Not anymore.
“This will probably be painful,” Delia went on, fitting the padded strap across his chest. “I’ve not been able to discuss pain with our animal subjects, but they don’t appear all that happy. The good news is, it only lasts seven seconds.” She shifted down to his ankles. “The second stage compresses your consciousness through the quantum keyhole.” She looked up, her good humor gone now, her gaze somber. “Like I said, this jolt will stop your heart.”
Ethan gave a mental shrug. For the first time since he’d received the news, his fear of death was balanced with the power of choice. Perhaps if he’d had more time to think things through, he would have gone with living out his few remaining days. But he doubted it. He could feel the cancer eating its way through his body, consuming in its path all the goodness he had known.
Delia fit a final strap to his forehead and wrenched it tight. “Sorry. But we need to make sure you’re fully immobilized.”
Ethan watched as Sonya took her daughter’s place and fit a plastic mesh helmet over his hair. “We should have shaved his head.”
Delia was already standing by a bank of instruments. “The trial subjects’ fur made no difference.”
Sonya buckled the strap under his jaw and told him, “Grit your teeth.” When he did so, she tightened this final strap until he could no longer open his mouth. The buckle dug into his right cheek, but there was no way of telling the ladies that it hurt. Nor, Ethan suspected, would he mind for much longer.
Delia said, “Twenty seconds.”
Sonya lowered her face to within inches of his own. For once, her constant irritation was gone. Instead, she looked at him with a yearning so deep the agony filled her eyes with tears. “Please, please, remember.”
“Ten seconds,” Delia said.
Sonya’s face disappeared, and all Ethan could see were the dangling cables and the ceiling lights and the truck’s rusty roof.
“Eight, seven, six . . .”
Ethan had no sensation of a life flashing in front of his eyes. Instead, he remembered just one event. The memory was so vivid he felt as though he was actually there once again. For three and a half years after Adrian’s death, Ethan had traveled the globe, surfing many of the finest breaks on earth. One day, on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, he’d slipped inside a tube twice his height. The day was windless, the waters so clear he could watch the sunrise through the wall of water. He was back there now, inside the tube, so deep the opening seemed a mile or so ahead of him. He could hear the thunderous roar, smell the salty air, feel the ocean spray cover him in a liquid blanket. It was . . .
Bliss.
Then the circular opening far ahead flashed a brilliant white. The light became so intense it compressed his brain. There was nothing anymore, no room even for thought. Just the light.
Then the second jolt struck, so fierce he actually felt his heart freeze solid.
And then he died.
CHAPTER
FOUR
Ethan was staring at the moon.
He sat up, gasping and choking. He rolled off the padding and clawed at the raw planks of the floor.
Then he heard the water.
A soft summer breeze blew up tiny waves. They splashed like cymbals against the pilings that rose to either side of where he lay. He gripped the nearest strut and forced himself to his feet. The night was utterly dark. He was dressed in a pair of raggedy cutoffs and a T-shirt. On his feet were leather sandals curled and cracked by salt and hard days. He was completely alone.
Ethan cried out, a choking sound wrenched from the terror and confusion that filled him.
He knew where he was.
What was more, he knew when.
The summer before his final year at the university, when he and his best friend had wrangled jobs at the Holiday Marina. The long pier ran back to the shore, every plank in place, the pilings straight as arrows. The marina’s unmistakable form was silhouetted by yellow streetlights. Four A-frames housed the sailing classes, the repair shop, the store, and the stockrooms.
An old canvas inflatable raft lay on the pier, with a towel for a cover. The dockhands rotated the task of hanging around until sunset and bringing in the day’s last rentals and hosing them down. The marina’s sixteen daysailers formed a floating perimeter to him now. The boats ducked and weaved in the gentle breeze, lashed to safety pilings, dimly visible in the moonlight. Nights like this were one of the reasons he had loved the job so much. When the last craft was in place and the gear stowed, Ethan often blew up the inflatable and ate a solitary sandwich and watched the sun set. Then he stretched out here, alone, and fell asleep to the cry of gulls and the liquid cymbals.
Back in a summer filled with impossible potential.
Now, as Ethan walked the lonely road, he knew flashes of very real terror, fearing it all might vanish and he’d find himself trapped on the gurney with electrodes zapping his brain. One thing was certain. This was not a dream. The reality was too, well, real.
The eighties version of Cocoa Beach was undergoing a drastic shift. The cheap motels thrown up in the early NASA heyday were being replaced by high-rise condos, luxury housing, elegant restaurants, and refined hotels. Here and there, however, a few remnants of the simpler world remained.
The Holiday Marina lay at the end of a hard-packed clay road. To Ethan’s right stood one of the last remaining orange groves within the Cocoa Beach city limits. The blossoms opened fully at night, and the fragrance was as powerful a confirmation as the body he occupied.
The year was 1985. Again.
He was twenty years old, with a youth’s ability to shrug off the fact that he had worked a ten-hour shift in the hot August sun, had slept maybe six hours on the end of a pier, and had not consumed a cup of coffee in forever. Back in the day, Ethan’s only caffeine kick came from the occasional Coke.
He arrived back at the rental cottage just as the first rose hues of dawn appeared in the east. He stood in the front yard, surrounded by everything he thought lost and gone forever. The unkempt yard was just as awful as he remembered. A line of surfboards flanked the cottage entrance. Leashes and board shorts and rash shirts littered the weeds and hung from the branches of two banana plants. Six plastic chairs stolen from some bar served as garden furniture. The house was squat and narrow and constructed of unpainted cinder blocks. There were no locks and nothing to steal inside.
A cold nose poked Ethan’s ankle as he opened the front door. He bent over and lifted the whining pup. His best buddy, Sawyer, had rescued it from the pound because he had fallen for a girl who volunteered there. Ethan and his buddies had named the pup Banzai, after the North Shore surf break. He had not thought of the dog in years.
He carried Banzai into the bathroom and shut the door. The house had a lot of serious flaws, but there were four closet-sized bedrooms and a huge screened rear porch that served as an indoor-outdoor kitchen. Ethan pulled the light cord, and there he was, staring back at himself from the cracked mirror over the sink.
When he groaned, Banzai responded by licking his face. Ethan watched his hand stroke the pup. His skin was tanned almost black. White-blond hair contrasted with his pale blue eyes. Scared eyes. Still, the face was definitely his. Staring at himself, Ethan had no choice but to accept what his reflection truly meant.
The transition, or whatever Delia and Sonya called it, had worked. He was four months from his twenty-first birthday. Again.