Chapter 8: The Hours Before Dawn

I woke in the dark and for several seconds I didn't know where I was.

Not the way you don't know where you are when you wake in a hotel room and reach for a bedside table that isn't there. This was deeper than that. I didn't know when I was. I didn't know who I was. The room was dark and warm and unfamiliar and my mind reached for the landmarks of my life and found nothing. No apartment. No phone on the nightstand. No glow of the city through the window. No hum of the refrigerator. No Edward breathing beside me in the bed.

Edward. Which Edward?

The question arrived like a crack in glass and everything shattered outward from it. I was Juliana West. I was twenty-seven years old. I was in San Francisco. It was 2027 and I had a board meeting in the morning and my wedding was in October and I needed to call Sawyer about the —

No. No, it was not 2027. It was 2100. Seventy-three years had passed while I lay frozen in a box in the basement of a building that had been built on top of me, and everyone I had ever known was dead. My parents were dead. They had lived their entire lives and died and been mourned and been forgotten and their bones had turned to dust and I had not been there for any of it. My mother, who called me every day about the flowers. My father, who asked too many questions about wine. Dead. Years and years and years of dead.

Edward Bartlett was dead. The man I was going to marry had lived a whole life without me. Had he looked for me? Had he grieved? Had he eventually stopped grieving and met someone else and married her and had children and grown old and died thinking of me or not thinking of me, and which of those was worse?

Sawyer was dead. Not dead the way everyone else was dead, from the long passage of time. Sawyer was dead because of me. Because of Freid. No one had known where to look for me. Edward didn't know where I'd gone because I had been ashamed to tell him. So I had simply vanished.

I understood now that I had been in shock. The rooftop, the dinner, the conversations with Helen, the walk with Edward through the neighborhood, the talk about ambition and purpose and how to spend a Tuesday. All of it had been happening on the surface of a frozen lake, and I had been skating along, asking questions, taking in the answers, marveling at the new world, while underneath the ice the water was black and deep and waiting. I had been functional. I had been curious. I had been, to all appearances, coping. And I had not felt any of it. Not really. Not the way you feel something when it reaches the part of you that is not your mind but your body, your gut, the place where loss actually lives.

Now it reached me.

Freid Huffman had taken my life. Not ended it, which would have been simpler and kinder, but removed it. He had reached into the flow of time and plucked me out of it and sealed me in the dark and walked away, and the world had continued without me for seventy-three years, and I had not aged a day, and everyone I loved had aged and died and I was here in this beautiful room in this beautiful future and I was alone in a way that no human being had ever been alone before.

I made a sound. I don't know how to describe it. It wasn't crying, not at first. It was something more animal than that, a sound that came from the center of my body, from the place where the self lives before language gets to it. It tore out of me and I couldn't stop it. I pressed my face into the pillow and I shook and the sound kept coming, and then the tears came, and they were not the gentle tears I'd shed on the rooftop with Helen. They were violent. My whole body convulsed with them. I sobbed the way I hadn't sobbed since I was a child, with my mouth open and my fists clenched and no thought of how I looked or sounded, because there was nobody to perform composure for, nobody who expected me to be strong, nobody who needed me to be the CEO, the founder, the woman on the cover of the magazine. There was just me, in the dark, seventy-three years from everyone I'd ever loved, and the grief was so large it didn't fit inside my body and so it came out as sound.

I don't know how long it lasted. A long time. Long enough that my throat went raw and my ribs ached and the pillow was soaked and I had curled into myself on the bed like something trying to be smaller, trying to take up less space in a world that had no place for me.

At some point I became aware that I needed to move. The room, beautiful as it was, had become a container for the grief, and if I stayed in it I would drown. I got up. I was wearing the soft clothes they'd given me to sleep in. I didn't change. I walked out of the room and down the corridor and through the garden room and out into the night.

The city was quiet. Not silent, it was never truly silent here, there were always the sounds of growing things, of water, of the wind in the living walls, but quiet in the way that a sleeping household is quiet. The streets were lit with a low amber glow that came from the ground itself, warm enough to see by, dim enough that the stars were visible above, more stars than I had ever seen from San Francisco, a sky so thick with them it looked dusty.

I walked. I didn't choose a direction. I went downhill, because downhill was easier, and I walked through neighborhoods I didn't recognize, past buildings I had no context for, under trees I couldn't name. The few people I passed, a couple walking arm in arm, a woman sitting on a bench looking at the sky, paid me no attention. I was a woman in sleeping clothes walking through the city at three in the morning and nobody found this alarming or strange. In my time, a woman alone on the streets at this hour would have been afraid. I felt no fear. The absence of fear was itself disorienting, because it removed the one emotion that might have given me something to do with my body other than grieve.

I walked for what might have been an hour. I walked until I couldn't walk anymore, until my legs ached and my bare feet were sore on the smooth ground, and then I found that I had circled back, the way you do in cities built on hills, and I was standing outside Helen's house, and I didn't remember choosing to come back.

I sat down on the step outside the door. I put my face in my hands.

This is where I want to be precise, because what happened next mattered more than anything that had happened since I woke up. I was sitting on the step and the grief had passed through its violent phase and entered something worse: a flat, gray stillness in which nothing seemed real and nothing seemed worth doing and I could not locate, anywhere in my mind, a reason to stand up. Not despair exactly. Emptiness. I had been a person with a life, and the life was gone, and the person who remained didn't know how to exist without it. I had been defined by my work, my relationships, my plans, my place in a world that no longer existed, and without those things I was not a diminished version of myself. I was no one. I had no idea who I was if I was not the CEO of Lumen, the fiancee of Edward Bartlett, the daughter of my parents, the resident of my apartment with the fourteen-foot ceilings. Those were not accessories. They were the structure, and without the structure there was nothing.

I was sitting there, as close to nothing as a living person can be, when the door opened behind me.

"I couldn't sleep either," Edward said.

He didn't ask if I was all right. He didn't offer to get his mother or make me tea or suggest I go back to bed. He sat down on the step beside me, close enough that I could feel the warmth of his arm near mine but not touching, and he didn't say anything. He just sat there.

After a while I said, "Everyone I know is dead."

"Yes," he said.

"My parents are dead."

"Yes."

"The man I was going to marry is dead."

"Yes."

He didn't add anything to it. He didn't try to comfort me or contextualize it or point out that I had a new life now and new people who cared about me. He just confirmed the facts, one by one, as I said them, with a steadiness that felt like the ground under my feet.

"I was put in a box by a man who wanted to steal my company," I said. "That's why I'm here. Not because of some miracle of science or some twist of fate. Because a man wanted what I had and decided to take it by removing me from the world."

"Yes."

"And he's dead too."

"He died in 2041," Edward said. "Naturally, as far as anyone knows."

"So I can't even be angry at him."

Edward was quiet for a moment. "You can be angry at him," he said. "You can be angry at a dead man. There's no rule against it."

Something that was not quite a laugh came out of me. It surprised us both. I wiped my face with my sleeve and looked at him. In the low amber light of the street, his face was serious and kind and patient, and I thought that this was what it looked like when someone was simply present with another person's pain. Not trying to fix it. Not trying to make it smaller. Just sitting next to it.

"I don't know how to be here," I said. "I don't know who I am in this world."

"You don't have to know yet," Edward said. "You just got here."

"It's been days."

"Days is nothing. You have all the time there is."

I noticed that he'd said "all the time there is" instead of "all the time in the world." It was a different phrase, and I didn't know if it was a 2100 idiom or something particular to him, but it sounded right. All the time there is. Not the boundless, pressurized time of my old life, where there was never enough and it was always running out. Just time. Available. Unhurried. Like the man sitting beside me.

We sat there for a long while in the quiet city with its stars and its soft light and its sleeping trees. At some point I put my head on his shoulder. He didn't move. He didn't put his arm around me. He just held still, and I leaned against him, and the warmth of another person's body was the most real thing in the world.

"Thank you for coming out," I said.

"I heard you leave," he said. "I wanted to make sure you came back."

We went inside. He walked me to my room and said good night and went across the hall to his own door. I lay in bed and the grief was still there, enormous and real, but it had a shape now. It was not the formless terror of the dark. It was the specific, nameable sorrow of a woman who had lost everything and was beginning, in the smallest way, to find out what was left.

I slept. And for the first time, I did not dream of 2027.