Time Is An Illusion

Chapter 4

Natalie threw the curtains aside.

As clear as a light suddenly flicked on in the thick dark of night, she saw George Carrington Barclay on the green ground of the backyard, lying flat amidst the heady dirt and the crisp grass and the little tiny leaves that nested there. His head lolled slowly from side to side.

In a second, her thoughts whorled and sharpened, whipping in the urgency of the moment. What would she do? She could run and scream for her parents, and the police, and have this all behind her. Or she could try to come to a compromise, a civil compromise, between her and a stranger who did not seem like a criminal at all.

She could close her window and let him escape.

There really was only one option, one sensible, logical, reasonable, right, correct option.

He scrambled upright, kicking. His coat flapped and flew around him. “Wait!” he said, when she began to turn away and run, ready to call out to her parents.

She ignored him and slammed the window down into its weathered sill. The woodwork and the glass shook and trembled as Natalie stamped the lock.

He sprung up then, and said, loud enough for her to hear through the thick pane of her clear window, “Don’t run! I’ll shoot you if you run!”

His face, shining skin marbled and streaked with the dark of dirt and night, was close now. Close enough for the bedside lamp to illuminate the hollows and hills, the dips and crevices of his eyes and eyebrows, the slow upward slope of his nose and the black line between his lips, dead set and severe.

Natalie saw all this with intense scrutiny. Her brain catalogued each detail and evaluated each variable against the question Why, as if the facial characteristics of an individual had, in any way, a say in what the mind said, or dictated, or lost. As if the body could, in any way, restrain one from making the wrong decision. As if there was anything at all to stop the human mind.

She froze. A breath passed. Her chest stopped its loyal, dependable sequence of respiratory-system-ordinaries. In between that breath and that last haaa of her lungs, the hairs on her arms rose up like millions of small flower shoots, and a cold stone sank to her stomach, down, done.

 “I do mean it!” he said, blankly, mechanically. His hand, burrowed in his right pocket, twitched. Perhaps he held the gun there. Probably. Surely.

Natalie wanted very much to say something loud, something insulting and coarse and sharp and memorable, even. But she couldn’t. Her brain was dormant once more, as it had been five minutes ago, when she was wrapped in her bed sheets, between Here and There, nearly gone. It refused to comprehend, because it was easier to live that way. Being oblivious until it was much too late, and again oblivious because what could you do after the moment of action was lost? The truth of the matter was, her brain, at that period of time, was a mindless sheep of a being, and a shameless one, for it had no answer to George Carrington Barclay’s blatant threat.

If Natalie lived, she would no doubt find it unacceptable in later days. If she didn’t, she would no doubt spend many dead minutes thinking of witty comebacks.

Finally, he said, “Well, where is it?”

It took her a while to roll the words on her tongue. At last, Natalie answered, “I won’t give it to you.” It was obvious that this watch was more than anyone knew, for who in their sane, stable mind would go to such lengths to retrieve it otherwise?

All her life, Natalie had dreamed of the day when she would get the opportunity to stretch her whole being for a cause, a rightful cause. She dreamed, like so many others, of becoming someone. An essential part of society, necessary. She dreamed of feeling brave and of having the chance to be brave.