The Here and Now (23 page)

I can see suspicion dawning on Mona’s face. “I moved them.”

“Where?”

“Someplace safe,” she says.

He goes to the other computer, a laptop, and searches its hard drive quickly, keeping the gun trained on us. He grows impatient with it and shoves it away.

He stands up and goes to the filing cabinet. I pray it is locked. He pulls at each of the drawers, cursing. With one arm he throws the heavy cabinet to the ground. It catches the side of the desk chair and flips the chair up on its side. Two of the file drawers pop open, and papers and folders spill out.

There is chaos of noise. Baltos has his back to the door and is leaning over to pick up files, and Ethan takes this moment to enter the office. I draw in a sharp breath as Ethan drives his shoulder into Baltos’s back.

Mona screams and I clutch her hand. Baltos smashes into the desk, and Ethan violently strips the hand holding the gun. The gun slides across the carpet toward Mona and me, and I reach for it. I think of what Ethan said about us and guns, but
what am I going to do? I stand and point it shakily at Baltos. “Stand up,” I say. I can’t quite believe myself.

Baltos more or less complies, slowly getting up from where he’d collided with the desk. Ethan steps away from him.

Mona is staring, mystified, at Ethan. “What are you doing here?”

“Stand up,” I order Andrew Baltos again. “Put your hands out.” I use my second hand to steady my first on the gun. I glance at Ethan. I test the feel of the trigger against my index finger.

Ethan comes close to me. I can feel he wants to reach for me but doesn’t. He doesn’t risk interfering with my concentration. “Are you okay?” he asks under his breath.

“Yes,” I say. I want to look at him, for him to prop me up, and I also want to cry, but I don’t dare take my eyes off Baltos.

“Is Ethan the friend you were waiting for?” Mona asks.

I nod.

Ethan approaches Baltos again. “Keep your arms out in front of you,” he tells him. He takes the wallet from Baltos’s back pocket. “Now reach your arms up,” Ethan says. He reaches into Baltos’s shirt pocket and takes out his phone.

Ethan steps back and I can’t help but look at his face. There’s something in his expression that spooks me. “What is it?” I ask him.

He shakes his head.

“Ethan, tell me.”

“The gorilla.”

“What?”

“He’s a traveler,” Ethan says to me under his breath.

“Can’t be.”

“He is.”

“He can’t be.”

“I can see it very clearly.”

My hands are shaking horribly. “He’s in the newspaper.”

Mona and Baltos are staring at us. Nobody is moving.

“I think he’s your Moses,” Ethan says quietly.

TWENTY

Everything that happens after that is my fault. I am trying to make sense of what Ethan is saying and I lose my focus. I lose my nerve.

Where is he from? He didn’t come with us. What does it mean? The newspaper was written seventy years before we came
.

When Baltos slams Ethan with his fist in the side of the head, I don’t shoot Baltos as I should. For that split second my eyes follow Ethan.

Baltos takes the moment to charge into me at full force. He throws me backward. My head hits the wall. I don’t even know what happens with the gun.

Mona cries out. I struggle to stay conscious and alert. I have to protect Ethan. I crawl across the floor to reach him, but Baltos is up on his feet, his gun back in his hand.

Baltos is rattled too. His hand is unsteady. “Why are you making this so difficult?” he demands. “All three of you. Put your backs against that wall.”

We do as he says. Ethan has his hands on me, checking to see that I’m all right. I hear Mona crying.

He gestures to me and Ethan. “I don’t want anything to do with you. Why are you here?” His voice nearly cracks with the strain of it.

“We’re not going to stand back and let you kill her,” Ethan says.

Baltos shakes his head. He looks like he’s going to be sick. “You don’t get to decide.”

Ethan is pushing himself up from sitting. Now it’s me clutching at him, trying to pull him down.

Baltos turns on him. “Just stay where you are, all right?” he explodes. “If you move, I’ll shoot you.” He is agitated. He looks crazy. He is Moses. He is Traveler One. But he doesn’t save us. He destroys us.

Ethan shakes free of my hand and gets up. “Ethan, stop!” I scream. I can hear myself sobbing. This is how it happens. I can’t let it happen.

Suddenly the gun is less than half a foot from Ethan’s head. I hear the barrel click. “Please, no,” I cry. I tackle Ethan to the floor and in that moment, Baltos turns and fires the gun directly into Mona Ghali’s chest.

In horror I watch as her chest seems to cave and then open.

I scream again.

Baltos’s body is shaking. He drops the gun on the ground. He looks almost as horrified as we do, like he wasn’t expecting this, this wet and warm and living horror to be the result of pulling a dry trigger on a gun. He throws the door open and disappears down the hall.

Gazing at Mona, angled wrong and open-eyed on the floor, I hear the heavy, rushed footsteps getting fainter.

“She’s dead,” Ethan says, and I know that’s true. He picks the gun up off the floor. Before I can do anything to stop him, he is gone.

I get up and go after him. I don’t know what else to do.

How long does thinking take? Does it fit into time? I think it is strange that the whole world can change in the time it takes to run across a dark parking lot.

At one end of the parking lot I am still fighting the natural order of time, still hoping to defy her. I am failing, but I am fighting. I lost Mona, but I am not letting her get Ethan.

At the other end of the parking lot, I know it is something else. I am not fighting time. She’s not really my enemy. I am fighting Andrew Baltos, Traveler One. He is the one who did this to her, to us. Mighty fate is injured and confused, like Babar’s mother after the hunters get her, and I am trying to help undo a terrible injustice. I am trying to give the poor soul a break.

I hear a gunshot.

My whole body turns icy. I am running on these terrible icy limbs of mine, though I can barely feel them. I am crying warmly, melting my own icy face.

You better not have
, I say in my mind to Andrew Baltos.
You just better not have
.

I can’t see either of them anymore. The sound of the shot came from the wooded area beyond the parking lot. I run, icily, to where I heard the sound.

A few yards out I see two dark figures, one standing and the other on the ground. I sprint wildly toward the figure on the ground, ready to throw my arms around my beloved, but
when I get there, I pull up short. It’s Andrew Baltos on the ground. Beloved son, brother, and friend is standing up and holding the gun, as alive as I am.

My whole body is flooding with warmth. “What happened? Is he dead?” I look down and I see he’s not. He’s writhing, though.

“I shot him in the leg,” Ethan says. His voice is flat. He hasn’t gotten around to feeling all this yet. Calmly, he takes a phone out of his pocket, the one he took from Baltos. I watch him, for the second time in four days, call 911. “My name is Andrew Baltos,” he says into the phone. “I’m at 7736 River Road, Teaneck. Sixth floor. I just shot someone. I believe she is dead.” He ends the call.

I can’t calm down, not any part of myself. But my limbs are thawing in all this warm relief. “Is he okay? What are you going to do about him?” I say, looking down on him. He’s a poor specimen, our Moses.

“I’m going to call an ambulance and stay until it gets here. But before I do, we’re going to talk to him.”

Andrew Baltos is writhing, but I sense he is also listening.

“If he talks too slow, he might bleed to death, but otherwise he ought to be fine,” Ethan says, amply loud so he will hear.

I look at Ethan’s hands. In the darkness a phone is glinting in one fist and a gun in the other. I reach out and take the gun from him. I wind up and throw it. The three of us watch it spinning through the air. I’ve never thrown anything farther in my life. I hope the muddy ground is muddy enough to swallow it up forever.

“Why did you do that?” Ethan says. He’s more surprised than mad, I think.

“No more shooting today,” I say. For the first time, I let myself tug at the corner of the thought that Ethan will be okay.

“Who are you?”

At first Andrew Baltos is not in the mood to talk. But over a couple of minutes it seems to dawn on him that he’s not in the mood to bleed to death either.

“What do you mean, who am I?” he grunts. “I am the guy you just shot in the leg.”

Within a couple of minutes we are listening to the first siren. And then to a lot of sirens.

Ethan is all business. “I know you are a traveler.”

This stops the writhing.

“I want to know when you came from. Why you came.”

The man is in pain and he’s mad and he’s flabbergasted, and Ethan sure did get his attention. “How do you know this?”

“I can see it from looking at you. I’ve never seen a traveler who’s less assimilated.”

“And you’ve seen others?” Baltos sounds sarcastic.

“I have.” He points to me. “Her, for example.”

Andrew Baltos sits up and tucks his leg under him protectively. His face is pale, looking from one of us to the other. “Why should I believe this?”

“Up to you,” says Ethan. “It will save time if you do. I want to know why you came. Why you murdered Mona Ghali.”

“Because she destroyed the lives of good people, including my father. Because I am making the world a better place.”

This is so extraordinary I almost fall over. There’s hint of irony in his voice, but a lot of sincerity too. It’s hard to listen
to it, picturing Mona’s body torn apart on the floor of her office.

“She’s a pivotal person, you know. Was. Will be. Would have been.” He coughs at the range of tenses. “She became chief engineer at my father’s energy company, and she turned around and gutted the place. She got the government regulators in there to tear it apart. She destroyed the company he built and put four and a half thousand of his good people out of work. My father hanged himself by his necktie in his office when he was fifty-five years old.”

I can see the pain raw in his face. I feel the force driving his mission, horrible as it is.

“And it doesn’t stop with that. The work she’s doing now destroys not just companies but entire industries in a matter of a few years: oil, gas, coal, the refineries, pipelines, tar shale and tar sands extraction, hydraulic fracturing. Do you know how many lives depend on those?”

Watching him talk, I see that his eyes are alight, as though he didn’t just leave a woman dead in an office building a quarter of a mile away. I wonder if maybe the experiences he finds here aren’t quite real to him. Like the Monopoly-money version of life, where it doesn’t really matter how you spend it.

“I met her when she was old, and by then she was a monster. Putting millions of people out of jobs, destroying the lifeblood of whole countries. Even her own people, the Egyptians. Not even a care. I am sorry to kill a young woman. Truly, I don’t like to do it. But it serves the greater good.”