Authors: Kamy Wicoff
Jennifer jerked her hand away from Jack, who wailed. “What?” she cried. “I mean, I thought the whole thing was over by five. I have to get back to the office.” She had formulated a plan: listen to Julien play, then run like hell back to work. The West End School wasn’t that far from 250 Broadway—fifteen minutes by cab, if traffic was light on the West Side Highway. If she hurried, she thought, she might even make the four thirty meeting, or at least be only a few minutes late. She certainly wasn’t going to wait around until 5:00 p.m. and hope the app would work a second time and transport her back to 4:00 p.m. at her office. It was much too big a risk.
She nudged Jack off her lap and placed him in Melissa’s.
“But Mama’s hand is hurt!” Jack protested. Instinctively she reached for her phone and handed it to him. “Play Angry Birds,” she said. “I’m going to find Julien’s teacher.” Appeased, Jack reached for her phone. “No, wait!” she yelled, grabbing it back as though he’d just picked up a hand grenade on the street. This time several people stared, including Norman, who had returned from his “meeting” with Scott Spencer after
all of thirty seconds. “I need to keep it with me, actually,” she said, as coolly as she could. “Norman, can he play on yours?”
“I don’t have Angry Birds,” he said. “You know I don’t believe in it.”
Jennifer wanted to ask him how it was possible to “believe” or not believe in Angry Birds, while having her usual nagging doubts about whether her dependence on Angry Birds in situations like this made her a bad mother. But now was hardly the time.
“Melissa?” she asked, trying not to sound desperate.
“I have it,” she said cheerily, handing her phone to Jack. “I even have the one that’s in outer space!” As Jack settled in to play, Jennifer headed backstage.
“B
ACKSTAGE
”
WAS REALLY JUST
one of the larger practice rooms in the school. Once there, she navigated her way through at least thirty-five kids running around the room, abusing their instruments, until at last she spotted Owen, Julien’s guitar instructor. Wanting to avoid Julien, who she was sure would immediately suspect something if he saw her there, she managed to attract Owen’s attention and beckoned him to a quiet corner of the room.
Owen walked up to her and smiled. “What’s up?” he asked in his easygoing, not-from–New York manner. Where
was
he from? she wondered. She’d never asked.
“I’m so sorry to do this,” she said quickly, “but I made some very difficult arrangements to be here, and I thought it was going to end right at five, you know, on the dot, and I told my colleagues I could be back in my office by then, or maybe even a little sooner, and so I was just wondering, is there any possible way that Julien could play a little bit earlier? Like, first?”
Owen paused, knitting his brow a bit.
“Jennifer, right?” he said.
Oh God
, she thought.
This is going to go badly. The obnoxious, absent working mom who thinks the world revolves around her and her schedule, barging in right before the recital starts and asking for favors.
Hoping to impress her humble desperation upon him, she sought to meet his gaze, but he was distracted for a moment by some horseplay between a violinist and a portly kid with a trombone. Owen was tall—she had not processed just how tall until now, as she was forced to tip her head back slightly in order to look at him pleadingly. He also had long, straight, light brown bangs that fell into his eyes—bangs on a man in his mid-forties, and he could pull it off. She was staring at them stupidly when he returned his focus to her and placed one huge, callused hand on her shoulder. Their eyes locked for a minute. That was when she felt it.
Kapow!
The unmistakable pop of sexual attraction, like a string attached to her crotch that had just been given a delicious yank.
Whoa!
she thought. She hadn’t felt that in a long time. So long that the feeling was as startling as it was pleasurable.
“Please?” she repeated, as steadily as possible.
“I’ll move him up on the program,” he said, giving her shoulder a gentle squeeze and then pulling his hand away. If he felt it, too, she thought, he showed no sign. “I’m not sure he’ll be first, but he’ll be close.”
“Thank you!” she said brightly. “And I’ll come to his next lesson, really! It’s been too long!” Owen, taking it all in stride, shot her a smile that sent another shudder through her. She turned away, hoping he hadn’t seen her blush.
I
T TOOK ALL OF
Jennifer’s willpower—and then some—to stay seated and silent when Julien did not go first. Or second.
Or third. But after the third rendition of “Smoke on the Water” (which was interpreted, painfully slowly, by three first-graders in a row), and just as Jennifer was contemplating heading for the door, Owen loped up onto the stage, followed by Julien.
“Slight change in the program, folks,” he said. (
Folks?
Really, where
was
this guy from?) “Julien Bideau will be playing next. He’s playing ‘Here Comes the Sun,’ and I think,” Owen continued, finding Jennifer in the audience and looking right at her, “this one is for Mom.” And then he winked. Norman didn’t notice the wink, of course. He was too busy training his Hubble space telescope–size camera on Julien. But Melissa turned her head toward Jennifer and raised her eyebrows questioningly. Jennifer threw her hands up—
Beats me
—but she couldn’t help smiling. She made eye contact with Owen and gave him a little wave. Ducking his head slightly, he made a gesture with his hand like a gentleman doffing his cap, as though to say,
It was nothing
.
But it was not nothing. Julien looked so self-assured as he pushed his long hair out of his eyes—hair he had insisted on growing out the moment he’d hung his first John Lennon circa-1970 picture on his wall—and as he perched himself on the stool, his sneaker-clad feet swinging in midair, and started to play, she felt as giddy and important as a rock star’s girlfriend seated in the very front row. (She wanted to cheer like one but managed to restrain herself.) For his part, Julien played as though he were playing only for her. More than once as he plucked and strummed, he actually managed to look up, find her eyes, and smile.
It was over by 4:23. The instant the applause began, Jennifer, clapping as she stood, waved good-bye to Julien, hugged Jack, nodded to Norman, and gave Melissa a kiss, then climbed over the legs of several annoyed parents and headed for the door.
She was outside again. It was a sunny, chilly autumn afternoon, and for a moment she stood stock-still, suddenly sober after drinking Julien in in the darkened auditorium, her phone gripped in one hand. It was 4:24 p.m. now. Was her plan to rush back to the office the right one? It was too late to be on time, and after that morning’s humiliation, being late a second time in one day was going to be hard to explain. But the idea of buying a latte and hanging out at Starbucks, waiting until 5:00 p.m. to be transported back to work at 4:00 p.m., was intolerable. The urge to do something,
anything
, was overpowering.
“Taxi!” she cried, sticking out her arm. It was time for the drivers’ shift change, however, and every taxi that passed was unavailable. Precious minutes ticked by. Finally, a taxi stopped. It was 4:27. Jennifer hauled the door open, gave the driver the address, and slid inside.
She was going to be late for the staff meeting, yes. But not crazy late. Not where-have-you-been-you’re-fired late. Was it possible, she let herself wonder for the first time, that this was all going to be okay?
Not if the traffic gods had anything to say about it. The West Side Highway moved slowly, and downtown was snarled with double-parked delivery trucks. It was already four forty-five when the cab reached the light at the corner of Duane and Broadway, just a few blocks north of NYCHA’s offices. Jennifer’s anxiety was so acute by then that she even craned her neck out the window to yell at a livery cab that was blocking the intersection. As they finally passed through the light, however, and Jennifer began to breathe a small sigh of relief, her phone suddenly delivered a moderate but painful electric shock to her hand. She dropped it like a hotcake, cursing. The phone, for its part, began to blare from the floor of the cab, emitting a pulsing, shrieking
eeek
like a smoke
alarm, so loud Jennifer could feel her eardrums shrivel. Whirling around, the driver screamed at her, “Turn that thing off!”
“Just a minute!” Jennifer called over the din, groping for the phone. “I’m trying!”
Phone in hand at last, Jennifer looked at the screen. She saw one word flashing there, and it was not in midnight blue.
STOP!
STOP!
STOP!
Stop?
Stop?
“Stop!” Jennifer cried.
The taxi driver cut the wheel so hard they almost turned over a hot-dog cart. Jennifer was thrown toward the center divider of the cab. “Get that thing out of here!” he yelled as soon as they came to a halt. Nodding, Jennifer reached into her bag for her wallet. “Forget it!” the driver said, which, Jennifer couldn’t help thinking, gave some idea just how god-awful the noise was. Shoving the phone under her armpit, Jennifer opened the door and jumped out. Producing it again on the sidewalk, Jennifer ignored the angry pedestrians who colorfully cursed at her, many physically recoiling from the unbearable sound as they passed. She jabbed at the screen. At last the
STOP!
sign disappeared and was replaced by a warning.
WHEN USING WISHFUL THINKING, YOU MUST MAINTAIN A DISTANCE OF FIVE HUNDRED YARDS FROM THE ORIGIN OF YOUR WISHFUL THINKING APPOINTMENT. REPEAT: YOU CANNOT GO WITHIN FIVE HUNDRED YARDS OF
250 BROADWAY, 18TH FLOOR,
OR A CAUSALITY VIOLATION MAY OCCUR.
“Five hundred yards?” she yelled at the phone, as she began to run back in the direction from which she’d come. “How far is five hundred yards? One hundred yards is a football field …
How many football fields are in a city block? How am I supposed to know that! I can’t use the Internet, remember?” Holding her phone up to her face as she ran, shoving past people and jaywalking as she headed away from her office and back toward Broadway and Duane, where the barrier had ostensibly been crossed, she couldn’t help addressing the only person she knew to be responsible for what was happening. “Dr. Sexton!” she yelled at her phone. “Are you there?”
Unsurprisingly, no response was forthcoming.
At last she crossed back over Duane Street, and as soon as she did, the sound ceased as abruptly as it had begun. Jennifer stopped, bending over to catch her breath. She let her body unclench, her ears luxuriating in the familiar street noises of Manhattan, which, in contrast with the horrible sound, were as soothing as a warm bath. Standing, she looked around. “Five hundred yards,” she muttered to herself, “is about as far as I can sprint without collapsing.”
She had been so close to her office. Was it really possible her phone could not travel there? Wary, she held her phone away from her body and retraced her steps, slowly, cautiously, back to the point where her phone had ceased its blaring. As soon as she was about to cross Duane heading north on Broadway, however, the sound kicked in again and Jennifer was forced to yank her phone back across the invisible threshold.
Her phone could not break the barrier, she thought. But could she?
Jennifer stretched her phone-free hand out in the direction of the curb. Her fingertips crossed the invisible line. Nothing. Emboldened, she stepped closer, inching more and more of her body into the space on the other side. Still nothing. And then she couldn’t help herself. She pulled her phone across too. The alarm was instantly triggered.
Wincing, Jennifer jumped back onto the curb.
Evidently
she
could go back to her office, but she would have to leave her phone behind. Could she hide it somewhere? Ditch it on the street?
Neither. She couldn’t shake the frightening idea that her body and mind had been melded to her phone somehow, were even being carried inside it. If she parted with it, she thought, she might go up in computer smoke, her body blown to bytes.
Besides, it was 4:53 p.m. Even if she ran back now, she would be thirty minutes late for her meeting. But what if, at five o’clock, her phone delivered her back to the secret bathroom stall at 4:00 p.m. sharp? She could still get the coffee and make it on time—early, even. It had worked before. Why wouldn’t it work again? It was worth a try.
She remembered the app’s first instruction:
find a place where you can travel without being observed by anybody else
. The secret bathroom had been perfect. But now she was in New York, on Broadway, at rush hour.
Moving down the block, beginning to despair, she heard another
PING!
It was 4:55. Her screen went midnight blue.
The wand appeared—jaunty, and, she recalled, about to go 3-D. Cupping her hand over her phone, Jennifer attempted to squash the wand, whispering, “Ixnay on the three-D-ay!” When she ducked around a corner and removed her hand, however, she found the wand hovering in midair anyway, as pleased with itself as ever. It tipped back slightly, then snapped forward and pricked the surface of her phone.
Reminder: Return journey to 250 Broadway, 18th floor, Tuesday, September 22, 4:00 p.m. Please proceed to a place where you can travel unobserved.
“Unobserved—I
know
,” she said to her phone, wishing again that it would answer her. “But where?”
And then she saw it, two blocks away, in a small city square that had gone from a crack den to a public garden in the
Giuliani years: an APT, also known as an automatic public toilet. Jennifer had never been so happy to see such an unappealing sight.
Jennifer knew about APTs because, early in her tenure at NYCHA, she had actually had to attend a ribbon cutting for one. The previous mayor had loved them. Designed by a hip architecture firm, the units sported an ultramodern steel-and-glass motif—which made them particularly well suited to host time travel, she thought, at least from a design perspective. More important, for twenty-five cents, an APT gave you up to twenty minutes alone. Once the twenty minutes were up, an “acoustic alarm” sounded and flashing red lights went off for three minutes, a powerful deterrent to anyone considering taking up residence there. The door then closed again in order for the unit to self-clean. Which meant that—provided she could go in without being seen—the bathroom would reopen its door and take care of itself after she’d gone.