Five October 17, 2023 #2
“Bailey’s emailing invites out this week,” Elsie says. “I’ll make sure she sends one to you,” she tells Hannah, trying again.
Hannah glances at Elsie as she turns back to her keyboard. “If I go as Kyle’s plus one, there’s no need.” She clicks her mouse. “She’ll invite Kyle, right?”
“I imagine.” Kyle’s been with the firm since before Elsie started working full-time.
Kyle, grinning, rolls his chair back to his cubicle. “Sweet,” he says, under his breath.
Elsie detects the start of a smile on Hannah’s face, and it occurs to her that maybe she really does like Kyle and isn’t simply sidestepping Elsie’s awkward attempts at friendship.
So, she tries yet again. “Did you see the eclipse on Saturday?” And then she tells Hannah what she’d been dying to tell Bailey on Sunday.
“At the height, during the ring of fire, there were donut-shaped shadows under the trees. Did you see them? They were there because holes in the leaves were acting like pinhole cameras. Isn’t that cool? ”
There’s a snicker from behind a cubicle and Elsie all at once feels like she’s back in high school.
Hannah forces a smile. “I really have to work,” she says. “Brian wants this done by the end of the day. I don’t have to tell you how pissed your father gets if we don’t make a deadline.”
Elsie rolls her chair away. “Sure.” She faces her desk and then, to deflect the pain of Hannah’s rejection, she turns to Kyle. “What about your T-Rex?” she asks him.
“What?”
She points at his T-shirt, which reads, Ask me about my T-Rex.
“Oh,” he says, and he pulls the front of his T-shirt over his head. A T-Rex, teeth bared, is printed on the underside, and now covers his face. He draws his arms into his sides to mimic a T-Rex’s ridiculous little claws. “Grr,” he says.
Inexplicably, that makes Hannah smile. But Elsie really doesn’t know what to say. Embarrassed by Kyle’s fluorescently white belly, she turns back to her desk.
Around her, the cubicles float on the sea-green carpet like a flotilla of little ships encrusted with technological barnacles—tower computers, dual monitors.
The workstations are arranged in rows of three, six of them on one side of the room where the mappers work, and three on the other side where the GIS analysts sit.
The mappers, like Hannah, armed with only diplomas, create simple maps from the data provided by the field crews.
With a master’s in GIS, which she completed online while working here, Elsie is one of three analysts, like Kyle, tasked with the more complex work.
Elsie’s current project is to analyze the data to find the best place within an area to harvest pine cones for seedlings.
But she can already tell she won’t be able to keep her mind on her project today.
The side of one eye spasms and she presses her index finger to it to stare open-eyed at the mapping room door in an attempt to make it stop.
From where she sits, she can see the employee photo wall, the picture of her mother, taken shortly before her death, and beside it, her father.
The plaques under their portraits bearing their names: Sophia Campbell, Brian Campbell. The founding partners.
And then she’s there—the old woman barefoot in her nightgown—shocking Elsie into sitting up straight in her chair.
In the time it took to blink, the ghost had manifested, standing in front of her father’s open door.
Elsie blinks again, and again, willing the vision away, but the old woman remains, a stubborn phantasm.
And she looks so real. Elsie can see the veins in the woman’s hands, the bunion on her foot, the tiny red roses in the bodice of her nightgown.
Elsie looks around at the others in the room, but most of them have their heads down behind their cubicles, their focus on their screens, and they don’t seem to notice the woman.
Elsie gets up, holding her stomach, and takes several tentative steps towards the hall. At the threshold, she whispers to the woman, “Who are you?” But the ghost immediately vanishes.
Disoriented, Elsie holds the door frame and peers down the hall in both directions.
“What?” her father asks her through his open door. “Were you talking to me?”
“No. It’s nothing,” Elsie says, her voice catching.
“Why were you late today?” And then his brows furrow in concern. “You’re not sleeping in again, are you?”
“I had an errand.”
Her father turns back to his screen. “Do it on your own time.”
Elsie returns to the mapping room and plunks down at her desk, her mind awash in confusion, her body shaking. It’s one thing to have her heels nipped by the black dog, quite another to find herself losing her grip on its leash. Maybe she should talk to her doctor.
But then she has a thought: the ghost, the old woman, appeared and disappeared just before she found the atlas at the lookout and had that all-too-real vision of her mother’s death.
What if, along with being at the map location, the ghost is the trigger?
What if Elsie has to see her first, then open the atlas?
Well, she’s here, at the location of the second chart’s map. And she’s seen the ghost.
Elsie pulls the atlas from her backpack and puts it on her desk. Both Kyle and Hannah are lost in their projects, hidden behind their cubicles, so she opens the book to the chart called “The Second House: Possessions.”
All at once she feels that same powerful wave of déjà vu she experienced at the lookout.
The sensation is almost like motion sickness, that queasy feeling she gets when reading on the bus.
But nothing has changed. The desk she’s seated at is the same.
There’s her glitter-covered rubber duck on the shelf above.
The mapping room is as it always is, the same blue carpet and cubicles.
The same big printer, plotter, scanner, light table and map cutter lined up along the walls.
Still, something’s off. The drones are missing.
They started using them a few years ago for reconnaissance work and to collect data in the field, but they’re no longer on the shelves above the map cabinets.
They were just there, weren’t they? Kyle still works at his desk beside her, but he isn’t wearing the T-Rex shirt.
And Hannah isn’t here. In her place, there’s an older man named Steve, who always wore plaid shirts and, in 2023, would retire, giving up his position to Hannah.
But Elsie’s no longer in 2023. The date on her computer puts her in the first week of working full-time for her dad, back in 2019. She had just taken over her mother’s desk in the mapping room, though not her management position.
What the hell?
Elsie cranes her neck to scan the room, and then she sees her doppelg?nger appear in the hallway outside her dad’s door wearing an almost identical outfit to the one Elsie has on now.
Black sweats and hoodie, black T-shirt. She called herself Ziz then.
But it’s her, Elsie, and also not her. Is this how identical twins view each other?
Then again, they aren’t identical, are they?
Elsie has years of experience on this girl.
In the hall, Ziz hugs her laptop, clearly agitated, like she’s working up the courage to knock on her father’s open door. And then she does. “Dad, can I have a minute? I have something to show you.”
“Sure.”
Ah. It’s that day. As Ziz enters her father’s office, Elsie rises slowly from her cubicle and, carrying the atlas open under her arm, tiptoes around the others absorbed on their projects.
Once out in the hall, she closes the mapping room door gently behind her.
How would she explain her appearance to all these people?
They would pull out their phones, splash this strange event all over social media. It’s better that she’s not seen.
Elsie presses herself against the wall near her father’s office, to listen in, snatching glimpses of her past self and the man her father was then through the crack between the open door and its frame.
He’s not yet wearing his glasses and he’s thinner, the bones in his face more clearly defined, as if he’s come into sharper focus.
He’d also lost weight after the funeral.
“What’s up?” he says, as he invites Ziz to sit. “We haven’t talked much since you started. Have you enjoyed your first week?”
(Enjoyed? No. Only months after her mother’s death, she endured. Still, if the project engaged her, she could escape into the flow of work.)
“I have something to run by you.” She opens her laptop, turns it to face him. “Don’t worry,” she says, already anticipating his objections. “I built this on my own time, at lunch and after work.” She hits play.
“A temporal map,” he says. An animated map showing changes over time.
At first the map showed the forestry roads fingering out as they were built, followed by the transformation of a forest, the cut blocks and later replantings shifting and changing in real time in a video; the cut blocks only here and there at first but multiplying over time, growing and consuming the forest.
“So that’s what’s already been done in this area over the last decade,” Ziz says.
“Nothing new there. But here’s my projection of where the roads and cut blocks could go over the next twenty years.
” On the screen, the forestry roads spread out like growing neural networks, and all around, the positions of future cut blocks appeared, year by year.
As she compiled this temporal map, Elsie was astonished at the deforestation as seen from the standpoint of a time traveller.
Her thought on first viewing her finished work: What have we done? What are we about to do?
“This is impressive,” her father says now.