While Michelle was in the shower, I looked around her apartment at her books and CDs, and I thought about what was going on. It didn’t make any sense. Why would this time traveler want to steal first Michelle’s body, and then mine? Where did the extra copy of Michelle’s body come from? The obvious answer was that the time traveler had met Michelle sometime in the future, and stolen her body, then jumped further back in time and stole mine... but why? Why did he leave us the time machine and body-swap machine? And why did my future self think I would need an extra body-swap machine? In a way I was glad to have so many mind-boggling questions to think about, to keep my mind off other questions — questions about this body and what it would be like to...

Michelle came out fully dressed. “Are you ready?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said, a little nervous. “How are we going to do this, exactly?”

“I figure we can go down to the laundry room and jump back a few hours from there. Then go out and set our watches from the bank clock, down the street; figure out how much time we have until you come over here. What time was that, exactly?”

“I’m not sure what time you — the person who sounded like you — called,” I answered; “or exactly what time I got here, but I glanced at my watch when I was at the stop light at the North Druid Hills Road exit, and it was 11:45.”

“So you got here sometime around noon, then. And what time did the person who stole your body leave?”

“Not more than five minutes later, I’m pretty sure.”

“So we hire a taxi and we lie in wait from about 11:45 onward, and then follow the person in your body wherever he’s going.”

“Right.”

“All right, let’s go.”

I was a little nervous as we walked down to the laundry room — it was the first time anybody besides Michelle had seen me in her body, and I kept feeling nervous, as though I would look as odd and out of place as I felt. We didn’t meet many people, though, and the few we met — a couple of older women — didn’t stare at me, so I started feeling a little better. We found a drier running, but there was nobody else there.

“A full turn is about five and a half days, right?” Michelle asked. “We need to jump back at least six hours, to be sure we can get a taxi before the thief leaves. That’s about a twentieth of a turn; hard to measure exactly...”

“Let’s suppose we have no better precision than about three or four hours,” I said; “so to be sure we arrive no later than we want, we need to try to turn it more than a twentieth of a turn but less than a tenth: roughly nine hours, plus or minus three hours.”

“Yes, and that gives us a better chance of arriving when the laundry room is empty, early in the morning. — Let’s go,” she said, as we heard footsteps in the hall outside. She hooked my arm into hers, and twisted the time machine. There was no obvious effect, except that the sound of footsteps suddenly ceased, as did the noise of the drier.

“Let’s go see when we are,” she said, releasing my arm.

We walked outside; the light was that of early morning. I was suddenly a lot more nervous.

“Come on,” Michelle said. “I just thought of something. I can’t call you Josh when people might hear us, can I?”

“It might sound odd. Are you going to tell your neighbors your twin sister is visiting you?”

“If I have to. That’s an idea. I’ll call you Margaret.”

“What? Why?”

“I’m named for my younger aunt; if my mom had had twin daughters she probably would have named the other one for my other aunt, Margaret.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Have you got something against my aunt?”

I didn’t try to answer that. We had crossed the parking lot to the street by now, and could see the clock display outside the bank down the street: 5:57 AM.

“We’ve got a lot of time to kill,” I realized.

Michelle was setting her watch. I hadn’t been wearing one when I first jumped into Michelle’s body, the one she was in now; she had scrounged up an older one from somewhere. I set my watch, the one she’d been wearing when she came home and found me asleep on her sofa.

“There’s a Waffle House down this way,” she said. “We can wait there for a while, until some other places open.”

We walked to the Waffle House and ordered coffee. There were a couple of men already there, eating, and I flinched as I saw them look toward us: speculatively, appreciatively? I didn’t want to know.

As we sat down, Michelle said, “I’ve been thinking about this some more. You jumped forward and found yourself in my apartment, early Friday morning. I don’t know whether that can be changed or not — but let’s get one thing straight: I’m not going to be trapped by some immutable fate into sleeping with you Thursday night, after you’ve got your body back. I reserve the right to lend you my apartment and go sleep in a motel or something, so you can meet your past self and give yourself the extra swapping machine.”

“He — I — said you were asleep in the bedroom,” I said diffidently.

“You can lie about it,” she said. “I don’t mind.”

That suggested something else.

“What if he was lying about something else? What if he wasn’t really my future self, but the same guy who stole my body?”

“Why would he lie about that?”

“I don’t know. But I should have asked him something to prove he was really me...” This was getting really confusing.

“I’ve thought about something else, too,” she continued, after another sip of coffee. “About where this extra instance of my body came from. I think the time traveler who stole your body must have stolen mine sometime in the future. I need to watch out for him. There’s no way to tell how soon it’s going to be, but it can’t be more than a few months or a year from now, since you don’t look any older than me.”

“You mean, you don’t look any older than me? I’m in the body that you had when you came home and found me... oh, this is too crazy.”

“That’s right. This body I’m in must be the older one, though not by much.”

“Why would he do that?” I wondered. “I guess maybe he needed my body to do something in particular while impersonating me. And maybe he needed yours for the same reason. Was he trying to alter history by changing something we would otherwise do in the next few days? I can’t see us being important enough to alter history in any particular way.”

“Speak for yourself,” she said. “I am historically important enough for both of us.”

“Granted,” I said, with a weak smile. I was sitting with my back to the window and my face to the door, and whenever another male customer came in I could see him looking us over; it was hard to have a discussion about time travel with that kind of distraction, much less the other, constantly present distraction of my — Michelle’s — body. “But then why leave me the time machine and the body-swapping machine when he had taken my body? That part I can’t figure out.”

“Maybe he just needed your body to impersonate you for a certain time, and after that didn’t mind if you catch up with him and get your body back; he could let you have your body in exchange for the time machine... But that doesn’t quite make sense either. Something doesn’t add up.”

We stretched our coffees out a while, and ordered more, and made those last even longer, with a couple of trips to the restroom — Michelle insisted on always being the one to take care of whichever body’s necessities, and we swapped twice more.

“I’m a little worried about this,” I said after she returned from the restroom the second time. “Swapping so often, I mean. How do we know it won’t have adverse effects?”

“We don’t,” she said, “but why suppose that it does? After the first time we haven’t felt even a moment of disorientation.”

About 8:30 we left; Michelle withdrew some cash from an ATM, and we walked to another coffee house to kill a few more hours. A few minutes before 10, a MARTA bus rolled by outside, and Michelle said, “I’m on that bus. My earlier self, running errands this morning... now... agh.”

“And in a little over an hour the thief is going to call me at home... maybe she’s already in your apartment now. She must have gotten there soon after you went out to the bus stop. Maybe we can just go up to your apartment and confront her? Get some answers?”

“And then what? Use the swapping machine to swap with her? And get another identical body just a few hours younger? Or tie her up in a closet and swap with yourself when you get there? That wouldn’t really make you any better off.”

“I guess not.”

“Besides, we don’t know if changing the past is possible. My guess is that it isn’t: if we try to go over and interfere with the meeting between you and the thief, some accident would interfere... we’d get hit by a car crossing the street, or something.”

That was worrying enough. “But if we follow the thief from your apartment, and catch up with him before four or five o’clock, that might be changing the past too... Just us being here at all might change things.”

“It might, but there’s no evidence of it. Neither we nor anybody we know was here or at the Waffle House earlier today — now — to see that there weren’t two Michelle-twins here. And we don’t yet know anything about where the thief went after he left my apartment — it could be that us chasing him, and catching him, and you getting your body back already happened, as of our jump this afternoon at five. And then I would have asked him, in the other instance of my body, when and why he took it from my future self...”

“So you could avoid it? I thought the past couldn’t be changed.”

“But that’s still the future...”

“It’s his, or her past — since she’s already taken your body, obviously.”

I was pleased to see Michelle getting as confused as I was.

A little after 11, I suggested to Michelle that we go ahead and find a taxi. She checked her watch. “I was using my cellphone about this time this morning,” she said, “on the bus. I’d better wait a few minutes before I call for a taxi.” She waited until 11:15, then called a taxi company and asked for a taxi to meet us in the parking lot of the apartment complex in a few minutes.

We paid our waitress and walked back to her apartment building; the taxi arrived not long after we did.

“Just wait here in a corner of the lot,” I instructed the driver. “There’s a guy coming here in a few minutes; he probably won’t stay long, and we want to follow him when he leaves.”

“Amateur detectives, hm?” But we wouldn’t comment on our plans. He amused himself looking at us in the rearview mirror, while we kept our eyes on the street entrance, looking for my car, a blue 2003 Honda Civic.

My earlier self arrived at 12:01. He parked, and went into Michelle’s building, without noticing the taxi with two Michelles in it — of course, I hadn’t noticed it earlier. “That’s him,” I said to the cabbie. “Be ready to move when he leaves.”

At 12:07, the thief walked out of the building, got into my car, and drove off. The taxi driver followed. At first it seemed like he was going toward my apartment, but once he got on I-85 north, he just kept going past my exit, past I-285, past Georgia Highway 316, and on toward South Carolina.

“What’s he doing?” I wondered. “Where could he be going?”

“I’d think you could guess that better than me,” Michelle said tensely. “Do you know anybody who lives up here?”

“Some people in Athens, but he would have taken 316 if he were going there. The rest of north Georgia and South Carolina, no.”

Michelle was watching the meter carefully. When it got over a hundred dollars, she asked the driver, “How much would it cost to get back to — say, the Doraville MARTA station from here?”

“About eighty dollars, ma’am.”

She hesitated just a moment before saying “If he hasn’t stopped by the time the meter gets to $110, we’ll have to give up. Take us back to Atlanta and drop us off at the Doraville MARTA station.”

“Michelle, no! We can’t lose him!”

“Margaret,” she explained patiently, “I’ve only got $200 in cash. If we keep following him until the money runs out and he keeps going until he has to stop for gas, how are we going to get back from whatever town in the Carolinas we end up in?”

I gave in, with bad grace. A few miles later we pulled off at the next exit, watching my car continue northeast, and got back on I-85 going south.

On the way back we had to stop — at another Waffle House — for a restroom break. Again Michelle quietly insisted on using the swapping machine.

When we got to the Doraville MARTA station, the meter read $204.50. Michelle gave the driver all the bills she’d gotten from the ATM that morning, and scrounged up the rest in change, plus a little more — it was a pretty short tip for such a long trip, and I felt kind of bad about it, but not as bad as I felt about losing my body again.

It was late when we finally got back to Michelle’s apartment. We were both exhausted; both bodies, we figured out, had been awake about twenty hours, except for a slight nap Michelle had gotten in the MARTA train.

“You can sleep on the sofa,” she said. “I’ll go change clothes, then we’ll swap and I’ll change clothes again.”

“Are you going to keep doing this every time?” I asked. “The first plan didn’t work; we have no idea how long it’s going to take for me to get my body back, if I can do it at all...”

“No more than five and a half days, your future self said.”

“If he really is my future self, and if he wasn’t lying to me just because he remembered being lied to when he was me...” I was eying the sofa, which, though its cushions were reasonably comfortable, wasn’t quite long enough for our body. “Could I sleep with you? I mean,” I said hastily, blushing, “just sleep in the same bed? It’s not like we’re...”

“I’ve shared beds when I needed to with my cousins, and once or twice with friends in college,” she said, “but this is different. If you don’t want to sleep on the sofa, I will.”

“No, that’s fine, then. It’s your apartment.”

She brought out some extra blankets and pillows for the sofa. Again, I looked over some of her bookshelves while she changed for bed; she came back in a T-shirt and sweat pants. “Here you go,” she said, handing me the swapping sphere, and then putting it on the desk next to the time machine and the other swapping sphere. “Good night.” She went back into her bedroom and didn’t come out. I laid down and, in spite of every thought and feeling that tried to distract me, fell asleep almost immediately.

 

* * *

 

In spite of the long day this body had had, — up presumably no later than 9:30, if she caught the bus at ten, and then awake until five in the afternoon, then jumping back to six in the morning and awake until nearly midnight the second time through — I woke up in the early morning, after just three or four hours of sleep. I lay there on the sofa a while and couldn’t get back to sleep.

I got up and cracked the door of Michelle’s bedroom slightly; she was sound asleep, of course. I took down an anthology from a shelf, turned on the desk light, and tried to read; but the spheres sat there insisting on my attention. Finally a fleeting idea I’d had earlier came back to me; after a few minutes of thinking about it, I picked up the time machine and one of the body-swapping machines, and jumped back, again, to early Saturday morning.

I was going to wait for the body-thief to show up, and ask her some questions.

So I was in Michelle’s living room about seven AM. I wasn’t sure when Michelle would get up and go out on her errands; I decided to hide until after she left. I hid in the closet off the living room, which seemed to contain rarely-used things like board games and winter clothes. I stayed hidden, soon deadly bored, as I heard Michelle getting up, fixing breakfast, eating, showering... Soon she would be gone and I could empty my bladder for the first time as a woman; something I was looking forward to intensely by that time.

Then suddenly I heard the closet door start to open. I almost wet my pants; but I’d had the time machine in my hand in case of something like this, and I jumped forward just the slightest bit. I waited a few minutes; the apartment was quiet. I slipped out of the closed and glanced at the clock; 10:15. Michelle was gone now.

Indescribable differences aside, the feeling of urgently needing to pee, and finally being able to after a long wait, was what I noticed most, and it was exactly the same.

Instead of pulling my pants up again, I undressed the rest of the way and looked at myself. I felt obscurely ashamed; I knew Michelle didn’t want me to see this, at least not yet, but I couldn’t help it — if this meeting with the body thief soon to arrive didn’t go as I planned, I might be stuck with this body for several days, even if I could trust my alleged future self, or indefinitely, if I couldn’t trust him — and we couldn’t keep swapping bodies every time one of them needed a shower or something. That reminded me: I had no idea when the thief would be arriving, but it would probably be soon, and I didn’t want her to find me inspecting myself in the bathroom mirror. I got dressed quickly and went to hide in the closet again, with the door cracked a little so I could see the clock in the living room.

I waited, and waited. Nobody came through the front door, nobody appeared out of nowhere... 11:05. I wasn’t sure what time the thief had called me, but it couldn’t have been much later than this, surely?

Suddenly a thought occurred to me. I counted the number of times Michelle and I had swapped and figured out which body I was in; now everything made sense. I walked boldly out of the closet and went to the phone in the kitchen.

“Hey, Josh,” I said, hunting through the drawers for a corkscrew, “it’s Michelle. Come over; I’ve got something to tell you. Something to show you.”

 

* * *

 

I still wasn’t sure why I took I-85 north almost to the South Carolina border once I left Michelle’s apartment, in my own body again. I had to stay ahead of the obvious pursuit from Michelle and my past self, and doing what I remembered the guy in my body doing was the easy, obvious thing to do; I pushed aside questions of free will and whether I could have done anything else, and enjoyed the drive, occasionally noticing the taxi in the rear-view mirror but not worrying about it any.

One exit past the one where we had given up the pursuit, I saw a sign for a state park I had never heard of, and got off there. It was not long until dark, but I paid the $2 admission fee, parked and walked around to stretch my legs until the park closed at dark.

On the way home, I stopped at a liquor store, not long before closing time, and bought a bottle of Merlot a little better than the one I had taken from Michelle’s wine rack. I thought about calling Michelle to tell her the good news, but it was too early; she and my younger self wouldn’t be home for half an hour yet. Then I realized that I hadn’t heard the phone ring when I was at Michelle’s apartment later tonight, or early in the morning when I’d been awake there. I had to wait until Sunday morning to call her.

“Good news,” I told her, “I got my body back. Can I take you out to lunch and tell you about it?”

“You may indeed,” she said.

When I picked her up, she said she had been worried when she woke up and found me-in-her-body not there, and the time machine and one of the swapping machines missing.

“I thought about calling you earlier,” I said, “so you wouldn’t have time to worry, but I finally decided you needed the sleep more.”

I told her what had happened over lunch, glossing over the part where I inspected her body in the mirror, and the other things I did between 11:05 and 12:01 besides telephoning myself and getting slightly drunk on a bottle of her Merlot; I hoped she wouldn’t remember that my hair had been wet when she first came home and found me in her body... When I got to that point of the story, I took out the bottle I’d bought last night and gave it to her.

“You are not supposed to bring in drinks from outside,” our waiter scolded us.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “we won’t open it here. It’s a gift for later.”

We spent most of the remainder of the meal trying to figure out where the hell the time machine came from, not to mention the swapping machine; but couldn’t make sense of it — at least, Michelle couldn’t make any sense of it that made sense to me.

 

* * *

 

“So where does this leave us?” I asked as I pulled into her apartment’s parking lot. “Vis-a-vis next Thursday night, Friday morning?”

She paused, then pulled the other swapping machine out of her purse.

“Since you have to give this to your past self then, it seems a waste not to get any use out of it between now and then,” she said, handing it to me — and then, in my voice, “Oh. My.”

“Would you like to come up to my apartment for a drink?” I asked.

“Thank you, ma’am, I would,” he said.