by Edward Aubry
“All right, Susan,” I said. She smiled faintly, shook her head ever so slightly, but did not interrupt. “Why does my life keep unhappening?”
She thought about this for a moment, then around a mouthful of pizza, she said, “You think I’m your fairy godmother, or your guardian angel or something. I’m not. I’m just a fellow traveler. You and I exist on the same level, and a lot of your questions are my questions too.”
“But you know things I don’t.”
She nodded. “Mm hmm. Not as much as you think, but yeah. And more than I can tell you,” she added with a slight pout.
“I’m getting that. I don’t suppose you can tell me why that is.”
“I wish I could. It’s nothing bad, if that’s what you’re thinking. You’re not in any kind of weird danger or anything. It’s just…” She fidgeted with a plastic fork, spearing a pepperoni and twirling it into a small gob of cheese. “Some stuff will make more sense to you if you work it out on your own.”
“That’s a dodge,” I said.
“You betcha.”
I laughed. Calling her out wasn’t going to get me anywhere. “All right, let’s take it from the top. What can you tell me?”
She shrugged. “What do you want to know? Ask me little things. Yes or no.”
I drummed my fingers on the table. “Is this a real thing? Is the world really changing all the time, and nobody notices but me?”
“You’re not nuts, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“That’s what I’m asking. Is there anyone else? Anyone besides you and me?”
She considered this, and I tried to read whether she was considering the answer, or just deciding if she was going to tell me. “Yeah,” she said.
“Lots of people?”
“That I don’t know,” she said.
“Are you a student here?” Her eyebrows went up, indicating the question had its desired effect; it threw her.
“No,” she said.
“You don’t look old enough.”
“That’s not why,” she said quickly. “Um, that’s… Don’t ask me stuff about me, okay?”
I leaned back in my seat and sighed. “Throw me a bone here, Penelope. You’re the first person I’ve really been able to talk to for a very long time, and you’re not saying anything.”
“Penelope,” she said. “I like that one. Call me that.”
“Did I find your name?” I asked. “That seems too easy.”
“No, but I like it. It’ll do for a while.” She took another bite, and continued to talk while chewing. “You don’t want to know about me, anyway. You want to know about the other thing. And I can tell you about that; I just have to be sure to tell it right. You know?”
“Not really.”
“Try this: You say I’m the first person you can talk to, so talk. You go first. Tell me about yourself. Tell me about what changes, and what you do when it happens.”
I thought about this. Apart from my aborted psycho-therapy sessions, I had never opened up about the most important part of what it meant to be me. “It’s usually little stuff,” I began. “Conversations that I know I had but no one else did. Stuff I’m supposed to do but don’t know about. Objects that appear, or disappear, or turn into other things. When it’s that kind of unhappening, it’s just embarrassing. People think I’m a flake, that I forget everything, that I’m unreliable. That’s why I don’t socialize much.”
“That’s an easy fix.”
I perked up. “I’m sorry, what did you just say?”
She sipped her drink. “I said you can fix that.” She waved away what must have been obvious on my face. “I don’t mean you can stop it from happening; I mean you don’t have to be embarrassed. There are tricks I can teach you.”
“Is that why you’re here?” I asked.
“Partly,” she admitted. “From now on, you’re on the attention deficit spectrum.”
I shook my head. “Is that a real thing?”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “It’s very real. You don’t have it, but it’s real. It’s a disorder. Um,” she added, “I hope that’s okay.”
“Tell me how this helps me.”
“Right. Well, it’s basically an underactive frontal lobe issue. The diagnosis is about a hundred years old, and they used to treat it with stimulants. In 2087 it’s treated mostly as a low-grade perceptual dissociation, and they don’t always medicate for it, depending on where you fall on the spectrum. So, no pills, don’t worry about that. I can teach you the management tools deficit spectrum people use. Basically, you’re going to mimic what a person does who has clinically chronic and severe issues remembering things and staying organized. You’re going to use these tricks in an obvious way, and work it into conversations over and over again. You will be making a show of how much work it is for you to remember all the stuff that you don’t actually have any trouble remembering. Everyone will come to know you as an extremely high-functioning ADD. When your life does unhappen, the little stuff I mean, it will look like you slipped. Your friends will step up with reminders and favors because they think they’re helping you catch up.”
“I don’t have any friends.”
“You will,” she said, and for the first time since Carrie Wolfe, I remembered what optimism feels like.
“It sounds manipulative.”
She slurped the bottom of her drink again. “It totally is. And it works like a charm.”
“My God,” I said quietly. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Well, you should probably say thank you, but wait until I train you and it works first. Welcome to survival, Nigel.” Then her smile faded to something more contemplative. “Now,” she said, “tell me about the bad ones.”
he first time I used one of the tricks Penelope taught me and made me practice until I got it right, I couldn’t help but wonder what circle of Hell was reserved for people who pretended to have disabilities. To be fair, I rationalized it with the secret understanding that I did have a disability, just not one that was diagnosable, or even remotely explainable.
It was a weekday, a few weeks after my lessons with Penelope began. I was in one of the campus eateries, sipping a coffee, nibbling a croissant, and scouring the Net on my tablet for any plausible reference to time travel. Very little of the information on the Slinky Probe accident was declassified at that time, so I found myself spending an absurd amount of my downtime getting to know the crackpots and fringe conspiracy theorists. As of that point, I had yet to come across a credible report from anyone who had actually traveled through time, but as I knew it to be my destiny, I assumed it would only be a matter of patience before I made a connection.
I was not so absorbed that I missed another student joining me at my table. He put down a tray with a chicken salad sandwich and a soft drink, and sat directly across from me.
“Excuse me,” he said politely.
I scrutinized him. On his narrow face sat thin glasses with wide frames, and his black hair stood in a flattop crew cut. Over a long-sleeved, peach-colored shirt, he wore a burgundy plaid vest, buttoned up. I had no idea whether to consider that pretentious, but I made a mental note of it. The next few moments would be critical. I did not recognize him, but from years of experience I knew how meaningless that was. Penelope had taught me a slew of visual and verbal cues to watch for to determine if any given person was supposed to be known to me. This new arrival was making steady eye contact. That meant a probable first introduction; a more familiar person would more likely be splitting his focus between me and his food. No clue was a guarantee, however. I offered a greeting in practiced neutrality. “Hello.”
“You’re in my combinatorics class, aren’t you?” he asked. Bingo.
“With Dr. Carter?”
He nodded. “Yeah. I thought I recognized you. My name’s Pete. Some of this stuff is starting to go over my head, and I’m looking to start a study group. You want in?”
I stared at him for a second, then formed opposing L’s wi
th my thumbs and forefingers and framed his face with them. “Pete,” I said. “Pete. Your name is Pete. ‘Are you in my combinatorics class?’ Pete. Pete wears a burgundy vest. ‘I’m looking to start a study group. Do you want in?’ Your name is Pete.” I dropped my hands and made a show of relaxing my face. “Sorry about that. I’m Nigel.”
Pete’s face took on a look of surprise, but where I expected to find discomfort, I saw fascination. “That’s a mnemonic trick. My cousin does it all the time. You’re bonding a semantic memory to an episodic memory, right?”
I had rehearsed this explanation so many times that it threw me off balance hearing it from someone else the very first time I tried to use it. I rolled with it, and laughed. “Yeah, something like that,” I said. “Your cousin does that too?”
He nodded. “She has an attention disorder. She does it every time she hears a new name. Is that what you have? Does it work?”
I shrugged, secretly grateful that he had fed me a cue to one of my rehearsed lines. “Most of the time,” I said. “Not always.”
“Then you’re better off than she is,” he said. “I love her, but she’s kind of a disaster.” He bit his lip. “Oh. Sorry. I didn’t mean—”
I waved away his concern. “Don’t. I’ve had years to get used to it,” I lied.
“Well, you must be doing okay with it. Heck, you made it into MIT. My cousin barely made it out of high school.”
I shrugged. “I’m told I am highly functional. It doesn’t always feel that way. I’ll tell you right now, though, don’t be surprised if I can’t remember your name the next time I see you. Or I might remember it for five years and then suddenly lose it. It doesn’t always stick.” Another lie. There was no way I was ever going to forget that this person was named Pete. However, there was always a chance that I could encounter someone else in his presence whose name I was supposed to know, and whom subjectively I had never met. I had now planted a suggestion in Pete’s head that could protect me later. Penelope had been drilling me on this for weeks, but feeling it play out in real time was a very new experience. I could already tell it was working, and I was already connecting with another student.
For the first time since preadolescence, I began to reclaim a social life.
y first trip through time was in no way like what I expected.
It was an early November evening. I was walking back from Pete’s dorm, where I had spent the past few hours with him, two of his friends, and at least four beers. It was dark and just beginning to rain, and neither of those things dimmed my joy in the slightest. What had started as a study session on the topic of exponential generating functions gradually rolled into a discussion of music, a debate on the comparative merits of Hamlet and Macbeth, and no small amount of observations about our female acquaintances. I was intoxicated, as much by the experience as the alcohol. I had enjoyed myself in the company of peers, none of whom thought I was crazy. And, even if it all unhappened right then and there, I believed I had the tools to recover.
My reaction time thus diminished, by the time I felt the hand on my shoulder, it was already spinning me around. I caught sight of the old man’s face, just before the slippery sidewalk and my own tipsiness sent me backwards, landing hard in a puddle.
“Nigel!” he shouted. It was a hoarse, weathered voice I did not recognize. “It is Nigel, yes?”
I had neither the wherewithal nor the inclination to play out my mnemonic charade. “What do you want?” I said, scrambling backward in an unsuccessful bid to stand. He grabbed my hand, and pulled me up, his strength belying his aged countenance. I stood, wet, trying to make out his features in the half-light of the campus streetlamps. All I could see was gray stubble, wrinkles and pain. He squinted at me.
“No,” he grumbled. “No, this was a mistake. You’re a boy. Christ, look at you! You’ll never pull this off.”
My heart began to race, as genuine fear began to take hold. For anyone else, this would be a difficult situation on its own terms. For me, the chronic uncertainty of what might be true about my own past at any given moment, combined with a creeping feeling of recognition, made me silently beg my metabolism to burn off those beers quickly. I was in no condition to plan my way out of this encounter. The rain chose that moment to open up full throttle. Perhaps in reaction to that, or perhaps for some other reason, my assailant shoved me, and I returned to my puddle. As I twisted and flopped to regain my footing, or find some way to crawl away at top speed, there was a flash of lightning. Dangers were accruing more quickly than I could compensate for them. As I got to my feet and prepared to bolt, hoping I wouldn’t slip again, I wobbled in a complete circle.
He was gone.
It was dark enough, and I was disoriented enough, that he could have easily made his way out of my field of vision without any particular ninja skills. As I stood there, slowly scanning my surroundings for any pending ambush, I reflected on that face. The more I did so, the more I wanted to reject the nagging apprehension that the face threatening me was nothing more than a stubbled, wrinkled, haggard mirror.
I waited for the thunder. It never came.
y other first trip through time happened the next day.
I had overslept. Although not exactly hung over, I was certainly not feeling my best. It had been a fitful night’s sleep, punctuated with a series of dreams about meeting myself. In some of them, I was the tipsy bewildered student, in some, the broken old man. I woke frequently, each time marked with the dreadful transition from telling myself it was only a dream to remembering it really wasn’t. When my alarm sounded at 8:00, I worked it seamlessly into my current nightmare, and slept straight through it. The only thing finally able to rouse me was the banging on my dorm room door.
I woke with a start and a headache. “Time,” I growled.
“10:47,” replied the clock with a hint of judgment. That nuance was an optional setting. It seemed much more amusing when I selected it than it did in practice.
There was more door banging. I clutched my head. The time meant I had already slept through most of my first class, and that I probably wouldn’t have enough time to make myself presentable and eat before the next one. Depending on who was at the door, that might be moot anyway.
I stumbled out of bed and opened the door. Standing there was a woman about ten years older than I, with a long blonde ponytail, wearing a denim jacket. Apart from being obviously and significantly older, this was the spitting image of the girl who had been giving me lessons on how to pass for someone whose life was not constantly, retroactively changing. I considered the possibility that this was another variation of the dream I had been sweating through all night, but I knew full well I was awake.
“Penelope?”
She laughed with delight. “Penelope! Wow, that takes me back!” She smiled, and allowed that smile to stretch right to the edge of an awkward moment. “Are you going to let me in?”
I stood aside, and she floated into the room, planting herself in my desk chair. Another pause blossomed awkwardly.
“Are you going to put some pants on?”
Crap. It was more or less clear what was happening here, especially after my experience with my older self the very day before, but it came at me so quickly I had no idea how to form the questions I had to ask. In light of that, the fact that I was still in my underwear had escaped me as insignificant. I nearly tripped getting to my dresser, and nearly fell over pulling on a pair of slacks.
“Relax,” she said. “We’re not in a hurry.”
Zip. “Not in a hurry for what?”
I turned around to see her rearranging the supplies on my desk into neat, but functionless, rows. “The usual. We have to run a fix.”
“What’s a fix?”
She looked up at me as I fumbled into a shirt, a curious smile on her face. Then the smile faded to something less amused, between surprise and trepidation.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh. No way.” She stood slowly, then reached for my left hand. Turning it ov
er she traced a line from my wrist to the crook of my elbow, with noticeable pressure. She stared at the invisible line she had drawn, and her jaw dropped, just a bit. “No way,” she whispered.
She pulled something the size of a coin from her pocket, which promptly snapped out to an object that looked like a pen. As she waved this object over my forearm to no apparent result, her entire demeanor became more reserved.
“It’s not here,” she said calmly. The pen object collapsed back into a coin, and went back in her pocket. “We need to talk,” she said. “You may want to sit down.”
I pulled the covers taut on my bed, and sat down. This was more for her benefit than mine. She pulled up my desk chair and sat facing me with deep concern in her eyes.
“Nigel,” she began formally, “this may be difficult for you to accept at first, but…” She paused, evidently collecting her thoughts. “I’ve come here from your future.”
“That part is kind of obvious.”
She pulled back. “Oh,” she said, with some combination of confusion and disappointment. “Well then, how much do you know?”
I shrugged. “That’s pretty much it, I think. A younger version of you is a recent friend of mine. I recognized you right away. No offense, but you don’t look her age anymore.”
“None taken. The time travel doesn’t surprise you?”
I shook my head. “My life keeps unhappening. You know that, right? I’ve known some version of this was coming for years. And…” I stopped, unsure how to describe the evening before. “You’re not my first visitor.”
Her eyebrows rose at this. “Who?”
“Me, I think.”
“Oh.” She sat for a moment in a silence I could not read. “What did he say?”
“I’m not sure. It was raining, and he wasn’t exactly coherent.” Describing a moment from my life that was disturbing, and likely inevitable, was not easy. “He said I was too young. A boy.”
She nodded, as something seemed to fall into place. “Well, he’s not wrong on that count. That was his first trip. You won’t see him again for a few years, unless something changes before then.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry he got to you before I did.”
