The Love That Split the World(101)
“And just like you, I thought there must have been some kind of fork in time, Beau surviving on one side, I on the other. I planned to tell him, but I never got the chance. That night I woke up with a black orb over my face, and his world closed to me, permanently. Like I’d been locked back into linear time, no slips, no alternate realities. Or more like the split between our worlds was sewn shut.
“I went away to college, devastated. Every time I came back, I tried to get back to him, but I couldn’t make time budge. I couldn’t find his world. After school, I moved back to Union and started working with a professor at Northern Kentucky University who studied experiences like mine. With all of her subjects we found the same thing: a cataclysmic event preceding their time slips, some hint of an alternate world—a world in which that event had been changed or prevented—and a black orb marking the end of it all. I think that’s how it always is for people like us, who can move time. There’s a reason, some thing we could fix or change, if we only knew how.
“Maybe someone, in some time, has managed to do it. But if anyone were to actually change or fix that thing, their whole past would be rewritten, leaving them with no memory or evidence of how things used to be. It’s possible Alice and I helped someone make that different choice, but that probably would have erased our memories of ever having known that person. We do, however, remember those patients whose mysteries we tried and failed to help solve before their time ran out. Either way, it became obvious that we only have a certain span of time in which we can access and change the past: None of the subjects were successful in moving time or breaching alternate realities after their Closing. As if tears in time are self-healing, allowing those ripped from its natural course to traverse freely until they are locked back into a linear track.
“I knew all of this meant there was no getting to Beau. But even when I went away to graduate school, I couldn’t get him out of my head, what had happened to him and whether there was some way to undo it. He’d been losing track of time before my Closing happened, as if the resealing of time was making him less and less real. That was the first hint for Alice and me that Beau’s world had collapsed alongside the wormhole within me—that the Opening was, in effect, the beginning of an alternate timeline, and the Closing was its end. All of our later subjects found that, leading up to their Closings, the same thing happened to those they’d met in their alternate realities. They lost time, like Beau. More and more of it, until there was no more to lose. It may be conjecture, but it’s conjecture in which even Alice Chan was confident: We are the door to Beau and his world, Natalie. When that door closes, he’s gone. When it closed inside me, he was gone.
“I did my best to move on. I married my grad-school boyfriend, did work that I cared about, poured myself into meaningful friendships. Still, I didn’t want to accept that Beau was gone, so I kept searching for a way to get to him. Eventually Alice realized I’d been going about it all wrong. Unable to move time anymore, I was never going to find Beau. My only hope was to be found in time. So I bought my parents’ old house and fixed it up, returned my childhood room to its original state to the best of my ability—so it wouldn’t scare you if you showed up here—and waited.”
“Waited?” I hear myself whisper.
“For you,” she says. “To find me. In the meantime, I started teaching at the University of Cincinnati. I commuted so I could keep working with Alice and her new subjects, who revealed another piece of the puzzle: the physical sensations of time travel. When moving forward in time, subjects felt a pull in their abdomens, like they were rising upward. When moving backward, they felt as though they were falling. Pretty obvious, really, but what we hadn’t documented before was that the physical sensation of entering the Other World always matched that of moving forward, while the feeling returning to your own world matched that of moving backward.”
I shake my head. “I don’t understand. What does it mean?”
“Time is an illusion, Natalie, relative to the person experiencing it. There’s the overall timeline of the world—dinosaurs, Ice Age, Middle Ages, Elizabethan Era, et cetera—but then each person experiences their own unique time stream as well. For most people that’s just a tiny section of time within that overall timeline. For people like us, it’s different. Our time streams can include excerpts from outside our linear lives. Think of arriving at our Senior Parade. Five minutes into our future, we were going to see buffalo where the school should be. That was our future, a moment occurring decades, if not centuries, in the past.
“Sometimes, you move through time and see everything changing before your eyes. Other times you lurch, or slip. That’s what used to happen to us as a little girl. Our body would wake up in the middle of the night, but our dreaming consciousness would lurch to a different time: a hypnopompic hallucination. You didn’t see yourself passing through every moment. You simply arrived, in my present, like you were locking on to me. That’s what you do when you go to Beau’s world. You jerk forward, as if you’re stepping over ripples in time to a point in the future.”
“Forward?” I say.
“You feel it, don’t you? The same sensation as passing into the future?”
“Beau’s in the same year as me, same day even—how can that be a future?”
She exhales. “We’ll get to that. Anyway, shortly after we made the discovery, Alice passed away. I was alone by then, my husband gone, and I almost gave up on you ever coming. Then one night, while I was sitting in my rocking chair, you found your way to my present. I knew from looking at you that you were around eighteen, probably already in the summer we met Beau. You only held time there for a minute before you lost your grip again—your Closing was close, after all. I was so caught off guard. I tried to comfort you, but I didn’t even know if you could hear me.”