“Jesus,” says Ernie. “You could wake up in a coffin.”
The kid nods and says, “I’ve thought of that. I’ll have to make it clear I want to be cremated.”
Ernie coughs up a mouthful of beer. “What are you, nuts?” he says. “You want to wake up burnt to a crisp?”
“You forget,” says the kid, “burning is a kind of change. Change can only take place over time, and I’ll have spent that time by then. When you’re borrowing time, dislodging something from its own time-stream into yours is difficult but it’s possible. Once you’ve borrowed the time, though, you’ve spent it; if you were to experience change then, that would be real time travel.”
“So nothing bad can happen to you,” says Ernie.
The kid gives him that sullen, cold-eyed stare again.
“Suppose the first one to find me is my daughter,” he says. “She’ll be almost two years old. Her father will be worse than comatose. He’ll be a zombie. A vampire.”
“Nah,” says Ernie. “You’ll explain it to her. Your wife’ll explain it. You got a year yet, right?”
“Then suppose I’m not at home,” he says. “What if when it happens I’m someplace where nobody knows me? Or what if I’m driving? If I’m in traffic when it hits me, I could kill someone.”
“Nah,” Ernie says again. “You’re a smart kid. You won’t let that happen. I bet you already got a backup plan.”
“You want to hear my plan?” says the kid. He makes a face like he’s gonna puke again. He says, “The big plan was to lock up a post-doc my advisor says I’m in the running for. He says our experiments make me a shoo-in. I secure the fellowship for next year’s fall semester. I take a summer vacation ‘to write’” – he gives Ernie the air quotes – “and find myself a cabin in the woods somewhere. I slip out of time for the summer, come back mid-October, and throw something together to satisfy the post-doc people in between mailing out résumés and applying for jobs.”
Ernie shrugs. It sounds like a good plan.
“Don’t you get it?” says the kid. “That was when I thought I’d be out for five months. With the discrepancy, do you know how much time I’ve got to pay back?”
“I’m guessing it’s not five months,” says Ernie.
The kid’s voice gets sharp and cold. “If I stop borrowing today,” he says, “I’m looking at three hundred and one days, fourteen hours, fifty-two minutes.” The numbers roll off his tongue as easily as his Social Security number. Ernie wonders how long he’s spent dwelling on this. “By the time I come back,” the kid says, “the best jobs will be gone. My fellowship deadline will be blown and I’ll have nothing to give them. Nothing. I’ll miss Christmas with Seeta. At her age she’s not even going to remember who I am. Her dad’s going to disappear on her for almost a year with nothing to show for it. Christ, what am I going to do?”
He’s practically crying now and it makes Ernie squirm in his seat. “Kid,” he tells him, “believe me when I tell you this: if that’s the worst this suit can do to you, you’re no different from the rest of us. Here I been thinking you’re gonna tell me the suit’ll give you a heart attack. Seriously, kid, nothing bad can happen to you while you’re slipped out of time? No cancer or nothing?”
“I’ll answer that,” he says, “just as soon as you give back the device.”
Ernie chokes on his beer and sputters. Then he puts on the most innocent face he can and asks him what he’s talking about.
All the kid’s emotion has drained out onto the floor.
“Face it,” he says, “cab drivers don’t usually go out to bars to discuss temporal physics.”
Wicked smart, this kid. Ernie’s looking at his shirt, his jacket, his hands, wondering what the kid saw that gave him away. He can’t figure it out so he asks, “How’d you know I was a cabbie?”
“You drove me from the airport,” says the kid.
Ernie says he thought the kid didn’t recognize him. “I know,” says the kid. “That’s what you were supposed to think. Now, do you have the device with you, or are we going back to your place?”
* * *
As the kid gets in the back seat, Ernie says, “So seriously, there’s got to be risks. Doesn’t there? To using the suit?”
“As if living on borrowed time isn’t bad enough,” says the kid. “As if lying to my wife every night for the last year isn’t bad enough.”
They pull out into light after-bar traffic. Ernie’s feeling a touch of fuzziness on the backs of his eyes. He’s in no shape to drive and he knows it, but the kid threatened to call the cops if Ernie didn’t take him straight to the suit.
“Come on,” he says. “Look at you. They invited you to bring your suit all the way to Harvard. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? If it weren’t for that suit, you and I never would’ve met because you wouldn’t have your conference to go to.”
A guffaw from the kid cuts Ernie off. “Are you kidding?” he says. “I’m just here because my advisor’s here. He said he’d introduce me to – no, no, ‘the suit’ – hell, I was never even supposed to take it out of the lab. Do you have any idea how completely fucked I am if I don’t get it back?”
“Hey, take it easy,” Ernie says. The booze is taking over now, jumbling the kid’s words, getting him all excitable, and Ernie doesn’t want to wait and find out if he’s a violent drunk.
“My point is, you’re getting away with it, aren’t you? You caught me, kid. I’m taking you back to the suit. How can you say this thing destroyed your life?”
“You ought to know,” he says. “You’ve been wearing it.”
Ernie thinks about lying but he can’t see the point.
“Yeah,” he says. “It’s harder to move. Harder to breathe. Money feels like it’s glued down. I got to tell you, though, if that’s all there is, it isn’t much of a downside.”
“Isn’t it?” The kid’s giving him that dead-eyed stare in the rearview. “In my book selling out all your values isn’t such a small price to pay. Or is it your own glued-down money you’ve been stealing? You have been stealing, haven’t you?”
Ernie feels his cheeks flush. Better than those other guys. That’s what Janine always said. I guess she was wrong, Ernie thinks. I guess we were both wrong.
That doesn’t sit well with Ernie, so he does what he always does when it comes to stuff like this: he talks himself out of it. “So what?” he says. “You said it yourself: I took myself out of the loop of cause and effect. Even if it’s only for ten minutes, for ten minutes there’s no consequences.”
“What else have you done?” says the kid. “Do you find yourself lying more often? Breaking the rules in general? Even when you’re not wearing the device?”
“Hey,” Ernie says, “don’t get all high and mighty on me. You’re just a kid. What do you know?”
“I know I never meant to lie to my wife,” he says. “I know the human body needs a little something extra to make it through thirty-two hour days. I know.…”
Ernie can hear it in his voice: the kid wants to stop himself, but the booze went and loosened his tongue and now he can’t stop talking. He says, “I know the first time I fell asleep wearing the device I told myself I’d never make such a waste of it again. I’ve been taking ephedrine every night ever since, and to be honest I’m not sure I can stop. I’m on sleeping pills to counteract the epinephrine and I’m not sure I can quit on those either.”
The kid starts crying. “And what’s the point?” he says.
Ernie really cannot stand seeing a grown man cry. Maybe it’s a generational thing. Maybe it’s old-fashioned machismo.
Whatever it is, there’s not enough beer in the world to make Ernie cry in front of a man he hardly knows. His eyes dodge the rearview like they might see his sister in it naked.
“All that to finish in a year,” the kid says. “I’ve become a drug addict so I can look better on paper. So I can land a job where I’ll always have to wonder if the reason I got hired was because I had an unfair advantage. You had it all wrong,” he says, sobbing. “You never escape cause and effect. You just draw your cards from the deck in the wrong order.”