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everyone’s body can take it — I don’t know if mine can
because my atomic structure really is different from everyone
else’s, or because maybe my brain is. Maybe some of the DARPA
workers have gone crazy because they think the whole idea of time
travel is crazy, to begin with.
    Thirty tried smiling at me again. “Like I
said, we want to find out more about your molecular structure, your
atoms, the electric charges in your body…to find out what makes you
so… unique .”
    That was when she gave me a House of David
replica jersey. With the name Bassett stitched in back, right over
the “33.”
    “We just want you to be comfortable
here.”
    I never did put on that jersey.
    At least not until a few minutes ago, when
the alarm went off. And the Twenty-Fives came in and finished
unstrapping me from the machine, though I don’t think they were
happy that I’d already yanked out a lot of the wires myself.
    I only had my underpants on, in the mapping
machine, so one of the Twenty-Five’s grabbed the House of David
shirt and threw it at me and told me to get dressed.
    “Why?” I managed to ask.
    “We’re taking you to a more secure room.”
    “Why?”
    That’s when they threw my pants at me.
     
    And then they brought me here. To my mom’s
old hotel room. Except, this time I didn’t have to time-travel to
get here. This time, they brought the room to me.
    Or brought it to the DARPA tunnels, anyway,
piece by piece, preserved like some kind of museum display so they
could study every bit of it and try to figure out what was going
wrong with all their plans. Apparently, the room had been boarded
up for years, following some “incidents” back in the 1940s.
    After the time travel started, DARPA started
to guess what some of those “incidents” might be, so while
pretending to renovate part of the hotel, they dismantled the
entire room and brought it here, trying to find clues.
    At least, that’s what I guessed after I asked
one of the Twenty-Fives what my mom’s hotel was doing here in the
first place.
    “It was scaring people, so we had to move it.
Hotel guests started seeing things: ghosts, newspapers left in the
hall that predicted the future. We don’t want people to be
scared!”
    Except when he said it, he was looking up
toward where the alarm noise was coming from and he looked pretty
frightened himself.
    I bet they were really afraid the room had
become one of those nexuses Clyne talked about — a place turned
into a kind of time portal as a result of my mom’s work. I bet
they’re wrong, but they aren’t taking any chances anymore.
    “Just stay in here, and don’t move!” Now both
Twenty-Fives looked really scared.
    “What is it? What’s going on?”
    “This room should be safe enough. Don’t touch
anything. We’ll be back.”
    That was a couple hours ago.
    I still half expect my mom to show up, and
take me downstairs through the hotel lobby, past the actors doing
that radio show — the one about families. One Man’s Family .
Maybe it’s not just my family that’s in trouble now, though. Maybe
it’s everybody’s.
    Everything here is exactly like I remember
it. Even the pictures are here. The ones Mom drew, where she
imagined how I would look as I grew up.
    She had to imagine it, she told me, because
she wasn’t going to be there to see it herself.
    Here’s one of me as a teenager. I still don’t
look like that yet.
    But I look older than in the first drawing
she did. I’m not that little a kid anymore.
    I feel my face. It’s damp under my eyes.
    She’s already missed part of my growing.
Already missed something she’ll never get back. I’ll never get
back.
    Thunk!
    Sskkaa sskkaa sskkaa…
    Now what? A scratching noise, a loud mouse
maybe. But I can’t believe, with all their security precautions,
that even a mouse could get in here if it wasn’t allowed.
    Maybe the mouse is a spy. Or maybe the mouse
used to be some other kid that wasn’t cooperating, and they decided
not