little bit rotten. I think you’re going to hate me for the next few weeks until you figure out how to cast me out. I think I love you more than my own arms and legs and I would shorten my already short life by a decade to have you stick around one more year. I think you’re brave as hell for keeping your head up on our journey together into the mouth of hell. I think you’re the most beautiful human being I’ve ever met, and you have a good heart despite how much you’re going to tear me to shreds.”
“I don’t want to see you any more,” Judy says. Her hair is all in her face, wet and ragged from the restaurant’s blast-furnace heat.
A few days later, Judy and Doug are playing foozball at a swanky bar in what used to be the Combat Zone. Judy makes a mean remark about something sexually humiliating that will happen to Doug five years from now, which he told her about in a moment of weakness. A couple days later, she needles him about an incident at work that almost got him fired a while back. She’s never been a sadist before now—although it’s also masochism, because when she torments him, she already knows how terrible she’ll feel in a few minutes.
Another time, Doug and Judy are drunk on the second floor of a Thayer Street frat bar, and Doug keeps getting Judy one more weird cocktail, even though she’s had more than enough. The retro pinball machine gossips at them. Judy staggers to the bathroom, leaving her purse with Doug—and when she gets back, the purse is gone. They both knew Doug was going to lose Judy’s purse, which only makes her madder. She bitches him out in front of a table of beer-pong champions. And then it’s too late to get back to Judy’s place, so they have to share Doug’s cramped, sagging hospital cot. Judy throws up on Doug’s favorite outfit: anise and stomach acid, it’ll never come out.
Judy loses track of which unbearable things have already happened, and which lay ahead. Has Doug insulted her parents yet, on their second meeting? Yes, that was yesterday. Has he made Marva cry? No, that’s tomorrow. Has she screamed at him that he’s a weak mean bastard yet? It’s all one moment to her. Judy has finally achieved timelessness.
Doug has already arranged—a year ago—to take two weeks off work, because he knows he won’t be able to answer people’s dumb tech problems and lose a piece of himself at the same time. He could do his job in his sleep, even if he didn’t know what all the callers were going to say before they said it, but his ability to sleepwalk through unpleasantness will shortly be maxed out. He tells his coworker Geoffrey, the closest he has to a friend, that he’ll be doing some Spring cleaning, even though it’s October.
A few days before the breakup, Judy stands in the middle of Central Square, and a homeless guy comes up to her and asks for money. She stares at his face, which is unevenly sunburned in the shape of a wheel. She concentrates on this man, who stands there, his hand out. For a moment, she just forgets to worry about Doug for once—and just like that, she’s seeing futures again.
The threads are there: if she buys this homeless man some scones from 1369, they’ll talk, and become friends, and maybe she’ll run into him once every few weeks and buy him dinner, for the next several years. And in five years, she’ll help the man, Franklin, find a place to live, and she’ll chip in for the deposit. But a couple years later, it’ll all have fallen apart, and he’ll be back here. And she flashes on something Franklin tells her eight years from now, if this whole chain of events comes to pass, about a lost opportunity. And then she knows what to do.
“Franklin,” she says to wheel-faced guy, who blinks at the sound of his name. “Listen. Angie’s pregnant, with your kid. She’s at the yellow house with the broken wheelbarrow, in Sturbridge. If you go to her right now, I think she’ll take you back. Here’s a hundred bucks.” She reaches in her new purse, for the entire wad of cash she took out of the bank to hold her until she gets her new ATM card. “Go find Angie.” Franklin just looks at her, takes the cash, and disappears.
Judy never knows if Franklin took her advice. But she does know for sure she’ll never see him again.
And then she wanders into the bakery where she would have bought Franklin scones, and she sees this guy working there. And she concentrates on him, too, even though it gives her a headache, and she “remembers” a future in which they become friendly and he tells her about the time he wrecked his best friend’s car, which hasn’t happened yet. She buys a scone and tells the guy, Scott, that he shouldn’t borrow Reggie’s T-Bird for that regatta thing, or he’ll regret it forever. She doesn’t even care that Scott is staring as she walks out.
“I’m going to be a vigilante soothsayer,” she tells Marva. She’s never used her power so recklessly before, but the more she does it, the easier it gets. She goes ahead and mails that Jollibee statue to Sukey.
The day of the big breakup, Marva’s like, “Why can’t you just dump him via text message? That’s what all the kids are doing, it’s the new sexting.” Judy’s best answer is, “Because then my bike would still be in one piece.” Which isn’t a very good argument. Judy dresses warm, because she knows she’ll be frozen later.
Doug takes deep breaths, tries to feel acceptance, but he’s all wrung out inside. He wants this to be over, but he dreads it being over. If there was any other way … Doug takes the train from Providence a couple hours early, so he can get lost for a while. But he doesn’t get lost enough, and he’s still early for their meeting. They’re supposed to get dinner at the fancy place, but Doug forgot to make the reservation, so they wind up at John Harvard’s Brew Pub, in the mall, and they each put away three pints of the microbrews that made John Harvard famous. They make small talk.
Afterwards, they’re wandering aimlessly, towards Mass Ave., and getting closer to the place where it happens. Judy blurts out, “It didn’t have to be this way. None of it. You made everything fall into place, but it didn’t have to.”
“I know you don’t believe that any more,” Doug says. “There’s a lot of stuff you have the right to blame me for, but you can’t believe I chose any of this. We’re both cursed to see stuff that nobody should be allowed to see, but we’re still responsible for our own mistakes. I still don’t regret anything. Even if I didn’t know today was the last day for you and me, I would want it to be.”
They are both going to say some vicious things to each other in the next hour or so. They’ve already heard it all, in their heads.
On Mass Ave., Judy sees the ice cream place opposite the locked side gates of Harvard, and she stops her bike. During their final blow-out fight, she’s not eating ice cream, any of the hundred times she’s seen it. “Watch my bike,” she tells Doug. She goes in and gets a triple scoop for herself and one for Doug, random flavors—Cambridge is one of the few places you can ask for random flavors and people will just nod—and then she and Doug resume their exit interview.
“It’s that you have this myth that you’re totally innocent and harmless, even though you also believe you control everything in the universe,” Doug is saying.
Judy doesn’t taste her ice cream, but she is aware of its texture, the voluptuousness of it, and the way it chills the roof of her mouth. There are lumps of something chewy in one of her random flavors. Her cone smells like candy, with a hint of wet dog.
They wind up down by the banks of the river, near the bridge surrounded by a million geese and their innumerable droppings, and Judy is crying and shouting that Doug is a passive aggressive asshole.
Doug’s weeping into the remains of his cone, and then he goes nuclear. He starts babbling about when he sees Judy ten years hence, and the future he describes is one of the ones that Judy’s always considered somewhat unlikely.
Judy tries to flee, but Doug has her wrist and he’s babbling at her, describing a scene where a broken-down Doug meets Judy with her two kids—Raina and Jeremy, one of dozens of combinations of kids Judy might have— and Raina, the toddler, has a black eye and a giant stuffed tiger. The future Judy looks tired, makes an effort to be nice to the future Doug, who’s a wreck, gripping her cashmere lapel.
Both the future Judy and the present Judy are trying to get away from Doug as fast as possible. Neither Doug will let go.
“And then 15 years from now, you only have one child,” Doug says.
“Let me go!” Judy screams.
But when Judy finally breaks free of Doug’s hand, and turns to flee, she’s hit with a blinding headrush, like a one-minute migraine. Three scoops of ice cream on top of three beers, or maybe just stress, but it paralyzes her, even as she’s trying to run. Doug tries to throw himself in her path, but he overbalances and falls down the river bank, landing almost in the water.
“Gah!” Doug wails. “Help me up. I’m hurt.” He lifts one arm, and Judy puts down her bike, helps him climb back up. Doug’s a mess, covered with mud, and he’s clutching one arm, heaving with pain.
“Are you okay?” Judy can’t help asking.
“Breaking my arm hurt a lot more …” Doug winces. “… than I thought it would.”
“Your arm.” Judy can’t believe what she’s seeing. “You broke … your arm.”
