Chapter Thirteen
Thirteen
Henry had camped out at a small table on the top floor of the library, just where Rose had recommended.
Its potted trees and the glass-domed ceiling crisscrossed by girders, framing a still-blue sky, suggested a conservatory, but with its wide-open space and its marble-and-terrazzo floor, it would’ve made a handsome ballroom, for those who enjoyed that sort of thing.
Piles of books surrounded him on the table and the empty chair next to him.
He checked his pocket watch: six thirty. She should be here any minute.
It was an unfathomable luxury to learn about scientific principles and even advancements he never could have dreamed of in his time. A luxury, too, to have several uninterrupted hours in which to read. He should not have been impatient to see Rose again.
But when she stepped off the little moving chamber—the elevator—he smiled and then felt suddenly awkward as she walked toward him. “Hi there!” she called out. When she drew up to his table and looked around at the books, she asked, “Do you want to take any of those home?”
“How many can I take?”
“Oh, as many as you want,” she said with a wave of her hand. “I think fifty’s the limit.”
Fifty? Henry’s spirits soared. He surveyed the volumes around him, then pulled the most interesting ones related to time travel to form a new stack.
Her eyes widened. “But you’re going to have to carry them on the train.”
“Naturally.” He began a second stack of books on other topics. “I will have no trouble.”
She pressed her lips together, then said, “I’ll go get a cart.”
Once she had procured one and Henry had loaded it up with his choices, they took the elevator to the ground floor.
There, she purchased bags with handles, printed with the message Friends of the Library, to make his spoils easy to carry.
He took two overstuffed bags in each hand and was obliged to allow her to carry the fifth one.
When they went outside, the late-afternoon sun had turned the city to amber, glinting off the windows of the tall buildings. In the golden hour, Rose’s sweet face was somehow one of the most real things he’d ever seen. He felt an ache like nostalgia for the very moment he inhabited.
“I’m afraid we’re not going home for a few more hours,” she said, a note of apology in her voice. “I have to go somewhere else for my job.”
The fact that he had no inclination to grumble about this surprised him.
Henry usually despised a change in plans, and he’d undergone a bigger one, surely, than any other man who had ever lived.
But after a day of fascinating reading, interspersed with several long daydreams about Rose that were anything but scholarly, he could not even label being in Chicago, in the twenty-first century, as a complete misadventure.
There were worse things, truly, than having one’s schedule demolished by Miss Rose Novak.
He said, “Well, then. Where are we going?”
“I don’t know how to explain it. You’ll just have to see it. But I hope you’ll like it! It’s kind of like art and science coming together.”
They took a different train, which delivered them to the banks of a river, lined with more tall buildings.
She led him down a broad, handsome flight of stone stairs.
The books he carried were extremely heavy.
But it had been a little while since he had exercised with dumbbells and Indian clubs, so he told himself it was just as well that the books would fortify his muscles as well as his mind.
People traversed the river in small white boats and kayaks.
The now-setting sun made pink and orange streaks on the little waves, disturbed by wakes and oars.
Across the river stood a huge building, twenty-some stories high, but much wider.
Couples, families, and small groups of friends milled along the river or sat at outdoor tables, eating their dinners or sipping coffee or wine.
Had he and Rose arrived earlier, perhaps they might have dined here, too.
Rose suddenly dashed forward, heedless as a child, and plunked her bag of books on a table that had been vacated by another couple moments before. Henry had to laugh as he joined her, gratefully setting his burdens down.
Triumphant and slightly out of breath, Rose said, “I always have good luck with getting a table. It’s one of my things.”
To Henry it seemed to be more a matter of shameless abandon than luck, but he meant it when he said, “Then I am lucky to be with you.”
“I’ll get us something for dinner,” Rose said, pointing to people waiting at a nearby counter. He was not accustomed to dinners being so spontaneously declared and arranged, though he found he didn’t truly mind.
As she got in line, he opened a book about multiverse theory. She soon returned with sandwiches and two bottles of water.
“Thank you,” he said as she sat down. “So this outing is part of your duties? I daresay that thus far, it does not strike me as arduous labor.”
“Right? We’re here to see a show. It’ll start in maybe a half hour.”
Henry attempted and failed to guess at what that might mean. “Perhaps you might use this time to tell me what, precisely, you do for the museum.”
She leaned forward eagerly. “I was just thinking about how to explain that to you. In your time, you had newspapers, right?”
“Indeed.”
“And did they have advertisements in them?”
“Yes, for goldsmiths, and pianofortes, and seaside resorts, and all manner of things.”
“Perfect. What I do is a little like news, but more like advertising. Here, I’ll show you one of the ways I do it.” She took out her phone, tapped on it a few times, and turned it to face him.
On the screen was a grid of rectangles, each with an image of a different object. A brightly colored basket, a painting of a contemplative saint, a golden mask, a stairway with illuminated words, a painting that appeared to have been produced by a drunk.
“Are these works in the museum?”
“Yes. I choose them, and I write about them. Here, I’ll show you.” She tapped on one, a bronze jar gone green with age, topped with a dragon figure. It filled more of the screen, with printed words beneath.
She handed the phone to him, and he read aloud. “ ‘Was the fierce dragon on the top of this jar inspired by dinosaur bones?’ ” He lifted his head. “What, pray tell, is a dinosaur?”
“You don’t…? Oh. Dinosaurs were these giant reptiles, like as big as an elephant, or even as big as a whale, I guess. They don’t exist anymore. They died out before the time of humans.”
“What do you mean, before the time of humans?” he asked.
She raised her eyebrows. “Well…” He realized, to his chagrin, that she had been momentarily stunned by his ignorance. “Let’s get back to that one. It’s going to take a long time to explain.”
“Asking you questions,” Henry said, “is sometimes like peeling an orange to discover another orange.”
“It kind of is.”
“I gather these enormous reptiles did not die out because they were hunted. So why do they no longer roam the Earth?”
“Oh, you’re going to like this,” she said. “Because an asteroid hit the Earth.”
“What?”
“Read the rest of it,” Rose urged him. “That was only the first sentence!”
He directed his attention back to the phone.
“ ‘This vessel, found in Shizhaishan, China, was created between 300 to 200 B.C.E.’ ” He did not ask about how they knew the date, nor about the mysterious E after the abbreviation for Before Christ. “ ‘The most remarkable thing about it was what it contained: both cowrie shells, used as currency by the Dian kingdom, and bronze coins, the currency of the Western Han dynasty that later conquered it. War and conflict are as old as time, but so are hopes that different cultures can mingle in harmony together.’ ”
Henry looked up at her. “You wrote this?”
She blushed. “Let me find you a better one. That was too sentimental.” She grabbed the phone out of his hand.
“I disagree. I have learned not only about natural science, but also about ancient cultures, from one object. That is remarkable.”
He’d made her forget her embarrassment. “Exactly!” She clicked back to the grid. “Every piece tells you so much about the world, and societies, and what they believe.”
When he’d first met her, he had not credited her with intellectual gifts, but it seemed she loved learning almost as much as he did, except about art and magic instead of science.
“May anyone in Chicago see these?” he asked, gesturing toward the phone.
“People from all over the world can see them. There are…” She tapped a couple of times. “Over eight hundred thousand followers. Kind of like newspaper subscribers.”
“Good Lord,” Henry said seriously. “You have a very important position.”
“Thank you.” She practically twinkled at the compliment.
“How many objects are in the museum?” He wondered if she might run out of ones to discuss.
“In total? About three hundred thousand.”
“Inconceivable,” Henry muttered. “Is it difficult to choose which works to feature?”
“Sometimes. But I feature all the big exhibitions, and I do posts based on the seasons. Like this one was for the first day of spring.”
When she turned the phone to face him again, he almost spit out his water. It was a detailed illustration of two women cavorting in a field without a stitch of clothing on, each holding one end of a garland of flowers.
“Isn’t it fun?” she asked. “It’s from around 1900, from France.”
Henry snorted. “French. I might have guessed.”
“I did have to delete a few comments on this one,” she admitted.
Henry was confused by more than one part of that sentence, and he must have looked it, because she pointed and said, “Look. People can comment on the post.”
He did, indeed, see messages from other people.
me & who??
Lovely! Very Belle époque. Reminds me of Choubrac.
Must be nice to have time to frolic
I mean, this is just lesbians
Ladies. This is Chicago. You’re going to get frostbite.
Is this in the vault? I don’t remember seeing it with the French drawings.
ohmygod they were bloommates
While he was puzzling over a few of these, she said, “If someone says something offensive, I can just make their comment disappear.”
“Does that happen often?”
She lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “Not really. But sometimes people criticize artists who are different from them. And I’ve had rude comments about me when I’ve interviewed people.”
“Rude comments from strangers?” Henry asked. When she nodded, he felt his blood simmer. “What sort of comments?”
“Nothing serious. Just saying I’m fat, or they hate my voice, or whatever.” She rolled her eyes and took a bite of her sandwich.
Nothing serious? Her composure was admirable, but this was not to be borne. “How might I pay each of them a visit?”
She made a confused noise and, after swallowing, said, “You mean…go where they live?”
“The ones in Chicago,” Henry said. He supposed he could not pay a call to any of the vile fellows who lived farther away.
Her expression hovered between amusement and disbelief. “Henry, what are you going to do? Go punch them in the nose?”
“I merely intend to have a conversation.” A conversation in which an abject apology might be extracted. Although if the apology were not forthcoming, then yes, a punch in the nose might be just the thing, assuming they were men. If some were women, then his most withering lecture would have to do.
“Well, you can’t,” she said. “I don’t know where any of them live. Most of the mean ones don’t even use their real names.”
“Contemptible cowards!” Henry spat out.
“I agree,” she said. “But people insult each other all the time on the Internet. And like I said, they lie, and the news is all bad…that’s why I like sharing art. It’s beautiful, and interesting, and you learn about different times and places…” She smiled. “I think it inspires people.”
A loud fanfare made Henry look around them. “It’s starting!” Rose exclaimed, grabbing her phone again and holding it up in front of her.
They had been sitting in a pool of light from a streetlamp, and with his attention fixed on Rose, he had not realized how dark it had become.
Crowds surrounded them now, standing or sitting on the pavement.
And then, on the face of the huge building across the river, synchronized to the music, a great burst of colored lights dissolved into sparkling waterfalls.
“But the fireworks will damage the building,” he exclaimed, even as the crowd cheered and clapped. Were they all mad?
“They’re just lights,” she reassured him in a murmur.
Clusters of dots appeared, multiplied, in one color and then another.
They danced in whirls over the surface of the building.
Henry stared, transfixed. As dots settled into place, they began to form a picture.
The bank of a river or lake, with tall trees and sailboats on the water.
Two dogs chased each other, followed by a mother with a parasol, and a little girl.
The park filled with more people, walking, lounging, enjoying the day.
Rose set her phone down. “Isn’t it amazing?”
“I’ve never seen anything like it!”
“This is the first show of the year! It’s called Art on the Mart. But this one is based on a very famous painting in the museum. It’s called A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.”
The spectacle must’ve lasted for fifteen minutes or so. For Henry, it was over far too quickly. When it rippled and disappeared in bright bursts of light, he and Rose got to their feet, applauding and cheering with the rest of the crowd.
“I see now what you meant,” Henry said. “Art and science.”
“And a little magic,” Rose said, smiling up at him.
Henry thought, I cannot leave.
And then he remembered how he’d confused lights for fireworks, embarrassing himself, and how he could not trust his own instincts after being ripped away into another timeline, and how Rose had never invited him to stay indefinitely, and he told himself, I must.