really appreciate the ride. If you wouldn’t mind—”
The man got out of the car. He left the engine running, and his door wide open. He began to walk toward Ninth. Orla turned to watch him through the smudged rear windshield. When he got to the old firehouse building, he stopped and turned, dramatically, to face the curved red door that had once let horses and buggies pass through. The cabbie hesitated for a moment. Then he lunged—kicking the door, punching the door. The flag above it quivered.
Orla got herself and Marlow out of the car as fast as her cut would allow. Before she walked into her building, she remembered the man was saving his gas. She reached in the driver’s side and shut off the ignition, leaving the warm keys dangling.
* * *
Manny wasn’t answering. Orla rocked Marlow back and forth as she slapped at the door, waiting. Soon, Marlow began to wail.
“Shh, Marlow,” she said. “Shh, baby, shh.”
“Orla.” She turned and saw the Ukrainian man at the end of the hall, walking toward her. He had a plastic bag of groceries in his hand. She didn’t know he knew her name; she still did not know his. He looked down at Marlow, then back at her. “They’re gone,” he said.
“Gone?” Orla bent her knees and straightened them, trying to soothe the baby, whose cries were growing louder. “Where would they go?”
The Ukrainian man nodded. “You’ve been in hospital, of course,” he said. “Things out here, well. Everything is moving pieces.” He put the groceries down and rolled up his sleeves, unfurled his forearms toward her. “All right,” he said, over Marlow’s crescendo. “Let’s go. We take our time.”
She stared back at him, not understanding.
“I’ll hold you,” he said. “You hold her.”
“The thing is, I can’t go to my apartment,” Orla said. She pictured Floss at the door, waiting, drumming her nails on folded arms.
The Ukrainian man took a step forward and began to lift her gingerly. “We go to my place, then,” he said.
“The penthouse?” Orla said, as her feet left the ground.
He breathed with force, like a weight lifter, as he curled them into his chest. “Just nine floors,” he said.
“Okay.” Orla clutched Marlow close. Somehow, it had always seemed higher. On the way to the stairs, she looked down and saw, strewn in the hallway, the jewels Manny gave his wife for Christmas. The necklace was slumped against a strip of vinyl trim, the bracelet turned metal belly-up on the carpet. One earring crunched beneath the Ukrainian man’s foot, and another lay just ahead, waiting. As if someone angry had hurled it down, a second after its match.
* * *
The man’s name, it turned out, was Andriy. The first thing Orla noticed, when he put her and the baby down just inside his apartment, was the alarm clock on the card table near his sofa. It read 11:18 a.m. Orla gasped and pointed at it. “Is that real?” she said.
Andriy nodded, grinning. “They got control of the current earlier,” he said, when he caught his breath. “My clock was blinking twelve when I woke up. I took it out on the street and asked someone the time, and when I set it, it keeps track.”
Orla lowered the baby toward it. “Marlow, look,” she said.
Andriy gestured to the television. The padded wall remained. “They say this is next,” he said. “We can hope.”
“Where did Manny and his family go?” Orla asked. Marlow began to fuss again. She stuck her thumb in Marlow’s mouth, wondering where she would feed the baby in this strange man’s apartment.
Andriy stopped smiling. “That is the thing I am not getting yet. The rumor that there is more to this. That time, power, data all going away, this was nothing. Just curtain for them to work behind. This morning, when I went out with my clock, Manny and his wife are shouting. I hear it even in the stairs.” Andriy raised his hands, as if to show he had nothing to do with it. “And then when I go outside, I see this again. People yelling, people crying. People whose phones have come back.”
He told her what he saw when he went looking for the time. People stopping in their tracks at the sounds in their pockets, sounds that had long been so familiar they were more like flicks in their brains, sounds that nonetheless were startling after the last few days. He widened his eyes and dropped his jaw, aping the shock