“It’s okay. I mean, thank you. Thank you for coming for me.”
“I think it’s safe here, Gaspery. I built a paper trail for you. You should settle in. Meet the neighbors.”
“Zoey, I can’t thank you enough.”
“You’d do the same for me.” （Unspoken between us: I couldn’t do the same for her. She was of a different order from me, and always had been.） “I don’t know if we’ll see each other again,” Zoey said.
Had we ever hugged before? I couldn’t remember. She clasped me close for just a moment, stepped back, and was gone.
I was alone in the room, but alone wasn’t a strong enough word for it. I knew no one in this century, and the fact of having been through this before did nothing to assuage my loneliness. I had a deranged moment of wondering how Hazelton was doing, then remembered that my cellmate would have died of old age by now.
I went to the window, in a daze, and looked out at a sea of green. The farm reached almost to the horizon, field upon field with agricultural robots moving slowly in the sunlight. In the far distance, I saw the spires of Oklahoma City. The sky was a dazzling blue.
5
The farm was owned and run by an older couple, Clara and Mariam. They were in their late eighties and had been here all their lives. They were pleased to have a well-paying boarder, they told me that first night, over a dinner of quiche and the freshest salad I’d tasted in decades, and they would ask me no questions. They respected privacy above all.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Your sister left us some identity paperwork for you,” Clara said. “Birth certificate and such. Shall we call you by the name on the paperwork?”
“Call me Gaspery,” I said. “Please.”
“Well, Gaspery,” Clara said, “should you ever have need of your documents, it’s all in that blue cabinet by the hallway door.”
I didn’t leave the farm at all those first few years, but I feared that eventually I’d have to. When Mariam fell ill, Clara drove her to the hospital, but who would drive Clara? They were nearing ninety. My first case at the Institute involved a doppelg?nger, Ephrem had told me once, in another, unfathomable life. According to our best facial-recognition software, the same woman appeared in photographs and video footage taken in 1925 and 2093. Whenever I imagined leaving the farm, I imagined surveillance cameras picking up my face and setting off alarms through the centuries, a Time Institute agent arriving to investigate, a cascade of horrors. I spoke with Clara, who made discreet inquiries with a neighbor, who had a friend with useful contacts, and a short time later I was lying on my back on the farmhouse kitchen table, undergoing laser facial resculpting and iris recoloring.
When the sedation wore off and I sat up, the surgeon was gone.
“Whiskey?” Mariam asked.
“Please,” I said.
“You look completely different,” Clara said. She passed me a mirror, and I gasped.
I did look completely different. But I recognized my face.
6
Later that month, I found the violin. It was very old, and in a box at the very back of the hall closet; Mariam hadn’t played it in years. Clara arranged for lessons from a neighbor.
“She goes by Lina,” Clara said, on the drive over. “She’s been playing violin all her life, in my understanding. Came here in much the same manner as you, if you get my drift.”
I glanced at her. She was ninety-two that year, but her profile was still strong. Her eyes were unreadable.
“I had no idea,” I said. There must have been a note of reproach in this, because Clara fixed me for a beat or two in her calm gaze.
“You know I believe in privacy,” she said. “So does she, by all appearances. She’s barely left that farm in thirty years.”
We pulled up at the neighboring farmhouse—a gray cubist monstrosity that could have served as a hotel—and I was thinking of Zoey’s words when she left me here, four years ago now—You should settle in. Meet the neighbors—and wondering why I’d never been able to properly apprehend anything she’d ever said. I stepped out of the truck into glaring sunlight.
The front door opened, and the woman who stepped out was around my age, early sixties.
“Good morning, Gaspery,” Talia said.
7
“Your sister probably got me out just in time,” Talia told me. “She came to the hotel one night, must have been right after she got out of prison, and told me the police had opened a file on me, something about repeating classified information.”