. I want to stay here. Maybe I was an Egyptian pharaoh or knew one in a previous lifetime and that’s what all this affinity is about. Or perhaps I was one of the people who helped make this stone. Or maybe I’m just avoiding everything. You pick.
A group of kids shows up and I have to move aside. Can’t hog the best stolen object in the museum to myself. Well, maybe procured would be a better way to describe how the British Museum ended up with this thing.
I wish I could go to Pompeii today too. Sort of hang out with the ancients, since I’m about to be one myself any minute now. See how it feels up close and in person.
Instead I go to the Enlightenment Gallery, which has—this is so promising—seven sections. I’m really onto something here. Definitely.
What the British Museum means by Enlightenment is not what I was hoping for, which was some enlightenment about my fucking situation. Instead it’s about the Enlightenment, the age of reason and knowledge, which age has I guess had its day since we’ve since moved into the age of unreason. At least I have.
I head through the rooms, ending up in the section about the Natural World, a world I know zero about, since my own world has become decidedly unnatural.
Yet something quite natural is taking place in this gallery. Something that involves my former best friend Sara Perry and her former lover, my current husband, Ryan Fitzgerald.
Just behind a pillar with a bust of someone-or-other who was I’m sure very important to the natural world, these two people—the only two fucking people in London I have a hope of recognizing, the only two people who could possibly help me even a little bit—are locked in one of their old tried-and-true embraces, oblivious to the only other visitor in the gallery: me.
Oblivious to propriety—well, maybe this era doesn’t have such a thing—and oblivious to anything but each other.
In a way, it’s reassuring. Some things never change.
Ever.
Chapter 32
Aging seven years overnight for the last three nights has given me the kind of nerve I always wished I had.
“Ryan,” I say as I approach my two friends. “Fancy meeting you here.” Well, I didn’t say I was original, did I? I said only that I have nerve.
The two lovebirds are still oblivious to me. Maybe I didn’t speak loudly enough.
“Ryan,” I say somewhat louder, although I’m reluctant to speak really loud, since my voice would probably echo through the entire gallery and alert the guard to all of us. As it is, he’s not paying us any attention.
“Ryan, honey, I think someone’s talking to you,” says Sara, who sounds like she’s going to have an orgasm in about ten or maybe seven seconds. Ryan’s hand is nestled in between her legs in its accustomed location. Even I think it belongs there. And he’s my husband. Or so he says.
Ryan unsucks his lips from Sara’s and turns around and—this part surprises me—blushes.
“Uh,” he says. Neither of us is very original, I note.
“Delaney,” Sara says. “I . . . well . . . You see.” She gives up, and rightly so. There’s no need to explain anything, and I tell her that.
“I was going to give him back to you anyway,” I say, although I’m furious.
I wasn’t supposed to find them together—certainly not in the British Fucking Museum!
I was supposed to locate Sara, have a lovely lunch with her, find out what the fuck I’ve been doing for the last seven years, since I’m sure my bestie would humor me, and then I was going to give Ryan back to her.
“You were?” Ryan says.
“Yeah,” I say. “You two belong together.” I cannot believe I’m doing this.
“Delaney,” Sara says. “I’m so . . .”
She can’t bring herself to apologize. Probably because I stole Ryan to begin with, although I’d like to know how I did it. So I just ask. What the fuck.
“Before I give him back to you permanent-like, would you mind enlightening me a little?” I say, cleverly throwing in the word enlighten to keep with the theme of our locale.
“What now?” Ryan says, like he’s annoyed. He’s annoyed? Seriously?
“I want to talk with Sara alone,” I say. “Let’s have some lunch. I’m starving.”
I grab Sara’s arm, loop mine through it, and start dragging her through the galleries. “Is there something like a restaurant nearby?”
“We’ve had lunch here together maybe a thousand times,” Sara says.
“Lead the way,” I say, and she takes me to the Court Café, where I get a cheese sandwich and a Coke and she gets something else, which I don’t pay attention to because I don’t care.
We get a table and the first thing I do is take the rock off my weighed-down hand and give it to her.
“This is really yours,” I say, feeling like I’m giving up a huge burden. “Take it. I can’t stand wearing it.”
“Delaney,” Sara says, “you’re overreacting.”
“To what? To seeing you and Ryan practically fucking each other in public? To being married to the wrong person? To being seven years older than I was yesterday?”
“You’re not starting that shit again,” Sara says.
“What shit is that?”
