Flashforward Read online

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  The United Nations Children’s Fund has stepped in to help overburdened national adoption agencies in finding homes for children orphaned during the Flashforward.

  Although CERN was jumping—every researcher had a pet theory about what had happened—Lloyd and Michiko went home early; nobody could blame them after what had happened to Michiko’s daughter. “Home,” again without discussion—none was necessary—was Lloyd’s apartment in St. Genis.

  Michiko was still crying every few hours, and Lloyd had finally found time at work to close his office door, put his head down on his desk, and cry his heart out, too. Sometimes, crying helped make the pain go away; it didn’t in this case.

  They had an early dinner; Lloyd cooked up chops, which he’d had in the fridge. Michiko, clearly wanting to do something—anything—to keep her mind busy, worked on straightening up Lloyd’s apartment.

  And, as they finished their dinner, and Michiko drank her tea and Lloyd his coffee, the question Lloyd had been dreading was finally asked again.

  “What did you see?” asked Michiko.

  Lloyd opened his mouth to reply, but then closed it.

  “Oh, come on,” said Michiko, evidently reading his face. “It couldn’t have been that bad.”

  “It was,” said Lloyd.

  “What did you see?” she asked again.

  “I—” He closed his eyes. “I was with another woman.”

  Michiko blinked several times. Finally, her voice frosty, she said, “You were cheating on me?”

  “No—no.”

  “Then what?”

  “I was—God, honey, I am so sorry—I was married to another woman.”

  “How do you know you were married?”

  “We were both in bed together; we were wearing matching wedding bands. And we were in a cottage in New England.”

  “Maybe it was her place.”

  “No. I recognized some of the furniture.”

  “You were married to someone else,” said Michiko, as if trying to digest the concept. She had such a shock recently that perhaps anything else would have been too much to absorb.

  Lloyd nodded. “We—you and I—we must have been divorced. Or…”

  “Or?”

  He shrugged. “Or maybe we never went through with the marriage in the first place.”

  “Don’t you still love me?” asked Michiko.

  “Of course I do. Of course I do. But—look, I didn’t want to have that vision. I didn’t enjoy it at all. Remember when we were talking about our vows? Remember when we discussed whether to leave ’till death do us part’ in there? You said it was old fashioned; you said nobody says that anymore. And, well, you have been married once before. But I said we should leave it in. That’s what I wanted. I wanted a marriage that would last forever. Not like my parents—and not like your first marriage.”

  “You were in New England,” said Michiko, still trying to deal with it. “And I—I was in Kyoto.”

  “With a little girl,” said Lloyd. He paused, unsure whether he should give voice to the nagging question. But then he did, not quite meeting her eyes as he spoke. “What did the girl look like?”

  “She had long black hair,” said Michiko.

  “And…?”

  Michiko looked away. “And Asian features. She looked Japanese.” She paused. “But that doesn’t mean anything; lots of kids of mixed couples look more like one parent than the other.”

  Lloyd felt his heart move in his chest. “I thought we were meant for each other,” he said softly. “I thought…” He trailed off, unable to say, “I thought you were my soulmate.” His eyes were stinging; so, apparently, were hers. She rubbed them with the backs of her hands.

  “I love you, Lloyd,” she said.

  “I love you too, but…”

  “Yes,” she said. “But…”

  He reached across and touched her hand, which was now sitting on the tabletop. She gripped his fingers. They sat silently together for a very long time.

  Theo sat for a while in his car on the street outside the Dreschers’ home, his mind racing. He’d been shot by a Glock 9mm; he was pretty sure from cop shows he’d watched that the Glock was a semiautomatic pistol, popular with police forces worldwide. But the ammunition had been American; maybe it had been an American who had pulled the trigger. Of course, Theo had probably not yet met whoever it was who would one day want him dead. Surely there would be almost no overlap between his current circle of friends, acquaintances, and colleagues and those who would comprise those groups two decades hence.

  Still, Theo already knew a lot of Americans.

  But none well. None, except Lloyd Simcoe.

  Of course, Lloyd wasn’t really an American. He was born in Canada. And Canadians didn’t like guns, either—they had no Second Amendment, or whatever damned thing it was that made Americans think they could go around armed.

  But Lloyd had lived in the U.S. for seventeen years before coming to CERN, first at Harvard, then as an experimenter with the Tevatron at Fermilab near Chicago. And, by Lloyd’s own admission, he’d be living in the U.S. again by the time of the visions. He could have gotten a gun easily enough.

  But no—Lloyd had an alibi. He was in New England when Theo was—what was it the Americans say? When Theo was wasted.

  Except…

  Except that Theo was/would be killed October 21—and Lloyd’s vision, like everyone else’s, was of October 23.

  Lloyd had told Theo his vision—he’d said he hadn’t told Michiko yet, but Theo had insisted, and Lloyd had relented, although he did swear the young Greek to secrecy. Lloyd had said his vision had him making love to an old woman, presumably his then-wife.

  Old people surely didn’t make love that often, thought Theo. Indeed, they probably only did it on special occasions. Like when one of them had returned from a long absence. It’s only a six-hour flight from New England to Switzerland…and that’s today. Twenty years hence, it might be much less.

  No, Lloyd could easily have been at CERN on Monday and back home in New Hampshire, or wherever the hell it was, on Wednesday. Not that Theo could think of any reason that Lloyd would want to kill him.

  Except that, of course, by 2030, Theo, not Lloyd, was apparently director of what sounded like an incredibly advanced particle accelerator at CERN: the Tachyon-Tardyon Collider. Academic and professional jealousy had led to more than one murder over the years.

  And, of course, there was the fact that Lloyd and Michiko were no longer together. If he were honest with himself, Theo fancied Michiko, too. What man wouldn’t? She was gorgeous and brilliant and warm and funny. And, well, she was closer to his age than to Lloyd’s. Could he have had a role in their breakup?

  Just as he had pushed Lloyd to share his vision, so, too, had he pushed Michiko to share hers: Theo was hungry for insight, vicariously trying to experience what everyone else had been lucky enough to see. In Michiko’s vision, she was in Kyoto, perhaps, as she had said, taking her daughter to visit Michiko’s uncle. Could Lloyd have waited until she was temporarily away from Geneva to come over to settle an old score with Theo?

  Theo hated himself for even considering such possibilities. Lloyd had been his mentor, his partner. They’d always talked about sharing a Nobel Prize. But—

  But there was no mention of a Nobel in the two articles he’d found now about his own death. Of course, that didn’t mean Lloyd wouldn’t get one, but…

  Theo’s mother was diabetic; Theo had researched the history of diabetes when she’d been diagnosed. The names Banting and Best kept coming up—the two Canadian researchers who had discovered insulin. Indeed, they were another pair people sometimes likened Lloyd and Theo to: like Crick and Watson, Banting and Best were of different ages—Banting was clearly the senior researcher. But although Crick and Watson had been jointly awarded the Nobel, Banting had shared his not with his true research partner, young Best, but rather with J. R. R. Macleod, Banting’s boss. Perhaps Lloyd would get a Nobe
l—not for the Higgs discovery, which had failed to materialize, but rather for an explanation of the time-displacement effect. And perhaps he would share it not with his young partner but rather with his boss—with Béranger, or someone else in the CERN hierarchy. What would that do to their friendship, their partnership? What jealousies and hatreds would fester between now and the year 2030?

  Madness. Paranoia. And yet—

  And yet, if he were killed on the CERN grounds—Moot Drescher’s suggestion of a shoot-out in a sports arena still seemed a dubious proposition—then he would be killed by someone who had managed to gain access to the campus. CERN wasn’t a maximum-security facility by any means, but neither did it allow just anyone to enter its gates.

  No, someone who could get into CERN had likely killed him. Someone whom Theo would meet with face-to-face. And someone who wanted him not just dead, but who had clearly vented pent up anger, pumping shot after shot into Theo’s body.

  Lloyd and Michiko had moved to the couch in the living room; the dishes could wait for later.

  Dammit, thought Lloyd, why did this have to happen? Everything had been going so well, and now—

  And now, it looked like it all was going to fall apart.

  Lloyd wasn’t a young man. He’d never intended to wait this long to get married, but…

  But work had gotten in the way, and—

  No. No, that wasn’t it. Let’s be honest. Let’s face it.

  He thought of himself as a good man, kind and gentle, but—

  But, truth be told, he wasn’t polished, he wasn’t slick; it had been easy for Michiko to improve his wardrobe, because, of course, almost any change would have been for the better.

  Oh, sure, women—and men, for that matter—said he was a good listener, but Lloyd knew that it wasn’t so much that he was sage but rather that he simply didn’t know what to say. And so he sat, taking it in, taking in the peaks and valleys of other people’s lives, the highs and lows, the trials and travails of those whose existence had more variation, more excitement, more angst than his own.

  Lloyd Simcoe wasn’t a lady’s man; he wasn’t a raconteur; he didn’t have a reputation as an after-dinner speaker. He was just a scientist, a specialist in quark-gluon plasma, a typical nerd who’d started out as a kid who couldn’t throw a baseball, who spent his adolescence with his nose buried in books when others his age were out honing interpersonal skills in a thousand and one different situations.

  And the years had slipped by—his twenties, his thirties, and now, here, most of his forties. Oh, he’d had success at his work, and he’d dated now and again, and there had been Pam, all those years ago, but nothing that looked as though it was going to be permanent, no relationship that seemed destined to stand the test of time.

  Until this one, with Michiko.

  It had felt so right. The way she laughed at his jokes; the way he laughed at hers. The way, even though they’d grown up in vastly different societies—him in conservative, rural Nova Scotia; her in cosmopolitan, overwhelming Tokyo—that they shared the same politics and morals and beliefs and opinions, as if—the term came again, unbidden—as if they were soul mates, always meant to be together. Yes, she’d been married and divorced, yes, she is—was—a parent, but, still, they had seemed absolutely in sync, so very right for each other.

  But now—

  Now, it seemed as though that, too, was an illusion. The world might still be struggling to decide what, if any, reality the visions reflected, but Lloyd had already accepted them as fact, true depictions of tomorrow, the one unalterable space-time continuum in which he had always known he dwelled.

  And yet he had to explain to her what he was feeling—him, Lloyd Simcoe, the man whom words always failed, the good listener, the brick, the one others turned to when they had doubts. He had to explain to her what was going through his mind, why a vision of a dissolved marriage twenty-one years—twenty-one years!—down the road so paralyzed him right now, so poisoned for him what he’d thought they had.

  He looked at Michiko, dropped his gaze, tried again to meet her eyes, then focussed on a blank spot on the apartment’s dark, wine-colored walls.

  He’d never spoken of this to anyone—not even to his sister Dolly, at least not since they were kids. He took a deep breath, then began, his eyes still locked on the wall. “When I was eight years old, my parents called me and my sister down to the living room.” He swallowed. “It was a Saturday afternoon. Tensions had been high for weeks in our house. That’s an adult way of expressing it—’tensions were high.’ As a kid, all I knew was that mom and dad weren’t talking. Oh, they spoke when they had to, but it was always with sharp voices. And it often ended in choked-off phrases. ‘If that’s the way—!’ ‘I’m not—!’ ‘Don’t you—!’ Like that. They tried to keep it civil when they knew we could hear them, but we heard a lot more than they thought.”

  He looked briefly at Michiko, then shifted his gaze to the wall again. “Anyway, they called us down to the living room. ‘Lloyd, Dolly—come here!’ It was my father. And, you know, when he yelled for us to come, it usually meant we were in trouble. We hadn’t put away our toys; one of the neighbors had complained about something we’d done; whatever. Well, I came out of my room, and Dolly came out of hers, and we kind of looked at each other, you know, just a glance, just a shared moment of apprehension.” He now looked at Michiko, just as he had at his sister all those years ago.

  Lloyd continued. “We went down the stairs, and there they were: Mom and Dad. And they were both standing, and we stood, too. The whole time, we stood around, like we were waiting for the fucking bus. They were both quiet for a bit, like they didn’t know what to say. And then, finally, my mother spoke up. She said, ‘Your father is moving out.’ Just like that. No preamble, no softening the blow: ‘Your father is moving out.’

  “And then he spoke. ‘I’ll get a place nearby. You’ll be able to see me on weekends.’

  “And my mother added, as if it needed to be said, ‘Your father and I haven’t been getting along.’”

  Lloyd fell quiet.

  Michiko made a sympathetic face. “Did you see him much, after he moved out?” she asked at last.

  “He didn’t move out.”

  “But your parents are divorced.”

  “Yes—six years later. But after the great announcement, he didn’t move out. He didn’t leave.”

  “So your parents made up?”

  Lloyd shrugged a little. “No. No, the fighting continued. But they never mentioned him moving out again. We—Dolly and I—we kept waiting for the other shoe to fall, for him to move out. For months—really, all of the six years their marriage lasted after that—we thought he might leave at any moment. There was never a timeframe mentioned, after all—they never said when he was going to go. When they did finally split up, it was almost a relief. I love my dad, and my mom, too, but having that hanging over our heads for so long was just too much to bear.” He paused. “And a marriage like that, one gone bad—I’m sorry, Michiko, but I don’t think I could ever go through anything like that again.”

  10

  Day Three: Thursday, April 23, 2009

  NEWS DIGEST

  The Los Angeles District Attorney’s office has dropped all pending misdemeanor cases to free up staff to deal with the flood of new charges being laid related to looting in the aftermath of the Flashforward.

  •

  The Department of Philosophy at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, reports record numbers of requests for course calendars.

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  Amtrak in the U.S., Via Rail in Canada, and British Rail have reported huge increases in passenger volume. No trains operated by those companies crashed during the Flashforward.

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  The Church of the Holy Visions, begun yesterday in Stockholm, Sweden, now claims 12,000 adherents worldwide, making it the fastest-growing religion on the planet.

  •

  The American Bar Association reports a
huge increase in requests for new wills to be drawn up, or existing wills to be revised.

  The next day, Theo and Michiko were working on setting up their Web site for people to report their visions. They’d decided to call it the Mosaic Project, both in honor of the first popular (but now long abandoned) Web browser, and in acknowledgement of the now clearly established fact, thanks to the efforts of researchers and reporters worldwide, that each person’s vision did indeed represent one small stone in a vast mosaic portrait of the year 2030.

  Theo had a mug of coffee. He took a sip, then, “Can I ask you a question about your vision?”

  Michiko looked out the window at the mountains. “Sure.”

  “That little girl you were with. Is she your daughter, do you think?” He’d almost said “your new daughter” but fortunately had censored the thought before it was free.

  Michiko lifted her narrow shoulders slightly. “Apparently.”

  “And—and Lloyd’s daughter, too?”

  Michiko looked surprised by the question. “Of course,” she said, but there was hesitation in her voice.

  “Because Lloyd—”

  Michiko stiffened. “He told you his vision, did he?”

  Theo realized he’d put his foot in it. “No, not exactly. Just that he was in New England—”

  “With a woman who wasn’t me. Yes, I know.”

  “I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything. I’m sure the visions aren’t going to turn out to be true.”

  Michiko looked out at the mountains again; Theo found himself doing that a lot, too. There was something about them—something solid, permanent, unchanging. He found it calming to look at them, to know that there were things that endured not just for decades but for millennia.

  “Look,” she said, “I’ve been divorced once already. I’m not naïve enough to think that all marriages will last forever. Maybe Lloyd and I will break up at some point. Who knows?”