Stars Rise

C. One Hundred Years Later Again

One Hundred Years Later.

My daughter Nova sits across from me at a chess board while we both avoid the clock.

We haven't so much as glanced at it for hours, but somehow we both know exactly what time it is. She touches her rook. Doesn't move it. Removes her hand. She's thinking about saying something; eyes read the chess board squinting narrowly. Like the pieces are telling her something. But the game is only a distraction; only we're too distracted to play the game.

We're levitating in the living room in the penthouse. The living room hasn't ever changed, not in my lifetime, so far as I know, but then everything has changed, could have changed, possibly over and over in iterations, I think. Maybe the sofa was cerulean last time I sent Cristo back a hundred years, and only this time is it dark blue. Maybe there are no iterations and that throw pillow was always ugly granite with gold veins imitating stone in a mine but failing to capture any of the beauty in the way typical of most interior decorating.

Maybe it's the same throw pillow every time, or maybe I have the sense to buy a more appealing one sometimes.

Maybe the girl in front of me is always the same: scrawny, bookish, intense, elegant, sitting on the floor legs crossed letting the old man — though I'm forever as old as she is — have the couch, with the long skirt of her white dress hiding her knees and almost her ankles.

But maybe sometimes when I send him back and he kills her and I have to live with it for a century and then send him back again, maybe it takes its toll and she's a different woman.

Maybe I raise her angry sometimes and she shaves her head and refuses to play chess with me, or maybe in some of them she rebels and she hates me so much that she saves the world.

Or gets herself killed. Or saves the world and gets herself killed doing it.

It's only a theory, though, that there would be iterations. The experiment doesn't prove it. Maybe this is all there is. He died; that's done, maybe he saved the Potestas family, she'll ask what ever happened to him and I'll lie. I won't tell her we killed him. Maybe I'll tell her it was them.

She isn't making her move, she's chewing her lip and glaring death at the chess pieces.

I give up and say, "Should we look at the clock?"

Her teeth let her lip go and her eyes meet mine to glare death and destruction at me. Then she softens and says, "You look."

My heart tells me it's exactly midnight and every person not connected to the new star dial is dying all at the same second of old age, though it will take a few minutes, each one letting go, letting a century catch up with the body and then reaching peace with one last exhale like nature intended, the good old way.

I tell myself it isn't political massacre, it's only returning some souls to the natural course of things, and maybe they have it better than we do.

My heart tells me it's exactly midnight, to the second, media nox, end of second watch, but my head turns to the clock on the wall as if it's a holocaust scene I've been refusing to see for as long as I can hold out looking at its minute hand and hour hand, and then my eyes see that it was almost a whole hour ago, it already happened and I missed it.

I had looked the other way, toward the window, away from the clock for fifty-five minutes.

I stand and go to the window as if the city light will look any different, or maybe some people will have turned out the light, and will stare at a winter city that looks alive as ever, snow swirling, lights shimmering and moving, stars looking down as if each one is looking out for one of us.