The Here and Now (14 page)

I hear the crumpling of paper behind me and I turn around. I bring myself back to this time, this room, this Ethan.

“What do you see?” I ask.

“This newspaper is from Tuesday.”

I stand up and go over to him.

“Not last Tuesday, but Tuesday coming up.”

It is indeed a curled and yellowed edition of the
New York Times
, reporting on a day that hasn’t happened yet. I squint at the date. I know this particular Sunday. I’ve thought a lot about this Sunday. Because it is the day too late.

“What about the other ones?” I see there’s a stack of them he’s piled neatly on the floor.

He hands the Sunday one to me. “This was on top. It’s the one he obviously spent the most time on. It looks like it’s been pulled apart and read a lot, which makes sense.”

I nod. I fold it and put it in the duffel bag Ethan brought in case we need to make a quick exit.

“There’s maybe ten or so papers altogether. One from 2010 and each of the years up until now.” He shakes his head, and his eyes look slightly out of focus. “I didn’t realize they would
keep going
. Look.” He pulls out another pile from the shelf and carefully flips through them. “Two more from this month, another from late this year, one from next year, another from the year after that, and then …” He examines the last paper in the box. “Unbelievable. June 2021.”

“That’s a late one,” I say, a little dizzy.

“How long did they go?”

I try to remember my history lessons. “I don’t think there was any news printed on paper after the early twenties,” I say.

“Unbelievable,” he says again. “So they went purely digital after that?”

“Basically, yes. But the whole delivery of news had changed out of the newspaper format by then.”

“That’s why I am surprised to see all this paper,” Ethan says. “I mean, even right now newspaper is kind of antique. I’d figured he’d have everything saved on some insane kind of drive or memory device. How much easier it would be to transport and preserve it than paper.…”

I am not so surprised. My father loved paper, even from before. “Think about it,” I say. “A paper is an object. An actual thing. It can’t be modified, overwritten, updated, refreshed, hacked or anything else. It is fragile, but it’s a snapshot of history that hasn’t been messed with. It’s one version of history we know happened.”

Ethan nods. “I see what you mean.”

“For now people are thrilled about everything digital, endless data farms, your own piece of the cloud and all that. Nobody has much respect for paper at the moment, but I think the excitement kind of dies down after a while,” I tell him. “As time goes on I think people, definitely my father, come back around to respect the power of actual things you can actually touch.”

Ethan picks up next Sunday’s paper. “I’m almost scared to look at this. Do you know what it means?”

“I think so.” I hear the rush of cars outside and feel a chill.

“Do you know how much power this one piece of paper could give you?”

“I do. Especially if it’s accurate.”

“Why wouldn’t it be? You just said it was a snapshot of history.”

“It is. But it’s one snapshot of one history.”

Ethan’s face is uneasy. He knows where I’m going.

“There’s a thing this paper shows us that’s more important than the stock quotes and the sports scores and the history of the day it was printed,” I say.

“What’s that?”

“How much we’ve changed things. Now that we’re here from the future, messing around, if a gap opens up between what’s happening in the world and what this newspaper says, we can see the impact we’ve made since it was printed.”

“What do you make of this?” Ethan hands me the red folder.

Inside the folder is a pile of loose sheets, each with a photo of a person; some printed information, mostly medical records; and a bunch of handwritten notes. On the top is a woman named Theresa Hunt. She was born in 1981. I’m having trouble reading the smaller print, but my eyes dart down to a note circled in red pen:
Patient #1?

The second is a boy, aged three, named Jason Hunt. I’m guessing he’s Theresa’s son.
Patient #2?
says the note.

There are at least a dozen other sheets with similar kinds of information. They aren’t all numbered as patients, but each is clearly related to the same project. Are these people sick? Are they still alive? “I think he could be trying to create an early medical history of the plague. I’m not sure.” I flip to the last sheet of paper. “I didn’t think the blood plague got started quite this early, but it’s possible, I guess. Maybe there was
some kind of precursor to it.” I know the disease mutated a bunch of times, getting worse with each one. In the beginning it was harder to transmit and by the end it was carried by mosquitoes. I’m not ready to get too deep into this with Ethan yet.

I put the folder in the duffel bag to study when we have more time and my eyes are working better.

I move on to the third of the file boxes. I open it and let out a breath.

“What?” Ethan asks.

“There’s money in here. Piles of cash. Mostly hundreds and fifties. I hope he wasn’t robbing banks.”

“I doubt he was.”

I check all the sections of the box and they contain the same. “God, there’s a lot.” I examine the dates on the money. Some of it is from 2008, 2009, up to the present. In another envelope the dates on the bills are from next year and the year after that. “He must have brought it back with him.”

“I wonder how he collected all that. It looks like a lot. Was he rich?”

I try to remember what I learned. “It’s not that. There was crazy inflation of US dollars in the fifties, I think. I remember my dad told me it cost two hundred and fifty dollars to ride the subway in 2056 and five hundred dollars to buy a doughnut.”

“You’re kidding me. How much did it cost when you were a kid?”

“I can’t really say. The US gave up on the dollar and made a new currency by the early sixties, and another one by the late sixties. Goldbacks was the name of the money we used when I was little. None of it kept its value, and anyway, by then you couldn’t buy a doughnut at any price. The old green dollars
were mostly destroyed, I guess. But I remember seeing them around once in a while. I even remember burning them in the fireplace. They were useless otherwise.”

Ethan is looking a little shell-shocked. “They are pretty useful around here.”

“I know. That surprised me when we came here. It’s hard to have any respect for these pieces of paper we used to chuck into the fireplace.”

“Your father must have salvaged these, knowing they would come in handy.”

“You see what I mean about his devotion to paper?” I hand one of the piles to Ethan so he can see for himself.

He calculates. “There’s got to be a hundred thousand dollars in that box.”

“I’ll put some in our bag to bring with us,” I say.

“Make sure you pick a stack of bills that have already been printed.”

I check the dates of the first stack and put it in our bag. “Never know when you might need”—I quickly try to calculate the clump of bills—“five thousand dollars.”

He opens his eyes wide. “What are you going to do with the rest of it?”

“Leave it for now, I guess. We’ve got more important stuff to think about.”

I turn to the last box. I see thin, semitransparent black cards arranged in decks. They are instantly familiar to me and yet I haven’t seen them since we left. “You’ll like these better,” I say to Ethan.

He comes over to examine them.

“These are memory banks, one card for each month. Each
deck is a year.” I pull one out. “I’m not sure what device could read them here. But if you could find one, you would see the future.”

“What do you mean by ‘memory banks’?”

“It starts soon, like in the next three years, if I’m remembering my history lessons right,” I tell him. “People start banking their memories. It’s very simple. You have the technology right now—everyone does who has a phone, basically. It’s the same principle the counselors use for our glasses. If you hold up your phone and keep the movie camera on for every waking hour, you can record everything you do and everything you see and everything you hear. Which would be dumb and cumbersome and you wouldn’t do it, but you get the idea.

“The first gizmo people adopted in a big way was called iMemory, this tiny microphone-camera combo about the size of a pearl you could wear as an earring, on a necklace or really any place. After a while they got even tinier and people started getting them implanted in their earlobes. It automatically records everything you see and do in the course of a day, and it all uploads and stores automatically to your own spot on the data cloud. Most of it you ignore, of course, because it is dead boring. But say you lost your wallet or your keys or your phone and need to figure out where you put them. Say you wanted to prove that you really did take out the garbage or finish your math homework or that your sister hit you first, or whatever. With memory banking you can go to the tape and it’s easily searchable. You can search it by date, by hour, by keyword. You can retrace any part of your life you want.” I haven’t thought about iMemory in a long time. “Not that people do it much, but they like to know they
can
. In the beginning
people used to say it was almost like being immortal, being able to hold on to your whole life like that.

“It may sound weird right now, but you’ll all be doing it soon. It’s great for some things—like the crime rate, for example. Nobody gets away with anything. The problem starts when other people besides you have access to your life.”

I hold up a deck. “These are my dad’s. This one’s from 2058. That might be the earliest one. Here. This is 2086. That’s the year I was born.”

He tugs on a strand of my hair. “I could see you being born?”

“Yeah, maybe. If we get through this week.” I pull out decades of my father’s memories and under them find decks with my mother’s initials.

“Unbelievable,” Ethan says.

I pull them out, re-creating the years in order. My eyes are aching, but I strain to read the dates. I find my own memories. Four and a half decks of them. I didn’t start banking until I was seven. And then I see there is one incomplete deck that comprises the brief life and memory of Julius. I put it all back, close the box and latch it. I put my hands over my face. What would I see if I looked through his eyes?

I stand. That’s all I can take for now.

Ethan is studying a yellowed piece of paper he found among the memory banks in the last box. Something about his posture alarms me.

“Ethan?”

No answer. I walk over to him. He is staring at a deeply faded drawing. I strain my eyes to make out the pencil marks. “That looks old,” I say. “What is it?”

Still no answer. I bend closer to see it. It’s a sketch of a storm of some kind. It’s got some arrows and diagrams to one side. Across the bottom is a map.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

Ethan looks up from the drawing. I have never seen him like this before. “Do you know what this is?” he asks.

“No.”

“It’s mine. It’s a drawing I made of the day at the river I described to you. The day you came through and I found you.”

“Did you give it to him?”

“No. That’s what I don’t understand, Pren. It is sitting in the bottom drawer of my desk in my room.”

“Right now?”

“Right now.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am absolutely sure.”

“Did you make a copy?”

“There is no copy.”

I consider this. “So you mean you haven’t given it to him
yet
.”

Love,
Your sister, Prenna

FOURTEEN