from "Freeze Time"

 

 

By Carolyn O'Doherty

Hawthorne Fellow 2012

 

Carolyn lives and works in Portland. She has an MFA from Stonecoast through the University of Southern Maine.

 

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Chapter 1

Our car slowed when we got to the police barricade.  Ross rolled down the window.

“Agent Carson Ross.”  He held his badge out to the square-faced cop standing guard.  “I have a Time Worker with me.”

The cop peered past Ross to look at me, eyes narrowed in that all-too familiar cross between curiosity and distrust.  I hated dealing with people who hadn’t met a Worker before.  They always managed to make me feel like an oddity at the zoo.

I ignored him, pretending to be fascinated by an overweight police officer pacing in front of City Hall.  The scene offered little distraction.  When I’d been here before, the street had been teeming with bikes, cars, and buses.  Food carts selling fresh sandwiches clogged the sidewalk for the people hustling past in their office pumps and collared shirts.  Now the only occupants were a clutch of fall leaves skittering along an empty street.  Police cars barricaded the corners at both ends of the block.  Behind them a knot of blue uniformed men huddled, tension radiating from them like a bad smell.  

“Isn’t she old for a Time Worker?” the cop at our window asked.  “I thought they were all kids.”

“Alex is sixteen,” Ross said.  “She’s one of the best.”  The cool rebuke in his tone cheered me a little.  The compliment cheered me a lot.

The cop handed Ross’s badge back.  

“Chief’s waiting for you.”

Ross didn’t bother to answer.  He gunned the motor and sped into the open space in front of the building, skidding to a stop in a squeal of brakes.  The police chief received this entrance with a frown.  

“Agent Ross.”  Chief’s lips cut a thin slash across the bottom of his face. “You’re late.”

“We got here as fast as we could, Chief.” Ross climbed from the car.  Next to the squat cop, Ross seemed even taller than his six-foot-three frame.  “Is someone from the bomb squad here?” 

Chief bawled a few words in the direction of the huddled officers.  I got out of the car as if the word bomb didn’t faze me and moved to join the two men.  Up close, I could see the sweat darkening the blue fabric under Chief’s arms.  His vanishing lips accentuated a nose that hung over his mouth like a squashed pear.  I straightened to my full five-foot-six-inches so I could meet the police chief eye-to-eye.  

Chief gestured towards two men striding towards us.  “These are Officers McDennon and Slavich.  The bomb team.”

The two men stood next to Chief at military attention. Except for a slight height difference, they looked like twins.  Both wore crew cuts, green uniforms, and matching expressions of stony resolution.  The taller one carried a bag with bomb squad etched across it in white letters.  

Ross shook his head.  “Alex can only take two.” He pointed at his chest.  “Me and one other.”

“My guys work in a team,” Chief said.  

“No.” Ross shook his head more firmly.  “Time work is draining enough. Each person she brings with her adds to the strain.”

Chief’s frown deepened.  “Time Workers can rewind an entire day.  I only need an hour.”

“If we were just rewinding, it wouldn’t be a problem.  In this case, you’re asking Alex to rewind time and then hold it while your man figures out the detonator.”

A muscle in Chief’s jaw clenched rhythmically, as if he were chewing up the words he’d like to say to Ross.  

“McDennon,” Chief barked at one of them bomb guys, “go with them.”

“Yes, sir.”  The taller of the two officers stepped forward.  I thought Slavich seemed relieved.  Norms are such wimps.  What do they think is going to happen during the freeze that’s so bad? Nothing works in frozen time and nothing you do sticks.  That’s why they’d hired us – I freeze time, they figure out how to disarm the detonator without any chance of the bomb going off, then I melt time and everything goes back to how it was before.  It’s in real time when things get hairy.  That’s when they have to deactivate a live bomb under a ticking clock.  

“Let’s get to it,” Ross said.  I held out my arm, exposing a flat three-inch metal bracelet, like those bands Wonder Woman wears in the old cartoons, except emblazoned with the Center’s logo.   

“What’s that?” McDennon asked.

“It’s called a leash.”  Ross pulled a key from his pocket and twisted it in the lock on my wrist.  The instant the metal fell away from my skin I felt looser, like taking a breath of fresh air after being cooped up in a stuffy building all day.  “It suppresses their power.”  Ross handed the leash to Chief.

 “You better hurry.”  Chief glanced at his watch. It was a sporty thing and even from four feet away I could read the time: 1:47.  “The guy called it in at 12:32 and said we only had ninety minutes.”

I calculated quickly.  Fifteen minutes left.  The bomb squad wouldn’t have much time when we got back.  

“Don’t worry.” Ross gave Chief a smile that exuded reassurance and competence. “Time isn’t your problem anymore.”

The smile didn’t reassure Chief.  His shoulders remained hunched, like a turtle half retracted into its shell.  

“I don’t need your bravado today, Ross,” Chief snapped.  “Just get the job done, OK?”

Ross took my hand, his annoyance with Chief evident in the way he squeezed my shoulder more tightly than was comfortable. McDennon accepted my other hand.  His palm felt moist.  For an instant I saw the three of us as McDennon might: a non-descript teenager with straight brown hair in an untidy ponytail, dressed in regulation khakis and a Crime Investigation Center T-shirt, holding hands with two grown men like a kid heading to a picnic.  

“You ready, Alex?” Ross asked.

I studied the building before us.  Unlike the slim high-rises surrounding it, City Hall took up an entire block.  Its three stories of two-hundred-year-old stone hunkered grimly, as if preparing themselves for the worst.  Inside laws were made, including the rules that bound every aspect of my life. Rules that forbade me from walking outside without a leash. Rules that demanded I live my short life inside the sterile halls of a Center.  Without looking, I knew Chief was watching me, and I knew the distaste I’d see on his face if I turned. 

“Alex?” Ross repeated.  

I took a breath and thought of what Ms. Eckbridge always told us: the Norms might think we were unnatural freaks, but they also needed us.  Ross and I made a good team. In the last three years, we’d solved dozens of cases.  I knew what mattered. It wasn’t prejudiced idiots like Chief, it was the job.  My job. The one only a few hundred of people scattered across the entire world could do.

I focused my attention on Carson Ross. Broad shoulders inside a crisp white shirt, hair just long enough to balance style with nonchalance.  I looked in his eyes. They were blue, with flecks of darker color in them, like choppy waves in a picture I once saw of the ocean.  I took another breath.  Released it.

And then I froze time.

Everything stopped in an instant.  Sound disappeared.  The bright September air grew perfectly still. People around us turned to statues: Chief stuck in his retracted hunch, Slavich staring unseeing at his boots.  A scrap of paper, caught by a passing gust of wind, hovered a few inches above the pavement.  In the sky over City Hall, a flag hung in a half-furled wave. Nothing – not a person, leaf, insect, machine or object – moved anywhere in the world. Nothing, that is, except me and the two people whose skin I touched.

McDennon broke his emotionless façade.  “Holy shit.”

“Unnerving at first, isn’t it?” Ross sounded pleased.

McDennon gaped at the unmoving scene, struggling to make sense of all the anomalies.  Like the squirrel suspended mid-leap between trees, tail bristled by a breeze that no longer existed.  Or the fact our shadows didn’t follow us since we couldn’t block an unmoving ray of light.  Or the utter, impossible silence.  

I let go of my companions.  McDennon move away from me and slowly circled the immobile Chief of Police.  I understood his fascination.  Frozen people always seem so vulnerable, exposed by some fleeting instant in their lives.  Usually they look stupid, too, faces caught in twisted expressions like an unflattering photograph.  McDennon tentatively reached out two fingers to brush the fabric of Chief’s shirt. 

“It’s soft,” he said.

“The term freezing time misleads people,” Ross said.  “Things don’t turn solid,  they just won’t move by themselves.  You can still move things around, though.  Go ahead, try it.”

McDennon bent to pick up the floating scrap of paper and ripped it into pieces. The tearing noise sounded jarring in the frozen quiet.  When he opened his hand, the shreds of paper fluttered to the ground like confetti.  

Ross turned toward the wide cement steps that fronted the building.  He seemed relaxed now the job had started, and I felt an answering release of tension.  Frozen time was our time.  Here, we were the ones in control.   

“Alex can only hold time for about an hour since she’s dragging two of us along,” Ross told McDennon, “so we better get moving.”  He turned to me.  “Where do you think we should set up?”

“The briefing notes said a camera caught the suspect leaving the building at the east entrance,” I said.  “Let’s head there.”

Inside, City Hall radiated a lonely, abandoned feeling.  The building was designed with an open lobby that soared all the way to the sky light three stories above us.  To the left and right, stairs led to the upper levels.  There were no people.  The cops must have gotten them all out when the suspect called.  We crossed the open space and headed down a hall to the right.  Ross and McDennon’s leather shoes echoed on the marble floor.  My sneakers squeaked like angry mice. 

Everyone must have evacuated the building pretty quickly. Doors hung ajar on either side of the hall. We caught glimpses of jackets drooping on the backs of chairs, coffee cups forsaken on window ledges, pens dropped on top of half finished notes.  Every desk we passed held a lit computer screen.  Most showed an image of the city seal the staff used as a screensaver, others revealed hints of memos, emails, and spreadsheets. The unmoving pixels made the screens hard to read.

The east entrance lay at the bend of a stairway that led down into the basement.  It was a heavy door with glass on the upper half and a sign saying Exit Only.  A security camera hung over the top molding, its green light shining dully through the still air.  The three of us stopped on the landing, facing the door.

“How long ago did the suspect leave?” I asked.

Ross glanced automatically at his watch.  The hands, of course, hadn’t moved since the freeze.  He flicked its metal casing.  “The camera caught him at 12:25. It was almost 1:50 when you froze, so we need to rewind about an hour and a quarter.”  Ross dug into his pocket and pulled out two sealed packs of orange ear plugs.  “Here,” he said, handing one to McDennon.  “You might want to use these.”

“What for?” McDennon asked. “Everything is so quiet.”

“It won’t be once Alex starts rewinding.” Ross ripped one package open and stuffed the plugs in his ears.  “The sound can be pretty disorienting.”

McDennon took the plugs.  I closed my eyes.  In my mind, I saw time as strands weaving through the air like fiber in fabric. I mentally tightened my grip and pulled the strands back toward me. Time shifted backward.  It felt like the rocking of a gentle current that only flowed through my own head.  I pulled harder, gathering momentum to make the minutes rush back faster.  The rewind settled into a smooth rhythm.  I opened my eyes.

Shadows flickered along the stairwell, light fading and brightening to match the rapidly altering pattern of sun and clouds outside.  A whispering hum spread out around us – a combination of all the background noises no one pays attention to in normal time: distant voices, the hum of a heater, a faint buzz of electricity.  None of us Workers find it particularly annoying.  To me it sounds like a mistuned radio, nothing more than a vague white noise. Ross describes the sound as a buzz that lodges deep in your inner ear.  He says its doubly irritating since everyday noises like a sneeze or a fan get unrecognizably distorted when heard speeded up and backwards.

McDennon shook his head, shoving his plugs deeper into his ear.  Ross settled on a step with an air of resigned boredom.  A maintenance guy flitted past us lugging a bucket and mop.  He moved with a Charlie Chaplin-like wobble, any natural grace obscured by his speeded-up backward trot.  The image was as insubstantial as the rewound sounds were hushed.  McDennon lurched out of the way.

“It’s OK,” I said. “He’s not really there.”

McDennon watched the transparent figure back around a corner and disappear.  “He looks like a ghost.”

“Think of the rewind like a movie,” Ross said, his voice pitched slightly too loudly on account of the ear plugs.  “A 3-D movie you can walk around in played over a permanent non-moving set.”

“With this soundtrack, it feels like a horror movie,” McDennon said.  “You know, the ones with all those creepy whispers from the undead.” He shivered, still staring after the maintenance guy. “Could I touch him?”

“Nope.”  Ross patted the cement next to him.  “All you can touch is what was here at the moment of the freeze. That guy’s like a memory. We can’t affect the past at all.  All we can do is rewind it and see what happened.”

“Is it true you can only rewind any particular moment once?” McDennon asked.

“Yep.  So we better get it right the first time.”  Ross flashed the bomb guy a grin.  “No pressure.”

McDennon rubbed a hand through his crew cut, looking dazed. I let more time slip past.  The strands moved sluggishly through me.  I felt tired, and more than usually aware of the draining sensation from dragging along the two Norms.  Probably stress.  I’d never been at a bomb site before.

“How are things at the Sick this week?” Ross asked.

McDennon tugged his ear.  “I beg your pardon?” 

“He’s talking to me,” I said.  I pointed to the embroidered Crime Investigation Center logo on my shirt. “The CIC? Pronounced phonetically the acronym sounds like sick.”

“I see.” McDennon didn’t sound like he did.  “And are things good there?”

I considered telling him that when the highlight of your week is rewinding a crime it’s generally not considered a sign of a happy home.  I refrained.  My life wasn’t this man’s business.

 “Stop!” Ross called.

I halted the flow of the rewind.  Superimposed over the closed east door, a shadow door stood open, revealing the dim figure of a man backing into the building.  He seemed young, I guessed early twenties.  He was a white guy, average height, wearing jeans and a dark windbreaker zipped up to his chin. I pulled on the time strands again, reeling events more slowly. The man continued his backward walk into the building.  When he headed up the stairs, we followed him. 

This time images of people passed us in the hallways.  Voices welled up around, the sound as subdued a their related images were misty.  McDennon stared in fascination as Ross walked right through a group of children on a tour. We passed a man in a suit yakking unintelligibly on his cell phone, a woman waving manicured hands as she babbled instructions to a younger man jogging backward at her side.  Compared to the muffled rewound sounds, the patter of our feet seemed loud.

Our suspect shuffled among the others, hands stuffed in his pockets.  No one paid him any attention.  The three of us trailed him up another flight of stairs and down an empty hall.  Recessed lights illuminated beige walls, their neutrality broken up by framed black-and-white photographs of city landmarks: a spraying fountain, trees blooming along a city street, a statue of a woman carrying a child. The doors here were all closed. 

Suspect moved with what would have been a sure stride had he been walking forward.  He must have been familiar with the surroundings.  He stopped at a large blue recycling bin. The bin’s lid dropped closed in reverse, meaning the plastic popped up into his hand.  Suspect reached out over the yawning interior.  A backpack, black and limp, leapt up to him.  He slid it onto one shoulder, lowered the lid, then glanced surreptitiously around before scuttling backward to a door marked Conference Room 3. To the left, a privacy screen covered a large glass panel, masking the room’s interior.  The suspect backed quickly into the room, paused at the threshold to check if anyone was in the hall, then pulled the door shut very slowly.  We waited until the memory of the door closed, then opened the real door and followed him inside.

 The room was dark. It was an interior windowless room, the only light bleeding through the window covering behind us.  Any light from the hall stopped where the door had blocked it when I froze.  I blinked, trying to find our suspect in the dim space.  I made out the outlines of a long table surrounded by lumpy shapes that must be chairs.  Nothing moved.  

“There he is.” Ross lunged over to the right of the conference table and dropped to his knees. McDennon and I scrambled over to join him. My vision was adjusting to the gloom and I could make out the suspect sprawled on his back with his head under one of the chairs.  Frowning with concentration, he pulled a strip of duct tape off a brick shaped object stuck to the underside of the seat. McDennon’s indrawn breath hissed near my ear.  

“Bingo,” Ross whispered. He reached out a hand and touched the hard plastic that housed the bomb. I shuddered.  Even in this inert form, the thing oozed passive horror.  Ross glanced at me. A smiled flirted with the edge of his lips. “You don’t like it?”

I shook my head.  “It’s creepy.”

Ross ripped off a piece of the duct tape.  The tearing sound echoed in the quiet room.

“I wouldn’t do that,” McDennon said with alarm.

“No?”  Ross’s smile widened.  “What about this?” With a quick tug, he pulled the rest of the tape away, letting the bomb drop to the floor with a loud clunk. McDennon shouted and leapt to his feet, knocking me flat on my back in his rush to get away.  

“Ross!” I laughed.

Ross grinned.  “Sorry, sorry.” He helped me to my feet. Our suspect remained under the chair, carefully taping the shadow bomb in reverse.  I stopped rewinding.  Frozen silence settled around us, making McDennon pull at his ear again

Ross picked up the bomb and held it out.  McDennon approached us warily.  Released from the tape, the bomb emerged as a mess of wires around a square of something that looked like modeling clay but must be the explosive.  

“It’s perfectly safe,” Ross explained.  “The bomb’s got an electrical trigger so there’s no way it can go off.  Electrical impulses freeze just like everything else. None of it works.”  Ross stuck a finger under one of the wires and wiggled it.  “Even if it did it wouldn’t hurt us. We’d just melt back and appear next to Chief.”

McDennon’s expression lacked conviction.

“Frozen time doesn’t count,” I reminded him.  “It doesn’t really exist.”

“Right.” McDennon straightened his shoulders.  He’d probably heard all this in training; it was just the reality of it that rattled him. With admirable resolve, he accepted the bomb from Ross.  I was impressed that his hands didn’t shake. “Let’s take this out where there’s better light.”

The three of us trekked out into the hall. The muted brightness of frozen light seemed glaring after the dark conference room.  Ross opened a door across the hallway to reveal a small office, furnished with a desk, a couple of file cabinets and a visitor’s chair.  A dark skinned bald man sat behind the desk, fingers raised in the act of typing.  The sun streaming through the window made him appear particularly insubstantial. Dust motes hung like bits of glitter inside his chest.

Ross swiped his arm across the desk. Papers fluttered to the ground, a tray of pencils clattered, the computer hit the ground with a painful crunch.

“Doesn’t count, remember?” Ross said in response to McDennon’s grunt of protest. “It will all go back right as rain when Alex melts us.” He pulled a chair up to the desk and offered it to McDennon with a cheerful flourish.

McDennon dropped his bomb squad bag on the desk top and started to work.  Ross and I watched.  It was slow going.  McDennon moved with meticulous patience, carefully moving wires and breaking open parts.  After a while, I leaned up against one of the file cabinets.  On a typical freeze I would have scratched my name into the cabinet’s surface. It’s my own little ritual, a temporary signature on the scene I created.  Today, I didn’t feel like it.  A particularly vicious time headache was growing behind my eyes.  

“Can you hurry it up at all?” Ross said. “Alex is getting tired.”

I realized I was rubbing the space between my eyebrows and dropped my hand.  “No, I’m OK.”

McDennon paused his work.  “How long do I have?” he asked me.

I focused my attention inward.  The current of time was pulling harder now, still manageable, but I knew from experience the pressure would grow.  “Twenty minutes without a problem.  Thirty if you need it.”

“McDennon, you have fifteen minutes.” Ross’s voice was firm. The bomb expert turned back to his work without comment. He must be used to working under deadlines.

I took a step away from the cabinet and toward Ross.  “I can hold it longer than that.”  I spoke softly, so I wouldn’t distract McDennon.

Ross held up a hand. “Push yourself too hard and you’ll get time sick.” He tapped me lightly on the nose.  “I need to keep you around.  I have plans for you.”

I nodded, torn between annoyance at his bossiness and pleasure that he cared about my health.  Pleasure won out.  I dropped my head so Ross wouldn’t see me smile.

We waited.  Ross plucked out his earplugs and flicked them across the room.  He stuck his hands in his pocket, jingling the loose change inside.  He pushed a framed photo lying on the floor with his toe.  It was a picture of the man at the desk smiling next to a teenage boy holding a fish.  The glass front was shattered.  I leaned back against the cabinet again and tried to think about something other than my growing headache.

Ten minutes later, McDennon let out a small sigh.  

“Got it.”  He wiped his brow against the shoulder of his shirt.  I sighed, too. Time was pulling at me harder now, a current with definite intentions of dragging me downstream.

McDennon started packing things back into his bomb squad bag.  A tiny screwdriver.  A magnifying glass.  

“There’s no need for that,” Ross said.  “Let it go, Alex.”

I released my hold.  The scene around us blurred.  Ross told me once that the melt made him feel momentarily dizzy, like missing your step on a curb.  For me, the feeling was more violent.  Scenes from the freeze swung crazily through my head: the suspect placing tape, manicured nails waving in a crowded hall, the janitor’s bouncing mop.  I tried to relax the way we’re trained to do, to let time wash through me, but it still felt like time was being forcibly ripped through my chest. 

The world steadied.  I stared into Ross’s ocean-blue eyes.  He blinked.  Both men let go of my hands.

“Holy shit.” McDennon again.  He was standing next to Chief, bomb bag packed, face going pale. At his feet, the intact scrap of paper floated by on its draft of wind.  The squirrel completed its journey to the neighboring tree. The flag on the rooftop fluttered.

Chief started.  “You’re  back?”  He looked up at the building, as if he might catch  us still inside.  “Did you find it?”

“Yes, sir,” McDennon answered, “and I know how to dismantle it.”

“Get your team,” Chief said. “Go.”

McDennon nodded to Slavich.  Chief watched the bomb guys trot back up the stairs before turning to Ross.  He handed him my leash.

“How long were you inside?”

“Less than an hour.”  Ross refastened the leash to my arm. I wished Chief had been less prompt.  The rush of returning time still swam in my head and the faint buzz from the leash only added to my sense of seasickness.

Ross went to stand next to Chief.  Neither man spoke.  Chief kept glancing at his watch, then back up at City Hall.  The cops waiting down the street muttered together, the sound an echo to the buzz in my head.  I thought we should go over and stand with them, just in case, but it seemed like too much effort to complain.  Instead, I sat on the steps and laid my head on my knees.  Time headaches usually only lasted a few minutes.

 “All clear, Chief.”

McDennon and Slavich burst through the front door, arms raised as if they had just won a championship race.  McDennon waved pieces of the bomb and cheers broke out from the waiting police.  Chief rushed to shake the men’s hands.  He was smiling so widely I could see the silver on his back teeth.  I stood up, and my seasickness bloomed into full-on nausea.

“Agent Ross.”  Chief was back, arms draped over McDennon and Slavich’s shoulders.  “You did all right today, you and…”  He nodded over at me, my name clearly gone from his memory. 

The other cops flooded up around them.  They were laughing and shoving each other, all eager to congratulate the new heroes.  I put a hand against my stomach, grateful for once to be ignored.  If this were the time someone finally thanked me it seemed likely I’d vomit all over their shoes.  Not something to help the Workers’ image.

“That was really freaky in there,” McDennon said to Ross.  “Do you spend a lot of time on missions like that?”

“Not always.” Ross shrugged. “Most of my job is plain old detective work.” 

I really regretted standing up.  On top of worrying I might throw up, my head felt like someone was squeezing my eyeballs from behind.  

“It’s your job that’s dangerous,” Chief said to McDennon.  “You’re the ones that deserve all the credit.”

The steps felt crowded with cops.  The stench of nervous sweat tainted the air with bitter perfume.  Voices called, cell phones jangled.  The noises bounced around my head like an untrained orchestra.  And it wasn’t just the noise, it was the light, too.  Everything around me seemed too bright, the edges so sharp they hurt.  I put a hand up to shade my eyes.  My skin felt clammy.

Nausea, fever… realization swept over me in a wave of ice.

“Mr. Ross!” 

I must have shouted.  Heads turned, confusion interrupting their celebration.  I didn’t care.  Panic was sweeping through me, drowning me in a way time never did.

Ross hurried over. 

“What is it?

I clutched his jacket. “I’m sick.”

“A headache?”

“No! I’m sick, Mr. Ross. Time sick.”

Emotions flickered across Ross’s face: surprise, annoyance, frustration.  They settled on concern.

“It’s OK,” he said. He put an arm around my shoulder. “I’ll get you out of here.”  

“Where are you going?” Chief called.  “We have a press conference in an hour.”

Ross waved him away.  “I’ll be there.”  He shepherded me down the steps toward his car.   “Don’t worry,” he murmured as we walked.  “It’s going to be OK.”

I stumbled along beside him.  I knew he was lying.  Time, that invisible essence we controlled with a twist of our mind, always took its revenge.  I’d lived in Centers my whole life.  Once a Worker got time sick, the end was inevitable. A few months, six at most, and then…  Sixteen was young, but not unheard of.  No Workers lived past twenty.  

 

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