Rewind
I sipped my wine and looked around the room. It was Gail’s and Jared’s new house we were warming, and Gail and Jared loved crowds. Their idea of entertainment was trapping assorted acquaintances to test who clicked and fit together and had a blast. I locked eyes with a girl clutching a wine glass with something green in it, recognizing the resigned discomfort on her face. At least I wasn’t the only one miserable in this room.
“Caleb,” Kurt boomed, waving at me from the sofa. “Come here!”
My misery was about to deepen. Yes, it was that time: the party crossed its apogee, the best snacks vanished, the conversation stalled, but it was hours before people switched to shots. The party needed a boost. And what better boost than Caleb’s little performance?
I downed my wine in a hurry. There was no avoiding it—Kurt had already told his little group about my talent. He shooed away a man with thick lensed glasses, and I obediently took his armchair.
Gail noticed the commotion her brother had created and squealed in excitement. “Everybody!” She gestured for the guests to gather around. “You’re about to witness an act of clairvoyance!”
I stopped wincing every time I heard the word. I despised the act, but a little practice wouldn’t hurt. If I resisted for too long, it could provoke an involuntary episode. I’d rather do it in a cosy armchair than behind the wheel.
“What’s it going to be?” I asked with a placid smile.
“Let’s find hidden treasure!” Gail said, sinking her fingers into Jared’s forearm. “It’s an old house. Who knows what’s behind the drywalls?”
“We just got everything fixed,” Jared protested.
“Can I talk to my great grandmother?” a woman with a high ponytail asked. She came over with Gail and had missed Kurt’s introduction.
“That’s unverifiable,” the man with the thick glasses said. There were always sceptics in the audience. “What did I have for breakfast this morning?”
“My clairvoyance has limits,” I said. “How about what you ate in this room?”
The sceptic winced. “That’s just observance. We need something you wouldn’t know.”
“Remember, it has to stay in the house,” Kurt said.
“Caleb hasn’t been upstairs yet,” Gail said. “What colour are the wall tiles in the master bathroom?”
“No,” the sceptic said. “Where’s proof he hasn’t been upstairs or seen pictures?” Was he cross with me for seizing his seat?
Jared grinned. “He hasn’t seen the old tiles. The tile setters couldn’t get behind the pipes—there are some fragments left behind the sink cabinet.” He turned to the sceptic. “Is that verifiable enough for you, Hank?”
The man crossed his arms. “Not if you’re in cahoots.”
“Oh, let him try,” an older woman with a whiskey glass said. The soft murmur of agreement rolled over the room.
“Do we have a challenge?” Kurt asked, scanning the crowd.
There were no objections. I had hoped they would come up with a task that didn’t involve other rooms, but I sat facing the stairs, the only access to that bathroom. It was doable.
“All right.”
I took my first deep breath.
The room sank into silence. The girl with the green drink stepped back to the window, and people dispersed. They walked backwards and spat wine into their glasses. Champagne bubbles dropped to the bottom, and steam swarmed back into coffee cups. The woman with the ponytail closed her teeth around half of a canapé and pulled out an intact one.
You see, the past wasn’t dead. It was alive, and it was happening—always, everywhere—and I could see it replay in reverse. I stayed still, a fleshless ghost among fleshless ghosts. The past unfolded before me, always silent, always unchangeable. I could do nothing but watch. Breathing helped control the pace.
The party people blurred out of the room, and it brightened. Shadows scurried around, accelerating until I saw nothing but streaks of sunlight on the rug. They appeared, shortened, turned, stretched, and faded away. The rug vanished. I took another deep breath, and the hardwood floor hid its gloss under a layer of dust and a web of scratches. All around me, piles of rubbish popped up and melted away. The white walls flickered to a faded wallpaper. Back by the stairs, the old brown carpet gained a large stain of white dust, and a moment later, a mountain of rubble materialized in its place. I held my breath, and the scene slowed down.
I had been able to see the past for as long as I could remember. Before I learned to control it, the history of any place leapt at me without warning, rewinding its episodes before my eyes. Classrooms filled with hospital beds, shops resurrected from ruins, motorways vanished among trees. A vivid imagination, my parents used to say until I learned not to mention it anymore. Even Kurt didn’t know. He thought staring into space and producing lucky guesses was my innocent quirk, but I’d rewinded past in so many places that nothing remained of my innocence.
I had seen everything over the years: violence, pain, and madness; blood and dead bodies and gut-wrenching gore. Every kink, every appalling and revolting act, I had witnessed it all. But I had seen joy and love and wonder too, and little pockets of quiet comfort that made life bearable. Nothing surprised me anymore.
I craned my neck to see the rubble better, fully aware I was craning my neck in the present. My audience would see it as a part of the performance. I walked to the stairs, careful not to bump into the furniture that remained in the present. That rubble was exactly what I was looking for—a pile of broken tiles. I breathed out and let go, and the elastic band that connected me to the present pulled me back with a snap.
Some might envy my ability to walk into any place and witness its past. But I wasn’t always in control. Spontaneous episodes were nauseatingly disorienting. A blink separated a bench in the park from a battlefield. Thrown into a random bubble of the past, with time ticking backwards, I had no lifeline, no countdown, no agency.
I turned around to face the crowd. Some people seemed impatient, others confused or already bored—it had taken me four minutes to reach back for the tiles. The girl with the green drink no longer looked miserable; she watched me with perplexed nervousness. She would call me a freak if she knew what happened during those four minutes of silence and deep breathing. Not everybody understood that everybody was a freak. Even saints had done something shameful or stupid or embarrassing in their life. Even Kurt. Gosh, I’d been to his bedroom. When you had watched the past in all its shades, you stopped judging people.
“They are pale green squares with little white flowers at the corners,” I said.
Gail pressed a palm to her mouth to stop a gasp.
“Is it true?” the woman with the ponytail demanded.
“Come and see,” Jared said.
Everybody followed him upstairs. Everybody except me and the green drink girl—only her drink was gone. She avoided me, her distant gaze piercing the sofa. Her ragged breathing betrayed discomfort. Perhaps even an innocent magic act was too much freakishness for her liking. A pity. She was cute.
“Unbelievable,” the whisky-drinking woman was saying, coming down the stairs. She was flushed. They all were.
“This could have been staged,” the sceptic grumbled.
The crowd returned, and I had to endure an inevitable Q&A session. I’d heard all their questions before, and I kept truthful answers to myself. Yes, I could have been a brilliant detective. Or a palaeontologist—except every field required hard evidence, not wild guesses. No, my job had nothing to do with this talent. I liked fixing electronics; it kept me in the present.
The performance was over. The party was no longer in danger: the alcohol saturation had reached optimum levels, and the crowd broke down into smaller self-entertaining groups. People forgot about me and the tiles. I was free to sneak out and go home.
I looked around in search of my jacket. The green drink girl stood by the stairs, hugging it.
“I think that’s mine,” I said, walking up to her. My heart ramped up.
“I know,” she said, smoothing a crease in a nervous gesture. We stood in the exact spot where the pile of broken tiles once was. “Let’s go.”
“Go? Go where?”
She shrugged, her bony shoulder reaching up to a curtain of adorable black curls. “I don’t know. But we leave together. I’m Mia.”
“What?” Did this girl just invite me over?
She stepped towards the door. “This is when we leave.”
My head spun in confusion. “And what happens then, Mia?”
“I don’t know yet.” She turned to look back at the sofa. “But the next time we’re in that room, we’re holding hands.”