Everyone decided to take a half-day off and meet in Brooklyn for Coffee. Jacob and I had talked yesterday, and we wanted to see what everyone thought.
We started off talking about the purposes of our shifting. The heart of the discussion was Jacob’s idea about not seeing the immediate effect; that it could be some distant ripple.
"What we actually did," Hannah said to get things started, "was a good thing. But there were so many lynchings…"
Jacob told everyone that he couldn't find anything significant about Joheh, that the only mention of anyone with that name was that he filed a report in the Vicksburg sheriff's office a few years after we saved him.
"That's not the point… Not that it wasn't a good thing… It just wasn't the real thing. It's like ripples in a pond. We are the stone in the pond,” Jacob concluded. “The purpose is the ripples pushed by the wind becoming a wave on the far bank.”
"That makes a lot of sense," Kent said. "Domino effect… We do this then then next, then the next until something significant."
"So we think," Jacob replied.
Then I changed the subject. “So, I feel like ‘they’ are sort of… invasive.”
“How so?” Addison said.
“I think we’ll all have a ‘compelled’ anecdote once I get started. I bought a car 2800 miles from my house, despite the possibility of getting a job in NYC. Merritt-2000 felt like he had to have it. That let me to being compelled to go to a dance club where I met Jenn. Emma was compelled to walk up to us out of the blue after shifting 144 years and being in shock. Skip ahead… Shay… at McDonalds…?”
Shay smiled. “I saw you and immediately knew you were the guy from Miami. I don’t usually speak to strangers out of the blue… I…”
“Felt compelled?” Hannah asked.
Shay nodded.
Kent spoke up next. “I reached out to Hannah the very next day. I mean, I was planning on reaching out, but… I just couldn’t wait.”
Jacob mentioned seeing Emma’s image on the marquee at the theater and feeling like he had to stop what he was doing to go inside. Addison went on to say that, despite Emma’s obvious qualifications to play the part, she and Tom both knew they had to, without option, hire her.
Hannah admitted that, as much as she felt like she was competing with Emma for Merritt’s attention, she couldn’t think of her in any way but as a friend. Emma reciprocated the feeling.
“Well,” Devon replied, “the night I spoke to Emma and Addison, it was pretty normal, but after Merritt’s invitation to move in… I mean, on face value, that seemed… pushy, but… it made sense, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”
We talked about how connected we felt; far beyond what we thought time spent together would achieve. I repeated my thoughts about it being metaphysical and no one disagreed.
Then, Jacob went on to mention the guy quitting the job at NYC SysCo that he was taking. “These time shifters… are making things happen. I see what you mean, Merritt. How much… power… do they have?”
Kent shook his head. “And if they have this kind of power, can’t they just use it to… you know… stop a lynching on their own?”
“Good point,” Hannah replied.
Then Emma said something I had never thought of. “There must be something we all have in common that them other people don’t have. Somethin’ their magic can hook onto…”
“Okay…” Hannah replied. “…that must be true. So… what is it?”
“DNA?” Kent asked. “Something on some gene or… whatever they call it?”
“Could be…” Devon replied. “Let’s say we never find out… I think we have to just assume we have something they hook onto, and…”
Everyone seemed to come to the point I was leading up to.
“We need to be very conscious of this,” Kent said. "If they can influence us like that… If we know we are being influenced, then we'll know something is up. Something connected to the shifting stuff."
“Yeah,” Shay replied. “Weigh what we’re feeling carefully, and… get a read… is it coming from ‘them’ or from us… If from them, we need to be ready for… action."
We all were nodding our agreement.
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