Thea Lim - An Ocean of Minutes

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the authors imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2018 by Thea Lim

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First Touchstone hardcover edition July 2018

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-1-5011-9255-5

ISBN 978-1-5011-9257-9 (ebook)

For Ryan, who sees the seabirds home

It was as if it were now up to me alone, as if by some trifling mental exertion I could reverse the entire course of history, as ifif I desired it onlyGrandmother Antonina, who had refused to go with us to England, would still be living in Kantstrae as before; she would not have gone on that journey, of which we had been informed by a Red Cross postcard shortly after the so-called outbreak of War, but would still be concerned about the wellbeing of her goldfish, which she washed under the kitchen tap every day and placed on the window ledge when the weather was fine, for a little fresh air. All that was required was a moment of concentration, piecing together the syllables of the word concealed in the riddle, and everything would again be as it once was.

W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

P eople wishing to time travel go to Houston Intercontinental Airport. At the orientation, the staff tell them that time travel is just like air travel, you even go to the same facility. People used to be apprehensive about airline travel too. But when you arrive at the airport, it is not the same at all. Before you can get within a mile of the terminals, you reach a bus stop moored at the edge of a vast concrete flat, where you must leave your vehicle and ascend a snaking trolley, like the ones they have at the zoo.

A quarantine taxi makes its way to that lone bus stop, the airport appearing through a million chain-link diamonds. The driver is encased in an oval of hermetically sealed Plexiglas. In the backseat, Frank is wearing a yellow hazmat suit. The color marks him as infected.

Now is the time for last words, but Pollys got nothing. Frank keeps nodding off and then snapping awake, stiff-spined with terror, until he can locate her beside him. We can still go back! He has been saying this for days. Even in his sleep he carries on this argument, and when he opens his eyes, he moves seamlessly from a dream fight to a waking one. Already his voice is far-off, sealed away inside his suit.

She pulls his forehead to her cheek, but his mask stops her short. They can only get within three inches of each other. The suit rubs against the vinyl car seat and makes a funny, crude noise, but they dont laugh. Polly would like to breathe in the smell of Franks skin one last time, a smell like salt cut with something sweet, like when it rains in the city. But all she gets is the dry smell of plastic.

The news outlets went down weeks ago, but that didnt stop the blitz of ads for the Rebuild America Time Travel Initiative: billboards painted on buildings, posters wheat-pasted over empty storefronts, unused mailboxes stuffed with mailers. There is no flu in 2002 and Travel to the future and rebuild America and No skills necessary! Training provided!

At first, the ads were like a joke, gallows humor for people who were stranded once the credit companies went down and the state borders were closed to stop the flus spread, people like Polly and Frank, who got trapped in Texas by accident. Later the ads made Frank angry. He would tear the pamphlets from the mailboxes and throw them on the ground, muttering about opportunism. You know they dont market this to the rich, hed say, and then an hour later hed say it again.

They stayed indoors except for the one day a week when they traveled to the grocery store, which had been commandeered by five army reservists who doled out freeze-dried goods to ragged shoppers. The reservists had taken it upon themselves to impose equal access to the food supply, partly out of goodness and partly out of the universal desperation for something to do. One day the glass doors were locked. A handwritten sign said to go around the back. The soldiers were having a party. With their rifles still strapped on, they were handing out canned cocktail wieners, one per person, on candy-striped paper dessert plates that looked forlorn in their huge hands. Ted, the youngest, a boy from Kansas who had already lost his hair, was leaving for a job in the future. He was going to be an independent energy contractor. There was another sign, bigger and in the same writing, on the back wall: 2000 here we come! It was a rare, happy thing, the soldiers and the shoppers in misfit clothes, standing around and smiling at each other and nibbling on withered cocktail sausages. But just that morning the phone had worked for five minutes and they got a call through to Franks brothers, only to be told it had been weeks since the landlord changed the locks to Franks apartment, back in Buffalo. The landlord was sympathetic to Franks predicament, but he could no longer endure the absence of rent. But what about my stereo? Frank had said. What about my records? What about Grandpas butcher knife? His voice was small, then smaller, as he listed off everything that was now gone.

Frank was usually the life of the party, but that afternoon behind the grocery store he picked on a pinch-faced woman, muttering at her, Why dont they stop the pandemic, then? If they can time travel, why dont they travel back in time to Patient Zero and stop him from coughing on Patient One?