Page 86 of Middlegame

Roger laughs, thin and pained. “I can be a dumb-ass sometimes, and I can be an asshole sometimes, but I’ve never been stupid enough to run away from you forever. He’ll come. I’ll come. And then you can make it so this version of me never exists, because I won’t have to. You can change the math.”

Dodger is quiet for a moment, taking that in, along with the distant sound of gunfire. Finally, she asks, “Am I with you, in the future?”

“You are.”

“What am I like?”

“Lonely.”

It’s just one word, but it encompasses so much, like an equal sign finishing the equation. Dodger closes her eyes, wishing she could treat the gesture the way she so often has: as an excuse to reach out and not be alone anymore. She knows she can’t. Future-Roger is outside of her range, and present-Roger needs her to leave him alone if he’s ever going to let her back in. That doesn’t make the emptiness of her own skull any easier to bear.

“That makes sense,” she says. “Tell her I’m going to make it better for us. I’m going to wait for you. I’m not going to give up.”

“That’s all I needed to hear.”

There’s a finality in his voice. Cold terror grips her, and she knows, without question, that he’s about to hang up: that their brief connection, whatever it is or was or will someday be, is coming to an end. She also knows that when he hangs up, he’ll cease to exist—either because he’s going to die, or because he changed the equation so profoundly that he can never become. Either way, she can’t let him go without telling him something.

“Roger?” she says quickly.

“Yes?”

“I love you.” They don’t say that as often as they should, because it’s an odd love, philia and agape and distance and time. It doesn’t fit the modern definitions. Neither do they.

She hears him smile. “Thanks, Dodge.”

“She loves you too. Future-me. There’s no way she doesn’t.”

“I knew that. But . . . thank you for making sure.” Then the line goes dead, and she’s truly alone, not talking to the future, not able to reach out to the present.

Dodger Cheswich sinks to the floor, looking at the phone in her hand, and is silent.

ORBITS

Timeline: 14:31 PDT, June 16, 2016 (the present returns).

The younger Dodger stops talking. Silence falls. Finally, awkwardly, she asks, “Are you still there?”

“I’m here,” confirms the older Dodger, the one who exists in 2016, the one who just hit a man in the head with her toaster. She remembers the call now. Remembers the sound of gunshots behind Roger’s voice, and the calm fear that swept through her like ink through cotton, coloring her from end to end with dread.

(She also remembers going back to the house, filling her suitcase, and leaving without speaking to another soul. She remembers thinking that if he was going to turn his back on her, she was going to turn her back on him. This version of events is already going fuzzy, smearing like those earthquake equations. Soon, it will be nothing but a faded “what if?” and not her timeline at all. It should be terrifying, losing a moment that shaped so many years. Instead, it’s soothing, comforting, like she’s putting things back the way they should have been all along. The déjà vu that has haunted her all her life is finally starting to make sense.)

“Okay, cool,” says younger Dodger. Then, in a voice filled with wonder, she says, “I really did it, huh? I called the future. That’s amazing. Do we have a flying car in the future?”

“Thankfully, no,” says older Dodger. “Can you imagine some of the drivers we know with flying cars? Can you imagine Roger with a flying car? We’d all be dead inside the week.”

Younger Dodger laughs. “I guess that’s true,” she says. “I want to ask you about . . . oh, everything, but I don’t want to create more of a paradox than I already have.”

“That’s probably smart,” says older Dodger. “If I told you about my life, it might change the things you’d do, and then I might never exist at all.”

“Better not to risk it.”

“Exactly.” She needs to exist. It’s not selfishness or self-preservation that puts that thought in her head: she needs to exist because she’s the version of herself with an unconscious man on her kitchen floor. She’s the version someone wanted to kill. She can’t risk becoming someone more trusting or less isolated. What if she’d been a mother, and he’d taken one of her children hostage? What if she’d had pets? What if she’d been a little fonder of lighting up in the afternoons, and had come home stoned and slow? No. This is the version of her that can survive the situation at hand, so this is the version of her that has to endure.

“I don’t know if I can call you again. I mean, it might not be a good idea, and I don’t have anything else to tell you about. Yet.”

“Call if that changes; otherwise, leave well enough alone, and let this be a one-time gig,” says older Dodger. “It was nice talking to you.”

“You, too. I always wondered how my voice sounded to everybody else.”