Eighty-Sixed : Chapter 1 - The Pomeranians

Part I - This is Happening Now

PART I - This is Happening Now

He’d be patient, Becca hoped.

For their entire forty-year marriage, Frankie was patient.

But instead, the first thing Frankie said when Becca picked up the phone was this:

“Twenty-three voicemails, Becca. Seriously?  I’ve left you twenty-three voicemails.”

Apparently, even Frankie’s patience could eventually be lost.

“Frankie, honey, you know if I don’t answer, I’m working.”

“Becca, honey, you know if your husband leaves you twenty-three voicemails that you had better call him back. 

“If I don’t answer, I’m working,” she repeated.  “That’s always how it’s been.”

“No,” Frankie said.  “That’s not how it’s always been.  That’s how you’ve always wanted it to be, but that’s not how it’s done.  What married couple operates like that?”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re not.”

“I am.  Frankie, I am.  I’m just so close.”

“Close,” Frankie said, and the word came out like he was spitting.  “You’ve been so close for years.” 

“I’m telling you,” Becca said.  “This time it’s true.”

“Do you even know where I am?” Frankie asked.

“What?”

“I could be in another country right now for all you know.”

“You’re not in another country.”

“I could be in another house right now, though,” he said.  “Not our house.”

Here it was. 

“Are you?” Becca asked.  

Even still, as the words left her mouth, Becca could barely keep her eyes away from her computer, from the green numbers running upwards on the left side of the screen. With effort, she slapped the laptop closed and draped her hand over her eyes, forcing herself to listen to her husband’s impatient breathing on the other end of the phone. 

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“I picked up the dogs this afternoon.”

“Frankie.”

“I’m taking them with me.”

“Frankie,” she said again. “Don’t.” 

It wouldn’t matter. 

“I don’t even know the last time you were home to feed them, Becca, so I’m taking them. You can’t do that to dogs.”

“They’re not your dogs,” Becca said, though honestly, she didn’t care.  

Semantics.  

What was his was hers, and the opposite should apply, but usually didn’t.

At this moment all she cared about was the fact that she was finally, acutely aware of a horrible, horrible lapse of judgment on her part, but it didn’t matter because she was in fact closer to her goal than ever before, even if Frankie didn’t believe her.

It had been too much.  Her expectations and the licenses she had taken in their relationship. She could see that now. 

Frankie was right, of course, that her work was the most important thing in her life.  But her relationship — her marriage to Frankie — should be more important.  As important as it had once been.  She understood that. Wanted it, even.

“Don’t do this, Frankie. Please.”

“I’m already gone, Becca.”

“I can fix it,” Becca pleaded.

“I can’t even imagine how you’d go about doing that.”

“Don’t say that.”

“We’ve basically been split for years.  Just neither of us wanted to admit it.”

Becca inhaled deeply.

“I love you, Frankie,” she said.  When did it become so difficult to say those words?

“Then quit.”

“What?”

“Quit your job, Becca. Walk out right now.  We’re both well past retirement age.  So let’s retire.”

“I…” she started, and could almost imagine what Frankie was suggesting. For the briefest of moments, she could actually see it, and how beautiful it could be. 

Here he was, offering one last way to fix their shattered marriage.  But all at the cost of her lifelong pursuit that she was sure — more certain than ever before — would change the world forever.

But maybe that wasn’t as important.   

For a brief second, so brief, she thought she could in fact walk away from it all.  But what if she could somehow still have both her marriage and the job?  The dream Frankie suggested along with the culmination of her lifetime of work? Maybe Frankie could be just a little more patient still.

“Let me do this one thing,” she pleaded. “It’s just one more month.”

Frankie laughed.

“Two at the most,” Becca continued. “It’s just so important.  You know that, Frankie. You know that. Please don’t ask me to choose.  Anything else.”

“You’re not giving me a choice,” Frankie retorted.

“You know this will bring the greatest moment since the creation of the world. This will allow us to see the creation of worlds.”

“I love you, Becs,” Frankie said.  “Have a good life.”

“No, wait…” Becca said, but the phone was already silent. Once he decided upon something, Frankie always acted quickly.  The only exception was with Becca, throughout their entire life, up until this final moment.  For forty years, he’d been the model of patience, but once he accepted that forty years was long enough to wait for his wife’s attention, he committed rapidly and with severity as he always did.

Dr. Becca Watts was not known to cry, but she spent the next hour sobbing into napkins scavenged out of an empty McDonald’s bag left there from earlier in the day. The refuse sat crinkled and unbalanced, a soggy grey grease stain on the side of the bag silently ogling at her like the Edvard Munch painting. 

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It rested upon Becca’s lab table, which was normally orderly and clean, with lines of circuit boards arranged in rows like cookies in a container or intricate pieces of art arranged neatly upon a wall.

This contrasted with her other desk, her work desk, which looked as if it had been attacked by a cannon that shot out stacks of paper and thumbtacks scattered in piles upon her desk.

Rather than looking at her “work” desk, where her telephone hid between two towers of manuals and unsigned equipment acquisition orders, she instead positioned herself in the direct center of the shiny metallic surface of her lab table where she felt more comfortable, more at ease, and more herself.  A perfectly centered light illuminated everything on the table in a soft white glow but shone especially bright on the strange-looking grease stain on the side of the bag.  

How dare he? 

How could he?

How could he have said goodbye after four decades of marriage?

And yet, despite her internal dialogue and protestations, a small vestige of herself brightened at the sudden freedom, though it was a freedom she was certain she would not enjoy for very long.  She loved Frankie, and love was always a confusing quandary for Dr. Becca Watts that often made her act in ways even she could not foresee.  

Truly, Frankie Watts was the love of her life, and their marriage meant something, even if they had both been living their own individual lives in the midst of whatever life they were supposed to be sharing.

Was it still marriage, then, if they were both so caught up in themselves?   Was it still marriage if it had gotten to the point after forty years where the other had become little more than a guaranteed plus one for their individual business functions? If the other was no more than a convenience and comfort? 

Somewhere in the midst of research and schedules for Becca, and blueprints and cocktail hours for Frankie, surely love still lurked like a daydream, a glorious dream where life could feel like it stopped for hours as if nothing existed except themselves and the dreams they shared together.  Or rather, the dreams they once shared. 

As Becca wiped her nose with the napkin which oozed with the stench of fries long gone cold — not necessarily stale, but still not particularly edible at the bottom of the bag — Becca was not so sure she’d recognize true love anymore, after so many years of the chill which silently slid over their once passionate relationship.  

She grabbed another napkin and blew her nose, sighing deeply.  

It is finished, she thought.

She sniffed again and wasn’t sure if it was a ghost smell from the napkins or the smell from the fast food bag permeating her entire metal-lined office, but now all she could smell was the stench of a grease fryer.  

The smell alone made her feel heavier, slouched and overweight, though she had hardly touched the dinner Sam and Drake — two of her internists — had brought back for her.  The fast food run had been her idea in the first place, a way for them to stay on target, continue working as they always did - as she made them stay focused — for they were so close, so very, very close, to changing everything.

But maybe there was something else she could change.

There was, after all, a potential massive side effect to what they’d been working toward for so many years.  It was this potential for disaster - which Becca had kept mostly to herself — that had kept them for so long from their final testing phase.

Frankie was one of the few who knew what could potentially happen.  

“What do you mean there’s a side effect?” Frankie had teased her once when they were laying in bed.  Moments such as these had grown far distant from one another in recent years, and Becca was tempted to share her vulnerability — her secret fear of the project — for just a moment.  

“We’re working on post-lightspeed travel,” Becca said.

“That I understand,” Frankie answered.  He kissed her hand.  “I mean, I don’t understand it, but I get the gist of it all. Your wormholes and all that.  Black holes and whatnot.”

“That’s the goal.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“Time travel.”

“What?”

“Time travel,” Becca repeated.  “Or rather, time disruptions.”

Frankie’s laugh was so unexpected and loud that it made Becca jump.

“Ah!” Frankie barked.  “I was wondering why we had a DeLorean hidden under a cloak in the backyard!”

Becca blushed at Frankie’s overly playful tone.  He didn’t mean to mock her, but the disbelief was in his voice, closing her off again like flower petals in the dark. 

“It’s just a theory,” Becca had told him.  But she knew it was more than that.

Therefore, not even Frankie was fully clued into what Becca believed was feasible with the research and experiments and radical groundbreaking technology created over the years by ENH Industries under her watchful command.

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Control over electrical waves, Farraday cages, and magnetic forces capable of ripping apart an Amtrak train cabin? 

This was all child’s play should Becca’s fears be warranted. 

But the fruit of ENH’s research also had the potential to radically transform civilizations for centuries to come. 

Colonization on Mars? Try colonization in every known solar system.  Lightspeed transit and instant transport? Try imagining the single greatest scientific breakthrough in all known history and it wouldn’t even be close to what was possible.

And they were always so close.  For years, they’d been so close.

“It’s right in our fingertips, Frankie,” she’d say night after night as she stumbled into bed next to her husband.  Years had passed since their previous conversation where Becca tried to confide in Frankie about possible risks in what she was working on.  

“Ah, good for you, Becca,” he’d say time and again.  His enthusiasm and compassion and support waned surprisingly slowly, but after forty years of the same promise, it was a miracle he was able to feign any enthusiasm at all.  

She didn’t blame him, though.  Close was so subjective.  Close could be a day or month or another decade.  Close could be the next of a countless menagerie of algorithms that may produce unexpected but life-altering findings. Any day could bring that unknown variable, the unexpected scientific breakthrough that would propel everything she’d sought to discover and bring her endless searching to an end.  What is so close could suddenly be right here.

But until that happened, even what was so close remained still so far away.

So Frankie took the dogs, and the hope of their marriage with him.