Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 96 - Colleagues

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The top of the vintage Marantz 2245 stereo receiver was somehow already unscrewed and removed, lying on the curved gutter at the side of the street. Next to it was a nearly translucent bag of garbage, baking from the heat of a sun that wasn’t truly there. Tabitha heard the buzzing swarm of flies, but none were there to be seen.

The Marantz’s speaker jacks were worn and brittle, and the exposed inside of the unit was caked with dust. Tabitha bent over and blew, dust kicking up in a tiny cloud that caught hold of a breeze and drifted off into nothingness, down toward where the community pool once was. But as she looked down the street, she saw nothing except a void of bright white light and more nihility.

“You’re blinking,” a voice said from behind her.

Turning, she was somehow not surprised to see doctors Sam Hollander and Drake Bitterman, the astrophysics wunderkinds from Princeton and Stanford, who earned their doctorates at MIT and internships at NASA before being snatched up and assigned to Becca Watts at ENH.

They now stood at the precipice of Tabitha’s childhood home, dressed in matching white t-shirts and gym shorts, as if late for cross-country practice.

“None of this is real,” Tabitha responded, nonplussed, and turned back to the Marantz and jiggled at a PVC cap cover that protected the interior power supply.

“Seriously,” Sam said and crouched down next to her. “You’re blinking.”

Tabitha looked up, brushed a tuft of hair out of her eyes, and slid it behind her right ear.

“You look like you’re five years old,” she said to Sam. Then to Drake, “And you look like an old man.”

“And one second, you look like a kid,” Drake said, “and then you’re how we remember you at ENH.”

“I don’t remember you having legs that nice, though,” Sam added, then looked confused. “I have no idea what just made me say that.”

“There,” Tabitha said. “You’re blinking, too. You just got older, and now Drake’s younger.”

“Is that a Marantz stereo?” Drake asked. “I remember taking those apart and reassembling them in college.”

“We assembled ours from scrap parts,” Sam said.

“I did this for the first time as a girl,” Tabitha told them. “You know you’ve both been gone?”

“The black hole,” Sam said knowingly.

“I have no memory of seeing it,” Drake said. “Except I somehow know all about it, like I can see what Sam saw.”

“But I don’t really remember anything,” Same said, “except for being stuck in the back of that car and then tossed into the black hole. But that’s it.”

“That was my car,” Tabitha said.

“You’ve stopped blinking,” Drake told her.

“Do you know what’s happening?” Sam asked. “Are we dead?”

“I’m not quite sure,” Tabitha answered. “The world was flung backward to before you were born.”

“1986,” Drake said.

“That’s right. How’d you know?”

“I have no idea,” Drake answered. “It’s like that number was just floating in the air, and I plucked it out.”

“Interesting,” Tabitha said. “We’ve been stuck there, though. In 1986. For almost a month now, I think.”

“You look like a twenty-year-old now,” Sam observed, then turned to Drake. “You both do.”

“So do you,” Drake told him.

“Why do you think that is?” Sam asked.

Tabitha stood and turned to the house — her childhood home — from the curb where she once procured her first set of magnets from her father’s discarded speakers. He railed at her that night after she used them to attach a note to his computer monitor.

“My parents sold this house while I was in college,” she said. “They moved to San Diego, and I rarely saw them after that. It was like they were done with me.”

“It was the opposite for me,” Sam said. “I moved out for college and rarely went back home.”

“Me either,” Drake said.

“I never wanted to be anything other than a scientist, but my parents never understood why,” Tabitha said.

“So what now?” Sam said and spun around, taking in all the whiteness. “What do we do here? In this place?”

“I’m not sure I could stay here,” Tabitha said. “But I’m not sure I can leave.”

As she spoke the words, Sam and Drake disappeared as if they’d never been there.

Tabitha shook her head and sat once more on the curb, prodding aimlessly at the insides of the Marantz 2245.