Time Share

Kelvin’s watch played “Waltzing Mathilda” like a dirge. He glanced down at it as his fingers flew over his keyboard, causing a couple of typos. A countdown was displayed on the watch’s face. The digits flashed red: 00:10:00. He had ten minutes to finish up what he was working on and report to the public freezer. He wrapped up the letter he was writing and made sure it was filed where his replacement would find it. The computer, tied into the same alarm system as Kelvin’s watch, beeped twice and then warned him that it would be shutting down, to ensure he made it to his appointment on time.

Kelvin stood up and glanced around his office. Its walls were bare; he had taken down the framed pictures of his mother and father and his diploma from the school of engineering and locked them in the drawer the company had reserved for him.

He knew he would have to run to make it on time, but he couldn’t help unrolling his blueprints one more time, just to see if he missed something. It wasn’t likely. He had been planning and drafting the tower now for almost five years. If it hadn’t been for the construction delays the foundation would have already been laid. Instead, Kelvin had to go put himself at the mercy of the freezer techs and miss out on the birth of his baby.

He rolled up the plans, set them on the desk, where they lay alone except for the computer terminal, and hurried out the door. As he ducked into the freezer office, a secretary glanced up at him, mumbled something into a phone, and then stood to greet him. “We’re glad you made it, Kelvin,” she said.

“Wouldn’t miss it,” said Kelvin without much conviction. “I take it my appeal for an extension didn’t go through.”

“It went through,” said the secretary. “It was rejected. If you’ll just follow me, now. Your tube is ready for you.”

His tube was only one out of a couple hundred thousand that were housed at the center of town. There were other facilities scattered in the suburbs, but none were so large. The secretary took him through a hissing labyrinth of blue-tinted glass barrels, brushing through a film of liquid steam that carpeted the concrete floor.

Kelvin’s pod was open and waiting when they reached it. A pair of technicians were standing nearby, organizing their tools. “See you in the future,” said the secretary. Kelvin gave her a weak smile. As he crawled into the tube, he felt two distinctly different emotions: one was a dark comfort at being returned, in essence, to the womb from which he would be born again; the other was a stinging regret at leaving his project behind, like that of a father who is not all bad but still abandons his children.

Like such a father, he hoped he would dream about his baby, with its cantilevered sculpture of a frame, its thin spires, its glasswork lobby and refraction panels. The technicians shut him in. He closed his eyes.

To Kelvin, it seemed that only moments passed — rather, he felt as though the moments he could sense where the only ones that mattered, for they carried bright images, fading to dull colors, and a sound of hammers. There were other seconds in between these, but they were thin and ephemeral, and left no trace of their passage.

When he woke up, it took him a few seconds to realize he was using his eyes and not his imagination. His throat was so dry he could hardly swallow. A technician let him out of the tube and handed him a squeeze bottle of water. “Welcome back,” said the tech.

Forty years had passed.

* * *

As he left the facility, a secretary, a different one than had welcomed him, said, “Your shift is over in eight years, sir.”

“Only eight years?” said Kelvin.

“Yes, sir. I’m sorry. It was a change made a couple years ago, based on new census information.”

“Oh,” said Kelvin. “Can you call me a cab?”

“Certainly, sir.”

Kelvin sprawled in the back seat of the cab and dozed throughout the drive. His accounts had all been frozen during his time off-duty — no interest could accrue for the sleepers — but he still convinced himself that, after a few decades, he could splurge on a leisurely, fifty dollar cab ride. “Take me downtown,” he told the driver. He wanted to see his tower, sparkling on the bayside.

His drowsiness melted away as the buildings of the city center began to line the streets like cliff walls. He slid from side to side of his seat, peering first out one window, then the other, eager to catch the first glimpse of his years’ work. Everything had risen higher during his sleep, and his hopeful sightline never reached more than a block or so. He gave the cabbie the exact address and tried to calm the butterflies in his stomach. He felt, he imagined, the same way a father might just before his son’s piano recital — nervous, and impotent to change the feeling.

“Here you go,” said the driver, settling the car into park. “Fifty-four fifty.”

Kelvin peered out the window. It was his tower, he had no doubt about that. His heart sank. If it was his son, it was prodigal, and scarred. He got out of the cab and tilted his head up. The shapeless monstrosity had almost none of his original design. The basic shape was the same as on his meticulous drafts, but the materials were coarse gray and weather-scarred. The elegant cantilevers had been shoved closer together to take up less space. Worst of all, it was dwarfed on either side by equally imposing, misshapen spikes of workman’s concrete.

By the time Kelvin reached what was once more his office, his fare was over a hundred bucks. He paid it, grudgingly, after haggling off the spare cents. He trudged up the stairs, greeting the few familiar faces whose shifts overlapped his own, and kicked open his office door.

The space was immaculate, as clean as he had left it. There was a stack of plans on the desk, next to the computer terminal. He unrolled them and took a look. The guys on the other shifts had given him a lot of work. He read the note from his immediate predecessor, who wrote at length about the sorry state of the country and its continuing population explosion and the necessity of egg-crate architecture. Kelvin’s task, at least for the next year, was to figure out how to build adequate housing on swampland.

There was another note waiting for Kelvin. It was from his immediate successor. It read: Sorry about your tower. Nothing I could do. Materials too unstable.

“It was already approved, you son of a—” Kelvin began, terminating the curse with his fist against the desk top. He had never met the guy, but he imagined him to be short, pudgy, and a nose broken flat like an ape’s from having been punched so many times.

Kelvin spent the next few days catching up on the changes in building codes, and the corresponding nights behind shots of whiskey in a bar that should have had a good view of his tower.

* * *

He spent the next seven years gradually forgetting that his design had been hijacked, or, indeed, that he had ever worked on a tower at all. Towers were for journeymen; the real talent lay in bridges. They were arcs of steel, frozen gunshot trajectories that were as difficult to frame and freeze as a bullet’s path. Towers were dull, stupid things that sat in one place like warts on a city’s face. Towers were evidence of stagnation; bridges were calls to motion.

As luck would have it, Kelvin’s shift was going to end before the workers could begin construction on his bridge. It was going to be three-pronged, connecting the shores of the bay at three points with an intersection in the middle. It would take two years to build; but before the first pylons could be sunk, Kelvin had two more years of bureaucratic planning to get through: committees of barely unfrozen council members, round-table design discussions — everything moved at the speed of a glacier in this new world of offset lives.

Two years of planning, though Kelvin. Of which I will only be awake for one.

His motivation started to wane; he spent more time away from the office, walking in the park that would be pushed aside to make way for his bridge, drinking to a pleasant buzz in his neighborhood bar, breathing in warmth from the sun in the barely-recognized hope that it would give him comfort during the long night.

One evening, six months before his shift was over, he met Tilda in line at the post office. “Hold this until I come back,” she said, handing a package over to the teller.

The teller started his spiel. “Any foodstuffs, breakables, perishables—”

“Trashy romance novels,” Tilda interrupted. “My husband will wake up, soon, and he doesn’t like me reading them.”

At the word “husband,” Kelvin’s heart sank a little. Nevertheless, he said, “You guys got put on different shifts?”

Tilda turned to look at him. She had brown eyes, like his, and looked half-asleep. “Yeah,” she said. “And that’s not the worst of it. Our son got stuck on yet a different one. He’s out in six months.”

“Me, too,” said Kelvin.

Tilda paid the teller to hold her stash, and then turned back to Kelvin. “I don’t suppose you need some baby-sitting money,” she said.

“I don’t suppose you’d like to have coffee,” said Kelvin.

They sat outside at a little shop across the street from the school where Tilda’s son went. “His name is Todd,” she said. “He wants to be an architect when he grows up.”

Kelvin smiled and said, “Is your husband coming on duty, soon?”

“He comes on right as Todd goes off,” she said. “At least we get to share some overlap, but he hasn’t ever seen his son.”

“That’s got to be rough,” said Kelvin. “Why were you getting rid of your books so far in advance?”

“I’m an absent-minded professor,” said Tilda. “I’m always forgetting to do things, or waiting until the last minute. When I was a kid in high school, I’d always let my homework slip. I ended up scribbling away just furiously before the first bell. So, once in a while, I remember to write a list, and then I overcompensate and, well, do stuff six months in advance.”

“I guess six months isn’t that long,” said Kelvin.

“One-sixteenth of your shift, now,” said Tilda.

Across the street, the school’s bell rang and kids stampeded out the front door. Tilda stood and waved and a young, blond-haired boy scampered over the crosswalk without looking both ways. Tilda frowned at him, but didn’t say anything. “He’s got a learning disability,” she muttered to Kelvin, before bending down to give him a hug. “Todd, honey, this is Kelvin.”

“Hey, Todd,” said Kelvin. “Want to design a tree house with me?”

“Yes,” said Todd. They drew on napkins with Tilda’s lipstick, and Kelvin taught the kid about triangles while Tilda watched. When they were finished, Todd clutched the mess of rags in his fingers and said, “Can we build it, mom?”

“I don’t think there’s time, honey,” said Tilda.

“My project’s on hold for, well, a few decades anyway, for all it matters to me. I can help you build a tree house.”

“We’ll need some trees,” said Tilda.

“No problem. There’s a park near where I live. We can build it there, as a public service.”

Todd thought that was the perfect idea. Kelvin walked the two of them back to their apartment, while Todd pointed out all the triangles he could see.

“I’m glad I met you,” Tilda said before she shut the door.

* * *

Months passed, and Kelvin came to visit Tilda and Todd frequently. One night, toward the end, Tilda had lit a fire and put Todd to bed before Kelvin came over. She poured him a glass of wine and they sat together on the couch, watching the flames burst and die. “Our lives used to be like that,” said Tilda. She nestled her head against his shoulder.

“Never,” said Kelvin. “We’ve never died so easily.”

Tilda sat up, set her glass on the end table, and reached for a tissue. Kelvin hadn’t noticed she was crying. He waited until she had composed herself and settled her weight against him. He stroked her hair and began to hum “Waltzing Mathilda” low in his throat. He felt her breathing even out and couldn’t begin to guess what sorts of sparks were flying through her brain, less than an inch beneath his fingers.

“It’s getting late,” he said.

“It’s not too late,” she replied.

She took him to her room and asked him to undress in the master bath. When he came out, all the lights were on, and every picture frame she owned was face down or turned against the wall. When they came together it was kind of like flames: the same short life, same little death.

Afterward, Tilda lifted a picture of her and her husband and righted it on the bedside table.

“That’s him, huh?” said Kelvin.

“Yeah, that’s him,” said Tilda. “He works for one of the architectural firms in the city. Todd wants to be just like his daddy.” She brought to covers right up to her nose, and Kelvin wondered if she were crying again.

“What happened to his nose?” asked Kelvin.

“He broke it twice playing tennis,” said Tilda. She started to giggle, and Kelvin joined in, for his own reasons. “He never took the breaks to the emergency room. Said it was a waste of time.”

Kelvin kept right on laughing. The next day, hand-in-hand with Todd, he went to the freezer.

* * *

When he woke up again, Kelvin wondered what would happen if the government decided to change the shift hours while he was out, and keep him in the tube for an extra decade or so. He wondered if he’d notice.

Todd woke up with him and they went together back to Kelvin’s apartment, as he and Tilda had agreed. Tilda wouldn’t wake up for another five years.

Kelvin and Todd went grocery shopping, and then Kelvin set Todd in front of the television while he checked up at the office. The familiar pile of projects was waiting for him, as well as an update on the status of his bridge. As it turned out, construction had been passed through the committees speedily, due to complaints of traffic congestion all around the bay.

Kelvin’s successor had left him another note. It read: Made some improvements. All to specs. Thanks for watching my son.

Where before the bridge had been three arms, now it was sixteen, like two spiders huddling together, connecting webs of pavement through the efforts of their legs.

Kelvin strolled back to his apartment. He saw a headline on the newspaper of a man waiting for the bus. It said that the government was considering cutting shifts down to six years, to allow for the continued population growth. Six or sixty-six, mused Kelvin. It’s not the time that we measure. It’s the people and the projects.

Todd was still sitting in front of the television. “Come on, son,” said Kelvin, switching off the set. “It’s a great day. Let’s go for a walk.”

“Can we check on my tree house?”

“Sure thing,” said Kelvin.

The park had been bisected by the construction of the bridge, but Todd’s tree house was still in place, barely. Some official had posted a warning sign, cautioning children that no medical attention was on hand to treat broken bones resulting from falling out of the poorly-maintained structure. Todd tried to climb into it and slipped down the bark. “We’ll build another one,” said Kelvin.

He steered them up to the bridge. It wasn’t made for pedestrians, since the closest connection point was miles away, but there was a small access path for maintenance. With cars streaming by them, Kelvin led Todd up the walk. The bridge was so large it had its own horizon, and they had gone almost a mile before Kelvin brought them to a halt. “Would you look at that,” he breathed. The webs of pavement and steel cut triangles of shadow into the bay’s cold water. While Todd counted them, Kelvin braced himself against a chilly wind and watched the ebb and flow of traffic.

“There’s too many,” said Todd, after a while.

“It looks kinda messy, doesn’t it?” said Kelvin. “They just made the connections where they could, I guess. Your dad, he’s not much for art.”

“I still like my tree house,” said Todd.

Kelvin smiled. “Let’s go draw you up another one.”

As they left the bridge, Kelvin was careful to keep Todd’s eyes away from the dedication plaque he had seen on one of the bridge’s pylons when they started their walk. It read: For a city of people who will never meet. For my son, Todd, whose bridges will all be built for him.

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