Sea of Tranquility(47)

“I got your message.” Zoey was staring at him, and he saw that she’d been crying. “I just spoke with Ephrem,” she said. “You’re being taken out of commission.”

“What will happen to me?”

“Nothing good.”

“I know what I did,” Gaspery said. “But if I finish the investigation, maybe they’ll…”

“I don’t think there’s anything you can do to save yourself now.”

“But there might be. Look. I just want another level of confirmation, another witness. I need two more destinations.” Gaspery stepped out of the machine, and handed over his device.

She looked at it and frowned. “1918?”

“I have follow-up questions for Edwin St. Andrew.”

“In 1918? He experienced the anomaly in 1912. And what’s in 2007?”

“A party Vincent Smith attended,” he said. “Or I guess she’s Vincent Alkaitis by that point. The party was on a list of secondary destinations.”

“But your device and your tracker are out of commission,” she said.

“Zoey,” Gaspery said. “Please.”

She closed her eyes for just a moment, and then took his device. She was typing something that he couldn’t see, then she leaned close to the projection for an iris scan. “I’m overriding the decommissioning order,” she said. Her voice was strangely flat, and he saw terror in her eyes. “Ephrem will be here any minute, probably with security forces. I won’t stop you from going, Gaspery, but I can’t protect you if you come back.”

“I understand,” he said. “Thank you.”

Gaspery heard the knock on the door just as he was leaving.





5


Gaspery stepped out of a New York City men’s room in the winter of 2007, into the warmth and light of a party in an art gallery. He moved slowly through the crowd, trying to orient himself. He was looking for Vincent Smith. He knew she’d be here—her presence had been entered into the historical record, because somewhere in this room was a society photographer—but what that meant, in 2007, was that Mirella Kessler was here too, and after his strange encounter with her in 2020, Gaspery hoped to avoid her.

He saw them together at the far end of the room, admiring a large-scale oil painting. He plucked a glass of red wine from a little round tray and went to stare at a different painting and plot his next move. He was utterly unnerved by the crowd. They were shaking hands, which even after all of his cultural-sensitivity training seemed like a bizarre thing to do in flu season, and kissing one another on the cheek. These people have no direct experience of pandemics, he reminded himself. None of them were old enough to remember the winter of 1918–1919; Ebola was a few years out and would mostly be confined to the other side of the Atlantic; Covid-19 would not arrive for another thirteen years. Gaspery began moving slowly around the periphery of the room, sidling toward Vincent.

In 2007, Vincent was wealthy, and possessed of a sheen of elegance and self-confidence that he wouldn’t have expected of the blue-haired waif he’d just encountered in Caiette. Her arm was looped through Mirella’s, and they were standing in front of a painting, but, he saw now, not really looking at it. They were speaking in a conspiratorial way. Mirella laughed softly. They had a look of inseparability that brought him close to despair. But then Vincent extricated herself to say hello to someone else, while Mirella turned to find her husband, and Gaspery saw his chance.

“Vincent?”

“Hello.” She had a warm smile, and he found that he liked her immediately.

“I’m sorry to bother you. I’m conducting an investigation on behalf of an art collector, and I wondered if I might ask you a quick question about your brother Paul’s videos.”

He had her attention. Her eyes widened. “My brother? But I didn’t think—I didn’t know he did videos. He’s a musician. Or a composer, I guess.”

“That’s my suspicion,” he said. “I don’t think he shot those videos. I think someone else did.”

She frowned. “Can you describe them?”

“Well, there’s one in particular,” Gaspery said. “The videographer was walking through a forest. British Columbia, I think. It was a sunny day. Judging by the quality of the footage, I’d say probably sometime in the mid-nineties.”

Her gaze softened. Gaspery had a sense of performing some kind of hypnosis. “The videographer walked along a path,” he continued, “toward a maple tree.”

She nodded. “I used to record on that path all the time,” she said.

“On this particular video, something strange happens. There’s this weird flash of something,” Gaspery said, “like it all goes dark for a second, probably just some kind of glitch on the tape—”

“It seemed like a glitch,” Vincent said, “but it wasn’t on the tape.”

“You saw it?”

“I heard these weird noises, and everything went dark.”

“What did you hear?”

“Violin music. Then a noise like hydraulics. It was inexplicable.” Her eyes focused suddenly. “I’m sorry,” she said, “what did you say your name was?”

Her husband was moving through the crowd toward them, he was handing Vincent a glass of wine, and Gaspery took advantage of this momentary distraction to slip away from them. He felt a strange elation that was equal parts exhaustion and joy. He had a corroborating interview, recorded on his device. He had his own observations. For the first time since his interview with Olive Llewellyn, on the morning of this strange and seemingly infinite day, he felt he might not be doomed.