“Okay, fine,” Matt said. “Yes, I built the compass, and yes, it was incredible, but I had something to go off of. I’d already seen it. I knew it could work, so it was like a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Jia threw up her hands. “So is this! You’ve already seen yourself disappear and reappear, so you know you can do it!”
“But I was much older when I saw myself do it. Maybe it takes years and years to learn. Maybe I won’t be able to do it until I’m, like, fifty.”
“I think you could do it right now if you wanted,” Jia said. “In fact, I think you’ve already done it before, and you didn’t even know it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about your seizures. You once told me that doctors never could find any reason for them, right?”
Memories suddenly flooded Matt’s mind—the antiseptic smell of hospitals, the prick of needles, drawing blood, brain scans, endless waits, and nurses giving him stickers. In his memory he was all alone, but that couldn’t be right. Someone had to have taken him to the hospital—his mother or father—but he couldn’t remember. He wasn’t even sure he had a mother or father. “Yeah, so?”
“So, maybe they couldn’t find anything wrong with you because there’s nothing actually wrong with you,” Jia said. “Maybe your seizures aren’t really seizures, but something else entirely.”
“I’m not following.”
“You haven’t seen yourself having a seizure, but I’ve seen it. Twice. I’m telling you, you don’t just shake and twitch. You flicker in and out like a shorted lightbulb. It’s like your body is trying to do something it knows it can do, but your brain doesn’t yet, at least not on a conscious level, so it fights it. Remember when you blacked out when we were in Nowhere in No Time, and when you came back you were convinced you had traveled, but none of us had seen you travel? What if you did travel, but it happened so quickly we just couldn’t see it for what it was. You were just . . . flickering.”
Matt considered this. He had never understood how he had traveled in that moment when he’d gone to see Quine in the future. At the time he thought maybe Quine was the one who had manipulated it all, but Jia’s hypothesis was pretty interesting. He felt she was probably on to something here. He did feel like he was having some kind of out-of-body experience when he had his seizures. The problem was, he hadn’t done any of it on purpose. It had just happened. He had no control over when his seizures happened or how long they lasted. He explained all this to Jia.
“Have you noticed any pattern to your seizures?” Jia asked. “Like when they come on?”
“They usually occur during moments of high stress or excitement,” he said. “Like when I get an adrenaline rush.” It was one reason why his mom had been a bit of a helicopter parent toward him in particular, always making sure he was calm and safe. He was more likely to have a seizure and black out if he was anxious or scared.
“Maybe your seizures are some kind of fight-or-flight response,” Jia said, “but much stronger, so your body loses control? But what if you could learn to control it?”
“It’s an idea,” Matt said. “But how are we supposed to test it—put me under a lot of stress or something?”
Jia looked like she was thinking just that. He could almost hear her brain coming up with all the ways she could torture him and make him have a seizure.
“Look, let’s not worry about it,” he said. “I’ll figure it out eventually, won’t I? You said it yourself. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. So it will happen when it happens.”
Jia nodded, but still she was frowning. He didn’t like the look on her face at all.
Later, when he was alone, Matt tried to make himself dissolve, just as he had seen Quine do before. He tried to focus on his body, produce that feeling when he was having a seizure. He always thought of it as a fuzzy feeling, but also jarring, like he was being tossed around a room, hitting walls. Maybe that was his brain fighting it. If he could relax himself into it, maybe he could make himself disassemble the way Quine did.
Come on, he told himself. Break apart!
He felt nothing, except maybe a bit silly for trying to make himself disappear with nothing but the power of his mind. He was smart. He’d even concede he was a genius, but he wasn’t a freaking superhero in a comic book.
Comic books . . . someone he knew once really liked comic books. . . . Matt felt a tug somewhere in his chest, and a small voice in the back of his head saying, Don’t let go!
But it was getting harder to hold on. (Hold on to what?) Throughout that day and into the next, the fog in Matt’s brain only thickened. His memories continued to unravel. Some memories remained sharp and clear, like his favorite ice cream flavor (mint chip), the periodic table, and the first time he met Jia on the Vermillion. But other things were in a shadowy haze. More and more of the threads of his memory seemed to be disintegrating, along with the bits of time tapestries he kept with him at all times. He couldn’t remember exactly where they’d come from, but when he held them in his hand he felt the fog lift ever so slightly, and he remembered that he had a brother and sister. (Or was it two brothers or two sisters? And what were their names? Connie and Ruben? Rudy and Casey?)
The morning after his mother had left (Was she really his mother? Why did she leave him?), Jia brought up Alfred Nobel
