The Slipstream Halt

*This one came out darker than I expected. Something about wanting connection when you're not sure you'll be here tomorrow. Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you'd do at the end.*

I retired at fifty-eight and I have been retired badly ever since. That's the honest way to put it, though on the good days I call it "independent research" and on the bad days I call it what it is, which is a man talking to his coffee maker.

My routine goes like this. I get up around six, before the desert heat does anything mean, and I make coffee in a pour-over rig that costs more than it should. I sit on the little patio of my unit at the Slipstream Apartments and I drink it while the sun comes up over the dry wash. Then I come inside and tinker. I spent thirty years writing software for companies that no longer exist, and now I write software for nobody, little tools that do nothing, a weather logger, a script that reorganizes my digital photos by color for reasons I can no longer remember. It keeps my hands busy. My hands need to be busy.

Then, in the evenings, the dating apps. I will admit this to you because you bought the story already, there's no use pretending. A sixty-two-year-old man on a dating app is a study in humility. The women my age want sailboats and grandchildren and men who don't live in a faded apartment complex at the edge of a dying town. I get maybe one match a month. The last one, a woman named Charlene from two counties over, lasted three texts before she asked what my five-year plan was.

"Surviving," I typed, and she never wrote back.

So that's Silas Decker, retired, married once and only once, well supplied with coffee and code and nothing else. I knew everybody at the Slipstream by sight. The manager, Jody Araragi, who also runs the diner in town and treats the whole property like a hobby she inherited against her will. A handful of long-term tenants who kept their blinds down. And then, in the spring, a moving truck, and a woman.

Her name was Lita Ochoa, and she told me she was thirty-four the first time we spoke, out by the mailboxes. She was a physicist, she said, taking a research sabbatical, and she had picked the Slipstream because the rent was nearly nothing and the quiet was nearly perfect.

"Nobody bothers you out here," she said, sorting her mail with quick fingers. "That's the selling point, right?"

"That's the whole brochure," I said. "Jody wrote it herself."

She laughed at that. She had a good laugh, quick and low, and dark hair she kept tied back, and she talked with her hands when she got going. We started having little conversations on her patio, which shared a wall with mine. She grew tomatoes in buckets and she watered them every evening at six, a green watering can, the same three plants, the same slow pass down the row.

That's what I was watching, the evening it happened. Not watching her, exactly. Watching the tomatoes, the way a man watches his neighbor's garden because his own life has no scenery. Six o'clock, the light going amber, Lita in her doorway with the green watering can.

She tipped it over the first bucket and the can slipped. Genuinely slipped, out of her wet hands, and it fell, and I heard it hit the concrete, a bright clanging bounce and then a rattle as it rolled.

Except Lita was gone.

I don't mean she went inside. I mean she was not there. The watering can hit the ground and rolled to my feet and the doorway behind it was empty, and not just empty, settled, like it had been empty for hours. A wind came off the wash and moved a plastic bag against her door. My coffee, sitting on the rail beside me, was cold.

I stood there with a neighbor's watering can in my hands and I did the math you would do. Too much sun. Too much coffee. Sixty-two years of eyes starting to lie to me at the edges. I put the can upright by her plants, watered the tomatoes myself because it seemed the neighborly thing, and sat back down.

I did not see her again until a little past nine, when she came around the corner of the building at a fast walk, in different clothes, a flannel shirt over her tee, looking as if she had been running.

"Silas," she said, before I said anything. "What day is it?"

"Tuesday," I said. "Tuesday evening."

"What time? Exactly, if you can."

"Nine twelve. Why?"

She stopped. She looked up at the sky like it might confirm it, then at me, and something in her face went from panic to a very controlled calm, the kind you build on purpose.

"Nine twelve," she repeated. "Okay. Okay, that's fine. That's actually fine."

"Lita, you dropped your watering can at six."

"I know."

"It hit the ground. I heard it."

"I know," she said again, softer. She picked up the can and held it against her hip. The tomatoes were watered. She noticed that, I saw her notice it, and her eyes went to me and stayed there a beat too long.

"You watered them," she said.

"They were sitting there thirsty. It felt rude."

"Silas." She set the can down and came and sat in the chair next to me without asking, which was unlike her, she was always very neat about boundaries. "What did you see? Exactly. Don't soften it."

"You were watering. You dropped the can. It fell. And you weren't there." I shrugged, because what else do you do. "Then it was nine and you were asking me what day it was, like you'd misplaced a few of them."

"How does it feel," she said slowly, "like it was three hours? Or like it was a second?"

And there it was, the question I had been avoiding all evening, because the honest answer was the wrong answer. It felt like a second. The can fell and then she was walking around the corner, and somewhere in between my coffee had gone cold and the sun had gone down and three hours had passed without my permission.

"Like a second," I said.

She nodded like I had handed her lab data.

"I need to tell you something," she said. "And you're going to decide I'm crazy, and that's a reasonable outcome, I want you to know that up front. But you heard the can hit the ground. That matters. That's the part that matters."

"Try me," I said. "I spent thirty years around engineers. Crazy is a competition."

She laughed, but not the good laugh. The tight one.

"Tomorrow," she said. "Let me check some things tonight, and tomorrow I'll tell you. If I tell you tomorrow and you still want coffee on this patio, then we'll be friends. And if you decide I'm nuts, well, you'll still water my tomatoes, apparently, so either way I come out ahead."

"That's not how friendship works," I said. "You can't just schedule it."

"Watch me," she said, and picked up her can, and went inside, and her light burned past midnight.

She was out at six the next evening, same bucket, same can, and I sat on my patio with my coffee as if I were guarding a science experiment. Nothing happened. She watered all three buckets, put the can away, and came and sat in the chair beside mine.

"Nothing happened," she said.

"Nothing happened," I agreed.

"That's good. That's very good." She pulled her knees up into the chair, which should have looked silly on a grown woman and didn't. "Okay. Tomorrow I'll tell you."

"You said that yesterday."

"I know what I said yesterday." She smiled at the ground. "Yesterday was a long one."

And that's how it went for a week. She watered at six, we talked about nothing, tomatoes and Jody's diner and whether the gas station across the lot had been closed since before either of us was born. And then the eighth evening, the can slipped again.

I heard it hit. I saw it roll. And the doorway was empty, and this time my own clock on the wall had skipped, six forty suddenly become nine fifty without the hands moving, I checked it twice, I stood in front of it like an idiot, and then I did not sit back down.

I walked to her door and I knocked.

She opened it almost immediately, like she'd been standing there waiting, and she looked terrible, pale and steady at the same time, and she said, "You heard it again."

"I heard it again. Lita, what is going on in this building?"

She stepped out and shut her door behind her and looked up and down the walk, both directions, the way people do in movies, and I laughed at her and she didn't laugh back.

"Come in," she said. "And Silas, I mean it this time. Tomorrow is today. I'm telling you now."

"You said..."

"I know what I said." She opened her door again. "I've been saying it for a week, haven't I. Haven't I, Silas?"

I thought about it, and the week got slippery in my hands, seven evenings or maybe fewer, maybe more, and I looked at my cold coffee through her open door, sitting on a table I did not remember her buying.

"How many days have we had this conversation?" I asked.

"I genuinely don't know anymore," she said. "Come inside. Please. I need help, and you're the only person in this whole town who's seen it and stayed."

I stepped inside and her apartment stopped me cold, and not because it was strange. Because it was normal. Books, a couch, a corkboard with string on it, okay, the string was a little strange. But there was a mug in the sink and a sweater over a chair and it looked like a person lived here, which somehow I had not fully believed until that second.

"Sit anywhere that isn't the corkboard," she said. "The corkboard is holding the whole theory up." She pointed at herself. "Lita," she said, "thirty-four, physicist, currently losing an argument with physics. You'll have to forgive my vocabulary."

I sat on the couch. She did not sit. She stood in the middle of her living room with her arms crossed, and then she uncrossed them, and then she crossed them again, like her body couldn't settle on a story.

"Okay," she said. "The short version. This building sits on a temporal fault line."

"A what?"

"You know what a geological fault is."

"I know what it is in the abstract."

"So imagine that, but for time instead of rock. The Slipstream sits on a place where it's thin. Where it slips. The whole complex. The dry wash next door, probably. Maybe the gas station."

"The gas station that's been closed for fifty years but sometimes has fresh tire tracks in the lot," I said, and she went very still.

"Who told you that?"

"Jody. She said it like a joke. She said everything here like a joke, so you can't quote her later."

"Jody knows more than she says," Lita said quietly. "Okay. Fine. Yes. The tire tracks are real, or they're real sometimes, which is worse. Silas, I came here on purpose. This place was in the literature, buried in the literature, three papers nobody could replicate. I'm on sabbatical. Officially I'm resting. Unofficially I'm trying to figure out why time here stutters."

"And?"

"And I found out why." She said it flat, like reading a number off a chart. "It's not a natural feature. Or it is, but it responds. It's got a rhythm, and somebody has to keep it in rhythm, and apparently that's me. I'm not special, I just walked in at the wrong moment. The fault grabbed the nearest consciousness with a stable... it doesn't matter. The point is, when it slips, I hold it. I hold the building in place, temporally. All of us. You included."

"Hold it how? You're a person. You're one hundred and thirty pounds of person."

"About that, thank you," she said, and for a second she almost smiled. "And I hold it anyway. That's the part I still don't have words for. When you heard the can drop, I was somewhere. I was holding all of this together, and it costs me. Every adjustment, I lose something. A piece of the present. Hours usually. Sometimes more."

"Lose it how?"

"The other night I made dinner. I remember starting it. I remember the pan. I do not remember eating it, and there's a clean plate in the sink, so somebody ate it, and I vote it was me." She sat down finally, on the far end of the couch, knees up. "That's the small stuff. Silas, the reason I kept saying tomorrow is that I kept losing the yesterdays."

"How many days have I known you?"

"Spring. You know that. March or April."

"Then how many evenings did we sit outside?"

She looked at her hands. "Seventeen. Give or take. I have notes. My notes disagree with each other, which is its own kind of answer."

I did the math you do, the sane-person math. Seventeen evenings, maybe ten days of calendar. And I remembered writing a message to Charlene, the woman from the app, two counties over, and I remembered her not writing back, and I could not for the life of me remember what day that had been.

"Lita," I said. "I'm sixty-two years old. I spent thirty years in software for companies that don't exist anymore, which, if you want a fault line, look there. I am not an easy scare. But what you're describing, you have to know how it sounds."

"I know exactly how it sounds."

"You're describing yourself as a support beam for reality."

"I'm describing myself as a person standing on a crack with a very heavy door on her shoulders," she said. "The beam image is yours. I like it less."