Fiction

Liam and Noelle had a routine. Sunday mornings they drove to Jester’s Coffee Shop for lattes and bagels. On the way home, they stopped at the gas station and bought four different newspapers. If the weather was warm, they sat at the round glass table in their backyard. If it was cold, like today, they stayed inside, covered their laps in throw blankets, and got to work.

For the rest of the morning, they each filled in as much of a crossword puzzle as they could, then switched. They worked on three or four puzzles at a time. Liam used pencil. Noelle used pen. Sometimes Liam watched her fill in a long answer, multiple words that stretched across the entire puzzle, and realized he was holding his breath. But when they traded, he’d read her work and she was almost always right. His, on the other hand, was smudged with eraser marks or dark lead where he turned a “c” into an “o” or a “d” into a “b.” Noelle practiced some of her answers in the margin beside the puzzle. A list of possibilities, a faint dot of ink above each counted letter. Liam liked reading these little lists. A glimpse into the way her mind worked.

Liam and Noelle had been married for almost twenty years. Sometimes the number felt like a friendly poke in the ribs. Other times it was as baffling as a beating heart on a sidewalk. In time-lapse photography of their Sunday ritual, the couch and the cups and their hairstyles and clothes would change, but the position of their bodies would remain almost the same: Noelle leaning on the arm, legs tucked underneath her, Liam’s legs stretched out on the coffee table. Brains buzzing with caffeine. Scribbling with a sense of comradery and competition.

Noelle put her cup on the side table. She folded her puzzle in half, clipped her pen to it, and dropped it on the couch between them. Liam glanced at her then back to his puzzle. She flipped to the classified ads and let out a little laugh.

“You know I found my first car like this,” she said, holding up the ads. “And my first job.”

Liam smiled.

“Why do they even still exist?” she asked. “Does anyone look at these anymore?”

Liam flipped to the ads in his paper. Only a page and a half. When he was a kid, there were pages and pages of ads: cars and jobs and garage sales and open houses, calls for antiques or sports memorabilia or vinyl records. Now it felt like reading printed SPAM emails: CASH 4 GOLD! Off-Track Betting. An ad for a lawyer specializing in personal injury and divorce.

  “I don’t remember these being so grim,” Liam said.

A thick black border caught his eye. A single question: Do You Wish You Could Go Back in Time? Below it, a 1-800 number. Liam held it up.

“Check this out.”

Noelle laughed. “Oh my god. What? Let’s call it.”

“No way,” Liam said. “It’ll probably put us on some junk list and we’ll be getting calls for the rest of our lives.”

Noelle reached for her phone. She tapped in the number, put it on speakerphone, and held it up between them.

“Ok, you asked for it,” Liam said. “Don’t complain to me when some weirdo in his basement starts call—”

Thank you for calling Time and Time Again, this is Jessica, how may I help you?

Liam and Noelle froze. Jessica sounded young and confident, a sing-songy cadence.

Hello?

“Hi. Hi, sorry,” Noelle said. “We saw the ad in the paper?” Noelle turned statements into questions when she was nervous.

Yes, of course, ma’am. How may we help you?

Noelle looked at Liam. He nodded, moving closer to the phone.

“My husband and I – Liam – we’d. We’d like to go back in time?”

A pause. The clacking of a keyboard. Liam thought he could hear more clacking in the background, and he imagined a warehouse of cubicles, a hive of women all named Jessica in headsets.

Of course. We would be happy to help you. Are you available this Friday for a free consultation?

Noelle and Liam held back a surge of laughter. Then their expressions turned and they stared at each other, waiting for the other to give permission.

“Yes,” Noelle said. “Yes, we can make that work.”

Excellent.

Noelle gave Jessica her date of birth and email address. Jessica thanked her for her interest in Time and Time Again. “They” looked forward to seeing them soon.

The air buzzed between them. They sat for a moment – Noelle holding her phone with two hands like a bouquet, Liam’s crossword splayed across his lap. He felt a stupid joke, some sarcastic comment bubbling in his throat, but he kept quiet. Something had been revealed, some truth admitted, and there was no going back.

_

Over the next few days, they didn’t talk about it, but Liam thought about it a lot and he suspected Noelle did, too. They made little jokes here and there – don’t forget about our consultation on Friday – but Liam was careful not to reveal a note of hope in his voice. Was Noelle holding back, too? He could remember a time, years ago, when he believed he knew exactly what she was thinking, that the words she spoke were the same as the words in her head. It hadn’t even occurred to him to doubt her. But over time, something changed. Something was lost. Or something had crept in.

He felt old. Forty-eight. Too much stomach fat. Not enough hair. The usual. But more than that. He felt he was suddenly in that stretch of time when the world stops caring about you. All the hoopla of high school and college graduations, weddings and houses and jobs – all those god-given milestones met, celebrated, forgotten. Now the chasm of routine. A creeping sense of guilt that he wasn’t prepared for retirement and never would be. But that was at least twenty years away, so why worry now? And wasn’t it true that social security would run dry well before then anyway? If the country wasn’t prepared, how could he be?

But all that seemed like an excuse, a cover for something else. He and Noelle used to do things together – tend a garden in the backyard, take long walks, plan long vacations. Liam used to feel like they were driving down a long, wide road together, not another car for miles. Now that open highway seemed more like a conveyer belt.

For Liam, going back in time was less about starting over and more about reclaiming that feeling of lightness. The way he used to feel in elementary school on the last day before Christmas break. Before middle school, before his mother died, before he met Noelle, before they lost years and money to fertility treatments and the endless cycle of doctor appointments. Before they stopped trying all together and Noelle’s eyes darkened, not enough for anyone else to notice, but enough for Liam to understand that some light in her had burned out. Before they convinced themselves that they just weren’t meant to be parents, rather than the truth: their bodies didn’t want them to be.

Maybe even before elementary school. Maybe he’d go back to a day when he was a toddler, an infant. Maybe a day that was insignificant at the time would reveal itself to be the turning point in his life. He imagined himself reaching out, touching the shoulders of his little infant body, and adjusting his course ever so slightly, like guiding a paper boat around a dam.

This was crazy.

But what if it wasn’t?

_

On Friday, Liam wore black dress pants and a checkered button-up shirt. He considered a tie, but decided to leave his collar open and slipped his arms into the same black suit jacket he’d worn to weddings and funerals for the last decade. He searched for a second black dress sock in the bottom drawer. Noelle walked in in a towel, pink splotches on her neck and shoulders.

“Wow,” she said, “we’re going formal, huh?”

Liam laughed. “I guess? I don’t know. For some reason, I feel like I’m going to an interview. Like I need to make a good impression.”

Noelle gave him one of those “you’re-a-sweet-man-I-really-don’t-tell-you-enough” smiles. He left the room while she dressed. Liam had not seen his wife fully naked in years. She was more self-conscious about her upper half than the lower – her towel wrapped high around her chest and stomach, leaving her legs and the bottom of her butt exposed. When Liam was a kid, he imagined married couples walked around their houses naked all the time. Wasn’t that the whole point of living with someone? To strip away the costumes we wore for the rest of the world? To shed all that armor? 

Liam was guarded, too. In ways he never expected. If Noelle had become indecipherable over the years, he had morphed into an opinion-less clone of his former self. Was there anything worse than having no opinion about anything? Agreeable to the point where no one, not even Liam, had any idea what he really liked and disliked? It wasn’t for lack of effort. He tried. He thought hard about the things that used to excite him – rock concerts, mafia documentaries, long train rides – but felt nothing. It was as if he were viewing those things through thick glass, a museum exhibit of his past.

Liam walked down the hall and into the bathroom. He brushed his teeth, paying close attention to the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. A red spider vein on the bridge of his nose. The new dark freckle on his ear lobe he’d been telling himself for months to get examined. He rinsed with mouthwash as if he were running late (they had plenty of time), spit hard in the sink, and turned.

Noelle stood in the doorway. Black pants and black sweater. Her earrings little bursts of silver. When she was in college, she wore floral sun dresses, bleached jeans and purple tank tops. A pair of Converse All Stars she spray-painted a new color every few weeks. It was one of the things that first drew him to her, the way she viewed her body as a blank canvas, thought carefully about colors and patterns. But all that color had turned to black.

_

           Dark puddles seeped into the road from the shoulder. An early thaw that wouldn’t last. The sun bright and cold, a whiff of spring, but Liam didn’t believe it. He’d lived in New England his entire life. He knew how the weather teased, dangled sunshine in your face one afternoon, clobbered you with snow the next. Still, each year when the sun came early, Liam leaned into it like a houseplant.     

  The directions led them out past the airport, down service roads that snaked around fields of cat tail weeds and half-abandoned industrial parks. A ghost town. Not even a town – some no man’s land between. A sign for nutritional supplements. A computer repair shop. And then nothing for almost two miles.

Noelle looked out her window. “This can’t be right.”

“The directions say ‘continue on service road for four miles.’”

“Maybe the directions are wrong.”

Liam followed the road, the air heavy with silence. The waistband of his dress pants cut into his stomach. His shirt collar suddenly felt tight. He fought the urge to turn around, head home, strip and lose himself in hot a shower the way he used to when he was a kid. He’d curl up on the round tasseled rug, lay his head down, and listen to the water drumming in the tub. Something about the steam, the heat. The floor slipped away and he floated on the rug, half-conscious. That was the sensation he longed for, the reason this crazy idea about time travel had hypnotized him – to be between worlds. Suspended.

“It’s a dead end,” Noelle said.

Liam rolled slowly toward the yellow sign before he saw a smaller black and silver sign stabbed into the dirt. Time and Time Again, Inc. An arrow pointed toward a narrow, paved driveway that couldn’t possibly have been there a minute ago.

“Down there?” Liam asked.

Noelle shrugged. “It would appear so.”

Up until now, this felt like an adventure, but now was the moment of truth. If Liam turned down this driveway, they would have to follow it to the end. There wasn’t enough room to turn around so they would have to see what the building looked like, and if they saw the building, how could they not go in? How could they not see this through, even if it turned out to be a scam? No one had forced them here. They didn’t have to pay anything yet or give a credit card number. They hadn’t signed any contract. He turned to Noelle and was about to ask her a question when she looked right back and said, “Let’s check it out.”

_

There was nothing special about the building. It wasn’t a mirrored pyramid or some mad architect’s fever dream. There were no stainless-steel sculptures erupting from the property, no brushed aluminum railings or ominous archways. It looked like an extra-long ranch house made of bricks. Indifferent. Come in or don’t, what do we care?

Liam parked in front. They sat for a moment, the exhaust pipe ticking.

“So, what’s the plan here?” Liam asked.

Noelle shrugged, opened the door, and stepped out. She walked toward the entrance. Liam jogged to catch up.

They stared at their reflections in the glass doors. They could be going to a christening or a funeral. Noelle reached over, slid her hand down Liam’s forearm and interlaced their fingers. He turned and she offered a tight-lipped smile, the one she used to give outside the fertility clinic, the one that said maybe this time. Liam kissed her on the forehead. They stepped up to the door.

The silver and black intercom built into the brick wall looked brand new. Liam leaned in; the iridescent eye of a camera stared back. He pressed the call button, and before he could lower his arm, Jessica’s cheerful voice hopped out of the speaker.

Liam and Noelle?

“Yes,” Liam said. “We’re here for our—

Consultation, yes, of course. Please come in and take the elevator down to Level 3.

“Down?” Noelle whispered.

They crossed the empty lobby, their footsteps squeaking and echoing on the linoleum tile. This could be the entrance to the DMV or an urgent care clinic – those sterile, anonymous rooms where time becomes slippery. Liam thought of the green slime he and his mother would make on raining Sundays. Elmer’s glue and food coloring and Borax. The liquid slowly thickening with each stir. How it trembled in his hands, drooped between his fingers, and the harder he squeezed, the more it gushed from his fist.

The shiny silver elevator opened like a mouth.

_

The sun burned over Liam’s half-naked body. A fat seagull, perched on the peak of a seafood restaurant, cried out three times before liftoff. Then children laughing, shouting, muffled footsteps in the sand. Far off, a radio playing a pop song Liam hadn’t heard in decades.

A hand moved over his face and Liam twitched.

“Don’t scrunch, honey.” She dabbed his nose, rubbed his cheeks. “There. Done.”

Liam sat up. His mother leaned in the opposite direction, digging through their little red and white cooler. He knew what she was going to pull out. He knew what was wrapped in tin foil. He could almost taste it.

“Turkey and cheese. No crusts.”

“Where’s Noelle?”

His question slapped her. She looked shocked. Appalled. “Who?”

But Liam couldn’t answer. The moment he said the name any reason for asking evaporated. It felt like waking suddenly from a dream, his half-conscious mind asking a question that no longer held purpose. He shrugged and bit into his sandwich.

That kid will drop the ball. That old man will pick his nose. That couple will kiss. Liam knew and didn’t know what would happen next. Everyone looked familiar yet strange. He glanced at his mother’s back – no zipper, no key. No three-pronged outlet, no flesh-colored control panel. His hands. Smooth and hairless. Scarless. Ringless. And his legs – skinny, lanky legs, thighs half-covered in blue and green swim trunks with the itchy mesh liner. He scarfed his sandwich, stood up, and started toward the water.

“You have to wait, Liam” his mother said, “or else you’ll get sick.”

__

Noelle blinked at the bright sky. The steady rush of traffic. No, not traffic. The ocean breathing in and out. How similar they sounded. She closed her eyes and saw cars and trucks rolling on top of the waves, then floating out and away.

Her father peeled an orange and offered her a slice. He kept his eyes on the ocean, but reached back. Only his hand and the orange came into focus. His arm and the rest of his body blurry, as if he were reaching out from a cloud. Noelle bit the orange and something like electricity bolted through her. Some girls she hadn’t seen since elementary school were laughing and playing volleyball, little puffs of sand around their feet as they jumped and turned. Her father handed her another orange slice, and another, and each bite made the world around her sharper, louder.

He seemed to have an endless supply of oranges and he kept sharing, no matter how hungry he was or how much time it took to peel them. Noelle ate most of her meals from his plate, each small square of steak or dollop of mashed potatoes somehow tasted better when it touched his fork first. But now it felt different and she spoke up. “Daddy, save some for yourself,” but he didn’t or couldn’t hear her, his arm now moving like one of those claw games at the arcade. Each time he reached back, he held two more orange slices, then two more, two more, two more. They piled in her lap, juice running down her knee, her shin. A wave of fear roiled in her stomach. Then she felt a kick, something moving inside her. She clawed a hole in the sand beside the blanket and pushed the orange slices in, but he kept dropping them on her. The more she buried, the more he gave her. She buried faster, threw some to the seagulls who pecked at them with disappointment. “I’m full, Daddy.” His arm stopped. His hand full of oranges. He squeezed and juice rained on the sand. He finally turned, leaned his face out of the cloud, half skin, half skull. Cheekbone cold as marble pressed against her forehead. “I’m starving,” he whispered.

_

          Liam pulled at his collar. Grains of sand between his toes, his feet wrapped in black dress socks, slipped into black shoes half a size too big for him. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the last bite of his turkey sandwich. He considered eating it, right there in the church, but when he brought it to his mouth it changed into a white handkerchief.

He wore this black suit to his cousin’s wedding and now he wore it to his mother’s funeral. Most of the men in his family only had one suit and they wore it until the elbows were threadbare, bought a new one only when it was absolutely necessary, like brake pads. They sat in pews like giant children, waiting for the teacher’s instructions.

Could he smell sunblock? Or was that wood polish? So many people he’d seen only in photographs – uncles and aunts and cousins. The priest at the front a statue come to life. He could be thirty-five or sixty-five. He spoke about Liam’s mother as if she were a mythical character, a lonely maiden from a folk tale. The priest’s stare cut through the rows like a laser and found Liam in the second to last pew. He held Liam’s eyes for the entire service. Liam felt an apology swelling in his throat. For what? To whom? The priest spoke about the loving family members his mother left behind. The more he talked, the more Liam felt like he was slowly revealing every one of Liam’s darkest secrets.

And then the bright, hot sun and the coffin a slab of volcanic glass sinking into the ground.

__

“Hold your breath,” her father says.

Noelle shuts her mouth and pinches her nose, as if she’s about to jump into a pool. The men and women in black stand around the open grave like a flock of birds. One of them is a boy, around her age, in a suit one size too big for him. She recognizes him and she doesn’t. A familiar stranger. Some part of her young brain, some part of her present mind: my father taught me that death is contagious.

Inside her belly, nothing moves.

__

Liam woke, gasping, gripping the arms of a black leather chair. Noelle sat across from him, in another black leather chair, her eyes moving beneath her lids as if following a metronome. When he clenched his jaw, sand crunched between his teeth.

  “Welcome back, Liam.”

He’d imagined Jessica young – a fresh college graduate, an intern. But she was much older, early seventies. She unhooked cables from the back of his chair and coiled them neatly.

“What’s happening?” Liam asked.

Jessica smiled. “That’s up to you. It’s wild, isn’t it?”

            Noelle shook her head, as if gently saying no. Then she was still.

            “Is she ok?”

            “Of course,” Jessica said.

            “I thought this was just a consultation.”

            Jessica looked disappointed. “We discussed this at the beginning. It’s unpredictable. This isn’t some silly movie, Liam. We don’t set the dial to 1955 and see what our parents were like as teenagers. At Time and Time Again, we believe each of us has a time and place within us we long to return to. A moment that feels unfinished. All we do here is create the environment for that ‘return’ to happen.”

            Liam released his grip, the sweaty indentations in the leather slowly refilling. Jessica checked his blood pressure, his pulse, then clacked a few notes into her laptop.

            “Now what?”

            “We wait,” Jessica said. “We wait for your wife to wake up. If her vitals are good, we send you on your way.”

            Liam squinted. “And that’s it?”

            “Then our aftercare team will follow up with you in the next few days and if the return was successful, you’ll see the difference.”

            There was something elegant about Jessica. Her tailored pantsuit. A smile of pearls below her throat. The provost of a university. A local politician.

            “And what if it wasn’t successful?” he asked. “The ‘return’?”

            She finished her note and looked up. “Then we try again, Liam.”

            Noelle’s eyes shot open, wide and glassy. She stared at Liam. He got up and crouched beside her chair.

            “Hey. Hey, it’s me. It’s me. We’re alright.”

            She tried to stand up.

            “Hang on, sweetie,” Jessica said. “Easy. Take your time.” Jessica leaned over the back of the chair and unhooked Noelle’s cables.

            “Are you ok?” Liam asked.

            Noelle opened her mouth but no words came out, just a raspy exhale.

            “Don’t worry,” Jessica said. “This sometimes happens.”

            Liam stood up. “This sometimes happens? Sometimes people get lured into some fuckin’ scam and wake up unable to talk?”

            Jessica held the coiled cables in her hand like she was passing a set of rings to Liam. “A scam? Is that what you think this is, Liam? We haven’t taken anything from you. You haven’t paid anything.”

            Liam helped Noelle to her feet. “Then this is some kind of initiation or cult or research experiment or something. We didn’t agree to this.”

            Noelle took a step then fell back in her chair.

            “You need to let her rest,” Jessica said. She walked over to a small refrigerator, filled a paper cup with orange juice, and gave it to Noelle. She drank it in one gulp, then spit it out, coughing. Noelle hunched forward, her cough deep and hollow.

            “Easy. Easy,” Liam said. He glared at Jessica.  

            Jessica gave them two clipboards. “Here is your discharge paperwork. Sign and date each page. After her blood pressure settles, you’re free to go.”

            Liam glanced down at the clipboard. Name, date of birth, a series of questions and rating scales, 1-10. Jessica turned and left.

            “Noelle. Noelle. Can you talk?”

            “Liam?”

            “Yeah, babe.”

            “I’m so hungry.”

__

They stopped at McDonalds and both ordered Happy Meals. It wasn’t a choice – they opened their mouths and the words were there, ready. Liam glanced at Noelle as she ate. Her skin still pale, droplets of sweat on her temple. The toy was wrapped in plastic. A character he didn’t know from a new kid’s movie he’d never see. He opened the toy and placed in on the dashboard. Noelle looked up.

“I think we were drugged, Liam.”

“Maybe we should see a doctor?”

Noelle turned away. He wanted to tell her about what he saw, about what went through his brain when they were hooked up to the cables. And he wanted to ask her what she saw, what moment in time she was brought back to. He thought of all the dreams they’d had beside each other, the decades of nights when their buzzing thoughts and visions and fears knocked against the inside of their heads. How those visions defied definition, existed beyond the reach of language. How their bodies offered hints, cryptic clues to the unborn words inside them.