The Chaos Loop, Page 4

  “But at some point, when you feel those weird things happen, you’ll have to stop,” Leila said. “Right?”

  “Exactly. So what if I’m one of the people who only has a few times, Leila? I can’t stop thinking about that. I don’t want to waste my gift. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life wondering if I did everything I could have done. So at about five in the morning I came up with this new plan.”

  “No,” Leila snapped.

  “I told you not to say that. Give me a chance—”

  “Corey, I know you,” Leila said. “You’re going to ask me if you should travel in time and do something really, really stupid.” Leila sipped her hot cocoa, which didn’t look hot anymore. “Maybe you need to go back to sleep. It’s Saturday. No diss, but you look terrible.”

  Corey broke off a chunk of chocolate chip muffin but he wasn’t feeling very hungry. He told her all the details about the night—his insomnia, the clock, the photos of his grandmother’s family, his mom’s story about the Nazi abduction and his grandparents’ romance, the creepy Hitler footage. . . .

  Leila listened patiently. “I didn’t know the part about your grandma meeting your grandpa. It’s so romantic.”

  “Not if you think about the reason she had to leave her country,” Corey said. “Watching her whole family be taken away to die. How could she have lived with that? I mean, when I was a kid, she was always smiling and laughing. But now her dementia is getting worse. She calls out for her dad and mom, and her brothers, Jakub, Stanislaw, and Aleksander. Sometimes she screams in English, sometimes in Polish, sometimes Spanish. It’s like she saved up the pain over her whole life, and now her brain won’t let her hide it anymore. Like she’s facing down a monster.”

  Leila sighed and looked out the window. “My grandfather was like that. When Opa Joseph got old, he screamed at his caregivers, warning them about the Nazis. But it was all in German and I had to translate. Did you know his name was Josef Scharfstein, and he changed it to Joseph Sharp at Ellis Island? He lost his mother and two older brothers. One was a doctor and the other was a concert pianist.”

  “You get this, Leila. You understand. Your grandpa, my mutti, they swallowed all their bad memories. It was like slow poison. There were so many families like that. All those millions of lives erased—inventors, musicians, writers, doctors. Imagine how much better the world would be if they didn’t die!”

  He let his words hang in the air. Leila eyed him carefully. “What are you saying, Corey?”

  “You’re going to tell me I’m crazy, and maybe I am,” Corey said. “But just listen. I brought my grandmother back from the dead. I saved the life of a Civil War soldier. I kept my sister from being mugged. I rescued Bailey. Every time I’ve tried to change something in the past, it’s been for a good reason, and it worked. But it’s been for me, Leila, or for someone close to me. And that’s just not fair. I can do so much more. If you have only a limited number of times you can change the past, and you’re the only one who can do it—why not go big?”

  “Corey’s there’s big and there’s biiiiig. You’re going to go back and single-handedly defeat the Nazis? Is that it?”

  Corey took a deep breath. “Well, yeah, that’s sort of the idea, but—”

  “Do you know how insane that sounds? Who do you think you are, Corey Fletcher—a superhero?”

  “Superman could fly,” Corey said. “Spider-Man could climb with his web. Thor had his hammer. What do you call what I have? What do you call being a Throwback?”

  Leila stared at him, frozen, for a good minute. Then she stood and lifted her cup from the table. “Well, I guess if you’re SuperCorey, you don’t need me. You can do everything yourself—”

  Corey took her arm gently. “Leila, you can travel in time. I can change time. You’re fluent in German. I’m not. What if you and I went back together?”

  “To when?” Leila said. “And to do what? Drop a bomb on Germany?”

  “That’s silly.”

  “Assassinate Hitler?”

  “Well . . .”

  “No. No. And no!” Leila pounded the table, nearly spilling Corey’s hot chocolate. “I can’t believe you’re thinking this. We’re just kids!”

  “We wouldn’t do the assassination ourselves,” Corey said. “I did research. There was an attempt. And it was foiled. Maybe we could just . . . unfoil it.”

  “That would make us accessories to murder,” Leila said. “And in case you were absent that day in Sunday school, it’s morally wrong to kill.”

  “It’s morally right to allow a guy to butcher as many people as the entire population of New York City—including your ancestors and mine? It’s right to allow it when there’s a chance you can prevent it?”

  “No!”

  “So you’ll do it?”

  “No!” Leila turned toward the door. “This is crazy. This is out there. This is absolutely bonkers. Did you even think what would happen if you stopped Hitler? Your grandmother would never be smuggled to South America, and she’d never meet your grandfather, right? So you wouldn’t exist!”

  “But I do exist!” Corey pointed out.

  “Everything adjusts when you change the past, right?” Leila said. “So wouldn’t you adjust your own self out of existence?”

  “Then how could I change the past if I never existed?”

  “I don’t know! Do I look like Einstein? How can we figure that out unless it actually happens?”

  “Exactly!” Corey said. “Look, first we get Hitler. If we can do that, how hard can anything else be? We make it a project to get Mutti and Papi to meet. That would be the easy part.”

  “Easy? You are making me cry, Corey Fletcher.”

  “So . . . we just let eleven million people die . . .” Corey said, his heart dropping.

  “I—how can I answer that?” Leila swallowed and turned away.

  “Just say yes,” Corey insisted.

  Leila pulled open the door and turned back toward Corey. “Give me twelve hours. I’ll have an answer for you then.”

  As she left, three or four pigeons flew away from the front of the door. Corey felt no desire to eat them. His appetite was just fine. Normal as can be.

  He smiled and finished his chocolate chip muffin.

  7

  Leila paced her bedroom.

  Corey’s plan was absolutely nuts.

  She kept trying to think her way around this. To give him the benefit of the doubt. But no matter how she looked at it, his idea was more like a sci-fi movie trailer: When two brave thirteen-year-old time travelers find themselves face-to-face with history’s greatest evil, anything can happen . . . and does! His scheme was well-meaning. Like Corey, it had heart. Huge heart.

  But it was insane.

  She had to tell Corey no, and she had to do it now. That would stop the whole thing. What did he plan to do, bring back a gun and shoot Hitler? How would he get close enough? How would a thirteen-year-old kid with no knowledge of German even figure out how to get to Hitler? Without her language skills, there wasn’t much he could do in Germany. If he knew he had to do this on his own, he would come to his senses.

  For the tenth time that morning, she picked up her phone.

  Flopping onto her bed, she typed NO in a text to Corey. As she poised her thumb over Send, she stopped. Her eye fixed on the pile of boxes by her bedroom door—all Auntie Flora’s stuff.

  Leila’s mom had agreed to take it, not long after Flora “left” Uncle Lazslo. The poor guy couldn’t understand why his wife had done that. He thought they’d been getting along just fine. And in truth, they had been. But Flora had never told him about her time-hopping. Or about transspeciation.

  It was only a few boxes. Someday she’d ask Auntie Flora what to do with it, but for now Leila didn’t mind looking after it. Leila’s mom kept referring to it as “old junk,” but it wasn’t junk, really. It contained all Flora’s secrets. Including the artifact that took Leila into the past for the first time.

  S
ometime earlier today, her mom had tidied it all up. Now the boxes were stacked neatly. Each one had a label, in Uncle Laszlo’s precise, engineer’s handwriting. Leila’s eyes were drawn to a big one on top, one she hadn’t yet touched:

  SCHRFSTN

  FML MMRBL

  ☹ ☹ ☹

  Scharfstein. Uncle Laszlo thought it was efficient to leave out vowels.

  It took her a moment to figure out the other two words: Family Memorabilia. This must have been Auntie Flora’s collection of old stuff. She was born Flora Scharfstein—Opa Joseph’s only daughter.

  The frowny faces scared Leila a little. The family history was tragic, so who knew what was inside?

  The box was about two feet high. She picked it up and heard a dull, musical sound. Setting the box down, she yanked open the top. The yellowing tape quickly gave way.

  Inside, at the top of a pile of sheet music, was a tiny red toy piano. As Leila picked it up, it slipped out of her hand and fell to the floor with a loud clatter. White veneers fell off three or four keys. Next to them landed a tarnished brass medal on a faded ribbon.

  She lifted the piano and held it to the light.

  “Wow . . .”

  It was sturdy, made of wood, and on the back was a carved relief of some somber-faced musician with curly hair, maybe Beethoven or Mozart. A label fell off the piano’s side, its adhesive tape brown and brittle. It fell to the floor, its label side up.

  1895. Das kleine Fritzchens erstes Klavier!

  Little Fritzie’s first piano.

  She heard a soft rap at the door, and her mom entered. “Is everything okay? I made us some . . .” Her voice drifted off as she saw the open box and the piano. “What on earth is that?”

  “Mom, who was Fritzie?” Leila asked, handing her the piano.

  Her mom examined it gingerly, as if it were made of crystal. She picked up the ribboned medal from the floor and placed that gently on top. “He was your great-grandfather. Opa’s dad. A trained concert pianist. Everyone said he was so passionate, he could make you cry. ‘A better player than Horowitz!’ Opa always said.”

  “Who?”

  “Vladimir Horowitz may have been the best concert pianist of his time. I think Opa was exaggerating.”

  “Was Great-grandpa Fritzie famous?” Leila asked.

  Leila’s mom shook her head. She held the piano to the light, her eyes moistening. “It was rough for artists and musicians in Poland, even before the war, so he ran a textile business to support his family. But he played professionally from time to time. Until the day the Nazis took him from a concert hall in Leipzig. Just ripped him from his seat in the middle of a rehearsal. They didn’t even let him finish or pack a bag. They accused him of playing decadent music. Whatever that meant.”

  Leila’s breath caught in her throat. She glanced down at the box. At the top was a decaying book titled Bach Choräle. And resting on it was a folded photograph, facedown.

  As she turned it over, she and her mom gasped.

  It was an image of a beaming man, sitting with his hands poised over a piano keyboard. On his chest he wore a small, crude-looking cloth Star of David with the word JUDE printed inside. Behind him, beaming even more, were a teenage girl, two teenage boys, and a younger boy. With a mischievous smile, the younger boy was proudly planting a kiss on the pianist’s cheek.

  Even with his lips pursed, Leila could tell the little guy was Opa Joseph.

  “Oh dear . . .” Leila’s mom said. “They all look so much like your father. . . .”

  Leila opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out. She could not stop looking at the word JUDE.

  It meant Jew.

  In the eyes of the Nazis, it marked you with shame. It meant you were barely more than an animal. It allowed the Nazis to destroy your life if they so pleased.

  As her mom left, Corey’s words came back to Leila.

  Inventors, musicians, writers, doctors. Imagine how much better the world would be if they didn’t die. . . .

  She looked at her text. It hadn’t been sent yet, so she deleted it. She took a good two minutes trying to compose what she wanted to say.

  Finally she typed out two words:

  I’m in.

  8

  The first thing Corey noticed in the Sharps’ apartment was an echo of muffled, scratchy classical music, like a piano trapped in a tin can.

  As he walked past Leila’s mom’s room, he could see her through the open door. She was listening to a vinyl record on a turntable, her eyes closed as she swayed to the tune. He followed Leila down the long hallway into her bedroom. Her pillows were covered with old photos, in and out of frames. Sheet music lay neatly arranged in a checkerboard on her bed, around a toy piano. Ticket stubs, trinkets, jewelry, notebooks, silverware, and broken statuettes were strewn about her floor. “I think we have some good artifacts,” she said. “I don’t know where you’re going to put your backpack, though.”

  “I’ll keep it on,” Corey said.

  He ran his fingers along the piano. It was sturdy, made of wood and steel. He picked up a faded medal Leila had draped over the top. It was still attached to a shredded ribbon. “‘Frederick Scharfstein, Erster Preis,’” Corey read slowly. “Does that mean ‘first prize’?”

  “Yup,” Leila said. “Frederick was my great-grandfather Fritzie’s full name. The music coming from Mom’s room? That’s Fritzie playing Bach. They recorded him a few months before he was killed. If you listen closely, you can hear his voice. Just a hint of a soft ‘uh . . . uh . . . uh’ in rhythm. He did that, kind of quietly grunted along with the music.”

  Corey stepped back into the hallway. The piano was really racing now, the notes spilling out fast and furious. Through the hisses and crackles of the old recording, Corey could hear a human voice humming along, low and soft. It gave him a chill. “That’s actually him.”

  “The family managed to hide away some recordings,” Leila said, “and all this other stuff. I’m not sure how they did it.”

  “Or why,” Corey said. Much of the artwork was crude, street scenes with buildings that slanted the wrong way, portraits with crooked eyes and weird smiles, animals that seemed to be floating above the pastures. “Most of the art is pretty ugly.”

  “It’s got to be, like, refrigerator art. The parents saving the kids’ masterpieces.”

  Corey held up a metal-framed drawing of a horse in a field, not much bigger than a cell phone. At the bottom it was signed FS 1908. “Or their own.”

  “FS—Frederick Scharfstein,” Leila said. Her face brightened as she ran her fingers along the metal frame. “Corey, this is amazing. This could take us back!”

  “What would we do in Poland in nineteen-oh-eight?”

  “Not Poland—Vienna,” Leila said. “Opa’s family traveled a lot. That’s why he knew so many languages. They were living in Berlin when Fritzie was old enough for high school. Back then, if you had some money and your kid was an artistic genius, you packed that kid off to Vienna, in Austria. It was really the center of culture in Europe. Fritzie dreamed of becoming an artist. His parents, my great-greats, knew Fritzie’s greatest gift was music, so they sent him to a place where he could study both. Vienna had a famous music conservatory and an academy of fine arts.”

  “Okay, so how does this help us?” Corey said.

  “Did you pay attention at all in World History class?” Leila said.

  “No, I’ve been too busy changing it,” Corey replied.

  With an exasperated sigh, Leila pocketed the small framed photo and darted over to her desk. Her fingers flew over her laptop keyboard, and when she was done she turned the screen toward Corey. On it was a Wikipedia entry adorned with the brooding, familiar face of Adolf Hitler.

  “Hitler spent many years in Vienna, trying to be an artist,” Leila pointed out as she scanned the piece. “Hitler was born in eighteen eighty-nine, Great-grandpa Fritzie in eighteen ninety. Many years later, Opa would shake his fist and say, ‘If only we’d known what
he would become, Papa could have poked his eyes out!’”

  “Did they know each other?” Corey asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Leila said.

  “But they were studying in the same town, and that’s good enough,” Corey said. “Which means that if we go there, we could get to him before he became . . . Hitler Hitler.”

  “That’s what I was thinking.”

  “Okay . . . we need a plan for this . . . we can’t just hop into Vienna and smack him over the head with a big sausage.” Corey began pacing the room. “Or maybe we could. It wouldn’t leave a trace.”

  “Maybe we can do this without killing him,” Leila said.

  “But he’s Hitler!” Corey protested.

  Leila exhaled. “Okay. Close your eyes. Imagine you have a gun in your hand. Somehow, conveniently, you’re face-to-face with Hitler.”

  “How?” Corey asked.

  “I don’t know, he comes out of the men’s room—this is a thought experiment!” Leila said. “Now. There he is. Inches away. He smiles and says ‘Guten Abend.’ Which means ‘Good evening.’”

  “What if it’s morning?”

  “The point is . . . do you see yourself lifting the gun and killing him? Even though he’s Hitler? Are you capable of that? Or does your hand start to wobble? Do you have second thoughts? I mean, be truthful. Because if you don’t shoot instantly, and even if you do, those Nazis are all over you. And that doesn’t turn out well.”

  Corey nodded. She had a point. If they were going to meet Hitler as a student, maybe there was a way to defeat him with a more normal, non-killing plan. “Okay, he dreamed of being a famous artist, right? If he succeeded, maybe he wouldn’t have become Dr. Evil. What if we were able to nudge him in that direction?”

  “How? Like, promote his paintings?”

  “Yeah, that was a dumb idea.”

  “No! It’s got potential.” Leila began pacing, which in her room meant three steps forward and three steps back. “We could bring money into the past. We’d have to get hold of old-fashioned German currency—marks. We could buy up lots of his paintings. People will get the idea he’s really popular. We’ll drive up demand and maybe he’ll actually become a famous artist and not need to go into politics.”