Deep Sky

“You’ll have a lot of downtime in Baltimore,” Bethany said.

“Maybe I’ll head over to Camden Yards. Jesus, Ripken wasn’t even there yet.”

A minute later Travis was thinking about a different baseball player—one who’d done something newsworthy two days before Ruben Ward disappeared. Travis hadn’t remembered the event himself; it was just one of a dozen stories Bethany had pulled from a news archive to help him dial in on the date he needed. On his own he couldn’t recall a thing from within months of that day. Just random flashes of fifth grade, impossible to place in a timeline.

“The game happened on the Friday you’re shooting for,” Bethany said. “That’s May 5. The story would’ve been in Saturday’s paper, probably somewhere on the front page—even in Minneapolis. So you want to pinpoint Saturday and then rewind to Friday night before you drop fully into the memory.”

Travis nodded. He tried to focus on the news about the game. He’d been into baseball as much as any kid in the neighborhood, and would’ve definitely heard about this story when it happened. Almost certainly would’ve glanced at the headline sometime Saturday.

“If you had any real awareness of it at the time,” Paige said, “you’ll remember it when you’ve got the Tap in. Just picture the name in headline print. And that number.”

The Tap was sitting on the table in front of him. Staring at him, in its way.

No reason to wait any longer.

He snatched it up, pressed it against his temple and screwed his eyes shut. Already his pulse was accelerating, before the pain had even begun.

Ten seconds. Agony overwhelming all other feeling. The tendril snaking and darting across the top of his brain. Coiling, advancing, pressing.

Then it was fully in, and still. As the pain ebbed Travis became aware of Paige draped over his shoulders from behind, her cheek against his own.

He went to the couch and lay down. Paige and Bethany sank into chairs and watched him. Win or lose, the outcome was minutes away for them.

Travis closed his eyes. He heard Paige’s cell phone begin to ring just as the world dropped out from under him.

Formless dark. No body. No limbs. Thoughts and memories suspended in the void.

The name.

The number.

He’d barely begun to picture them when the image came up, clear and brilliant as a photo held in front of his face. It was a view of the dining-room table in his parents’ house. Yellow afternoon sunlight slanted in, swimming with dust motes. He saw it all from an oddly low angle, his eyes only a couple feet above the scattered mail at the table’s edge.

On top of the mail, like it’d been set there a minute before, lay a newspaper. Travis’s eyes went to a headline at the lower right corner, just peeking above the fold.

Rose hits 3,000.

The paper was dated Saturday, May 6, 1978.

Travis let the moment begin to slide backward in time. He watched the viewpoint drift away from the table, reversing along the path he must have just walked.

Out of the dining room. Down the hall toward his bedroom. The details were as strange as they were familiar—this was the old house. The little one they’d lived in before his parents’ illicit income sources began to blossom. The one place, at least in his childhood, that had really felt like a home to him. All at once he didn’t want to see its specifics.

He sped up the reverse until it was a blur, his viewpoint surging backward through a firehose stream of imagery he could hardly follow. Crazy bursts of walking movement that felt disturbingly like falling down a well. Jittery spells of holding still with his face over a magazine, or watching TV—he caught shutter-quick glimpses of Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny and Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote. There came a sudden rush of shower spray and soap and shampoo and then a split-second view of his own small face in a mirror, a toothbrush humming in and out of his mouth like a jigsaw blade. A glimpse of his pillow followed and then there was darkness, and the spooky tumble of dream visuals running backward through the night. These sights he could make no sense of at all—trees and fields and hallways and classrooms—and then he was awake again, propped up on his elbows in bed, staring at a book in the glow of his nightstand lamp. His hand flickered up and reverse-turned a page. Then again.

He slowed the memory stream down. All the way down. Froze it.

His field of view took in the book, the nightstand, and the alarm clock at the base of the lamp.

11:57 P.M.

Good enough.

Travis left the image still and waited. Two seconds passed. Three. Then, sensation. Not the soles of his feet but the entire front of his body: his legs and chest and elbows, all seeming to hover at static-spark distance above the bed.

He let himself drop.

The change was so jarring he flinched. On his previous use of the Tap he’d gone back only two years; his body had been indistinguishable from its forty-four-year-old state.

Ten was different—startlingly different—and his size and shape were the least of reasons.

The reasons were everything else.

His senses. The richness of the world came through them like a high. Had he really felt this way all through his childhood? This alive and feral? Had he lost it so gradually he’d never noticed it going away? He took a breath of the humidity coming in through the screen. He tasted cut grass and damp pavement and the pulp stock pages of the book lying open beneath him. A blue hardcover with no dust jacket. He flipped it shut. The Hardy Boys Number 2: The House on the Cliff. He set it beside the lamp and listened to the night. Crickets, katydids, distant tires hissing on asphalt. His hearing had to be half again better than what he was used to. His vision, too, though not in its clarity—at forty-four he still didn’t need glasses. It was more about the depth of colors. The saturation, maybe. Whatever it was, plastic lenses wouldn’t give it back to you once you’d outgrown it.

Beneath all the sensations lay something else, harder to name but more powerful. Some mix of hormones and oxygen-rich blood and uncluttered emotion. The simple, wild energy of being a child. It made him want to swing from the trees. If there’d been a drug to make a grown-up feel this way, it would’ve put to shame all the shit his parents were probably already selling in 1978.

He looked through his doorway into the room across the hall, and saw his brother Jeff asleep in the blue- white glow of his Captain Kirk night-light. Jeff was seven and already a certified Trekkie. Travis resisted the urge to wake him and tell him the movie version was coming out next year.

Further away was the sound of the TV in the living room, cranked down almost to silence for a commercial break. His father had done that all his life, even before he had a remote control. Now the floor creaked and the volume rose. Trumpets swelled and cut out, and then Johnny Carson was talking.

Travis killed the light, rolled onto his back, and lay waiting.

His father went to bed at 1:07.

Started snoring at 1:12.

Travis waited five more minutes, then got up and dressed.

He’d expected walking to feel strange in this body, but it was fine—the same unconscious act it’d always been.

He took his dad’s keys from their hook in the kitchen, pocketing them so they wouldn’t jingle. He opened the silverware drawer, slid aside the compartmentalized tray and found the envelope that’d lain beneath it all through his childhood. Inside was a quarter-inch stack of tens and twenties. He took them all, then returned to his bedroom and eased the window screen from its frame.

The car was a 1971 Impala, shit brown and already rusting around the wheel wells. Travis had actually driven it lots of times—as late as 1984 it’d been pretty reliable. It was parked on the street; there was no garage. He slipped in and racked the seat forward and got his foot on the gas without a problem.

He hit Kmart and bought everything he needed. Bread, chips, cookies, crackers, peanut butter, a twelve-pack of Pepsi. It all looked absurd in its ancient packaging. He got a coil of clear plastic tubing from