by Edward Aubry
Over coffee one day, her standoffishness took a particularly interesting turn. We were discussing my progress as a social being. It had been several months since Penelope first taught me simple tricks to blend in. My friendship with Pete had expanded to inclusion in his social circle. It was the first time in years I had felt truly comfortable around other people. It was also the first time I had spent long enough in anyone’s company to discover I didn’t like some of them, and that was as rewarding as any aspect of the experience. Learning how to manage myself around people I found irritating was a skill that had atrophied since high school, and it felt wonderful to put it back into practice.
Now that I was starting to trust other people, Penelope and I talked about the next steps, including how safe it would be to broach with my closer friends the true nature of my existence. The better I got to know Pete, the more I felt he might be both smart enough and stable enough to understand my plight for what it was. There was risk there, including the very real possibility that doing so might precede an unhappening that would retroactively collapse my entire social network. I still had no idea what the underlying cause of my problem was, and if Penelope did, she wasn’t saying. Instead, we simply mapped out a recovery plan, should I happen to need one.
While we organized how I would word my revelation, and what type of opportune moment I could contrive to drop it, I mentioned the possibility of telling another person as well. A woman named Sandy was in two of my classes, and I had gotten to know her pretty well around the same time I was being inducted into Pete’s clique. When I mentioned this to Penelope, her reaction was unexpected.
“Oh,” she said. “Um. Maybe.” She stopped there, and the awkwardness of the pause surprised me.
“Is that a bad idea?” I probed.
“I don’t… This isn’t because you’re attracted to her, is it?”
These words came out in such a rush I almost didn’t process them. This was a topic that had never come up in our talks, primarily because I was, by that point, so thoroughly convinced that any woman who got involved with me would pay for it with her life. In any case, the answer to Penelope’s question was no. Sandy and I had some things in common, and I had a great deal of respect for her, but there was never any sexual tension there. It would have been easy to dispel Penelope’s concern, but the fact of it intrigued me. It harkened back to Future Penelope’s revolted reaction to my question about whether we were in a relationship that hadn’t started yet. This new question made me wonder if there was a story connected to whatever she felt she needed to hide from me. I believed her when she said that we would never be a couple, besides which, Young Penelope couldn’t possibly know what lay in store for either of us, any more than I did. And yet, this now smacked of an unexpected loose thread, and I couldn’t help but tug it.
“Would that be a problem?” I asked, with an exaggeratedly feigned innocence.
“No,” she said quickly. Then, “Maybe. I don’t know.” She rubbed her face, clearly trying to regain her bearings. “Probably not,” she said finally. “But don’t tell her anyway. Let’s stick to the plan. We don’t even know what will happen when you talk to Pete. For now, let’s not complicate anything.” She waited a beat, then added, “Please?”
I nodded. “Yeah, that’s probably right,” I said, and while I was being honest about my intent to hold off on saying anything to Sandy, I filed away my certainty that something about this circumstance was the nerve Future Penelope had exposed in her younger self. There was something about my eventual relationship with a woman—perhaps Sandy, perhaps someone else, surely not Penelope—that she desperately wanted me not to know.
fter my third attempt to tell Pete about my problem, I gave up. The first time he was amazing about it. Asked me all kinds of questions, took everything I said at its face. We spent an entire afternoon talking, at the end of which he told me he had never felt more touched than he did to know that I trusted him with something that big and risky.
By the time I saw him that evening, the whole thing had unhappened. Thankfully, there was no awful moment of discovery that I would need to explain my way out of. I had become so accustomed to Penelope’s tricks for entering any conversation without exposing myself, and so used to people utterly transforming between times I saw them, all I needed was a quick probe to learn Pete knew nothing.
I tried twice more over the course of that week. The second time was a fiasco. He accused me of trying to play him for a fool, and wanted to know if I was on drugs. I had made the mistake of broaching the topic too quickly, because I already knew (or thought I did) what his reaction would be. He avoided me for two days, then reverted to a blank slate on the matter. Having learned from that, I was substantially more cautious on my third try. That one went very well, until I realized that he was humoring me, first out of amusement, and eventually out of compassion. He begged me to seek professional help. I backpedalled by informing him (honestly) that I had already tried that to no avail. When that final confession unhappened, I resigned.
Sandy was a different story, many times worse. It took me weeks to work up the courage to go to her, but I never got the chance. One day, to my profound surprise and discomfort, she confessed her feelings for me. Given that our friendship had always seemed entirely platonic from my end of it, my initial assumption was that this was some sort of super awkward unhappening of it. However, the more that story played out, the more details she revealed about events exactly as I recalled them. This crush had always been there, and I missed it. At first I tried to stay friends with her, with the clear understanding that I wanted nothing more. The longer we tried that, the more she began to fall apart. It finally got to the point where she would not leave me alone, her communications with me alternating between desperate pleas for a chance, and threats.
It is with no great pride that I admit when she ultimately, inevitably, retroactively vanished, I was not sorry to see her go. I hoped her unhappening was not some dire or dreadful fate, but not enough to investigate.
For the next two years, I settled into a comfortable social life. My friendship with Pete—all of my friendships, in fact—never progressed beyond surface camaraderie. Nothing else seemed worth the bother. I never again shared my tale with another peer. I never allowed anyone to get overly close and learn who and what I really was.
And I never, ever dated.
he second time—from my perspective—that Future Penelope visited me (or third, counting her mysterious appearance when I was in high school) was about six months after our Cumberland Farms outing. In our previous meeting she looked about thirty. This time I guessed her for mid twenties. Once again, we were to “run a fix.” She gave no indication of awareness that this sort of thing was new to me, and I gave her no reason to believe it was. We traveled back in time about four years, and visited a florist in a small city in New Hampshire. Our objective was to stall a woman who had come there to pick up flowers for a hospitalized friend. We only had to keep her there an additional seven minutes, which proved remarkably easy. We arrived just before she did, and Penelope had prepared a barrage of extensive and picayune questions to occupy the manager. My job was to engage the only other employee there, with an imaginary conflict regarding a previous purchase that never happened. She deferred to her boss, who then became tangled between our two distractions. The woman—the only real customer—patiently waited for us to resolve our issues. When the seven minutes were up, I stormed out, and Penelope bought an orchid that she left in the dumpster behind the store before we returned.
Our next fix was three months after that, for me, and at least a couple of years earlier for her. We traveled thirty years into the past, to a dog track, where we persuaded a bettor to drop two thousand dollars on a dog that finished fourth. By the time his money was lost, we were long gone.
She whisked me away a total of fifteen times during my years as an undergrad. There was never any explanation given for our objectives, nor any clear consequence of them. I learn
ed not to ask questions, because it was pointless. The purpose of the device in my arm was not clear, although it certainly did something. On our longer trips, I sometimes thought I could feel it tingling.
But with or without any sense of what we were really doing, absolutely nothing could beat the thrill.
All the while this was happening, I was also continuing my association with Young Penelope. She learned not to ask questions as well, which struck me as an extraordinary measure of self control. There were times her future version appeared to me at an age that couldn’t have been more than five years older than she was now. At the time, I imagined that telling her about that would have been hazardous somehow. More to the point, I knew that her career as a time traveler was bound to begin very soon, and I didn’t want to somehow interfere with that by warning her about it.
During her fifteenth visit, that concern became moot. After traveling more than fifty years into the past to steal someone’s taxi, we returned to my apartment. I made a joke about her looking exhausted after such a hard day’s work, and she laughed. Then she said, “You try jumping back a total of a hundred and forty years, and tell me it wouldn’t wipe you out.”
I didn’t laugh. Penelope gasped.
“Oh, shit,” she said. “This is when you find out, isn’t it?”
only saw Penelope—Young Penelope—twice after that. Things between us ended very badly. So much so, in fact, that I had a great deal of difficulty reconciling it with how well her older version got along with me.
Our penultimate encounter happened on a cold December afternoon, just before sunset. I was walking home from a quick trip to the store when she accosted me on the sidewalk, as was her way. For two years, the only way I had ever seen her was by her own initiative. Given that I viewed her less a friend than a co-conspirator, it always seemed appropriate to me that we had no normal social interaction. We never exchanged phone numbers or emails. None of my other friends had any idea she existed. I certainly had no idea where she lived. All of this seemed entirely reasonable to me, in a bizarre, adolescent, fantasy-of-being-in-a-spy-movie way. The obvious, true explanation for all of this evaded me through sheer willful self-misdirection. I was now furious with myself, not only for being so naïve in the first place, but for allowing it to continue as long as it did.
That day, I heard her voice from behind me. “Hey, Nigel,” she said. I looked over my shoulder without returning the greeting, but did pause long enough for her to catch up to me. “What are you up to?” she asked, with rehearsed innocence.
“How old are you?” I asked her. If this non sequitur fazed her, she showed no sign. Instead, she gave me a coy, mysterious smile.
“How old do you think I am?”
We had played this game before, but not for a long time now. I learned early on that questions about her background were pointless. In two years she hadn’t even given me her real name. Her question was meaningless bait.
“Eighteen,” I said.
Her smile faded. This was not going to be a game. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s right.”
The revelation so quickly given was unexpected, but I forged on. “What year were you born?”
She frowned. “Do the math. I just told you—”
“You’re eighteen. Got it. What year were you born?”
The pause that followed was painfully silent, and couldn’t have been anywhere near as long as it felt. “2070,” she said quietly.
I laughed. “You can’t even pretend to answer that naturally, can you? Two years to rehearse that answer, and you still flubbed it.” We had stopped walking at that point. Penelope’s smile was gone, and she wasn’t making eye contact. “What year were you born?”
“I said—”
“I heard you. What year were you born?”
This pause was longer, and quite a bit more painful. Her older self told me she had traveled a hundred and forty years into the past when for me it had been a little more than fifty. That left at least eighty years, minus the twenty-something years old she appeared to be at the time. Rounding, I guessed, “2150?”
“That’s… close enough,” she said quietly.
Hearing her admission out loud was far less satisfying than I expected. And far more troubling.
“Plus 18 makes 2168,” I said. “I’m a hundred years old in your time. Am I still alive?” I meant it as a dig, but its impact as a real question hit me once it was out of my mouth, and I braced myself for the answer.
“Um,” she said. “It’s kind of…” She trailed off, and while I mentally juggled all the reasons she might not be able to answer that question truthfully, she said, “Yeah. You’re alive.”
Wow. “I guess that’s something,” I said. “So what does that make you? My great-granddaughter?”
“It’s not like that,” she said.
“Well, what is it like?”
She still wouldn’t look at me, and her face took on a pained look that might mean she was about to cry, or punch me in the face. Impossible to predict.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
With those words, she backed away from me, then turned and ran. I watched her flee, secure in the knowledge that she would find me again, having already done so many times in her own future. Still, something about this new understanding felt even less resolved than before, and perhaps irresolvable. As she shrank out of sight in the fading twilight, it began to snow.
or several weeks after that encounter, I spent each day expecting a visit from Penelope, although never certain which version I expected more. I did the best I could to carry on with my normal life—at that point I was only a few months away from graduation—but the distraction began to mount, and my schoolwork began to suffer. This was not the first time I had found myself underperforming at school, but it was the first time I could remember that struggle happening in real time, and not as the result of an unhappening. I grappled with the possibility that whatever relationship I had forged with this woman, at whatever various points in her own time, might actually have come to an abrupt halt in my own frame of reference. The thought troubled me in ways both obvious and inexplicable. My primary ostensible concern was the plethora of questions that would now go forever unanswered by her. Underlying that was a sick feeling that a part of myself had been torn away with her.
When she did finally break silence, I didn’t recognize her. She caught up with me in a shoe store, trying on a pair of hiking boots. It was a whimsical purchase, meant as part of a random reinvention of myself. Honestly, I half-expected the shoes to disappear after I got them home, and perhaps even hoped they would.
“Nigel?” I heard the voice as I was tying the second lace, and for a moment could not place it. I looked up into her eyes, and another moment elapsed before her face resolved into familiarity. Her blonde hair was quite a bit shorter than usual, and riddled with streaks of silver. A quiet smile with a hint of exhaustion spread out, and carried with it a collection of lines I had never seen before. This woman was fifty years old if she was a day.
“Penelope?”
She shook her head. “Once,” she said. “Not today.”
I looked at my shoes. “Should I take these off, or pay for them? Are we going somewhere?” I hoped my eagerness was less apparent than it felt.
“Either,” she said. “And no. I’m just here to talk.” She paused there. “Do you know when I was born?”
I nodded. “Circa 2150.”
“How long have you known?”
I shrugged, thinking back. “Two months? About?”
She sighed, audibly. “I didn’t think I would get this close.”
She let that hang, long enough that I felt compelled to take charge, something new for me around her. I stood.
“I’m going to pay for these. You want to go grab a cup of coffee?” She nodded. The stiff leather of the shoes strained against my feet in ways that did not say proper fit. I ignored it. “You okay?” She nodded again, quite unconvincingly. I abandoned my own shoe
s to pay for these uncomfortable ones. The five hundred forty dollars it cost me to wear them out seemed a reasonable sacrifice.
We walked in silence a block and a half to a café. Over a latte and a chai, I prompted her. “I haven’t seen you in a while,” I said.
“I haven’t seen you in eight years,” she replied.
Unexpected, but unsurprising. “Why now?” I asked simply.
“Because I owe you some apologies, and I don’t think…” She stopped there, and turned away. I gave her a moment, as she regained her composure by focusing on her latte. She blew on it, sipped it, and said into it, “Do you know how difficult time travel is?”
“Sort of,” I admitted. “I’ve only done it a couple dozen times, but it does take the wind of me most days.”
“That’s not what I mean,” she said. “Yes, it is taxing, physically, emotionally. I’m asking how much you know about the mechanics.”
“Nothing. You never told me. I never asked. I assumed I would find out when I was ready, to protect the space-time continuum or something.”
She laughed softly at that. “Space-Time takes care of herself just fine. That was always just about keeping you innocent. That part of your life is over, I’m sorry to say.” She looked up. “Time travel is technologically, mechanically, extremely difficult. Setting up the field is child’s play. Riding it is another thing entirely. Have you ever wondered why my visits to you were always non-sequential from your point of view? Or why my ages varied to the tune of about fifteen years? Aiming a time travel field is a desperately imprecise science. Do you want to guess what the margin of error is for a typical jump?”
