by Jeff Elkins
His eyes grew wide with surprise when I sat down across from him. He removed his glasses and began cleaning them with a white handkerchief from his jacket pocket. “C-c-can I help you?” he said with a concerned stutter of shock, looking down at his glasses. His accent was harsh and blocked. It sounded German to me.
I placed one of the beers in front of him and the plate of fries between us. “You look like a man with a story to tell,” I said with my best encouraging smile.
He folded his handkerchief with precision and tucked it back into his pocket. He then returned his glasses to his face, carefully wrapping the circular, wire rims behind his ears. With clean glasses on, he looked up to meet my smile. His eyes were gray, deep, and experienced. He smelled of peppermint and smoke. It reminded me of my grandfather’s pipe.
Fearing I was about to be asked to leave, I decided to slow things down and ease into the conversation. I sipped my beer and asked, “Your accent is interesting. Where are you from?”
“Here,” he said.
“Oh,” I said surprised and embarrassed by my mistake. “It’s just, you sound German,” I explained. “Are you from here, originally?”
“I’ve lived here all my life,” he said with a grin. He took a fry from the plate and popped it into his mouth.
I was glad to see him accept my offering. “What do you do?” I asked.
“I’m currently looking for new employment,” he said. “I’ve just finished a, um, a big project.”
“Cool,” I replied, drinking more beer. “So we’re celebrating?” I could tell he was beginning to relax.
“Yes,” he said leaning back in his chair, amused by my interest. “Yes, we are celebrating.” He grabbed his beer, motioned it toward me as a toast, and then took a long swig. I returned the gesture.
He grimaced and put the beer back on the table, unsatisfied. “I miss real beer,” he said to the air as he stared at his glass mug. Then he smiled at me and continued, “Thank you for the drink and food. I came in to… I intended to get something to drink… I just didn’t consider that my money wouldn’t be any good.”
“What?” I said with exaggerated shock. “I’d think any money is good money around here.”
“I’m afraid mine is, um, how do you say, um, irrelevant,” he replied. He then fished into his pants pocket, retrieved a handful of bills and coins, and laid them on the table in front of me.
The currency was like nothing I’d ever seen. The bills were printed in black, gray, and red ink. They were ornately decorated with faces I didn’t recognize and covered in a language I couldn’t read. The coins were gold and heavy with unfamiliar buildings and symbols on them. I held one of the bills up to the light. Watermarked faces and pictures were revealed. It was the fanciest fake money I’d ever seen. “Where’s this from?” I asked.
“Here,” he said, leaning forward to munch on more fries.
“Oh, are these like B-More Bucks?” I’d heard of a group of hipsters trying to launch a city based currency that could only be used in Baltimore. Something about encouraging people to buy local. So far, from what I’d heard, it hadn’t pushed past being a novelty.
The man laughed and shook his head. “No,” he said. “This is real money. Real currency. From here.” He sighed and smiled. “But no one wants it anymore.”
Intrigued by this strange man, I sat up in my chair and ventured forward in the conversation. “So tell me about your project. What are we celebrating?”
The man leaned in, looked left and right to ensure no one else was listening, and then said to me in an excited whisper, “I killed Muller.” Then he sat back and waited for me to celebrate his victory with him.
I wasn’t sure how to respond. Nervous I’d just heard a horrible confession, I replied with caution, “Who is Muller?”
“Exactly,” he said, nodding excitedly.
“Is he your neighbor? Or a friend? Or maybe your wife’s lover?”
He laughed loudly. “I am not married,” he said. “But this is a good joke.”
“I’m confused,” I said raising my hands in surrender. “Who’s Muller?”
“This is my victory,” he said with glee. “You do not know Muller. This is what we are celebrating. You do not know Muller.”
“And you killed him? We are celebrating because you killed a man I don’t know?”
“Because,” he corrected. “Because I killed him. You don’t know Muller because I went back and killed him.” His smile grew to fill his face. His pride and joy were infectious. I felt strange celebrating the death of a stranger, but the odd man across from me was so happy; it was hard not to join him in his victory.
“How’d you do it?” I said, playing along.
“Each one has required a unique touch,” the man said with pride. “For Muller, it took years of searching. I didn’t find him until he was a young teen. They grow harder to kill the older they become. For Muller, I waited outside his school until one day, when he was walking home alone. Then I pushed him off a bridge.” The man clapped his hands with joy and laughed. “Right off the side of the bridge.”
I forced a nervous laugh in return. “So you said ‘each one.’ ‘Each one’ means more than one? You’ve killed more than one man?”
“Seven,” he said matter-a-factly as he ate more fries. “The first was Schmidt. Schmidt was a monster. He’s the one that inspired my invention in the first place. But then I came home and there was Schneider. Schneider was worse than Schmidt. Much, much worse. So I went back again. Only then when I came back there was Schafer. So I went back again. Schafer was replaced by Wagner, then Wagner by Becker, then Becker by Hoffmann, then Hoffmann by Muller. But I think now, I think I am done. This time looks like a good time,” he said looking around the room. “I think I like this time. I think I am done now.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” I said laughing, wondering if this old man was pulling a prank on me. “So ‘invention’, ‘going back’, ‘coming home’,” I said emphasizing his words. “Are you trying to tell me that you created some kind of time machine?”
“Yes,” he replied. He removed his handkerchief and glasses and began cleaning them again. “I thought,” he started. “I believed I could…” He shook his head and sighed. “You must understand. My time, it was bad. Things were bad. They needed fixing. But the balance of power was so out of whack, I couldn’t fix them in the here and now. So I went to then, to back then, to when they went off course, to when the monster took charge. And back then I fixed them. Back then, not here. Not now. But then? Do you understand? I fixed them back then by erasing the monster before he came to power.” He paused and took a long swig of his beer and then began to confide in me again. “What I didn’t understand at first,” he said. “What I missed, was that in the right conditions a monster will emerge. There is never a shortage of monsters.”
I nodded in response, faking belief, still unsure if this strange man was insane or putting me on. Was this his thing? Did he come to bars dressed in odd clothes hoping someone would buy him a beer so he could then lure them in with crazy stories of killing and time travel?
The man ate more fries. He pointed one at me and continued, “You know, Schafer wasn’t half bad. In comparison to the others that is. I feel a little bad about that one. But I didn’t know then what I know now.” He ate the fry and took another swig of his beer. “I was idealistic then. Naïve even. I thought I could make it perfect. But there’s always a monster. If the world is right, there’s always a monster.”
Sure now that the man was nuts, I decided to play along. I finished my beer and said, “If you were going to go back in time to kill someone, I’d think you go back and kill Hitler. I mean, if I had a time machine, that’s what’d I’d do. I’d kill Hitler.”
The man smiled knowingly, replaced his glasses, carefully wrapping the wire frames behind his ears. Then he looked at me and said, “Hitler would make eight.”
Friday
Kevin took another fry from the plate, tossed i
t in the air, and then caught it in his teeth. I could tell by his sharp jawline that he’d been working out since I’d last seen him. Other things, like his sandy brown hair and engaging blue eyes, hadn’t changed at all.
“So, bro,” Kevin said with enthusiasm. “You should have seen how red this dude’s face was. He had this vein on his forehead that was like bam-bam-bam. Like it was having sex under his skin or something. It was creepy. And he all yelling at me all this stuff about, ‘This is my spot. I saved this spot. It’s mine.”
“So what did you do?” I asked.
“What do you think I did?” Kevin said, leaning back in his chair. “I put the dude’s orange cone between my legs and pretended like it was a giant cock.”
“Classic Kevin,” I said with a smile.
“If it ain’t broken,” Kevin said.
“But you said this was about Facebook?” I asked.
“Oh, I’m getting there. So anyway, I’m doing my cone thing and the guy is pissed because he knows he’s wrong. You can’t save spots on the street. I don’t care where your house is. I don’t care that you went out and bought some fancy orange cone, bro. The street is public property. I’ve got as much right to park there as any loser. You can’t just put a cone down and claim it, bro. This isn’t like Far and Away.”
“True,” I said. “Because they had flags and they were settling the west.”
“That is all true. But besides that, it’s the same. So anyway, this dude pulls out his cell phone and starts taking a video of me. And I didn’t think anything of it, so I play it up a little.”
“Naturally.”
“But then, when I go inside, I find out that he put it on our neighborhood page and was talking all kinds of crap about me. So I was like, ‘Bro. Not cool. Too far.’ I mean, on your personal page, sure. But putting me up on the neighborhood page.”
“Did the neighborhood get pissed at you?”
“Well, some did. They were all like, ‘This is what’s wrong with our neighborhood. Idiots like this guy are wrecking everything for the children.”
“It’s always the children.”
“No more climate change!”
“For the children!”
“Stop getting people fat with Big Macs!”
“For the children!”
“No more happiness!”
“For the children!”
“So people were all like, ‘This dude is wrecking everything for the children.’ But then there were some hot chicks who were like, ‘This dude is smoking.’ So I was all, ‘Hit me on the IM.’ And they were all like, ‘You know it.’ And they are totally fine too. Not like normal hot chicks. More like model hot chicks.”
“I don’t think that part’s real.”
“Shut up. You don’t know.”
“So what did you do?”
“I set up a time to meet them on Friday.”
“No. What’d you do to get back at the guy for putting you on Facebook?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said with a laugh. “So I found out the dude drives this, like, green Honda Fit. It’s a super tiny car. So I found out where he parked it. And I texted my roommates. And we picked it up and moved it.”
“You moved it?”
“Yeah, bro,” he said laughing. “We totally moved it to another space down the street. And he got totally pissed. He called the cops. So I went out and was like, ‘What’s going on?’ And was all accusing me of stealing his car and stuff. But then I was like, ‘Isn’t that it right there, officer?’ And the cop was super grateful. And the dude looked like a total ass.”
“I can’t believe you moved his car,” I said. “That’s insane.”
“Oh, that’s not the end of it. It was so easy to move, so it, like, became a game, bro. So we went out and moved it every time one of us saw it. One time, we walked it like five blocks away.”
“That’s some serious commitment to a prank,” I said.
“I know, right?”
“Reminds me of the time you put all those flyers up.”
“Which time?” he said with confusion as he ate some more fries and took a long swig of beer.
“You remember? Our landlord put these signs all over the apartment building…”
“Master Key Change Lost. $50 Reward if Returned to Main Office,” he said nodding his head at the memory.
“So you printed off a few hundred and hung them everywhere that said…”
“Master Key Change Lost. $51 Reward if Returned to Room 215.”
“That was hysterical.”
“Not as good though as the time you gave the naked tour.”
“Well, it wasn’t my fault…”
“No, totally deserved. How dare they try to show our apartment to tenants while you were sleeping?”
“Yeah,” I said. I took a sip of my beer.
“It’s not like they had an appointment. Oh, wait. They did have an appointment.”
“They should have known we wouldn’t remember an early morning appointment.”
“You could have been chill like me and stayed in bed, though,” he said with a grin.
“You stayed in bed because you were too hung over to get up,” I said.
“Really, you were doing a public service.”
“Why wouldn’t a group of freshman want a tour of an apartment from a naked guy?”
“Sounds like a glorious day to me,” he said.
“Absolutely,” I said.
Kevin leaned back in his chair and smiled. “I miss hanging out with you, bro. It’s just like college all over again.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“You remember that time you went to the landlord and tried to pitch installing a slide from the upstairs apartments to the courtyard?”
“That was a fantastic idea that would have worked. Some people have no vision.”
“I’ve got a double chili burger with bacon,” Billy said, placing the first plate in front of Kevin. “And the usual,” he said placing the second burger in front of me.
“Thanks, Billy,” I said.
After Billy had stepped away, Kevin took a bite from his burger. Chili spilled out the sides and onto the plate. “Oh man,” he said. “This is awesome. So what Marissa said is real? Stacey told you she needed a week and you’ve just been sitting here waiting. Bro. That’s pathetic.”
I shrugged.
“I mean, I love you, bro. But you do know you don’t deserve her, right?”
“I know,” I said and took a swig of my beer. “But to be fair, you are a little biased.”
“Put aside that she’s my little sister. I’m just talking about you, bro. You’re kind of a mess.”
“Did you just call me a mess? I’m not the one pretending a parking cone is my penis.”
“Bro, that hurts. And you’re right. There’s no way in hell I would let a guy like me date my little sister.”
“You and I are different people,” I said.
“Bro. False. We don’t change. I’m the same guy from college. I’m a little fatter and I’m not going out to play lacrosse, but inside, I’m the same. You too. You’re the same. And I know that guy. And I want more for my sister. That’s all.”
“But I’m not the same guy. I’m growing. I learn stuff all the time.”
“Bullshit.”
“No, seriously. I wouldn’t want anyone to date college me either because that guy was a total jerk.”
“Right, bro?”
“But I’m not that guy.”
“Fine,” Kevin said, crossing his arms. “Prove it. Tell me one thing you’ve learned.”
I smiled. “How about five? I was talking to this one German guy, and I learned that the past is the past and that you can’t change it no matter how much you want to. And then I learned from this other guy that you can’t be afraid of change or you will miss some new opportunities. And I learned from this girl that I need to pay more attention to my surroundings. And when I talked to Marissa… She helped me understand that I need to take res
ponsibility for the decisions I’ve made.” I sighed and took a drink of beer. “That’s a big one. And last, I learned that even if I’m a just the little boss, if I want the cheese fries, then I still need to have the balls to walk up to the table and eat the damn cheese fries.”
“I don’t understand that last one at all, bro.”
“It doesn’t matter. What’s important, and the reason I asked you to meet me here, is because I want you to know that I love your sister. And if she is willing to give it a go, it’ll be different this time. I’ll be different this time.”
Kevin took another bite of his burger, chewed, and thought. “Okay,” he said leaning back in his chair. “You know I love you, bro. So I’ll call her tonight and tell her to come and talk to you. I can’t promise she’ll say what you want to hear. But I’ll make sure she shows up.”
“Thanks,” I said. “That’s all I can ask.”
Saturday
“Reason number one,” Stacy said.
“You don’t have to do this,” I protested. The bar felt warm and humid, maybe from the body heat of the crowd, or maybe from my anxiety. She sat across from me at the small two-top in the middle of the room. Her journal was propped up in front of her as a barrier between us.
“Reason number one,” she repeated, not looking up from her journal. Her hair was pulled back in a pony-tail, and she was wearing the dark rimmed glasses she bought two years ago. It was her “nerd” look. She knew it drove me absolutely mad. She was a beautiful nerd.
“Seriously,” I said. “This isn’t…”
“Reason. Number. One,” she said again, shooting a fierce glare at me. She looked back down at her journal. The theater of it was absurd. She had everyone on her list memorized. We both knew it, but the setting was important to her. She liked the stage of conversation to be precisely arranged.
“At my mom’s house last Thanksgiving,” she said, “you ate the last of the pumpkin pie, even though you knew it was my favorite.”
“That’s a reason? Really.”
