Chapter One: Tomorrow

At 9:06 on a Thursday morning, Iris Vale received a voicemail from Friday.

She noticed the date before she noticed the caller. The message had arrived without ringing, as messages sometimes did in the underground sections of the train, though Iris was home, seated at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee that had developed a pale skin. The caller was listed as Iris Vale. Under the name, in the smaller type she habitually ignored, was a timestamp: Friday, 9:06 a.m.

It was Thursday. She checked the oven clock, the laptop, the small paper calendar clipped to a magnet shaped like a pear. None offered an alternative.

She played the message.

Her own voice said, “Listen carefully. Don't leave the apartment today. Not for anything. Whatever you hear at the door, don't open it. At nine fourteen the blue bowl is going to break. I know how that sounds. I'm sorry. I have to go.”

There was a noise like a chair scraping across concrete, and then the recording stopped.

Iris listened twice more. Her voice sounded slightly flatter than it did in her head, which was how it always sounded in recordings. The little hitch before “I'm sorry” was unmistakably hers. No one in the world had ever managed to imitate the way she apologized for something she hadn't done yet.

The woman who had owned the apartment before Iris was called Mrs. Brill. Iris knew this because Mrs. Brill's name was still written in pencil on the inside of a kitchen cupboard, just above the place where the shelves had been shortened to accommodate a microwave. The landlord had told Iris to paint over it. She had not. There was something discourteous about destroying the last evidence of a person merely because the lease had changed hands.

Iris had been living there for eleven months. She was thirty-eight, divorced, and possessed of the sort of practical independence that left people assuming she needed nothing. She had learned to be useful rather than interesting. At dinner parties she fixed televisions, retrieved deleted files, and, once, extracted a splinter from the foot of a man who later asked whether she was a nurse. She had never been particularly good at telling anyone she was unhappy. Her ex-husband, Martin, had described this as emotional dishonesty, although he had delivered the accusation while collecting the last of his golf clubs.

The apartment had been chosen for its quiet. The front windows looked onto a street where the same delivery vehicles blocked traffic at approximately the same times every day. An old railway station stood two blocks east, renovated at great expense and still faintly embarrassed by the smell of its original tunnels. Across the courtyard was a medical office, closed for repairs after a pipe burst. On Sundays, a man with a yellow dog visited the empty courtyard and allowed the animal to relieve itself against the wall. Such events formed the reliable, uninteresting structure of her life. She had once believed that a catastrophe would announce itself by disrupting that structure. In fact she had come to understand that catastrophes generally arrived during ordinary hours, while the kettle was boiling or a person was waiting for a receipt.

Her younger sister, Nell, lived across town. They spoke every Sunday with a regularity neither had ever explicitly requested. Nell was married to a man named Peter who had the habit of narrating his own reasonable behavior aloud. He was a harmless person in the particular way that harmless people could become exhausting. Nell had lately begun declining invitations, claiming fatigue, then insisting the fatigue was nothing. Iris had chosen not to interfere. There was an etiquette surrounding other people's difficulties, and she had spent most of her adult life confusing it with kindness.

On the refrigerator was a photograph of the two sisters taken when Nell was thirteen. Iris was seventeen and wore an expression that suggested she already understood the cost of being the responsible one. Nell was holding a plastic trophy for a science fair project about the behavior of mice. None of the mice had survived the exhibition. Nell had cried so hard that their father had hidden the trophy, which Iris found years later behind a box of Christmas ornaments. It was still there when the house was sold. Iris had never told her sister.

She was thinking of the photograph while waiting for the telephone to make sense of itself.

She worked as a document conservator, restoring damaged papers for archives. It was a profession that gave her an unreasonable faith in evidence. Ink could be dated. Paper could be examined under a lens. A telephone could, surely, be made to explain the origin of a message. She took a screenshot of the timestamp and forwarded it to her email address. Then she tried calling herself.

Her phone didn't ring. A recorded voice offered to take a message.

At 9:11, a second voicemail appeared.

Friday, 9:11 a.m. Iris Vale.

This time her voice was breathless. “The first message is wrong. I sent it, but I was wrong. You have to leave before nine twenty. Take the stairs, not the elevator. And whatever happens, do not believe the woman in the green coat. She knows exactly what to say.”

A faint sound passed beneath the words, three electronic notes followed by an announcement too distant to make out. Iris knew those notes. They played before every service announcement at the nearby railway station, though she couldn't understand why she would be there recording a message from tomorrow.

The recording ended with six words spoken almost tenderly: “You aren't the only one listening.”

She opened the message details. The network field contained an alphanumeric string considerably longer than the numbers she was accustomed to seeing. She copied it into a note, where it looked no less absurd. An internet search returned a document about international call routing, a forum for people who believed their telephones had been compromised, and an advertisement promising to remove unfavorable photographs from search results. The internet, she thought, had become a place where every question was answered by someone selling the certainty she lacked.

Martin would have known whom to call. That was the irritating part. He worked in telecommunications, or rather in the management of people who worked in telecommunications, and had spent fifteen years correcting Iris when she used the word 'signal' in a way that displeased him. He would have assumed a spoofed number and explained it loudly. She considered calling anyway, then remembered that he had remarried in March and that his new wife had once referred to Iris as 'the previous situation.' It seemed unreasonable to invite the current situation into an investigation of the future.

She called Nell instead. The call went unanswered. Iris left a message about nothing, asking what the two of them were doing for dinner on Sunday. It sounded so normal that she began to dislike herself for making it. She considered adding a warning, although she had no idea what to warn her sister against. A telephone that claimed to know tomorrow was not yet proof of anything except the stubborn ingenuity of malicious strangers.

In the kitchen she put water in a saucepan, took it off the stove, and returned it to the refrigerator, which was an action so obviously senseless that she stood for a moment examining the pan as though it might provide a diagnosis. She could feel herself making errors, tiny administrative errors of the mind. She had not become frightened. She had become inefficient, which was worse. Fear had the dignity of an explanation. Inefficiency made her suspicious of everything she had previously believed about herself.

A third time she played the first recording. There was a breath between 'don't open it' and the prediction about the bowl, the small inhalation she made whenever she was about to say something her listener might not appreciate. That breath had survived the recording process intact. Whoever had manufactured the message understood her better than most people who had loved her. She wrote the observation down, because writing it down transformed it for a moment into somebody else's problem.

She locked her phone and laid it face down. She did not believe in messages from the future. She believed in fraud, damaged software, clever editing, and ordinary people who found elaborate ways to frighten strangers. But her apartment was small and she lived alone, and the blue bowl was on the draining board where she'd left it after breakfast. No one else knew it was blue. No one else knew she had chipped it last night and meant to throw it away.

At 9:14, the bowl fell.

It didn't slide or rock. Iris was looking at it when it moved, as if a hand had tilted it upward from beneath. It struck the tile in three pieces, one of them breaking again when it landed. She stood so quickly that her chair fell behind her. The sound of that was worse than the bowl: familiar, ordinary, completely without mystery.

Her phone vibrated against the table. There was no new message. Only a notification reminding her about an appointment she had canceled two weeks ago.

She swept the broken pieces into a dish towel without touching them. The smallest splinter, a blue crescent no longer than a fingernail, disappeared beneath the stove. She knelt to retrieve it and found, beside a dead battery and a pencil stub, a small silver earring she did not recognize. Mrs. Brill's, perhaps, or the possession of someone who had visited Mrs. Brill during the years Iris had not yet begun to exist in the apartment. She held it in her palm, struck by how much of another life could remain in a rented room without troubling the next occupant.

A siren went past below, then another in the opposite direction. She checked the time. The minutes appeared to have grown shorter since the phone rang. At the conservation studio, an hour could disappear while she lifted a single sheet of damaged paper from a backing board. Here, four minutes contained an unfamiliar voice, an impossible date, and the destruction of an object she had owned since college. She wondered whether the bowl had fallen because the message predicted it, or whether the message had predicted it because, in some world she could not see, she was already cleaning up the pieces.

There was no respectable answer. She went to the window and examined the street with an attention it had never previously earned. A woman waited at the crossing in a green coat, one hand buried in a pocket. A cyclist struck the curb, swore, and continued. On the opposite sidewalk a child dragged a violin case that was nearly as large as her body. Iris began looking for evidence of design, which was an exceptionally efficient way of finding it. Every movement seemed rehearsed. Every stranger appeared to know where she would stand next.

The strangest part was the sudden conviction that she had missed a cue. Something was happening, and everyone else seemed to have been given a copy of the instructions.

Then someone knocked at the apartment door. Three soft knocks, politely spaced.

From the corridor a woman said, “Iris? I know you're in there.”

Iris took one step toward the door. From the window behind her she could see the street, the bright ordinary street, with a delivery truck holding up traffic and someone in a green coat waiting beside the crossing. The woman by the crossing looked up, directly at the apartment.

Iris had until 9:20, if the second message was telling the truth. Six minutes was enough time to do almost anything foolish.

There was a peculiar economy to fear. It made everything else seem suddenly expensive. Iris noticed the unpaid electricity bill under the salt cellar, the half-open packet of crackers, the three small scratches on the tabletop where Martin had tried to repair a radio with a screwdriver. Every object appeared to have been put there as evidence, although evidence of what remained undecided. She had lived an adequate life among these objects. Until this morning, she had been able to describe it from beginning to end without mentioning anything extraordinary.

She placed the telephone facedown and sat still long enough to hear the refrigerator cycle off. The silence that followed was not absolute. A pair of shoes crossed the apartment above. A truck reversed somewhere outside with the melancholy insistence of an animal that had been trained to warn people of its approach. In the corridor a man cleared his throat, waited, and cleared it again. Any ordinary Thursday could have accommodated all these noises. It was the fact that she was listening for a different kind of Thursday that made them unbearable.

She remembered a habit of her mother's, who used to read the final paragraph of every novel before beginning the first. Her mother claimed this allowed her to appreciate the workmanship without the distraction of suspense. Iris had regarded it as cheating when she was young and cowardice when she was old enough to understand that the two were often the same activity. Now she would have paid handsomely for a final paragraph, even an unhappy one, so long as it remained where she had been promised to find it.

The second voicemail had not arrived yet. She knew it would. This was not an intuition so much as the ordinary way a threat develops when it has entered the house and made itself comfortable. One message had forbidden her to leave. A second would eventually provide the reason, or its opposite, and the cost of finding out which message was lying would be paid by somebody who had not agreed to the arrangement.

At 9:13 the screen lit up. For a second Iris saw only her own name, duplicated in white letters against the glass. The message began with the intake of breath that she made before saying something unpleasant. She heard herself instructing her to leave at once. The voice sounded tired enough to be believed. It described, with the boring authority of a person remembering an appointment, something that was about to happen in the kitchen. She turned toward the blue bowl at the exact moment the clock changed.

When it broke she did not scream. The sound was too intimate for that. She sat with the phone in her hand and wondered how much of a person's life could be removed before the person ceased to recognize it as their own.