you?” He looked at me and waited.
“No I guess not.” I said.
“No. And the second time you saw it, you might not think to try to send it back, so you wouldn’t know what had just happened. It has to alter an outcome in order for you to know that it’d happened for sure.” He said.
I thought for a minute. “I think I’ve got a way we could stop Hitler.” I said finally.
“Oh, are we still on that? Go ahead, I’d like to hear.”
“See, I could send back instructions on how to send back information to a younger version of myself, you know? And that younger-me could teach it to an old man, who would do the same thing. Then I could send back any information to the young-me, who would tell it to the old guy, who would send it back to a young-him. It would form a chain going back. We could send information back as far as we wanted if we did that. Does that make sense?”
Mr. Bennett smiled. “Who’s to say that’s not what’s happening right now? I think you have a good idea, except when you say you’d teach it to an old man. How many old men do you know who are ready to receive time control lessons from a young Nick? Not many. What you want to do is wait until you’re old and teach it to a young person. They’ll be able to give you messages from a time after your death, and you could send the messages back and tell them to me, and I could send them back and tell them to Will Brimmel who put the notion in my head. So Nick, I ask you, do you have something you’d like to tell me?”
I looked at him. He looked back at me for a long time, then he gave a little laugh. “You look so serious.” He said. “It’s just an idea m’boy. I don’t actually expect you to have a message from the future. You’re one of the brightest people I’ve ever tried to explain this to, and I’ve tried a lot. If it were possible, you wouldn’t be a useful link in the chain until you’d come to a better understanding of the nature of time. Our consciousness is trapped on the surface of time, or what we call space. It’s the forward edge of time and it pulls our little bodies ever forward. It’s like riding a wave. It takes practice to send a thought, or an image, or a memory back, away from the forward edge, but it can be done. Maybe there are lots of chains back through time. Who knows? The past might be changing as we speak.”
I let his words sink in for a minute. “Is it real?” I asked. “Do you think there are chains like that? Because if you’re serious and you think it can actually be done, I want to do it. But please, tell me if you’re just fucking with me.”
“I’m not fucking with you. I don’t know if it can be done. Think about it. Understanding the concept and actually doing it are two different things. If we did change the past, we might cease to exist instantaneously and two new versions of us would take our place. We would never know. Or we could be eliminated completely. Say we opened up a chain to the distant past and used it to ramp-up scientific achievement. We could send airplane designs back to some engineer in the 1820s and we might put air travel ahead a hundred years. But if your grandparents met on a train? You wouldn’t exist anymore, and who would send back the information? Your existence would be purely theoretical, and you might only exist in an alternate reality, or a reality that was instantaneously destroyed. A phantom limb of time. On the other hand all reality might be alternate reality. There could be any number of 1989’s happening simultaneously. Some might include us, some might not… You know it’s hard to get out of the habit of thinking in straight lines all the time. We experience our lives linearly but that might not be the whole story. What if after we die we live our lives from the beginning again, and it’s a new roll of the dice? New outcomes on all the chance occurrences in the world around us? Your life might follow the same path for a while and then veer off in some unexpected direction. To a creature that views time differently than us, our lives might look like trees, with the end of every branch being another death. It’s a funny thing about trees -the variations they can take are infinite, the number of branches, the twists, the leaf distribution, the angle -it’s infinite. And yet every tree looks like a tree.” He looked at his watch. “Well, it’s almost four. I have to run some chores.”
“I have to go too.” I said. “I’m supposed to see a man about a job. Thanks for the talk Mr. Bennett.”
“My pleasure. And good luck with the job.”
“It’ll be an easy four hundred dollars or so.” Jason said.
“You really think that shit’ll work?” I asked.
“It works, believe me. I’ve done it before. Ask Michael. He’s seen lots of people go for it, and the beauty of it is, it’s not illegal.”
“You’d be surprised how many people fall for that shit.” Michael said.
I took a hit from my cigarette and thought about it for a moment. “Yeah, I’ll do it.” I said. “As long as you promise you won’t get pissed at me if I fuck it up.”
“No ones gonna be pissed at you man. If it don’t work -fuck it. That’s life.” Jason said.
“Alright so, when and where?”
“This Sunday at the PCC flea market.” Jason said. “You have to meet me down by the tennis courts at 8:00 in the morning OK?”
I agreed, but I was ninety-nine percent sure that I’d fuck it up. The car thing had been lucky, but this seemed like it would take more skill. There were variables that had to go our way for it to work. My only consolation was that if it failed, I’d only look foolish, not get arrested, so it passed the risk-benefit test.
“I gotta go.” Jason said. “I’ll see you Sunday Nick. Just remember, the key is to stay cool. You can’t over-sell that shit or it’s obvious. The guy has to think he thought of it on his own.”
“Alright, man. I’ll see you Sunday.” I said. He walked down the steps of the porch and got into his car. It was a gray hatchback, and when he started it we could hear the thumping bass of whatever he was listening to in his tape deck. Michael and I watched him back out of the driveway.
“Hey man, lemme ask you something.” I said when his car was out of sight. “Has your brother ever been arrested?”
“Yeah, he’s been arrested. It wasn’t shit though, he never went to jail for longer than a night or two. Why, are you nervous?”
“A little.”
He made a dismissive gesture. “You’ll be fine.” He said. “Oh hey, there’s a new addition to the Ho Chi Minh trail… A thing of beauty. I was over at Jeremy’s last night and we were talking about the Viet Cong when it hit us.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. ‘Cause see they were smart. They didn’t just have trails through the jungle, they had trails under it too. Tunnels. They knew GI Joe wasn’t gonna follow them into a hole in the ground. So that’s what gave us the inspiration. You know that house behind Jeremy’s that’s empty? It’s been for sale forever and it’s got that crazy overgrown backyard? We’re gonna tunnel over there and dig an underground bunker.” Michael said. “We already finished the tunnel on Jeremy’s side. It goes from the side of his garage up to the fence.”
“What do you mean tunnel? Like a prison-break tunnel? What if that shit caves in?” I asked.
“Well that was the problem. That’s what we tried to do at first, but it was too fucking hard. We dug this deep-ass hole and started to tunnel toward the fence, but after we got a few feet into it, it collapsed. So we figured out a better way- trenches. We dug a deep trench up to the fence and covered it over with some scrap plywood. We camouflaged it with dirt and boom, we got a tunnel. You wouldn’t even know it was there if you were looking at it. You can even walk on it no problem. We got Don bringing a bunch of two-by-fours and plywood over tonight and we’re gonna dig a bunker in the neighbor’s yard and connect it to our tunnel. Jeremy said he could get a couple of flashlights from the Rite Aid near his work, so we’ll have light down there and everything.”
“Man, that sounds good… So if we’re running from the law and we make it to Jeremy’s yard, we can just hit the hole and disappear. I like it.”
15
We were like grave robbe
rs, digging in the dark and speaking in hushed tones. Don showed up in his mother’s truck with a bunch of wood from a ramp he’d planned to build but had never gotten around to. We threw all the wood and the shovels over the fence, making a lot more noise than we should have before climbing over ourselves. We started by clearing out all the vines and dead branches in a large square in the center of the yard. We put it all in a pile to use later as camouflage. There were only three shovels, so we worked in shifts. I soon had two large blisters forming on my right hand. Eventually they broke and got dirty and started to sting. Jeremy had a single pair of gloves that he let Don or Michael use when he wasn’t digging. The way the rotation worked out, I never got them. We were all covered with dirt and after a while when you got in the hole, you could smell the wetness of the soil. We decided the bunker should be about seven feet deep, and the trench four or five, that way the roof of the trench would be high enough that we could run through it hunched over, which would be faster than crawling.
I brought over a couple of packs of cigarettes and whoever was on break would smoke one, which took about five minutes. This meant that we’d spend fifteen minutes digging and have a five minute break. It was a good system and soon we had a nice deep hole. We were trying for a rectangle but it
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