Wishful Thinking (11 page)

Jennifer’s throat tightened. She looked away. It had been a terribly difficult three years—the hardest of her life. Could her phone really tell that story to a stranger? The invasion of her privacy, somehow, seemed secondary to the fact that Dr. Sexton, using only these digital clues and some chance encounters in their building, seemed to know her so well.

“As we know now, however,” Dr. Sexton said, withdrawing her hand with a sigh, “it was a mistake. An arrogant and dangerous one. Thankfully, I took one true precaution,
which was to ensure the app’s disappearance should it be used without my knowledge.”

“I noticed that,” Jennifer said, sitting forward in her chair. “And I wanted to thank you,” she went on, “for choosing me. Because you’re right. My life
is
full of unrelenting pressures. Sometimes I feel like I can’t possibly manage it all. Sometimes,” she said, “making my life work seems more impossible than time travel!” She laughed. Dr. Sexton did not. “It scared me using the app today,” Jennifer said, looking up at her and holding her gaze. “But I don’t think you made a mistake.”

Dr. Sexton said nothing. Her look of sympathy and affection had been replaced by a coolly skeptical expression.

“I need it back,” Jennifer said, as levelly as she could.

At that, Dr. Sexton outright scowled. “Out of the question. As soon as you leave here tonight, in fact, I am going to destroy it.”

“You’re going to
what
?”

“Destroy it. And all evidence that it ever existed.”

“What if I tell someone?”

“What, that you traveled in time through your cell phone? Who would believe that?”

“Nobody,” Jennifer muttered, thinking back to her conversation with Vinita earlier that day.

“I’m sorry,” Dr. Sexton said, “but my mind is made up.”

“So no one will ever know that you did this? That you have achieved the most significant breakthrough in the history of science?”

“Aside from the discovery of nuclear fission? Yes. And we all know how that turned out.”

“But couldn’t you use it for something peaceful? To travel to other planets? Discover life in other parts of the universe?”

“I couldn’t care less about life in other parts of the universe. Carl Sagan and all that alien mumbo jumbo. What
nonsense.” Jennifer winced slightly. “My concern is behaving with integrity and morality with regard to human life
right here on our planet
. First do no harm,” she said. And then she repeated herself, closing her eyes tightly. “
First do no harm.
When I was caught up in the sheer science of it, when I was in the deepest throes of my obsession, I chose not to think about its implications. But now that I have achieved it, I can think of nothing else. The accolades don’t matter to me. I have never required more than my own intellectual satisfaction. And I have fulfilled it beyond my wildest dreams.”

Jennifer put her head in her hands.

“Dr. Sexton,” she said, looking up, trying to recapture the connection they had shared just moments ago. “
I
am a human being, right here on this planet. And you saw something in me—or in my phone—that meant something to you.” Dr. Sexton narrowed her eyes. “My phone didn’t tell you the half of it. My ex-husband, who basically abandoned us for two years after the divorce, has been spying on me, saying I work too much and using it against me to try to take away time with the children.” Her voice broke. “The worst part is, he’s right. I’ve been forced to take on ‘private-sector hours,’ which means sixty to eighty hours a week. If I choose my work, I will lose my children. If I choose my children, I will lose my job. And my work, while it may seem ‘mundane’ to you, is actually incredibly important to me, and to others, I hope.” She looked Dr. Sexton in the eye. “So I’m asking you. Please. I really, really need to be in two places at once. Just for a little while.”

Dr. Sexton shook her head sadly. “I wanted to grant you a wish.
One
wish. Not offer you a solution to a problem that technology cannot solve.”

“Who says it can’t? You were right. The app
could
help women like me, so much.” She paused. “I need it.”

Dr. Sexton shook her head again. “I’m sorry, Jennifer,” she
said. “But your bourgeois plight does not pass muster as a humanitarian catastrophe.”

Jennifer flinched, embarrassed. “I know,” she said quietly.

“Is it money that you need?” Dr. Sexton asked, softening a little.

“No,” Jennifer said. “It’s time.”

Recognizing defeat, and bone-splittingly tired, she rose and turned to go. “Thank you for the tea,” she said. “It really was delicious.” Dr. Sexton flashed a tiny smile. Assuming she would never enter the apartment again, Jennifer took one last look around before heading for the door. It seemed to take forever for her to get there, and it was not until her hand was on the knob that she realized Dr. Sexton was behind her. Feeling a cool hand upon her shoulder, she turned around. Dr. Sexton’s eyes were shining again. In the half-light Jennifer could not tell: Were those tears? The two women looked at each other for a long moment.

“I don’t want to destroy it,” Dr. Sexton said at last, in a near whisper. “Though I feel that I should.”

Jennifer, not daring to speak, simply nodded.

“You could tell no one,” Dr. Sexton said. “We would approach it as an experiment. A trial.”

Jennifer nodded again, doing her best to conceal her excitement, the sensation of her heart lifting.

“Perhaps some good
could
come of it,” Dr. Sexton added cautiously, “if we proceeded with the utmost care.”

At this, Jennifer allowed herself to smile a little. “If you could have seen the look on Julien’s face today when I came to his recital,” Jennifer said, “you’d know that even though it’s in a small way, some good has come of it already.”

“He’s a wonderful child,” Dr. Sexton said warmly. “I’d love to get to know him better.”

“He is,” Jennifer said. “And you will.”

“All right, then,” said Dr. Sexton. “Come around again tomorrow evening, and we’ll talk.”

Jennifer nodded. She was about to leave, when, feeling an overpowering rush of affection for this woman she hardly knew, she turned back to Dr. Sexton and kissed her on the cheek. “I always wanted a fairy godmother,” she said.

“How lucky you are, my dear,” Dr. Sexton replied, drawing back and smiling at her fondly, “that I am not a fairy but a
physicist
.”

T
HE
S
ATURDAY NIGHT BEFORE
Jennifer was to begin her life as a time-traveling superwoman (whose feats would include things like cooking dinner for her children with non-frozen ingredients and working till ten o’clock on a school night) she found herself, as she almost always did on Saturday nights, alone. Saturday nights were still a struggle for Jennifer, though for the most part she had stopped using them as the one night a week she allowed herself to be self-pityingly depressed. She had not yet succeeded, however, in making them into the weekly funfest her married friends fantasized they would be. To begin with, it was practically impossible to make Saturday-night plans with married people with kids, which pretty much described everyone Jennifer knew. And while she had made several halfhearted attempts at online dating, agonizing over her profile and trying to crop her kids out of pictures (what adult
woman has photos of herself standing around solo, she’d wondered, particularly the “full-body” shots the sites all seemed to recommend?), the whole process still felt to her like wearing a sandwich board in Penn Station, hoping one of the thousands of men who walked by would either bother to grab her ass or miraculously turn out to be “the one.” Twenty-four hours a week of being a thirty-nine-year-old single woman with a cat, when the other 144 hours were spent as a working mother of two active boys, did not seem a luxury. Instead, it was just weird.

This Saturday night, however, Jennifer was feeling fine. In a series of conversations since their rendezvous a week and a half before, she and Dr. Sexton had settled on a one-year trial. Dr. Sexton had suggested six months at first, but Jennifer—having signed Bill’s contract, which meant four quarters of milestones to meet at work looming ahead of her—had argued that it wouldn’t be enough to test it thoroughly. She had promised, however, to use the app only twice per week, despite being immediately tempted to use it more. (That Friday Melissa had officially asked to cut back to just two afternoons a week, offering to help Jennifer find somebody to fill in the other three afternoons.
No need
, she’d said, to Melissa’s astonishment.
I’ll manage
.) In the meantime Jennifer had gone for the testing Vinita had ordered—though without telling Vinita—and both the EEG and the MRI had come out fine. With confirmation of Jennifer’s good health in hand, the two women had agreed to start right away.

In a long meeting earlier that day, Dr. Sexton had outlined Wishful Thinking’s parameters and protocols in detail. Alone now, seated at her kitchen table, Jennifer was about to book her first appointments, for Tuesday and Thursday that week. In preparation, she began to review the user’s guide, of sorts, that Dr. Sexton had prepared.

1) Make an appointment in the Wishful Thinking calendar for the
second
place you want to be for a specified period of time. Enter the correct Google Maps coordinates and the length of the appointment. Confirm and book.

2) At the appointed time of travel, be sure to find a place where you will be unobserved, and be sure to have the phone in physical contact with your hand.

3) Any objects in physical contact with your person, from your clothing to your briefcase, will travel through the portal with you.

4) During the return trip to the original space-time coordinates, follow the instructions above: find a place where you can travel unobserved, and be sure to be in physical contact with your phone.

5)
Once a Wishful Thinking appointment has been scheduled, it cannot be altered in any way.
If, in the event of an emergency, such a need should arise, you will require my assistance in order to make any changes to an appointment.

1) You may travel backward in time (departing the office at 6:00 p.m., for example, and arriving at the school at 3:00 p.m.),
but not forward
. In other words, you may not schedule an appointment to depart the office at 3:00 p.m. and arrive at school at 6:00 p.m. You may not use Wishful Thinking to
skip
hours of the day, nor to jet off to 2095. You may use it only to
add
hours to the day.

2) You may not use Wishful Thinking to travel more than six hours backward in time. (No hurtling back to the belle epoque for a quick cancan, either.) Six hours is the maximum length of an appointment, but shorter journeys, between one and three hours, are ideal.

3) While on a Wishful Thinking appointment, interacting with your “other self” or anyone who might be around her could result in a causality violation and is strictly forbidden. This applies to both physical interaction (observing the fixed boundary of the five-hundred-yard radius) and all other forms of communication. Causality violations occur when the relationship between cause and effect is disrupted by a time-travel paradox: if Jennifer were to run over Jennifer in a car, for example, or, far less catastrophic but no less disturbing to the universe and the people in it, if Jennifer were to e-mail a colleague about something that for Jennifer had already happened but for the colleague in question hadn’t happened yet. Most physicists do not believe that such causality violations are permitted by the laws of physics (for further reading, see the Novikov self-consistency principle), but, as usual, the physicists in question concern themselves with grandiose ideas about shooting one’s own grandfather, etc., and do not consider the implications of a woman in two places at once sending causality-violating text messages to her babysitter.

4) It is for this reason that the phone, while on a Wishful Thinking appointment, enters airplane mode. It is up to you to observe this moratorium in all other forms of communication and contact.

This is less an instruction than a clarification, or perhaps a measure of reassurance. When using Wishful Thinking, the traveler, mind and body, is fully present in the location of her appointment. A Wishful Thinking user simply experiences hours
in addition
to the ones that those around her experience, and she experiences them sequentially: first, for example, experiencing the time period from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. at the park, then experiencing the same time period, 2:00 to 4:00 p.m., at the office. She does not experience these two realities simultaneously.

T
HERE WAS ONLY ONE
rule, after the two women had gone over all of them together, that Jennifer asked Dr. Sexton to change: having her phone automatically enter into airplane mode when she was in two places at once. “I can’t function in either place without it,” she’d argued. “How can I communicate with other moms about playdates, or stay in contact with the office if I go for a coffee at work, or do anything?” Her anxiety on this score wasn’t solely practical. The idea of being phoneless in any space-time unnerved Jennifer greatly. When she’d lost her phone the year before, she’d felt as though she’d lost a limb, reaching for a phantom phone every time somebody else’s rang or chimed. (She’d found a word for this affliction in the Urban Dictionary:
nomophobia
. She was without question a sufferer.) Dr. Sexton had conceded the point, though she had not liked it one bit. “Very well, though you will have to manage the separation of the two worlds manually,” she’d said darkly,
manually
apparently meaning
relying upon your hopelessly flawed brain
. “And you will have to be extraordinarily careful.”