A few days after the accident, a nurse removes the bandages from my face and hands me a mirror. A troll stares back at me while the nurse says something about cosmetic surgery. When I don’t respond, he leaves me alone to stare at myself. My face aches in the places where shards of rock or glass worked their way under my skin, the pain doubling as I poke and prod the tiny mounds of flesh. I trace my index finger from one intersection where fresh scars meet age lines to the next. My face is misshapen, unrecognizable; yet, inexplicably, I know this monster. I run a hand across my clean-shaven head and watch the creature do the same, never breaking eye contact.
“It was me,” I think. “All along, it was me.”
I reach for a cigarette to calm my racing heart.
When the call comes, I’m in the shower. It’s been several weeks since the accident, long enough for the mechanic to fix my car better than the doctors fixed my body. Not so long, though, that my showers aren’t punctuated with plinks as pieces of gravel and translucent plastic work their way free from my skin and fall with the water to the tiled floor. I haven’t left my house since I got home from the hospital. My days have been a steady stream of reality TV and painkillers. But I force myself to shower daily, even though twisting to wash my body leaves me sore. I know something important is coming, something I need to be ready for when it comes, even if it means ten minutes a day of coughing from shower steam hitting my recuperating lungs.
I notice the voicemail once I’m back in my weathered recliner. My phone blinks an angry red, like it blames me for missing the call. I sigh and tell it to play the message, expecting another diatribe from Brianna. I didn’t tell her about the accident until I’d been home from the hospital for a week. She was furious, screaming at me while choking back tears.
“Reza, why did you wait so long to call me? Why didn’t you call me in the hospital?” she asked, none of the characteristic bitterness staining her voice. For the first time in over a decade, I wondered if there was something there I could salvage, if there was some response to her question I could give that would pull us back into each other’s orbit.
“It didn’t really occur to me,” I lied.
When the bitterness returned to her voice, its edge was keen. “What if you had died? Was I supposed to learn about the accident from your obituary?”
“When I die, there won’t be an obituary. Not in any paper you’d read, anyway.” She yelled, and we fought, and finally, she hung up the phone in anger only to call back the next day and tell me, her voice carefully restrained, that she was here for me if I needed anything. I thanked her, hoping that was all. But she continued, emphasizing that it was healthy for people who’d experienced traumatic events to talk through their feelings, and that different people dealt with trauma in different ways, and…
And I knew, as the restraint drained from her tone, that her phone call wasn’t about me. It was about her.
It was always about her.
That conversation didn’t resolve anything, but that didn’t stop her from calling. After over a week of listening to her play therapist over my protestations that I didn’t care about my own death, I just stopped answering my phone, letting my inbox bloat with message after message from her. But this voicemail isn’t from Brianna.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Hilbert.” The woman’s voice is authoritative, taking compliance for granted. “My name is Perez, with the Southeastern Division of the U.S. Time Travel Department in Atlanta. We have important business to discuss. When you can, please contact me at—” Her message cuts off as I tell my phone to dial her callback number. Perez picks up on the second ring.
After arriving at USTTD the next day, I’m put through several hours of physical and mental evaluations I’m sure I just barely pass. I listen to an endless set of rules and sign half a dozen nondisclosure and compliance agreements.
Finally, I’m ushered into the office of Perez—the only first name she ever offers me is “Agent”—a tall, tan woman with a gray suit and a painfully tight black ponytail.
