In the Same Time, Though

By Julie Hersh

One side of the platform had the regular time. The other side was three minutes earlier. It’d only been discovered recently. Station clocks are inaccurate; analog especially, digital less so, but you can never quite trust them. It was only when they put in the radio-controlled clocks that everyone realized. The time never matched on that side of the platform. People studied the clock, switched it out, looked at its mechanism. The clockmakers were disgraced, then came triumphantly back to business a few months later when everyone realized--no, the clock is correct, it’s the world that’s wrong.

That side of the platform was new--that’s probably when the mistake had happened, when they’d renovated a few years ago. Probably they’d tripped the wrong switch or gotten the wrong piece of metal irradiated with electricity. So they dug up the tiles of the platform and placed new, time-stable ones. They painted the walls yellow, to absorb any extra time. Nothing helped. After a while it was just a thing. The subway platform where you could go back in time a little.

If you stayed there long enough, you could discover everything. There were people who came there and never left. They called themselves rats, to claim their habitat. You could always recognize them: their look of waiting, their refusal to step anywhere near the line. They lived on the platform, on the staircase, on the footholds and insets and ladders within the tracks, in wide spots of the tunnel, in muddy equipment rooms. The station was the hub, their homeworld. But the subways that stopped there took their time from that platform, and most people who wanted to live there lived in the subway cars. They were light, they had seats and heating, they were cleaned out once a day very late at night (three minutes earlier), and they were always moving, the motion making sense with the feeling you had of time.

—

Clifford has been on the subway for a long time. He’s a large guy, with glasses, hair that’s often too long--a barber sometimes comes to the platform, but it’s not a priority--and a yellow sweatshirt. He sometimes showers, in the bathrooms at the end of the platform, but not all the time. He eats whatever food the vendors have that day: sometimes mangos, sometimes burritos. It’s an ecosphere down there, a whole slow city. They take credit cards.

He’s seen everything so far, from embarrassing falls and muddy clothing undone all the way to a death, the person reviving as bystanders pushed him across the barrier. He’d yelled goodbye loudly and then died again. People stood across from each other over the line and yelled, the conversations backward. Playwrights tried to find a sequence that would make sense; audiences watching from both sides. And anything that hadn’t happened there yet would.

The real rats never left. If they did, the theory went, they wouldn’t be in the same three-minutes-ago as before. It changed as people came in and out, life happened and unhappened. What had happened three minutes ago couldn’t happen again three minutes ago. The scientists and soldiers said it didn’t matter, you could jump back and forth as many times as you wanted, but they knew it wasn’t true. By staying they’d give the past stability, be an anchor for time, like it was the coat and they the body that inhabits it. By giving their lives to time, by traveling away from every other concept, time would give them something back. Clifford always stayed toward the middle of the cars; he’d seen people get pushed out by accident.

—

Before he had gone down there, Clifford had thought about the future a lot. He knew that someday he would have people call him Cliff; he’d get muscular, wear black shirts. He didn’t want that. And he also wanted to see things. He wanted to meet all the people in the world. When he went down there, he didn’t think it was forever, or even for a full day. He just wanted to see what it was like. He took the other subway to that stop, feeling it wouldn’t count if it was just the bing of the doors closing that announced his entry into new life. He got out and walked partway across the platform, looked at the clock above him, then looked at the clock across the way. Three minutes. He stepped over. He felt no different. He reset his watch; then the train came and he got on.

He sat down on the one remaining seat, right in the middle of a long row. There was an elderly woman on one side of him, a man in a suit on the other. He said hello to both of them. They pretended not to hear him. He stretched his legs carefully, avoiding other legs. He thought about everything that was going to happen to him here. By the time he remembered to look at his watch, the three minutes had long since passed.

He stayed the day, fascinated by the feeling that he had left his life; and then he didn’t return, and then he still didn’t return.

By now he’d been there a while, a year or something. Besides the time, he liked the life down there. It was bright, somehow. There was always something good to eat and something to look at. The mango slices in plastic cups, the trays of peels waiting to be thrown out. Sometimes a halal cart, venting smoke into the tunnel and gradually heating up the platform; the brightly colored photos of false offerings were cheerful, the gyros handed out in their red-and-white-checked wrappers were cheerful, the talking was cheerful. Everything was always perfect three minutes ago, where you could pretend you knew what had happened.

—

The rats were in a constant fight with the brokers, people who had started out as rats but then took a break for a few days or hours--and then kept taking breaks, to take care of things, shower in a permanent bathroom, cook dinner, change clothes . . . get a haircut, earn some money, read the news . . . At first the rats were okay with that, not everyone could be as pure as they were; these people still spent most of their time in the three-minutes-ago, and they seemed dedicated enough. Some brokers made a point of closing their eyes and not thinking for each of those three minutes, so as not to get any further ahead of anyone else. But it wasn’t sustainable. They started sliding across the border more and more often, faster and faster, to try to miss the moment when the three minutes were lost again. They tried to catch those minutes and add them up, collect them in the outstretched fabric of their shirts. There was never enough time for everyone.

Clifford had known a broker. They’d spent a few circular rides together, learned most things about each other backward and forward, even told each other that there was an evil inside but not what specifically was in it, and then a few days after that, the man left. That’s fine. People leave. But then he came back, said hi to Clifford, and left again. Clifford couldn’t forgive that.

“What do you want?” he asked the next time he saw him.

The broker said, “Time, life, eternity, immortality.”

“For what?” Clifford asked.

“What?” the broker asked. “You’re in exactly the same time they are in. Maybe a little earlier, but it’s the same. I am a vortex. I bring the time across and back, and double-knot it.”

“So?” Clifford asked.

“I’m changing the world, and even time.”

“You’re probably not,” Clifford said, and turned toward the wall.

Luckily Ben looked nothing like him and had nothing good to say about brokers. Ben said it was like they were hitchhiking together, the most intense and important things happen on the road.

—

When Ben got on, Cliff made room for him at the end of the car; they leaned against the same door. You had to stand close to do that, but two people could fit, if they wanted to and if they understood how. The sleeves of your jackets may touch, but your legs must be far away from the other person’s legs. Ben didn’t worry about where his legs were. He had big curly black hair and a denim jacket. When the car emptied they sat on a two-person seat and talked all night, until the commuters started coming back. Then they leaned their heads against each other and fell asleep. When you meet someone you like, for whatever reason, probably for no reason, out of all the people in the world you don’t like, the billions of people you can never like, you never leave them, even if they live on a subway, Ben said. You do that for yourself.

They pretended they lived together, even though they lived with thousands of other people, could only rarely even be in the dark together. Sometimes when they got tired of the constant movement, the constant eyes, they got out and explored their tunnel together. There were places to sit, ladder rungs where it was dark and empty and even sometimes quiet. They hid in the service rooms off the platform.

That was where they met Janie, too. She was from the military. She was supposed to be making a packet of three-minutes-ago that anyone could take with them; it would envelop them like a hypothermia blanket, give them another chance. But she gave it up. She wouldn’t say why, only that time was too true and she needed a break. She was tiny, could fit right between the two of them even on one of those two-seaters. She told them she could never decide which of them she loved best.

Cliff wanted to be there with them, eat mangos, and ignore everything except that sweet yellow forever. He loved it more than he loved Janie, maybe more than Ben too. Ben would sit next to him, put his knee on Cliff’s thigh, lick the mango juice off his fingers. It wasn’t right here. Mangos were almost but not the same as the sun. He missed working. When he and Janie talked to each other about physics they sounded more like lovers than they usually did.

—

“Do you ever want to go out?” Janie would ask them. Late at night, she’d run back and forth down their car, the one they’d taken to be their home for the day. They’d put jars of flowers in the corners, sit on as many seats as they could so the car would smell like them, this fruity, meaty, grimy, soapy smell they all shared. Cliff would be sitting in a corner, Ben somewhere in the middle, and she’d run, swing around the poles, land in one lap and then another, until she’d get tired and lie all the way down on the seat with her feet hanging off the end and her head on Ben’s legs, and Cliff would come over and burrow into Ben’s chest, and Ben would put his arm around his waist to make sure they were all together.

Ben would look at Cliff. “Do you?”

Cliff didn’t. He would never. But he would look back at Ben. “Do you?”

“I want to do something in the world.”

“We are in the world. Better than the world,” Cliff said.

“You know what I mean.”

Janie said, “I miss the dark. I miss not moving when I sleep. I want to shower for longer than five minutes. I want to eat vegetables.”

“We have vegetables,” Cliff said. There’d been bags of baby carrots for sale on the platform yesterday. He found them in one of his huge pockets and gave her a handful. She ate them lying down. Ben wouldn’t take any.

“Do you?” Ben asked again.

“No,” Cliff said, wondering for the first time if there was something that mattered in the outside world, something Ben might need, or give. Cliff didn’t want to leave, so they didn’t leave. But Janie did calculations on the backs of old envelopes, and Ben looked at the people on the other benches.

—

“Can’t we just get out of here,” Ben started saying.

“What happened to ‘You do that for yourself’?” Cliff said.

“I was wrong.”

“So leave,” Cliff would say, holding on hard to a few of Ben’s fingers.

“You both exist, Clifford. You and the world.”

Cliff had thought everything that could ever happen would happen on those subways; all the events and people and things would fall or be dragged there, because this was the place. This was the place. And it might be true, but. But. Something always wouldn’t happen there. He thought his life with Ben and Janie would make a good play, one of those reflected over the line, where their dialogue echoed back and forth, everything said twice in distorted frequency; where you thought you knew what would come next because you thought you had already heard it, but you were wrong; where the people across the line saw the same things, but heard something totally different. Just like him and Ben. In the same place, in the same time, though.

They kept living there, and sometimes enjoyed each other, and laughed, and laughed so loudly that the commuters stared. They got off the subways in the right tunnels and explored, found patterns and different-shaped tiles. Then they would argue at night, then they would put a jacket over all their heads and huddle together and go to sleep in the dark musty warmth. Everything just ends at some point. You get over it.

—

They woke up one morning and Ben had left. They spent days on their subway platform, waiting to see if he’d come back to look for them. If he wanted to find them, he’d know where. You couldn’t see perfectly through the border; better than you could hear, but there was something, a light haze. You could convince yourself that’s why you didn’t see Ben. Clifford hadn’t been so close to the border in a long time. He didn’t want it touching him; he thought even talking through it would be wrong. He looked farther than he’d ever looked before, all the way up to the escalators. He could imagine Ben walking up; Ben seemed like he’d walk, not ride. To feel the sun for the first time in some time. Ben would go up into the world, which he thought was the right place, even though everything in it was terrible.

One of Janie’s former officers came by to ask what had happened to her and see if she had any secrets she could sell them. They tried to pull her off the subway when they left. She wrapped her whole body around a pole, grabbing with her legs every time they freed her arms. Cliff wrapped himself around her around the pole and eventually the officers left.

But they barely spoke to each other anymore. “Why are you still here?” he asked her.

“Because nothing bad can be done here,” she answered. One morning he picked her up and put her over the border himself. His arm felt numb when it passed through and he drew it back after a few minutes, after Janie was done holding it. She sat down next to the border and kept looking in while he left.

—

It lasted only a few more months. Cliff would stand in front of the border, waiting for someone to push him over. He’d eavesdrop twice on all the conversations, smell the food smells and then their distorted cousins. He barely went on the subway anymore, spent most of his nights in the tunnel or the supply closet. More military people had come in. They didn’t get as distracted as Janie. He began seeing people in yellow ponchos on the other side of the line. They flickered. In the bathroom he stole a poncho that someone had left on the sink while they were in a stall. He couldn’t make himself put it on, though. Would he be six minutes behind? Or back in the present (though some found that pejorative--who’s to say what’s the present)? Or somewhere else? It didn’t matter, but he still didn’t try. He used it to cover the subway seats before sitting down, until someone else stole it from him.

And then they turned it off. They claimed it was intentional, but Cliff wasn’t sure. It must have been because of him. Everything finished together. He woke up one morning and felt sick and could tell it was done. The food carts were packing up and going upstairs. He asked what was going on but no one answered. He didn’t cross over the line, though, even though there was no line anymore. People always talked about what happened in the three minutes you weren’t there, when you crossed back over. Those who had done it said it was nothing, taking a step. But he didn’t believe it.

He watched the other rats crawl past where the line had been and go home. They must all have come back to that subway station in order to exit the right way. He said goodbye to them all, and probably to some regular people, too. He was the last one to go. He waited for hours, and then Janie and Ben arrived to pick him up. He walked up the stairs with them; he hadn’t walked that much in a long time. They took him back to their apartment. They didn’t make him cut his hair. They ate salads and slept in a bed together, and grew up.

THE END

Author Bio: Julie A. Hersh is a writer of speculative/odd fiction living in New York. She also works as an editor and practices martial arts. Her writing has appeared in journals including Monkeybicycle, Gone Lawn, Menacing Hedge, Syntax and Salt, and The Swamp. She can be found at julieahersh.wordpress.com and on Twitter at @jahersh.

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