Chapter 4
I went to Chamberlin Hall by myself the next morning.
Amy couldn’t afford to miss more work, and Lyle needed to be in school.
Amy made me promise I’d come back, that I had to come back, even if it happened again.
I promised, neither of us acknowledging that it could be eight days if it did happen again.
She kissed me on the cheek, a brush of her lips, gentle and soft, and our hands touched, fingers moving against one another.
It was a moment of barest contact and somehow more intimate and reassuring than the night before.
Beck met me at the front door to Chamberlin, a cup of coffee steaming in one hand, an aging book bag slung over one shoulder. “I didn’t think you’d show,” he said as I came up the steps.
“Thanks for meeting me.”
He used his key to unlock the door. “Come on in, then.”
I followed him inside. We climbed the stairs toward his office.
“I had an image in my head,” Beck said. “An image of you and your wife sitting in a coffee shop on State Street, laughing at the gullible old professor you’d hoodwinked.”
“I doubt we’d have brought Lyle for something like that.”
“Yes, his presence cast doubt on the little play I’d conjured.”
We reached the professor’s floor, and he led me through the tight hallways to his office. I held his coffee while he unlocked the door.
The headache was back again. A dull, rhythmic ache behind my eyes.
“Thanks,” he said, taking the coffee back. I followed him inside.
“We’re not going to a lab?”
Beck set his book bag down on one of the chairs next to his desk and turned back to face me. He put the coffee to his lips and sipped before replying. “Frankly, Mr. Treder, before I impose on anyone else’s time, I’ll need to see this event for myself.”
I clamped my teeth shut. I forced myself to breathe for a moment. “Fine.” I took my phone out and checked the time.
7:51 AM.
I looked back up. “We’ll see what you think after this.”
Beck was opening his mouth when the world slipped.
Then I was back, standing in the office.
Beck was there, sitting behind his desk in different clothes, clutching at another cup of coffee and looking frazzled and unkempt.
Amy and Lyle were there as well, staring at me.
And there were four other adults in the room, all with the look of professional intellectuals, all wearing expressions shifting from amused boredom to shock.
“My God,” one of them said, an elderly man wearing a bow tie and cardigan suit.
Another man was holding a phone, recording the office with bemused detachment. His eyes bulged and he dropped the phone on the hard carpet. He didn’t seem to notice.
I took in the extra people in the office without really paying attention. My attention was on Amy and Lyle. Amy’s hands were clenched on Lyle’s shoulders, but he didn’t seem to notice.
With five sets of strange eyes on me, I walked over and hugged my wife and son.
For me, it’d been barely an hour since I’d kissed her goodbye.
Tears ran down her face, and her hug was stiff and shaky.
Lyle returned my hug with bearlike ferocity.
“I knew you’d come back, Dad,” he said, too quietly for the others to hear.
I heard a rustling thump of movement and looked up in time to see Beck surge to his feet behind his desk, knocking over his coffee in the process. He glared at me, face thunderous. Sweat beaded on his wrinkled forehead. “Get out of my office!”
“What?”
“Get out! Now!” His voice cracked on the last word.
I glanced over at Amy, but she was far away, her arms crossed around her chest.
“What are you waiting for?” Beck’s entire body trembled.
I reached out, unsteady, and grabbed Amy with one hand and Lyle with the other. “Fine. Fine, we’re going.” I pulled my family a few steps forward, toward the door. We were a pace away when Lyle twisted in my grasp, enough to make me lose my grip. “Lyle—”
But he walked back to Beck’s desk. As every person in the room watched, he set a book on the professor’s desk.
It was Physics of the Impossible. “Thank you for letting me borrow this, sir,” Lyle said.
He turned and stepped back to me, reaching out his hand.
I took it. Beck stared down at the book on his desk, unblinking, his mouth partly open.
Then he collapsed into his chair, falling hard enough to force a hissing whoosh of air out through the cracks in the leather.
“Come with me,” a woman said, inches away. She’d been one of the silent observers in the room when I’d reappeared. She gave me an encouraging smile and beckoned with one hand.
Lyle went first, following her out the door, tugging me along behind him. I trailed in a trance, pulling Amy with me.
The woman led us a few doors down, opened another door, and motioned us inside. The room was almost identical to Beck’s office, except the desk was neater. There were sections where the wood was actually visible. “Coffee?” the woman asked, moving around us toward the desk. “Tea?”
“I, uh…”
“What kind of tea do you have, ma’am?” Lyle asked.
“Well, let me see here.” She bent over the shelving behind her desk, in front of a window looking out over the grassy slope of the campus outside. There was a coffee maker and teapot on the shelf. “I have Earl Grey, lemon green tea, and some chai.”
“Earl Grey, please,” Lyle said. He slipped out of my grasp, walked over to one of the chairs in front of the desk, and sat. He started swinging his legs.
“That has caffeine. Is that okay with your dad?”
“Um, sure,” I said.
“One Earl Grey for the little master.” The woman peered at me through her glasses. Her gray hair was tied back in a bun, and her long dress did a fine job of masking a portly figure. “Are you sure you don’t want anything?”
“I—I think I’d appreciate some coffee. Thank you. Amy?”
“Yes.” Her voice was faint.
“One Earl Grey, three coffees. Have a seat while I make them.”
I stood in place for a moment, swaying. Then I shook myself and led Amy to one of the other chairs. She let me sit her down, still with her arms crossed over her chest. She stared into the distance. Lyle swung his legs and looked over the books on the shelves around us.
“I’m Maggie,” the woman said as she prepared the drinks. “Maggie Paulson.”
“Scott Treder,” I said. “Nice to meet you.” It popped out, years of social training taking over.
She looked back at me with a stare I was certain had silenced any number of overly anxious or disruptive college students. “Yes, I know who you are.” She turned back to the drinks. “Scott Treder, the Disappearing Man.”
“The Disappearing Man. As good a name as any.”
“You gave poor Professor Beck quite a fright, you know.” She didn’t bother hiding a satisfied smile.
“Well. I didn’t intend to.”
“No, I don’t think you did. But that’s not what he thinks.”
“He thinks I pulled a fast one on him?”
“You got it.” She turned with two ceramic mugs in her hand, walked around the desk, and handed the larger one to Lyle. “Careful, now, honey, it’s hot.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Lyle said, taking the mug in his small hands.
Maggie held the other out to Amy. Amy gave a start, blinked, and looked up. “Thank you.” She coughed to clear her throat. She sipped. “It’s good.”
“Glad to hear,” Maggie said. She looked back toward me. “He spent all week trying to figure out how you did it.”
“Professor Beck?”
“Yep.” She crossed the room and returned with two more mugs.
She handed one to me, then leaned against her desk in a motion both comfortable and practiced.
“Drove him just short of the edge. Not that he’s ever that far from it, mind you.
” She smiled again. “But you did vanish, and without a trace. And you reappeared, on time and as predicted, in exactly the same spot you left. Which is impossible in more ways than one.”
I sipped my coffee and found my way back to myself. “How so?”
“Modern physics knows of situations where things can disappear and reappear at different places. Even disappear and reappear at different times. But that behavior only takes place at the tiniest of scales. The quantum level. Electrons, quarks, and the like.”
“All right.”
“But you’re obviously a touch bigger than an electron or a quark. And even assuming you did find a way to spontaneously disappear, to travel forward through time, and pop back into place, there’s no way you should reappear exactly where you left.”
“Where else would I appear?”
“Where you actually disappeared.”
I frowned at her, and she laughed. It was a tinkling sound, full of easy humor.
“Think about it for a moment,” she said. “The Earth’s traveling around the Sun. And the Sun itself is traveling—very quickly—around the center of the Milky Way, which is itself whirling through the universe at many hundreds of kilometers per second.”
“So … I should be…”
“You should be floating around in empty space right now, quite dead, the Earth now eight days farther around the Sun than it was when you vanished, and the Sun eight days farther around the center of the Milky Way, and so on. But here you are. And you even managed to displace the oxygen and nitrogen and water molecules in your local environment when you reappeared, so you didn’t kill us all in an explosion of forced fusion as your atoms occupied the same space as those of the air. ”
Lyle watched Maggie, entranced. I rubbed my forehead.
“An interesting conundrum, no?” She seemed to be directing the question toward Lyle, her tone light and amused.
“What do you do?” It was Amy, without warning, directed toward Maggie.
“Oh my, I didn’t even introduce myself properly, did I?
I’m professor emeritus in theoretical physics here at the UW.
Really, you should have come to me first. My research is much wilder and farther out on the fringe than poor Beck’s ever was.
Particularly after I got my tenure and was able to, as they say, have at it. ”
“I—a grad student recommended Professor Beck, as the chair…”
“Oh, he’s a chair, all right.” She shook her head and had another sip of coffee. When she lowered the mug, she looked at me with an intensity that made me feel like an insect wriggling on a pin. “So, Mr. Disappearing Man. What are we going to do about you?”
I related the entire story again, just as I had with Professor Beck. Maggie—Professor Paulson—proved more credulous, however. She listened closely and asked penetrating questions.
Amy and Lyle sat through my halting recitation of the events of the last few days—last few weeks, for them. Lyle piped up to contribute here and there with a relevant observation. Maggie beamed down at him from her half-seated place on the edge of her desk whenever he spoke.
“Well, Mr. Treder, I would very much like you to come back tomorrow,” Maggie said when I finished.
“I don’t know how much more…” I trailed off, not sure what I was trying to say.
“Don’t worry, I don’t want to see you disappear in my office. I’d like to have you come down to the physics lab to take some readings. I’ll have to talk with some colleagues in the experimental physics and chemistry fields first, since I rarely touch actual instruments myself.”
“Okay.” I stood. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet.”
Amy stood and helped Lyle out of his chair. She spoke before I could. “Thank you for believing us.”
Maggie gazed at her over the tops of her reading glasses. “Mrs. Treder, I just watched your husband pop into existence right in front of my eyes. Professor Beck may have convinced himself you performed some fancy parlor trick to hoodwink him, but I know real magic when I see it.”
“But it’s not magic,” Lyle said.
“What was that, my boy?”
“It’s not magic. What’s happening to my dad.”
Maggie’s smile faded. “Quite right. And we’ll figure it out.”
We said our goodbyes to Maggie and left.
Walking together, silent, Lyle’s hand in mine, we left the campus and walked to a coffee shop on State Street, one of the little places trying hard to look privately owned—the walls plastered with flyers and fair-trade posters—but that was in fact a subsidiary of some faceless corporation from the West Coast. Still, the latte I had was good, even though I’d just finished the coffee Maggie made for us.
The three of us sat and watched students trudge by outside.
Two homeless men sat on a nearby sidewalk, holding out cups, hoping for change; buses slid by with dull roars; fit-looking young people jogged past, listening to music as they ran.
The entire world going about its daily morning routine around us. Oblivious.
“The next one will be sixteen days,” Amy said.
I looked away from the window. Amy clutched her drink, threatening to pop the lid and spill the hot contents over her hand.
Lyle watched her without expression. I reached across the table.
Amy’s eyes tracked the movement, and she hesitated before moving her hand to meet mine.
Our fingers intertwined. “The last one.”
“You don’t know that.”
“We’re getting help now. These are smart people—”
“Half of whom think we’re pranksters or nutcases.”
I darted my eyes toward Lyle.
Amy didn’t miss the movement. She sighed and pulled her hand away. She rubbed her face. “I’m sorry. I … just…”
“Yeah.” I swallowed down the lump in my throat. “I know.”
We sat for a long moment. She stood. “I need to get to work. I don’t have many sick days or vacation left. And we only have one income now…” She trailed off as I winced.
I tried to cover it with a smile. “At least I’m not there to eat as much, right?”
Amy grimaced.
“I’ll drive you,” I said. “I’ll take Lyle to school. You’ll be late, but not too bad.”
She watched my face for a few seconds. “Okay.”
Outside on the sidewalk she let me hold her hand. Lyle’s eyes, behind his thick glasses, missed nothing.