I smoothed out Crumbling Yellow Newspaper #1647 and wrote down its date: March 18, 2029. CHINA LAUNCHES MISSILES AT JAPAN! IS THIS THE START OF WORLD WAR III?
“World War Three?” I read. “So… there were two others? Two other whole world wars? Tim, put this on the timeline.”
We’d drawn a long, long timeline across one of the solid walls, and when we found something interesting that had a date on it, we wrote it in.
He came over to get the newspaper and I showed him which words to copy. He had all his numbers down, so that was good. “I couldn’t find the Grateful Dead cell anywhere,” he said.
“Put that paper in the Ms. Strepp stack when you’re done, okay?”
“Look—what’s this?” He held out a flat silver disk about as wide as his hand. “It says ‘Adele’ on it.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Is it part of some machine? Hey, like one of those little machines on that table? See if it fits any of them.”
While he looked at the machines, I tossed a menu for Popeyes fried chicken, business cards for a tax service, an ad for a haircut
salon, and an ad for something called a tarot card reader into a garbage bag.
“It fits in this one!” he said, pressing a button. The blast of music startled both of us and for a minute we just stared at each other in surprise. “I like it,” he decided.
“I like it, too,” I said. Soon we were both singing along, and I was tapping my fingers on the pile I was working on. “Send my love to your new luh-uh-ver, treat her be-eh-ehter, we gotta let go of all of our ghosts…”
This was definitely a solid link to the past.
36
BUT EVEN WITH THE MUSIC and the challenge of figuring out the past, this was a boring, dirty job. We were hunched over for hours, shaking dust and cobwebs off everything, reading every last slip of paper or artifact. For each possible clue, we weeded out thousands and thousands of valueless garbage.
One day after lunch I was on the floor leafing through a magazine called The New Yorker, reading its cartoons. I remembered Julie’s diary entry about going to visit her aunt in New York—maybe it wasn’t fantasy after all.
I jumped when Tim tossed an empty plastic cup at me. “We’re falling asleep, because we have the stupidest job ever,” he said. “But we’re not gonna let it make us soft! Drop and give me twenty!”
“What?”
“Thirty!” he commanded.
A week ago, thirty push-ups wouldn’t have winded me. This time I was panting and sweating, my arms shaking when I finished. Then he surprised me by also doing thirty push-ups.
“New plan,” he panted when he was done. “We work for two hours, then work out for twenty minutes. If we get invaded we need to stay in top fighting condition!”
It was a good plan. Maybe his reading was on a kindergarten level, but he had practical smarts.
During our next twenty-minute break he leaped on me and we wrestled hard, using the tricks we’d learned at the Crazy House. Our sweat mixed with the dust and we looked like we’d come from a mining cell.
My moment of pride was when I slammed his head against the floor and he grunted, but my victory was immediately wiped out by him pinning me for the third time. His arm across my neck, one leg holding my body to the floor, he panted, “I miss Becca so bad.”
I went slack immediately, and he let me go.
“I do, too. I know she’s alive, wherever she is,” I said. “I would feel it if she weren’t.”
He met my eyes. “I would, too.”
Later he found another silver disk, but instead of audio, it was video. He messed with it until he got it to play on a blank wall.
It was a biography about a guy who was in a war and then ran a lot and then had a fishing boat. We were so engrossed in the pre-System world that we forgot to bolt the trapdoor after lunch, and of course that was when Ms. Strepp came up with no warning.
“I assume this is you two, working hard?” she asked frostily, her lips turning white from being pressed together.
“Yeah… it’s… showing that some things from the past are the same today,” he said.