The Forty-Year Gap

The rain had trapped them in the museum, and the museum had trapped them in the room nobody liked, the one with the brown teeth and the old saws.

"Look at this," Maya said. She was standing in front of a glass case with a green silk bag inside it, the kind of bag you might keep a hat in. "Eighteen hundreds. People paid money to breathe out of that."

Soren read the panel. "Nitrous oxide. Laughing gas. Discovered seventeen seventy-two." He stopped. "First surgery, eighteen forty-four."

"So?"

"So that's a long time." He counted on the glass with his finger, leaving a little fog where it touched. "Seventy-two years. Almost."

Maya looked at the bag again. "What were they doing with it the whole time?"

"Parties." Soren pointed at the painting beside the case, men in tall collars laughing too hard, one of them falling sideways off a chair. "Laughing gas parties. Rich people. They'd breathe it and giggle and fall over."

"For seventy years."

Maya was quiet for a second. "That doesn't make sense."

"Which part?"

"All of it." She tapped the glass. "If it made you fall off a chair and not care, somebody who breathed it must have hit their head. On a table. On the floor."

"Probably," said Soren.

"And didn't feel it."

"Probably."

"So they knew." Maya turned to face him. "They had to know. Every party. Somebody whacked their elbow and looked at the blood and laughed, because it didn't hurt yet. For seventy years people held the thing that stops pain in a green silk bag and used it to be silly."

Soren stopped reading the panel and looked at her.

"That's not the part I don't get," Maya said. "I don't get how nobody connected it."

"Somebody did. Eventually. Eighteen forty-four."

"One person. After seventy years. What was different about him?"

Soren read further down. His finger stopped. "A dentist. He went to a laughing gas show. As a customer. And he watched a man bang his leg hard, badly, while the gas was working, and the man got up not knowing he was hurt." He looked up. "And the dentist was sitting there thinking about teeth."

"Because pulling teeth hurt," Maya said.

"Pulling teeth was the worst thing that happened to a person who wasn't dying," Soren said. "He did it all day. To people who screamed." He read the last line, slower. "He had it done to himself first. His own tooth. The next day."

Maya pressed both hands flat on the top of the case and leaned over it. "That's the part."

"What is?"

"Everyone at every party saw the exact same thing he saw. A person who couldn't feel pain, walking around feeling fine." She wasn't looking at Soren now, she was looking through the green bag like it might have an answer folded up inside it. "Same gas. Same falling over. Same not-hurting. Seventy years of people seeing it."

"And not seeing it," Soren said.

"Right. Right." She straightened up. "It wasn't a chemistry problem. The chemistry was done in seventeen seventy-two. It was a, a noticing problem."

Soren got the notebook out of his jacket. He opened it on the edge of the case and wrote nineteen seventy-two, crossed it out, wrote seventeen seventy-two, then eighteen forty-four under it, and drew a long line between them.

"What are you putting," Maya said.

"The gap." He tapped the line. "Seventy-two years long. And nothing's in it. No new fact got discovered. They had every fact in seventeen seventy-two. They had it at the first party."

Maya looked at the line. "So what filled it."

"Nobody. That's why it's a line and not a thing."

They both looked at the empty line on the page.

"He didn't know more chemistry than the partygoers," Maya said slowly. "He knew about teeth. He brought the teeth to the party in his head. And then the gas meant something."

"The gas was the same," said Soren.

"The gas was always the same. He was different. He came in carrying a different question." Maya laughed, one short surprised laugh, the kind that comes out before you decide to make it. "That's terrifying."

"Why terrifying?"

"Because that means it's still happening. Right now. Somewhere there's a thing that fixes something, sitting out in the open, and everyone's seen it a thousand times, and it just looks like a party." She was talking fast now. "And the only reason it stays a party is nobody walked in carrying the right question yet."

Soren stopped writing.

"Seventy years," Maya said. "That's a person born and grown old, breathing the answer, laughing, while the thing it could do just waits."

A museum guard leaned in the doorway. "Rain's letting up," she said. "We close in ten."

Neither of them moved.

Soren looked at the line in his notebook, then at the painting, the man falling off the chair with his mouth open, the others laughing, and one figure at the edge he hadn't noticed before, a man in a dark coat sitting still, not laughing, watching the falling man's hands.

"Maya." He pointed. "Is that him? In the picture?"

Maya leaned in close to the painted faces, the laughing ones and the one that wasn't, and for a long moment she didn't say anything at all.

Then she said, "What are we already looking at?"

Outside, the rain thinned to almost nothing, and the green silk bag sat in its case the way it had sat for a hundred and eighty years waiting for the next person to walk in carrying the right question.