Matthew grabbed the map and raced out the door. He hailed a taxi. Checking the coordinates he saw that it was in the theater district. He found her at Les Misérables. She was with a group of people, all of them dressed up, but she perhaps more than any of them. She was wearing a red dress. She looked stunning, like a movie star. Lots of people looked at her, but she didn’t look back at any of them. She was clearly with someone. A handsome man who had a hand around her waist in an extremely possessive manner. Matt’s heart sank. Had he been a fool obsessing over this woman for the past year? She could be married for all he knew. She could have children, for crying out loud.
He almost left, but then she looked up and their eyes met. Matthew started to move toward her. She said something to her friends, and then she turned abruptly and walked out of the theater. Her group followed, and they all got into a limousine. But before she got inside she stopped at the vendor selling hats and T-shirts. She grabbed a Mets jersey, then looked up. Their eyes met again. He could tell she was confused, scared. She knew, just like he did, that something strange was happening, but neither of them knew what, exactly.
“Ma’am, you going to pay for that?” the vendor said.
The woman didn’t say anything. She jumped into the limousine.
“Wait!” Matthew called, running after her.
“Hey!” The seller pounded on the window. “I’ll call the police! I got your license plate number!”
But he didn’t. The limousine didn’t even have a license plate, and seconds later, it disappeared.
The vendor cursed.
“Here,” Matthew said, pulling a twenty out of his wallet. “I got it.”
“Nah, man,” said the vendor. “You don’t have to pay for the thieves.”
“Neither should you,” said Matthew. “Please. Allow me.”
The vendor thanked him. Matthew walked home, his mind buzzing.
It was another year before he saw the mark again. August 3, 1997. As luck would have it, this time it was at the convenience store just down the street from him, which was fortunate as he probably would have missed her had she been anywhere else. When he walked in, he found her stuffing things in her bags. Was she stealing? Matthew found he didn’t care. He thought it somewhat amusing, actually. She tossed items in her shopping bags, cosmetics, creams, snacks. Then she stopped in front of the book section. Ah, a reading thief. Matthew was terribly amused, especially when he saw that what she picked up was a sultry romance novel, the kind his mom would buy and try to hide.
The woman looked up, met eyes with him. Matthew smiled, waiting for recognition to come to her. It didn’t. This struck him as very odd. She had seemed to recognize him before. But then Matthew realized, if she really was a time traveler, as he suspected, it was possible that their timelines were mixed up. While he had seen her twice before now, this could be the first time she was seeing him. And the first time he had seen her may not have been the first time she had seen him.
The woman looked around as though maybe he was smiling at someone else, but there wasn’t anyone else in the store, so she finally looked back at him, staring him down with a bold confidence that Matthew found completely irresistible. She held up the book, smiled, and tossed the book in one of her bags.
Matthew almost started laughing. The woman grabbed something around her neck, a watch of some kind, it looked like. She twisted some knobs or dials on the watch. She looked up at Matthew, winked, and blew a kiss, right before she disappeared.
She disappeared! Into thin air. Matthew ran out of the store, looked up and down both ends of the street, but the woman was nowhere to be found.
Game on, he thought. He was going to get to the bottom of this.
He didn’t have to wait long. The symbol appeared on the map the very next day, this time at the bay. He raced down as fast as he could. He had a feeling this time she was testing him, waiting to see if he would show up. When he arrived, he didn’t see her. But there was a man dressed all in black wearing red Converse. Matthew recognized him. He was the man who had been with the woman that night in the theater. He was looking at Matthew with cold hatred, and Matthew knew he had done something to anger him, though he wasn’t sure what. Sure, he was kind of obsessed with the guy’s girlfriend (assuming she was his girlfriend) but he hadn’t done anything. He hadn’t even talked to her.
“Good evening,” said the man in black in an oily British drawl. “Looking for someone?”
“I was, actually,” Matthew said. “But it looks like I’m in the wrong place.”
“Indeed,” the man said. “The wrong place and the wrong time.”
The man smiled as though he thought something was amusing. He took a step toward Matthew, who had a hard time not flinching or recoiling with fear. He wasn’t sure what it was about this man. Like the woman, he seemed to have an otherworldly quality about him, but not in a good way. Something was off about this man.
“My mistake,” he said. He turned around to leave, only to come face-to-face with two other men. He didn’t recognize either of them, though he was sure he would have remembered if he’d seen them before. The one on his right was a young black man wearing an old-fashioned suit and smoking a pipe, something out of a 1930s gangster film.
