Page 74 of Life Out of Order

“The dude on the Quaker Oats box. I know. But the Quakers were strong abolitionists, and both sides of my family have been various sorts of Quakers going back to Underground Railroad times. Some of my mom’s family is white. My parents met at Meeting, actually.”

“So are you a practicing Quaker?” I have no idea what this might entail.

“I might duck into Meeting every now and then,” Beck says slowly. “I just go when I feel the need. What about you?”

“Lapsed,” I admit. “After my mother died, the rest of my family all stopped going to church. It turned out, she’d been believing for all of us, and once she was gone it was like a power failure, pfft, dead.”

“I have noticed that when the Catholics give it up, they’re done. I like being able to come and go, like a cat.” Beck smiles and half closes her eyes and she does look remarkably like a cat for a moment. “I just had a thought. Does the time-travel thing make you more or less able to believe in God?”

“Less,” I say without hesitation. “It makes the universe seem random and pointless. It produces these violently amazing effects and I see my life from strange vantage points; people I love come and go, and we all lose our equilibrium. Extraordinary things seem normal when time folds onto itself; I have to protect myself from knowing more than I should. If I’d asked Alba just now, she could have told us our futures, but you saw that look on her face? She understood that if she sat down with us, the future, which is already decades in the past for her, that future would be pressing through her at us, and any spontaneity or sense of agency would drain out of this evening, and what seemed to be a cool party trick might become a sense of obligation. As long as we don’t know, we’re free.” I feel as though I’m explaining the rules of a very arcane board game. “Time travelers can’t change anything. After 9/11 a few of our friends were angry with Henry because he didn’t prevent it from happening. He had to explain that it had happened and it wasn’t ever going to not happen. If you time travel, you are still subject to cause and effect, but you have a sort of aerial view. We still got blindsided by stuff, it just came at us from different angles than it might have otherwise.”

“A block universe,” Beck says.

“Exactly.”

Beck says, “I remember when Chrono-Displacement Disorder was discovered, there was a doctor at University of Chicago who published a paper—”

“David Kendrick,” I tell her. “He was Henry’s doctor. Alba still sees him.”

“I remember thinking, this will change everything, religion, physics, medicine: but then it didn’t seem to go anywhere, I didn’t see any more news about it. It was like cold fusion or something, I wondered if it had been a hoax?”

“There’s been a lot of activity behind the scenes. I think David has been doing research for the military, though he won’t confirm or deny that. They don’t want the press writing about it, and so David doesn’t give interviews. The internet is full of conspiracy theories; some of David’s patients have been doxxed. People show up at our house once in a while. We have to pretend we don’t know what they’re talking about. You can see why the powers that be don’t want people to believe it. On the other hand, all the kids in Alba’s class know about it.”

“Stock markets would collapse,” Beck says, regarding me thoughtfully. “Heck, whole economies would go under. The world depends on not knowing what happens next.”

“A lot of my conversations with Henry were just a continuous jumble of spoiler alerts. Alba is more secretive, but if I ask her something point-blank she usually tells me.”

“So what’s the craziest thing Alba’s ever told you?” Beck asks. I lower my voice and start to tell her about the 2016 presidential election. After a few minutes Beck holds up her hand, palm out. “No. That’s horrible,” she says. She looks ill. “How do we stop—”

“We don’t,” I say gently. “We can’t.”

“We have to!” Beck says. Her voice shakes. The waiter appears to collect our plates. I ask Beck if she’d like wine. She nods. We order an Argentinian Malbec. I feel as though I’ve ruined the evening: Beck sits with her arms folded across her chest, frowning as though I am personally responsible for the collapse of American democracy. I wonder if my coat and shoes will come back as promised. Maybe I should call home? Kimy is babysitting Alba, she could send me one of my other coats, different shoes . . . ? When the waiter is gone Beck says, “How can you bear knowing things? It would crush me, to know what’s coming—how can you be so calm when you know about—that?”

“I was very upset when I first found out about it. But—” I was about to say there’s worse to come but I catch myself. I am speaking quickly as though she’s about to get up and leave, although she is actually sitting quite still, so I take a breath and try to speak more deliberately: “—but the thing about time, that is, you mentioned the concept of a block universe, and I agree that it is the philosophy of time that makes the most sense—in a block universe, past, present and future all exist at once. I usually imagine space-time as a very large house, with an infinite number of rooms. Each room has an entrance and an exit, and most people can only wander through the house room by room, and they don’t know about the rooms they haven’t been in yet, but those rooms are there: All the rooms exist at once. Someone like Henry might go crashing through a wall or a floor and find himself in rooms he wasn’t meant to visit yet; Alba seems to be able to create new doors between nonadjacent rooms. But everyone I know of who’s time traveled agrees: If you know something has happened, you can’t change it. It’s already there, in another room, waiting for you.”

Beck passes her hands over her face. “Tell me something good, to counterbalance all that bad you just laid on me.”

“Gene therapy works. They announce it next year.”

“Thank you.”

The waiter places glasses of wine in front of us. Beck raises her glass, so I do, too. “To life, out of order,” she says.

“‘To world enough, and time,’” I reply. It was Henry’s favorite toast, but it seems appropriate tonight. We drink, and regard each other. “Well,” I say, “at least I haven’t bored you.”

Beck laughs. “No, I’ve never been so not bored in my life. I feel kind of plain by comparison.”

“What? I think you’re amazing.” I can feel myself blushing.

“I’m not sure I’ve given you any reason to think so, but maybe I will.” Beck smiles. “Come to my studio. I can’t match time travel, but I can show you the Museum. Have you ever experienced virtual reality?”

“No,” I say. “I mean, yes? I tried it about ten years ago but it made me carsick.”

“You may be pleasantly surprised,” Beck says. She looks over my shoulder. “I think your coat and shoes have returned.”

A cab driver stands near the door scanning the restaurant. I get up and tell him my name and he hands me a shopping bag. When I try to tip him he says, “The lady took care of it,” and wishes me a good-night. It’s funny how wearing shoes instantly makes me feel like things are under control. When I turn around Beck has paid the bill.

“You can get it next time,” she says when I protest.