fiction: Be Nice Or Leave Part 2
Part One
When she opens her eyes again they are back in the house before Daniel has moved in. "You're gone now," Delilah says. "You're safe here."
The Arsonist does not respond. He's still crying, his tears leaving a cloud-shaped wet spot on Delilah's blue coat. Later, when he sleeps on the floor of the dusty attic, she wonders if she must babysit him now, if she should bring him food from the kitchen like she has Daniel, if she is responsible for his destiny now, too. When he wakes she is sitting on the floor, playing cat's cradle, and he stands up to look out the window, his back to her, silhouetted.
"She died," Delilah says, her voice flat. "She woke up and looked out the window. She saw a bird flying before she died, and now her eyes won't open anymore."
The Arsonist doesn't speak. Delilah's heart is beating very loudly and suddenly she realizes that she has broken the rules, that the Agency would take her off the mission for this, that she could lose her licenses. That she is trapped in the empty house with the Arsonist, and that she had just taken him away from the woman he loved.
"So that's it, then," he says, and that's all. He does not turn around. "She's gone."
"I'm sorry," Delilah says.
It's sunny outside. The sky is blue and the trees move in the wind; it is gorgeous. Inappropriate for the guilt they both feel.
The Arsonist turns around. "Where are we?"
"The house," Delilah says. "1834."
"So I am another person," he says. "In another time."
"Not another place," Delilah says. "I can't go to other places."
"Why did you bring me here?" he asks, turning around to face her then, his eyes bright against the dark outline of his face.
Delilah closes her eyes. "I don't know," she says. "I don't know what I'm supposed to do. I think I need help, and I can't trust the Captain anymore."
"Then trust me," the Arsonist says, and he sits down on the floor across from her. Now his stooped over shoulders, his defeated posture, seem appropriate and not pessimistic: his eyes aren't wary any longer, just sad. This is where Delilah falls into the trap. Later, she realizes this is why the Agency has rules.
"You know why you're special? You don't need the time machine," the Captain is saying to her. This is when Delilah is still small, a young girl with tightly-braded hair, wearing the novice overalls who thinks the Agency headquarters is more special than any other place in the world, with its red velvet furnishings and brass machines. "The other Agents, they do. They are not normal. They have a finely-honed sense of time, just as you do. Their knowledge and intuition of cause-and-effect is unparalleled. They learn, above all things, to use this machine to guard the past against the future."
She turns to the young Delilah. This is the first time they have spoken since Delilah arrived. "You must be just as good as they are," she says, her voice low and rich. "Because you do not need the machine. But in everything you do, you must guard the past against the future."
This time Delilah has broken the rules. And for the first time since Daniel Bradshaw has died, she is not alone.
Slowly the Arsonist learns. She does not learn his name, but this is not important: she will never have to address him in a group, find him in a crowd, search for his name in a database, she will never have to identify him on the basis of his name. In her head he is and will be the Arsonist. The name carries with it dangerous connotations, adding excitement to small actions: making coffee, tying his shoes, pulling on a shirt over the long, bony lines of his body. His eyes lose their sadness and turn back to wariness. They travel silently, watching traffic, watching people, watching time go forward, too fast, like a fast-forward on a movie. She begins to notice him slumping less, no longer hunched over his coffee like he is afraid of the world. Sometimes she thinks that the worst has happened to him, that the death of the first Delilah has ignited something, some slow-burning fuse that shines in the back of his eyes at night. He begins to move with confidence, dressing in black, losing the desire for frivolous things.
Delilah has no sense of time and it no wonder that those with her lose it quickly. Taste in clothing, music becomes irrelevant to culture or time period. The obsolete musicals of the forties and the passionate wailing of Neutral Milk Hotel both echo in her head, she finds herself whispering the words to old African spirituals late at night while the Arsonist sleeps. Sometimes she wishes to jump ahead in her own life, to discover the time when she has figured out the mystery, to just whisper in the ear of that Delilah and return to the Agency, to have all this be over. Sometimes she wishes to prolong these days with the Arsonist, weeks on end when they stay in the same time period, pretending like she is someone else in another time. It is the Arsonist who wished for these things but when it happens Delilah catches him looking out windows, glancing at the calendar, going to the white, circular room on the second floor. She wonders if there are other Agents in New Orleans, if she is fighting this battle alone.
"Tell me about the Agency," he says one day, sitting on the back porch. Delilah is knitting again, using a very fine silvery thread that looks like a spider web.
"You come to the Agency when you are very young," Delilah says. "The first thing they do is show you the time machine. It's...it's not something you can really explain. A time machine has more parts than you can count and only some of those parts go with you when you go. They put you in the time machine and show you the future. Then you come back, and they teach you about time. You do not use the time machine again until you can answer the Paradoxes."
"What are the Paradoxes?" the Arsonist asks. He's sitting on the steps, his back against the railing, sunlight casting his shadow long upon the steps, breaking it into flat lines and angles.
"You have heard the paradoxes," Delilah says. "The simple one is the grandfather paradox. A man hates his grandfather, so he invents a time machine to go back and kill his grandfather, before the man himself was born."
"But if he kills his grandfather, then his father wouldn't be born, and thus the man himself couldn't be born to shoot the grandfather," the Arsonist says.
"Yes," Delilah says. "That's the paradox. Before you can use the time machine you are given a written test of fifteen paradoxes and you must resolve or explain each one. That's question one."
The Arsonist muses on this, watching Delilah knit calmly, her needles long and thin, flashing silver in the dappled sunlight. "So what's the answer?" he asks finally, looking up at her.
Delilah pauses her knitting, tilts her head at him. "It's how you think about time," she says. "We go through years. We train on the instruments: the benzometer, the heliographer, the chronometer. We learn to manipulate the string. We make strips of paper that have no end and no beginning--you can do this, everyone can do this. Once you can do that, then you learn to do it with, with more. You can make a universe that has one edge, one side, which is strung upon a chain of universes that also has one edge, one side."
"But there has to be an answer," the Arsonist insists. "Something that's not in your head. A real, concrete answer. A Moebius strip? That's just an trick, like an optical illusion, that's not how the world works."
"Time always moves forward," she says softly. "You live your life in order. Always."
"You can't go back to when you were born, then?" the Arsonist asks. "You can't go back and teach your younger self everything you know?"
"Time always moves forward," Delilah says, then frowns. "You're not thinking about it right. No, no, you could never."
"Why?" he asks, his eyes moving about restlessly. His eyes are angry, glittering, and in the back of them she can see the flames of the house burning before her. She knows with certainty that he will leave, and that she will be alone. Since she made this mistake, since he is here, her future is no longer certain. She has Gotten Involved, the Agency would say, temporal interference. The future is there but now she is part of it, and she cannot read it as she would the future of others.
She has no answer for this question. When Delilah received the written paradox test she was seven years old, and time was laid out before her like the string puzzles the Agency had in their lounges: golden affairs hanging on wires, three-dimensional shapes that combined air into their locks, that had to be arranged in a certain way. When they were, then you could see a secret design. These were designed to give training to the Agents, to teach them about perception, about observation and time. When Delilah was given the written paradox test when she was seven years old she closed her eyes, fitting the pieces to the olden wires. The man, the grandfather, the grandmother, the father, the mother. In her mind, she twisted the wires, bringing their golden lines into order with her fingers until they lined up like an optical illusion, a statue that couldn't exist, and then she wrote what she saw.
There is no wrong or right way to explain the paradoxes. They are only there to discern whether an Agent has the ability to see time. Delilah was the first Agent ever to get the puzzle right.
Time passes and follows Occum's Razor. The simplest explanation is the right one.
It is 1907 and Delilah is shivering on the porch of the house, lying on the floor in the fetal position, her head pressed to her knees, both touching the ground. Outside, there is a hurricane with no name roaring through the streets, or maybe a tropical storm-weather is imprecise, in 1907, and it is a bad time for Delilah to be pregnant.
The Arsonist just watches from the porch door, his eyes dark. Delilah woke up with fever and ran outside to throw up, in the rain, off the side of the porch. She feels his dark eyes on her and wishes, with all her heart, that he would just come over and touch her shoulder, that he would wrap an arm around her and hold her close, tell her that things were going to be okay, push her dripping hair behind her ears, and lead her back inside.
Instead he stands in the doorway, hands in his pockets, looking scruffy and immaculate all in one, his black shabby, his skin pale. He just stands there until Delilah, shivering and wet, pulls herself up from the porch floor, wiping the rain and tears off her face. When she turns around he doesn't hug her, doesn't hold out a hand of comfort. She brushes past him in the doorway and he stands as still as ever, just watching the rain.
Delilah takes off her blue coat and red dress, hangs them in front of the fire. She wraps up in a quilt, a quilt that Maryann Bradshaw will use to deliver Meredith Bradshaw into the world and--Delilah barely thinks it--Daniel Bradshaw, too. Outside, the sky is like charcoal and the wind runs, screaming, through the streets. Delilah does not look over her shoulder to stare at the Arsonist, and he does not come inside to wipe her tears with one finger.
Later on, Delilah and the Arsonist cease talking. She takes him back to 2008, months after he left. The time period doesn't correspond; he's aged dramatically, three years since his last venture into this household. While she is in the kitchen, making tea, she looks out the window and sees him on the other side of the fence, in the street, where she can never go.
Delilah leaves 2008, taking her swollen stomach with her. But she can't stay away. In a week she's back, sitting on the back porch in a rocking chair, holding her head in her hands. Two weeks later she's curled up on the red velvet couch on the second floor landing, staring at the ceiling. She gives birth in the attic, in 2008, on a rainy April day--April 19th--and the baby is a girl, just like Delilah had known it would be. When she opens her eyes they are blue.
Delilah holds her baby, cries into its arms, rocks it all night long, whispering into its ear all the lovely things she knows, the tiny loopholes and arrows of time, the nature of paradoxes, how to make the golden puzzle work like no one else in the world can. Delilah doesn't have anything else to give her child.
When Delilah leaves 2008 she places the child in a basket on the doorstep, wrapped in a lace shawl knitted in an hourglass pattern. Jessamine's the one who finds the baby.
The Arsonist meets up with the Captain, in 2009. Delilah doesn't see the meeting, but she knows about it, reading Cassie's blue-ink on linen paper letters while Cassie is asleep, the Captain speaking about her new Time Machine, about some remarks recently made to her by Jessamine's foundling, who Jessamine and Cassie have named Delilah. She encloses a form, the beginnings, Delilah supposes, of the Agency. Included is a photo of the Arsonist and the Captain, standing in front of the blue zeppelin, the Arsonist in all black, his eyes hollow and haunting as ever. The Captain is, as ever, mysterious, lovely, untouchable, unreachable.
Delilah never sees small Delilah again. You can't cross your own timeline, after all.
Later on the Arsonist makes his own special branch of the Agency. This time the red planes are not comic book drawings but larger than life machines, sailing over the house, dropping down fluttering yellow papers which bear the stamp Delilah has seen over and over. BE NICE OR LEAVE, the Arsonist says, and Delilah knows he is taunting her. It is only weeks now until the house goes up in flames, and Delilah is running out of time. Sometimes she's close enough to see the blue blimp hovering over the house, knows that the Captain is there, making tea, waiting for her.
The Arsonist breaks from the Time Agency, his fight with the Captain the beginning of the madness. When he leaves, he takes machines with him, machines the Captain has used to keep time in check. now the red planes fly every day, casting liquid fire over the countryside and bright yellow pamphlets fluttering against blue skies in the cities, BE NICE OR LEAVE, BE NICE OR LEAVE. The Captain responds with her own. "CATCH THE ARSONIST" posters, his black, hollow eyes staring out of posters on every street corner. Cassie has one up on the kitchen door, and when Delilah sits at the kitchen she can feel his eyes on her, again.
He's looking for her. He's come back to the house so many times, while she kept just out of sight. The Captain won't let him near Delilah anymore, keeping the young girl locked up in the Agency, brainwashing her, making her forget all but her most basic memories, trained for command, read for this mission she must achieve.
Delilah watches the Arsonist in the house. It's dangerous for him after the skism, after the break from the Agency and the Captain. He sneaks in, but he knows all the hiding places (she showed him herself). "Delilah?" he calls, softly, in the night, unable to see in the darkness like she can. Now, too late, he reaches out as if he could brush her skin with his fingertips, as if he could erase everything he's done.
He grows increasingly mad. Cassie and Jessamine become more alert, bring more people into the house, making it harder for him to enter. Delilah sees him when they don't, waiting across the street, scanning the rooftops and windows, looking for her face. He might have spotted her, once or twice, but she won't talk to him now.
Delilah understands that she is caught in a loop of time but she doesn't know how to erase it.
This time she approaches it the right way around. She climbs the ladder to the blue zeppelin and enters the cabin just as she has left for the second time. This time she doesn't shout angrily or take orders; she sits in the wrought-iron chair, opposite the Captain, and accepts the cup of tea with shaking hands.
"I don't know how to break it," Delilah says. "I didn't create this loop of time, did I? If I don't, then...all this will have happened, but if I do, then--"
"You created it," the Captain says. "You pulled him back."
"That was the starting point, but I can't cross my own timeline," Delilah says, and she sets the tea down with trembling hands. "But I did. I can't make the puzzle fit this time," she says. "I can't see the link."
"You're too involved," the Captain says. "I can't help you anymore except to tell you that now, you are in the puzzle. You already broke the rules."
"I broke the rules?" Delilah says, and it is not a question but a thought process inside her brain. She stands up, slowly, and walks around the room, her blue coat fitted at the waist, her golden hourglass-in-a-circle of the Agency gleaming on her left arm.
"You stop the red planes," Delilah says, turning around to face the Captain. She notices, for the first time, the tiny lines around the Captain's eyes, wonders what she herself is like, what she would look from an outside observer. It doesn't matter. Schrodinger's Cat has no outside observers.
"I will," the Captain says.
"I will catch the Arsonist," Delilah says.
The Captain does not embrace Delilah. Instead, she only nods, a slow movement that contains within it a wellspring of pity, a strength borne from shared hardness. She has had to make decisions this hard and Delilah draws strength from the knowledge. The Captain touches her hand, then lets Delilah go.
She doesn't leave, this time. She doesn't think she can anymore. She climbs down the ladder, back onto the roof, dropping silently in her boot feet.
She stops in, to see Jessamine, while Jessamine is sleeping. She kisses the woman on the forehead, gently, and takes the blue cornflower out of her pocket to place it on Jessamine's pillow.
When the Arsonist comes, with his gasoline and his matches, Delilah is standing on the front porch, waiting for him. He drops them in the yard and rushes forward, up the steps in twos. When he's at the top step he reaches for her, his fingers brushing her shoulders, then pulls her into an embrace, burying his head in her hair, pressing her body against his.
"Delilah," he whispers, into her hair. "They said you died in there, died of cancer while I was away. They said it with these voices, oh Delilah, you knew they were just thinking good riddance, at least we're rid of him, they never understood how much I love you--Delilah, Delilah, Delilah," he whispers, over and over, into her hair, his hands rubbing her back. "I knew you weren't gone, I knew you couldn't leave me. I can't do it anymore, I can't live without you, I had to get them to let you go. I knew they were keeping you from me, keeping you in the house, I was going to smoke you out. I saw our child, our child, Delilah, they tried to keep her from me too, even her. They gave her your name and thought I didn't know, wouldn't find out? Delilah, Delilah, Delilah," he murmurs over and over, her name on his lips like a praise, clinging to her like she is his lifeline, his salvation.
Gently, Delilah lifts her hand to his face, looks at the hollowness in his eyes, runs her hand across his haggard cheek, kisses him softly on the lips.
"I'm here," she says. "I knew you loved me, all the time."
"I do," he says, both his hands on her shoulders, his eyes searching her face hungrily, as if he can't get enough of her. "I do, so, so much. Delilah. I've waited so long, Delilah, can you take me back? Take us back? I've done so much to reach you, I'd give anything, anything."
"Yes," she whispers. "We can be together, forever, without them, without anyone. Come on," she says, and clasps his hand. "Get the gasoline. I'll take us where it's safe."
Doubt clouds over his eyes. "It's not safe anywhere," he whispers, following her down the porch steps. "The Captain, she has a time machine, I told her what you told me, I told her how it worked, all the things you showed me about time. Delilah, I was just trying to find you but she won't, she turned on me, said it couldn't, said I would just kill you--Delilah, Delilah, it's not safe anywhere," he says, but they are in the front yard now, next to the red plastic containers full of gasoline.
"Shhh," Delilah says, reaching up with one hand to smooth his hair. "You don't think those were all of my secrets, did you? I can still save us, I can still take us away. But you mustn't hurt these people anymore," she says. "They were very good to me while I was sick, you know that. Here, take this gasoline and put it back into the car, all right? I'll be here, right here, in plain sight, the entire time. I'll tell you stories," she promises, when the Arsonist hesitates. "Stories for when we go away together. Stories about all the people who lived in the house, about my very first friend. You'll like him. Come on, put the gasoline away."
The Arsonist does it, reluctantly, glancing back at Delilah every few seconds. She waits until all the cans of gasoline are safely gone before she walks over to him, takes his hand. He smiles down at her, brokenly, tucks a strand of hair behind her ear.
"I love you," he says.
"I love you," she says. "Are you ready?"
He nods. Hands still clasped, they turn and walk through the front gate, into the empty street.
When she opens her eyes again they are back in the house before Daniel has moved in. "You're gone now," Delilah says. "You're safe here."
The Arsonist does not respond. He's still crying, his tears leaving a cloud-shaped wet spot on Delilah's blue coat. Later, when he sleeps on the floor of the dusty attic, she wonders if she must babysit him now, if she should bring him food from the kitchen like she has Daniel, if she is responsible for his destiny now, too. When he wakes she is sitting on the floor, playing cat's cradle, and he stands up to look out the window, his back to her, silhouetted.
"She died," Delilah says, her voice flat. "She woke up and looked out the window. She saw a bird flying before she died, and now her eyes won't open anymore."
The Arsonist doesn't speak. Delilah's heart is beating very loudly and suddenly she realizes that she has broken the rules, that the Agency would take her off the mission for this, that she could lose her licenses. That she is trapped in the empty house with the Arsonist, and that she had just taken him away from the woman he loved.
"So that's it, then," he says, and that's all. He does not turn around. "She's gone."
"I'm sorry," Delilah says.
It's sunny outside. The sky is blue and the trees move in the wind; it is gorgeous. Inappropriate for the guilt they both feel.
The Arsonist turns around. "Where are we?"
"The house," Delilah says. "1834."
"So I am another person," he says. "In another time."
"Not another place," Delilah says. "I can't go to other places."
"Why did you bring me here?" he asks, turning around to face her then, his eyes bright against the dark outline of his face.
Delilah closes her eyes. "I don't know," she says. "I don't know what I'm supposed to do. I think I need help, and I can't trust the Captain anymore."
"Then trust me," the Arsonist says, and he sits down on the floor across from her. Now his stooped over shoulders, his defeated posture, seem appropriate and not pessimistic: his eyes aren't wary any longer, just sad. This is where Delilah falls into the trap. Later, she realizes this is why the Agency has rules.
"You know why you're special? You don't need the time machine," the Captain is saying to her. This is when Delilah is still small, a young girl with tightly-braded hair, wearing the novice overalls who thinks the Agency headquarters is more special than any other place in the world, with its red velvet furnishings and brass machines. "The other Agents, they do. They are not normal. They have a finely-honed sense of time, just as you do. Their knowledge and intuition of cause-and-effect is unparalleled. They learn, above all things, to use this machine to guard the past against the future."
She turns to the young Delilah. This is the first time they have spoken since Delilah arrived. "You must be just as good as they are," she says, her voice low and rich. "Because you do not need the machine. But in everything you do, you must guard the past against the future."
This time Delilah has broken the rules. And for the first time since Daniel Bradshaw has died, she is not alone.
Slowly the Arsonist learns. She does not learn his name, but this is not important: she will never have to address him in a group, find him in a crowd, search for his name in a database, she will never have to identify him on the basis of his name. In her head he is and will be the Arsonist. The name carries with it dangerous connotations, adding excitement to small actions: making coffee, tying his shoes, pulling on a shirt over the long, bony lines of his body. His eyes lose their sadness and turn back to wariness. They travel silently, watching traffic, watching people, watching time go forward, too fast, like a fast-forward on a movie. She begins to notice him slumping less, no longer hunched over his coffee like he is afraid of the world. Sometimes she thinks that the worst has happened to him, that the death of the first Delilah has ignited something, some slow-burning fuse that shines in the back of his eyes at night. He begins to move with confidence, dressing in black, losing the desire for frivolous things.
Delilah has no sense of time and it no wonder that those with her lose it quickly. Taste in clothing, music becomes irrelevant to culture or time period. The obsolete musicals of the forties and the passionate wailing of Neutral Milk Hotel both echo in her head, she finds herself whispering the words to old African spirituals late at night while the Arsonist sleeps. Sometimes she wishes to jump ahead in her own life, to discover the time when she has figured out the mystery, to just whisper in the ear of that Delilah and return to the Agency, to have all this be over. Sometimes she wishes to prolong these days with the Arsonist, weeks on end when they stay in the same time period, pretending like she is someone else in another time. It is the Arsonist who wished for these things but when it happens Delilah catches him looking out windows, glancing at the calendar, going to the white, circular room on the second floor. She wonders if there are other Agents in New Orleans, if she is fighting this battle alone.
"Tell me about the Agency," he says one day, sitting on the back porch. Delilah is knitting again, using a very fine silvery thread that looks like a spider web.
"You come to the Agency when you are very young," Delilah says. "The first thing they do is show you the time machine. It's...it's not something you can really explain. A time machine has more parts than you can count and only some of those parts go with you when you go. They put you in the time machine and show you the future. Then you come back, and they teach you about time. You do not use the time machine again until you can answer the Paradoxes."
"What are the Paradoxes?" the Arsonist asks. He's sitting on the steps, his back against the railing, sunlight casting his shadow long upon the steps, breaking it into flat lines and angles.
"You have heard the paradoxes," Delilah says. "The simple one is the grandfather paradox. A man hates his grandfather, so he invents a time machine to go back and kill his grandfather, before the man himself was born."
"But if he kills his grandfather, then his father wouldn't be born, and thus the man himself couldn't be born to shoot the grandfather," the Arsonist says.
"Yes," Delilah says. "That's the paradox. Before you can use the time machine you are given a written test of fifteen paradoxes and you must resolve or explain each one. That's question one."
The Arsonist muses on this, watching Delilah knit calmly, her needles long and thin, flashing silver in the dappled sunlight. "So what's the answer?" he asks finally, looking up at her.
Delilah pauses her knitting, tilts her head at him. "It's how you think about time," she says. "We go through years. We train on the instruments: the benzometer, the heliographer, the chronometer. We learn to manipulate the string. We make strips of paper that have no end and no beginning--you can do this, everyone can do this. Once you can do that, then you learn to do it with, with more. You can make a universe that has one edge, one side, which is strung upon a chain of universes that also has one edge, one side."
"But there has to be an answer," the Arsonist insists. "Something that's not in your head. A real, concrete answer. A Moebius strip? That's just an trick, like an optical illusion, that's not how the world works."
"Time always moves forward," she says softly. "You live your life in order. Always."
"You can't go back to when you were born, then?" the Arsonist asks. "You can't go back and teach your younger self everything you know?"
"Time always moves forward," Delilah says, then frowns. "You're not thinking about it right. No, no, you could never."
"Why?" he asks, his eyes moving about restlessly. His eyes are angry, glittering, and in the back of them she can see the flames of the house burning before her. She knows with certainty that he will leave, and that she will be alone. Since she made this mistake, since he is here, her future is no longer certain. She has Gotten Involved, the Agency would say, temporal interference. The future is there but now she is part of it, and she cannot read it as she would the future of others.
She has no answer for this question. When Delilah received the written paradox test she was seven years old, and time was laid out before her like the string puzzles the Agency had in their lounges: golden affairs hanging on wires, three-dimensional shapes that combined air into their locks, that had to be arranged in a certain way. When they were, then you could see a secret design. These were designed to give training to the Agents, to teach them about perception, about observation and time. When Delilah was given the written paradox test when she was seven years old she closed her eyes, fitting the pieces to the olden wires. The man, the grandfather, the grandmother, the father, the mother. In her mind, she twisted the wires, bringing their golden lines into order with her fingers until they lined up like an optical illusion, a statue that couldn't exist, and then she wrote what she saw.
There is no wrong or right way to explain the paradoxes. They are only there to discern whether an Agent has the ability to see time. Delilah was the first Agent ever to get the puzzle right.
Time passes and follows Occum's Razor. The simplest explanation is the right one.
It is 1907 and Delilah is shivering on the porch of the house, lying on the floor in the fetal position, her head pressed to her knees, both touching the ground. Outside, there is a hurricane with no name roaring through the streets, or maybe a tropical storm-weather is imprecise, in 1907, and it is a bad time for Delilah to be pregnant.
The Arsonist just watches from the porch door, his eyes dark. Delilah woke up with fever and ran outside to throw up, in the rain, off the side of the porch. She feels his dark eyes on her and wishes, with all her heart, that he would just come over and touch her shoulder, that he would wrap an arm around her and hold her close, tell her that things were going to be okay, push her dripping hair behind her ears, and lead her back inside.
Instead he stands in the doorway, hands in his pockets, looking scruffy and immaculate all in one, his black shabby, his skin pale. He just stands there until Delilah, shivering and wet, pulls herself up from the porch floor, wiping the rain and tears off her face. When she turns around he doesn't hug her, doesn't hold out a hand of comfort. She brushes past him in the doorway and he stands as still as ever, just watching the rain.
Delilah takes off her blue coat and red dress, hangs them in front of the fire. She wraps up in a quilt, a quilt that Maryann Bradshaw will use to deliver Meredith Bradshaw into the world and--Delilah barely thinks it--Daniel Bradshaw, too. Outside, the sky is like charcoal and the wind runs, screaming, through the streets. Delilah does not look over her shoulder to stare at the Arsonist, and he does not come inside to wipe her tears with one finger.
Later on, Delilah and the Arsonist cease talking. She takes him back to 2008, months after he left. The time period doesn't correspond; he's aged dramatically, three years since his last venture into this household. While she is in the kitchen, making tea, she looks out the window and sees him on the other side of the fence, in the street, where she can never go.
Delilah leaves 2008, taking her swollen stomach with her. But she can't stay away. In a week she's back, sitting on the back porch in a rocking chair, holding her head in her hands. Two weeks later she's curled up on the red velvet couch on the second floor landing, staring at the ceiling. She gives birth in the attic, in 2008, on a rainy April day--April 19th--and the baby is a girl, just like Delilah had known it would be. When she opens her eyes they are blue.
Delilah holds her baby, cries into its arms, rocks it all night long, whispering into its ear all the lovely things she knows, the tiny loopholes and arrows of time, the nature of paradoxes, how to make the golden puzzle work like no one else in the world can. Delilah doesn't have anything else to give her child.
When Delilah leaves 2008 she places the child in a basket on the doorstep, wrapped in a lace shawl knitted in an hourglass pattern. Jessamine's the one who finds the baby.
The Arsonist meets up with the Captain, in 2009. Delilah doesn't see the meeting, but she knows about it, reading Cassie's blue-ink on linen paper letters while Cassie is asleep, the Captain speaking about her new Time Machine, about some remarks recently made to her by Jessamine's foundling, who Jessamine and Cassie have named Delilah. She encloses a form, the beginnings, Delilah supposes, of the Agency. Included is a photo of the Arsonist and the Captain, standing in front of the blue zeppelin, the Arsonist in all black, his eyes hollow and haunting as ever. The Captain is, as ever, mysterious, lovely, untouchable, unreachable.
Delilah never sees small Delilah again. You can't cross your own timeline, after all.
Later on the Arsonist makes his own special branch of the Agency. This time the red planes are not comic book drawings but larger than life machines, sailing over the house, dropping down fluttering yellow papers which bear the stamp Delilah has seen over and over. BE NICE OR LEAVE, the Arsonist says, and Delilah knows he is taunting her. It is only weeks now until the house goes up in flames, and Delilah is running out of time. Sometimes she's close enough to see the blue blimp hovering over the house, knows that the Captain is there, making tea, waiting for her.
The Arsonist breaks from the Time Agency, his fight with the Captain the beginning of the madness. When he leaves, he takes machines with him, machines the Captain has used to keep time in check. now the red planes fly every day, casting liquid fire over the countryside and bright yellow pamphlets fluttering against blue skies in the cities, BE NICE OR LEAVE, BE NICE OR LEAVE. The Captain responds with her own. "CATCH THE ARSONIST" posters, his black, hollow eyes staring out of posters on every street corner. Cassie has one up on the kitchen door, and when Delilah sits at the kitchen she can feel his eyes on her, again.
He's looking for her. He's come back to the house so many times, while she kept just out of sight. The Captain won't let him near Delilah anymore, keeping the young girl locked up in the Agency, brainwashing her, making her forget all but her most basic memories, trained for command, read for this mission she must achieve.
Delilah watches the Arsonist in the house. It's dangerous for him after the skism, after the break from the Agency and the Captain. He sneaks in, but he knows all the hiding places (she showed him herself). "Delilah?" he calls, softly, in the night, unable to see in the darkness like she can. Now, too late, he reaches out as if he could brush her skin with his fingertips, as if he could erase everything he's done.
He grows increasingly mad. Cassie and Jessamine become more alert, bring more people into the house, making it harder for him to enter. Delilah sees him when they don't, waiting across the street, scanning the rooftops and windows, looking for her face. He might have spotted her, once or twice, but she won't talk to him now.
Delilah understands that she is caught in a loop of time but she doesn't know how to erase it.
This time she approaches it the right way around. She climbs the ladder to the blue zeppelin and enters the cabin just as she has left for the second time. This time she doesn't shout angrily or take orders; she sits in the wrought-iron chair, opposite the Captain, and accepts the cup of tea with shaking hands.
"I don't know how to break it," Delilah says. "I didn't create this loop of time, did I? If I don't, then...all this will have happened, but if I do, then--"
"You created it," the Captain says. "You pulled him back."
"That was the starting point, but I can't cross my own timeline," Delilah says, and she sets the tea down with trembling hands. "But I did. I can't make the puzzle fit this time," she says. "I can't see the link."
"You're too involved," the Captain says. "I can't help you anymore except to tell you that now, you are in the puzzle. You already broke the rules."
"I broke the rules?" Delilah says, and it is not a question but a thought process inside her brain. She stands up, slowly, and walks around the room, her blue coat fitted at the waist, her golden hourglass-in-a-circle of the Agency gleaming on her left arm.
"You stop the red planes," Delilah says, turning around to face the Captain. She notices, for the first time, the tiny lines around the Captain's eyes, wonders what she herself is like, what she would look from an outside observer. It doesn't matter. Schrodinger's Cat has no outside observers.
"I will," the Captain says.
"I will catch the Arsonist," Delilah says.
The Captain does not embrace Delilah. Instead, she only nods, a slow movement that contains within it a wellspring of pity, a strength borne from shared hardness. She has had to make decisions this hard and Delilah draws strength from the knowledge. The Captain touches her hand, then lets Delilah go.
She doesn't leave, this time. She doesn't think she can anymore. She climbs down the ladder, back onto the roof, dropping silently in her boot feet.
She stops in, to see Jessamine, while Jessamine is sleeping. She kisses the woman on the forehead, gently, and takes the blue cornflower out of her pocket to place it on Jessamine's pillow.
When the Arsonist comes, with his gasoline and his matches, Delilah is standing on the front porch, waiting for him. He drops them in the yard and rushes forward, up the steps in twos. When he's at the top step he reaches for her, his fingers brushing her shoulders, then pulls her into an embrace, burying his head in her hair, pressing her body against his.
"Delilah," he whispers, into her hair. "They said you died in there, died of cancer while I was away. They said it with these voices, oh Delilah, you knew they were just thinking good riddance, at least we're rid of him, they never understood how much I love you--Delilah, Delilah, Delilah," he whispers, over and over, into her hair, his hands rubbing her back. "I knew you weren't gone, I knew you couldn't leave me. I can't do it anymore, I can't live without you, I had to get them to let you go. I knew they were keeping you from me, keeping you in the house, I was going to smoke you out. I saw our child, our child, Delilah, they tried to keep her from me too, even her. They gave her your name and thought I didn't know, wouldn't find out? Delilah, Delilah, Delilah," he murmurs over and over, her name on his lips like a praise, clinging to her like she is his lifeline, his salvation.
Gently, Delilah lifts her hand to his face, looks at the hollowness in his eyes, runs her hand across his haggard cheek, kisses him softly on the lips.
"I'm here," she says. "I knew you loved me, all the time."
"I do," he says, both his hands on her shoulders, his eyes searching her face hungrily, as if he can't get enough of her. "I do, so, so much. Delilah. I've waited so long, Delilah, can you take me back? Take us back? I've done so much to reach you, I'd give anything, anything."
"Yes," she whispers. "We can be together, forever, without them, without anyone. Come on," she says, and clasps his hand. "Get the gasoline. I'll take us where it's safe."
Doubt clouds over his eyes. "It's not safe anywhere," he whispers, following her down the porch steps. "The Captain, she has a time machine, I told her what you told me, I told her how it worked, all the things you showed me about time. Delilah, I was just trying to find you but she won't, she turned on me, said it couldn't, said I would just kill you--Delilah, Delilah, it's not safe anywhere," he says, but they are in the front yard now, next to the red plastic containers full of gasoline.
"Shhh," Delilah says, reaching up with one hand to smooth his hair. "You don't think those were all of my secrets, did you? I can still save us, I can still take us away. But you mustn't hurt these people anymore," she says. "They were very good to me while I was sick, you know that. Here, take this gasoline and put it back into the car, all right? I'll be here, right here, in plain sight, the entire time. I'll tell you stories," she promises, when the Arsonist hesitates. "Stories for when we go away together. Stories about all the people who lived in the house, about my very first friend. You'll like him. Come on, put the gasoline away."
The Arsonist does it, reluctantly, glancing back at Delilah every few seconds. She waits until all the cans of gasoline are safely gone before she walks over to him, takes his hand. He smiles down at her, brokenly, tucks a strand of hair behind her ear.
"I love you," he says.
"I love you," she says. "Are you ready?"
He nods. Hands still clasped, they turn and walk through the front gate, into the empty street.