Connie Willis - Time Out

“Not anymore she’s not. You remember that Make Me Marvy guy who was going around doing color consultations? Well, apparently Brendan’s mother didn’t stop with a few swatches.”

“Mother, Coach Nicotero said we’re supposed to let our food settle before we practice.”

“Look, Sherri, I’m going to have to go,” Carolyn said. “Whoever put my name on the emergency card, it’s fine.”

“Wait, wait, that isn’t really what I called about. Do you remember that fat, bald guy from the university who had you take all those tests last March?”

“Dr. Young?”

“Yeah. Well, he’s coming back with some kind of research team, and he wants you to work for him. It’d be every day all day for about a month, he said. It pays better than volunteering.”

“Oh, gosh, I don’t know,” Carolyn said, thinking about Wendy’s hightops. “Don starts gymnastics practice next week, and the PTA Fair’s coming up. Did he say how much he’d pay?”

“Yeah, and he must really want you because he said he’d pay anything you asked. And you wouldn’t have to start till October second.”

Carolyn tried to lift up the September page of the calendar with the hand that was still holding the bread knife. “That’s next Wednesday, right?”

“I have my orthodontist appointment on Wednesday,” Wendy said.

“I’ll have to see if I can reschedule some stuff. How long will you be at school?”

“Oh, till about midnight if Old Paperwork has his way. After I’m done with the emergency cards, he wants the recess-duty schedule redone alphabetically.”

“I’ll call you back,” Carolyn said, and hung up.

“There’s no way that meat loaf is going to be done by six,” Wendy said.

Carolyn poked some holes in a hot dog with the end of the bread knife and put it in the microwave. Then she called the orthodontist and changed Wendy’s appointment to four-fifteen on Tuesday.

“I have practice at four on Tuesdays,” Wendy said. “Coach Nicotero says if we miss even one practice, we can’t play.”

“What do you have on Thursday?” Carolyn asked the orthodontist’s receptionist.

“We have a five forty-five,” she said.

“How’s five forty-five?” Carolyn asked Wendy.

“Fine,” Wendy said.

“Thursday’s the College Fair,” Liz said. “You promised you’d drive Lisa and me.”

“I have a three-thirty on Wednesday,” the receptionist said.

“Oh, good. That’s after school. I’ll take it,” Carolyn said.

Before she could get the phone back in its cradle, it rang again.

“Hi, this is Lisa. Can I talk to Liz?”

Carolyn handed the phone to Liz and got Wendy’s hot dog out of the microwave. She poured her a glass of milk.

“Coach Nicotero says we’re supposed to have something from each of the four food groups. Meat, grains, dairy products—”

“Fruits and vegetables,” Carolyn said. She handed Wendy the tomato.

Liz hung up the phone. “I’m eating supper at Lisa’s,” she said. “Can you drop me off when you take Wendy?” She ran into her room and came out with a stack of college catalogs. “Where did you say you went to college, Mom?”

“NSC,” Carolyn said.

“Did you like it?”

I had all the time in the world, Carolyn thought. I didn’t have to take anybody anywhere, and I’d never heard of the four basic food groups. My favorite food was a suicide, which my roommate Allison and I made by mixing different flavors of pop together.

“I loved it,” Carolyn said.

The phone rang.

“Sorry to call so late, honey,” Don said. “We’re not even half-done. Don’t wait supper for me. You and the girls go ahead and eat.”

The plane taxied to a stop, and everyone made a dash for the aisles. Andrew was in the window seat. He pulled his duffel bag out from under the seat in front of him and leaned back against the upright seat back. He shouldn’t have had the Scotch on the L.A.-to-Denver leg. He had hoped it might put him to sleep so he wouldn’t have to listen to the obviously unhappily married couple in the seats next to him.

Instead it had sent him off into a sentimental reverie of his junior year in college, which was possibly the worst year of his life. He had nearly flunked out of prelaw, he had gotten serious about Stephanie Forrester, and he had been an usher at her wedding. There was no reason to remember that misbegotten year at all, and especially not nostalgically.

“I didn’t say I didn’t want you to play tennis,” the male half of the unhappy couple said. He stood up, opened the overhead compartment, and got down a suitcase and his raincoat. “I just said I thought four lessons a day was a little too much.”

“For your information,” the woman said, “Carlos thinks I have real potential.” She reached in the elasticized seat-back pocket, pulled out a paperback of Passages , and jammed it in her purse.

Andrew remembered Dr. Young’s project proposal and got it out of his seat pocket. That was the real reason he’d had the Scotch, to try to blot out the memory of Dr. Young’s harebrained ideas. Dr. Young’s theory was that time existed not as a continuous flow but as a series of discrete quantum objects. They were perceived as a flow because of a “persistence” phenomenon that was learned in childhood. That part of the theory wasn’t so bad. Ashtekar’s research at Syracuse University had already suggested the quantum nature of time, and the idea of perceptual time blocks of some duration was generally accepted by temporal psychologists. Without it, there couldn’t be phenomena like music, which depended on relationships between notes. If time were a continuous flow, music would be perceived as a single note replaced immediately in the consciousness by another instead of as a pattern of interval and duration.

But the concept of time blocks, or hodiechrons, as Dr. Young had christened them, was a perceptual concept, not a physical reality. Not only did Dr. Young think his hodiechrons were real, he also thought they were much longer than any temporal psychologist had suggested—minutes or even hours long instead of the seconds it took to hear a melody. But the truly crazy part of his theory was that these hodiechrons could be moved around like toy blocks, even stacked one on top of the other.

It had nothing to do with cultural aspects of time perception or déjà vu, and if he’d read it all the way through before this, he’d never have accepted Dr. Young’s offer, but he hadn’t checked Dr. Young out at all. Dr. Young had checked him out—he’d had him take a whole battery of tests before he offered Andrew the job. And Andrew had leaped at it without even reading the proposal. Andrew stood up in a semicrouch and looked ahead at the line of people in the aisle. He willed it to move.

“For your information,” the woman said, “Carlos says I have the most beautiful backhand he’s ever seen.”

“For your information,” the man said, wrestling with something in the overhead compartment, “Carlos is paid to say things like that to overweight, middle-aged women.”

Andrew took his plastic safety-instructions card out of the seat pocket and began reading the emergency-exit diagrams.

“I’ve been thinking about going on tour,” the woman said.

“Now that’s what I mean,” the man said, pulling down a tennis racket in a zippered lavender cover. “You’re getting carried away with this tennis thing!”

“The way you got carried away with those Managua municipal bonds? The way you got carried away with that little blond in securities?” She grabbed the tennis racket out of his hands.

According to the safety card there were emergency slides over both wings. If he could climb back over the seats till he got to row H and then pull down the handle on the emergency door …