Los Angeles Times

The Los Angeles Times is more than a source of news in Dan Davis’s search through a disrupted chronology: its records become a fragile bridge between the lives he remembers and the people who may still be found. He consults it first to test what happened to Miles Gentry, then makes a habit of reading its cold-sleep notices in the hope of welcoming someone from his own past. A listing for F. V. Heinicke gives him a lead to Ricky; a later check reveals that the paper printed his own name too, though he failed to notice it at the time.

Records and the search for Miles

On a Friday, May 4, Dan goes to the county Hall of Records, only to learn that its records are being moved and that he must return the next month. He instead visits the Times office and strains his neck using a microscanner to inspect the paper’s records. The search establishes a limit, not an answer: if Miles died between twelve and thirty-six months after Dan was put into cold sleep, the death notices show that it did not happen in Los Angeles County.

Dan recognizes that the result cannot settle Miles’s fate. There is no requirement that someone die in the county where he is being sought, and Dan considers checking whether Sacramento has consolidated state records. For the moment, the newspaper offers a geographically bounded negative finding rather than a conclusion. Its usefulness lies in narrowing the search while making the gaps in the available record plain.

A recurring habit of recognition

The Times arrives by tube each morning, but Dan rarely reads it closely. When an engineering problem occupies his mind, the day’s news tends to feel like a distraction. He nevertheless keeps each paper until he has at least glanced at the headlines and the vital-statistics column, whose entries interest him less for births, deaths, and marriages than for withdrawals: people emerging from cold sleep.

This repeated check is driven by the possibility that someone he once knew might awaken. Dan imagines going to greet that person and offering help, though he knows the chances are against it. The practice gives him satisfaction even when it produces no reunion. He thinks of other people who have slept through the years as a kind of kinfolk, like former members of the same outfit who remain buddies enough to share a drink.

That routine makes the paper a personal register as well as a public record. Its brief notices might connect the present to people displaced from Dan’s earlier life, but only if he reads them and recognizes what they mean. The smallness of the printed entry contrasts with the scale of what it can change: a name can turn an abstract hope of finding someone into a reason to act.

F. V. Heinicke and the lead to Ricky

After waking, Dan returns to a stack of newspapers and reads the vital statistics again, this time scanning all the categories. He worries that he might have glimpsed Ricky’s name without consciously registering it while concentrating only on withdrawals; she might, for example, have married or had a baby. The broader search is an adjustment to the limits of his own attention as much as a search of the archive.

In the Times for May 2, 2001, he finds a withdrawal reported in the following day’s paper: F. V. Heinicke at Riverside Sanctuary. The entry does not give Ricky’s name, but “Heinicke” recalls the surname of her grandmother. Dan feels certain that this recognition joins a forgotten piece of information to the clue before him, although he cannot say precisely how he learned it. He considers that he may once have heard the name from Ricky or Miles, or even met the older woman at Sandia. The newspaper supplies the immediate trigger; the personal association supplies the direction.

The discovery turns a routine scan into a consequential lead. Rather than treating the listing as a complete identification, Dan reads it alongside what he remembers and what he has forgotten. The Times’ compact public notice thus becomes meaningful through the uncertain work of recognition: its initials and surname point him toward a person and, through her, toward the search for Ricky.

The missing notice and the limits of the record

At the end of the narrative, Dan revisits the newspaper record and finds that his own second withdrawal had appeared in the Times for Saturday, April 28, 2001. He had awakened from cold sleep on Friday, April 27, so the notice should have been available the next morning. Yet he did not see it, despite having made a habit of checking the lists. The paper records his return, but the act of recording does not guarantee that he will read or remember it.

Dan considers whether the unnoticed line means that his changes to events sent him into a different universe, one in which he nevertheless found Ricky and Pete. He imagines a contrasting possibility in which Pete wandered away alone and Ricky never escaped with her grandmother from Belle’s vindictive control. But he does not settle on branching time streams or multiple universes as an explanation. His ordinary account is that he fell asleep before reading his name and discarded the paper the next morning, as he sometimes did when absorbed in work.

This final uncertainty gives the newspaper a double significance. Its printed entries seem stable enough to verify a date or offer a clue, yet the story’s consequences still depend on an inattentive reader: Dan can be present in the record and miss seeing himself there. The Times connects lives across long stretches of cold sleep, but it cannot remove the fallibility of memory, or determine by itself what an apparent omission means.