Always/Never

Chapter 30 / Laws of Timelines, and Laws of Dryer Machines

The laboratory's benches hugged the wall, sparkling like polished black agate. I stepped into the room with a tingle of pain across my spine and found past Michaela watering the plants.

For a second, for a minute extended through time, beyond my comprehension, I was tugged to the memory of the few times I'd visited her while working. She measured the water in plastic graduated cylinders with the blue tint of fertilizer, which I could only assume followed the taped-on notes across the racks. She flowed through the steps as though in a practiced, one-person dance. Water poured into the cylinder, the swish of her shoes against the tile, her body following a rotation.

Was it strange to think of her as beautiful when I wasn't dating this Michaela?

She is, though. Even though right now she hated me. Rory. Both of us.

I rubbed the back of my neck, glancing at the still-off lights.

As Michaela glided over the laboratory, her eyes flickered to the plants, then to me, and all she could do was circle the pots, letting the liquid trickle. Setting her cylinder on the rack to keep track of where she stopped, she nudged past the jug with the diluted mixture of fertilizer and reverse osmosis water. Stray droplets marked the floor like the evidence she'd had to make more.

I smiled. My heart stuttered.

She watched me on the entry into the room, and I couldn't say a word in my defence. Not about this. Never about this.

We didn't speak at first.

I rooted through my toolbox for the gears. The smallest one I would use for the finest point of the timescale, like a clock, would be the day. The middle size was the month and the largest, the year. Its inner pinions interlocked.

Michaela watched me back.

"I'm glad you told me," she said.

Drifting to the machine, I studied the dials. Removed their caps, so as to feed the wire through.

"About?" I spun the wire around each dial.

"Dropping out." She leaned against the machine's side. Directed her words at the room more than at me, like I wasn't here, like when Michaela—my Michaela—talked to herself. It still didn't quite make sense to me, when I was here, when I wasn't going anywhere.

But she spoke as though to the room as a whole, into the radius of where I was, had been, would be. In the circle of possible superposed places.

"Oh," I said as I pulled the connection taut. "I shouldn't have. Now we're—you're—some paradox like I am. I kind of messed up there."

"Why?"

"Michaela, I did horrible things. You're still mad about that. Don't pretend."

She sighed, dragged a finger through her hair, and looked at me. "I'm not sure it makes sense, but I'm not mad at this version of you. The one that so clearly learns. I'm mad at—"

"—your version of Rory," I finished, because of course, she was.

I had to admit, we weren't different in that regard.

I'd been mad at this version of me all along. Mad at what I'd done. What I'd always do. The infernal endlessness of this loop.

She lifted her chin as her eyes creased. Ever since I'd come in, she'd left it open-ended. The question I knew both her and Rory hadn't addressed, and had been too afraid to ask. The same question I asked myself many times. Is that even possible? Is what's happening even allowed?

Am I alone in this confusion?

Fitting the sensors over the wire, I considered how to bridge the gap between telling time and transcending time. Seeing it and erasing it. Being within and observing it.