The next few weeks passed uneventfully, each day serving only as a marker to bring Angela and Tete closer to August 15. At Angela's request, the Elucidator started providing daily updates on what Charles Lindbergh was up to—Angela figured it would be good to stay informed. The Elucidator was a huge help in other ways as well, providing food, changes of clothing, maps, and invisibility whenever they requested. The only basic need it couldn't meet was shelter. Angela and Tete had spent the first couple nights hiding out in various sheds and garages, always cold and afraid of being discovered. Finally, Angela had come up with a better idea. Every evening, they would turn one of them invisible and slip into a store shortly before it closed. Once the owners and employees had gone home for the night, they had free reign of the store and could sleep wherever they wanted. When the store re-opened in the morning, they would slip out, then find a hidden place to turn themselves visible again.
Angela wished they could both be visible during the entering and exiting, since the process of following someone closely enough to get through the door behind them without drawing attention was always nerve-wracking. But the racism of the time period complicated matters. Angela wasn't allowed in any of the stores run by white people, and when they traveled a couple miles down the road to an area populated by black people, Tete wasn't allowed in any of those stores. The best they could do was have one of them be visible, holding the door open wide enough for the other to get through.
Other than eating, sleeping, and reading the occasional newspaper Angela managed to pilfer from a trash can, there wasn't much to do. Sure, there were movie theaters and libraries and the occasional community event, but nothing that Angela and Tete were allowed to participate in together. They usually spent their days walking from one town to the next—not because they had to, but simply to keep themselves busy.
It was far from perfect. But they were surviving.
"This is real, isn't it?" Tete asked one night around the beginning of April, as he and Angela settled themselves on bags of grain in the back room of a supply store. "This whole thing? It's not just in my head."
Angela regarded him in surprise. He'd spent the whole last month convinced that he was living in a hallucination. What had changed his mind?
"Yes," she told him. "It is real."
"Which means you're real too."
Angela couldn't believe how good it felt to have Tete finally acknowledge this fact. "Yes. I am."
"Hmm." Tete seemed to consider this for a moment. "What's your name?"
The question took Angela by surprise, but only for a moment. The only time she had told Tete her name was way back when they were still in the police station. Back when there was still so much newness and strangeness for him to process. "Angela. Angela DuPre."
"And how do we know each other again?"
Did Angela dare try one more time to tell him the truth? Or would that sound so outlandish that Tete would revert to thinking everything was a hallucination?
"I found you at the police station, remember?" she reminded him. "And ever since then, we've been helping each other out."
"Yeah, but…" Tete didn't finish. He stared off into space for a moment before seeming to snap out of it. "Sorry. What were we talking about? Oh. I remember. So where did you come from, anyway? Are you from Switzerland, like me?"
"No," Angela responded, glad that this question, at least, was easy to answer. "I'm from America."
"America? You're from here?" Tete looked around, puzzled. "Why haven't we gone to your house, then? Why are we still sneaking around and sleeping in places like this?"
Angela felt a wave of homesickness for her little house, her comfortable bedroom, the ability to walk down the street without receiving dirty looks and derisive comments. All the things she'd taken for granted before. "My house is far away," she told Tete. "America's a big country. We're in New Jersey right now. I live all the way over in Ohio."
"What's your family like?"
Rather than explaining that she hadn't seen them in years, Angela thought about what her family was like when she was thirteen the first time around. "I have an older sister named Shayla," she told Tete. "She's seventeen. She takes me shopping sometimes, or out to get my nails done. Sometimes she lets me hang out with her and her friends. That always makes me feel so cool." Angela smiled at the parade of memories cavorting through her mind. "And I have a big brother named Robert. He's nineteen. He's away at college right now, but every time he comes back, he takes me to the park so we can shoot baskets and kick a soccer ball around." Angela pictured her parents, sitting side-by-side on the couch, smiling and encouraging Angela to tell them all about her first day of junior high school. "My parents are great people. They're always encouraging me to go after my dreams." Angela remembered the way her mom had brought her to the library every week so she could check out more books about piloting, and how her dad—a mechanic—had taught her everything he knew about the way airplanes worked.
"Do you miss them?" Tete asked.
Angela felt a lump appear in her throat. For a moment, it had almost felt like she really was thirteen again, still seeing her mom and dad and sister every day, still able to call her brother on the phone whenever she felt like it. But she wasn't thirteen. And, bizarrely, her parents currently weren't even born yet.
"Yes," she told Tete quietly. "I do."
Will I ever be able to be part of their lives again? she wondered. Is there any way to explain away all those years of paranoid behavior—in a way that they'd actually believe?
"Tell me a story about them," Tete interrupted her thoughts. "My mom used to tell me stories all the time when I was little. Sometimes she still does. Or—did, before… whatever this is."
For a moment he looked worried again, but his expression smoothed out as Angela began telling him about a game she and her siblings had created long ago, and then about a family vacation they'd taken to St. Louis when she was nine. Soon Tete's eyes closed and he fell into a peaceful sleep, but Angela lay awake for hours afterward, thinking about her family.
Storytelling became a regular part of Angela and Tete's routine. Whenever they settled in for the night—as long as they were in a place with thick enough walls that nobody outside would hear them—they would take turns telling each other stories about their childhoods. Angela hadn't thought so much about her childhood in years, and was surprised at how crisp and clear the memories seemed. She wondered, a little worriedly, if that had anything to do with the de-aging.
Tete's stories were enlightening, a window into what it was like to be the chronically ill youngest son of a man who was continually rising in prominence, and a woman who was doing the best she could under trying circumstances. Angela was surprised to hear that Tete's parents had separated when Tete was four, with Mileva taking Tete and his brother to Zurich while Albert stayed behind in Berlin. Apparently they'd gotten officially divorced when Tete was eight, and his father had married someone else. "We still see him sometimes," Tete had explained. "Just not very much."
Although Tete's stories started out much like Angela's—accounts of daily life and fun things he'd done in the past—as time went on, they started to take on distinctly imaginative qualities. One night, Tete went on for almost an hour about a magical piano that had transported him to a different country every time he played it. Another night, he insisted that he'd gotten a real, live elephant for Christmas the year he was six, and that it had lived in his apartment with him for three years, before running off to join the circus.
One morning, Angela woke up to the sound of Tete chattering away about something. This seemed a little strange. Although Tete would often start talking about random things, jumping from one subject to another in a way that was hard for Angela to follow, he usually at least waited until she was already awake.
Blearily, Angela opened her eyes to see that he was sitting a few feet away from her spot on the floor of the clothing store, speaking animatedly to the air in front of him.
"We stay in places like this, mostly, except sometimes we sleep outside, now that it's nicer weather, but normally we find a store and sneak in when nobody's watching, except we have to be really quiet so no one sees us. If you're quiet you become invisible. And sometimes she says we're invisible but we're actually not; we just turned into glass, like this glass vase I saw at someone's house once, it had flowers in it, and the flowers made me sneeze. Just like all the smelly soot makes me cough so hard I can't even breathe. Oh, and we can order whatever food we want from the Elucidator. I had this fancy roast duck the other night; it was so good. There were ducks at the pond too. They all had umbrellas."
"Tete?" Angela spoke up. "Who are you talking to?"
Tete turned to look at her. "Oh, Angela, you're awake! This is Gerhard. He's joining us." He gestured to the empty space in front of him. "Gerhard, that's Angela. She's magic."
Angela raised her eyebrows. "I am?"
"Well, yeah, you have the Elucidator, so," Tete shrugged as if that explained it. "Anyway, I was just telling Gerhard all about our life here."
"Huh." Angela wrestled with herself over whether to tell Tete that Gerhard wasn't real. Would he believe her? Or would he just go back to thinking that maybe she wasn't real either?
She decided to hold off. Tete had experienced plenty of hallucinations over the past two and a half months, and none of them had lasted very long. Of course, Tete had never hallucinated a whole person before, but still. Angela was pretty sure "Gerhard" would be gone by nightfall.
But he wasn't. Gerhard stayed with them through that night, and the one after, and the one after. Tete held conversations with him—conversations which made very little sense, but then again, Angela was only hearing one side of them. He ordered food for him from the Elucidator. Angela thought that once Tete saw that Gerhard's food wasn't actually being eaten, he might start to realize something was off. But when Angela went as far as to point that out one day, Tete gestured to the still-full plate and said, "What do you mean, look, he's eaten half of it already!"
Gerhard complicated matters such as being invisible and sneaking in and out of places. When it was Tete's turn to be visible and hold the doors open for Angela, he held them open for his imaginary friend too, taking just long enough to draw curious looks from passers-by. When he was invisible, if Gerhard "said" something to him, he would respond out loud, ignoring Angela's attempts to shush him.
"Tete," Angela finally said one evening, after a frightening incident in which Tete had almost been hit by a car in an attempt to pull "Gerhard" out of the middle of the road. "I know this is going to be hard to believe, but Gerhard… isn't real. He's in your mind."
Tete was silent for a moment, and Angela thought he was processing what she'd just said. But then he responded, "Gerhard says that he's real and you're the one that's in my mind. I know one of you is lying, but since I don't know which, I'll just act as if you're both real until I get convinced otherwise."
Over the next few days, Angela tried as hard as she could to point out as many illogical things as she could about "Gerhard." But apparently, "Gerhard" was doing the same thing about her, so Tete remained unconvinced.
It was one night toward the end of May that Tete woke up screaming. Angela hurried over to see him lying on his back with his eyes wide open in terror. "Tete, what is it?" Angela asked, alarmed. "What do you see?"
"I did it. It was me. It was my fault. I did it."
"You did what? What was your fault?" Was he talking about the Lindbergh baby again? It had been months since he'd mentioned that.
"It was me. It was my fault," Tete repeated, his eyes unfocused and wild-looking.
"Tete, it wasn't your fault," Angela said firmly. "You didn't do anything wrong."
"It was my fault!" Tete maintained, half-sobbing. "It was. It was all me."
It was a long night, with Tete crying and screaming hysterically that something was all his fault, and Angela alternating between telling him it wasn't and trying to figure out exactly what he was talking about, all the while worried that someone would hear his screams and discover them.
"Is there anything you can do to help?" Angela asked the Elucidator in despair.
WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE HELP WITH? The Elucidator responded.
"Giving me insight into what Tete's talking about? Convincing him it wasn't his fault? Making it so no one in the places around us can hear him?"
I CAN FREEZE HIS VOCAL CORDS, IF YOU'D LIKE, the Elucidator offered. THEN HE WON'T BE ABLE TO SCREAM.
"Oh, yeah, that would really help him feel better," Angela said sarcastically. "Wait—I was being sarcastic! Don't actually do that!"
By sunrise, Tete had calmed down significantly, but still seemed worried and withdrawn. This disposition continued until shortly after dinner, when he suddenly burst into hysterical giggles. "What's so funny?" Angela asked, troubled by this abrupt change in mood.
Tete pointed to a blade of the grass they were sitting on and kept laughing.
Tete's bizarre mood swings continued over the course of the next several days, interspersed with short periods of time in which he seemed normal, and slightly longer periods of time in which he held conversations with "Gerhard." Many of these conversations seemed to revolve around ladders, guilt about something never elaborated upon, and a fear of being kidnapped and held for ransom.
"Hey Elucidator, can you get us one of those schizophrenia vaccines JB was given as a baby?" Angela asked one day, feeling simultaneously brilliant for coming up with the idea, and mad at herself for not thinking of it earlier.
NO, the Elucidator replied.
"Well, then, can you give us some kind of good medicine from the future that can treat schizophrenia? Even if it doesn't completely cure it?"
NO, the Elucidator said again.
"Why not?" Angela wailed, her heart sinking. "You can produce food out of air molecules! You can send things through time and space! It shouldn't be that hard to either grab some medicine from the future or make it right here on the spot."
IT IS ILLEGAL TO BRING ANACHRONISTIC MEDICINE INTO AN EARLIER TIME PERIOD, the Elucidator explained. THAT INCLUDES PRODUCING IT HERE. SORRY.
Angela eyed Tete, who was mumbling to himself with his head in his hands. "What kind of medicine do they have for schizophrenia in this time period?" she asked. She knew that whatever they had wouldn't be very effective, but by this point, something might be better than nothing.
The Elucidator produced a list of 1930's "treatments" for mental illness, each of which sounded worse than the last. Most of them seemed like they'd probably end up doing more harm than good.
"Never mind," she sighed, defeated.
It became harder and harder to go into towns. Tete was unpredictable, one moment silent and placid, the next screaming in agony or laughing uncontrollably. Sometimes he would mumble to himself for hours on end, most of his words incomprehensible to Angela even with the continual translation help she was receiving from the Elucidator. It wasn't safe for him to be invisible around other people anymore, but Angela didn't like having him visible around other people either. And it wasn't so much because people were starting to give him the same nasty looks as they gave her—it was more the comment Angela had distinctly heard one woman make as they walked by: "That boy should be in an asylum."
If the authorities decided to put Tete in an asylum, Angela would have no say in the matter. She was a thirteen-year-old girl—a thirteen-year-old black girl, for that matter. Sure, she could sneak him out of the asylum the way she'd sneaked him out of jail so many months ago, but it would be a lot harder now, given Tete's current mental state.
Angela was glad it was summer now, because that meant it was warm enough that they could sleep outside. After having the Elucidator show her where Charles Lindbergh would be flying on August 15, she found a thick patch of woods just a short distance away from the airfield, and determined that that would be home for her and Tete for the rest of their time in 1932.
As June wore into July, Tete's behavior became more and more erratic. He talked to "Gerhard" much more often than he talked to Angela, and all "Gerhard" ever seemed to do was convince Tete that something—presumably the death of the Lindbergh baby—was all Tete's fault.
The laughing fits grew fewer and farther in between. So did the screaming fits, but the guilt and worry persisted no matter what Angela said or did. Tete's conversations started making increasingly less sense, his manner of speaking sounding more and more like mumbling. And then one day he stopped speaking altogether.
"Tete," said Angela when she noticed that he was staring off into space, his expression vacant. Tete tended to zone out a lot, but usually his name or a tap on the shoulder was enough to bring him back.
Not this time. Tete acted as if he hadn't even heard her.
"Tete," Angela said again, placing her hand on his arm. No response.
"Hey Tete, I'm going to order lunch now," she told him. When he still didn't respond, Angela asked the Elucidator to produce what had come to be his favorite meal—roast beef with corn and mashed potatoes. "Do you want this?" she asked, holding it up to him.
Again, Tete didn't respond. If Angela couldn't see his chest rising and falling with every breath, she might have thought he was dead.
"Elucidator, what happened to Tete?" Angela asked, an edge of panic in her voice.
EDUARD 'TETE' EINSTEIN WAS BORN ON JULY 28, 1910. DURING HIS EARLY CHILDHOOD, HE—
"That's not what I'm asking!" Angela screamed. It felt good to yell at something, express her frustration about the whole situation. "I mean, what happened to him right now; why isn't he responding or moving or doing anything?"
The Elucidator took a moment before answering. IT IS DIFFICULT TO DETERMINE EXACTLY WHAT IS GOING ON INSIDE TETE'S BRAIN AND BODY RIGHT NOW, it finally said. THIS IS AN UNPRECEDENDED CIRCUMSTANCE IN WHICH A PERSON WITH A PREDISPOSITION FOR MENTAL ILLNESS GREW UP TO THE AGE OF SIXTEEN, WAS UN-AGED TO INFANCY, GREW UP INTO ADULTHOOD AFTER RECEIVING A VACCINE TO CURE HIS CONDITION, AND THEN WAS REVERTED TO THE AGE OF THIRTEEN THROUGH INSTANTANEOUS UN-AGING—A METHOD THE TIME AGENCY STRONGLY CAUTIONS AGAINST. I DO NOT HAVE ANY DATA OF PREVIOUS CASES SIMILAR TO THIS ONE, SO I CANNOT TELL YOU WITH ANY CERTAINTY WHAT IS GOING ON. THE BEST I CAN DO IS PROVIDE YOU WITH INFORMATION ABOUT THE WAY TETE'S CONDITION WORKS UNDER NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES.
Angela spent the next several hours poring over all the information the Elucidator was willing to provide about schizophrenia. She wasn't sure whether the information would be particularly useful—as the Elucidator had pointed out, Tete's circumstances were unprecedented, and what he was going through was undoubtedly a mix of schizophrenia, the time travel and un-aging, and the fact that he had once been someone else—but it at least gave her something to do. She learned that what Tete was experiencing right now was called "catatonia" and that even under normal circumstances, it could persist for days or even weeks if untreated.
"And there's no way you could give him just a small dose of some safe medication from the future?" Angela double-checked with the Elucidator, watching as Tete continued to zone out, completely unaware of his surroundings.
NO. SORRY.
Angela's days became boring and lonely. Tete hadn't always been the easiest person to sneak around in 1932 with, but she had enjoyed his companionship despite his unpredictable behavior. Now, for all intents and purposes, her only companion was the Elucidator.
"Can you put me in touch with any time agents?" Angela asked halfheartedly one day after she'd finished eating her breakfast and feeding Tete his. She'd been asking the same question multiple times a day for the last four and a half months, so she wasn't hopeful about the answer.
Sure enough, the Elucidator responded NOT POSSIBLE AT THIS JUNCTURE. "Well, what is possible, then?" Angela asked irritably. "Can you show me what Jonah's doing right now?"
JONAH IS NOT PRESENT IN THIS TIME PERIOD.
"Can you show me… what happened to Jonah after JB and I got sucked into 1932?" she amended, slightly heartened that it hadn't given her a straight no.
NOT WITH ANY CERTAINTY, the Elucidator replied. EVERYTHING IS STILL IN FLUX.
"But it's been over four months already!" Angela complained.
BUT JONAH HAS NOT BEEN PRESENT IN YOUR TIME STREAM DURING THOSE FOUR MONTHS. HIS EXPERIENCES ARE NOT HAPPENING AT THE SAME TIME AS YOURS.
Angela grudgingly had to admit that the explanation made sense. She tried to think of what else she could ask the Elucidator. "Can you show me what happened to Katherine after she disappeared from her living room on November 21, 2012?"
NO. THAT IS IN FLUX TOO.
"Can you show me what Hadley's doing? I mean, what he did right after leaving my kitchen the night of November 20?" Even if she couldn't talk to Hadley, it would be reassuring to see him working behind the scenes, doing whatever he felt he needed to do to help the situation.
Plus she would love just to see his face again.
The Elucidator responded negatively to that request too, however, and Angela sighed. "What can you show me?"
I CAN SHOW YOU ANYTHING THAT IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW, ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD. I CAN SHOW YOU, WITH APPROXIMATELY 87.987698% CERTAINTY, EVENTS THAT HAPPENED BEFORE YOUR CURRENT TIME PERIOD.
The Elucidator can't even be completely certain about events that happened in the past? Angela marveled. Maybe that was normal, since with time travel, the past was always subject to change. But she couldn't help thinking that in this situation, it might have more to do with how "in flux" everything was.
Because she didn't have anything else to do, Angela spent her last few weeks in 1932 familiarizing herself with world events of the time period, keeping tabs on Lindbergh, watching the return and rescue of every single kid on the plane (except Jonah), and sometimes—though it felt a little intrusive—watching pieces of her own ancestors' lives. Her grandparents were toddlers; her great-grandparents in their twenties, just starting out in life. It was weird to think of them that way, weirder still to see their lives playing out in front of her eyes. Angela sometimes switched over to videos of Tete's childhood, hoping that seeing or hearing something familiar would jog him back into consciousness. But it didn't.
At night, Angela prayed. And asked the Elucidator over and over if it could show her anything new. And thought about Hadley.
During the day, when she wasn't watching videos on the Elucidator, Angela took care of Tete and kept an eye on the airfield, noting where the security officers patrolled, where the office was, and approximately how often people came in and out on a daily basis. It didn't take her too long to figure out her plan of action for the day Jonah was supposed to show up.
And finally, after five months and fourteen days of long, tedious waiting, August 15 arrived.