Unhappenings

by Edward Aubry

  I thought back on what little she had revealed to me in our travels about how closely she had made her goals. “Three days?” I considered the guess to be conservative.

  She took another sip. “Seven years,” she said. “Ish,” she added with a slight smile that almost seemed genuine. “Mind you, that’s a typical jump. Ours were anything but that.”

  “Is this stuff I’m supposed to know?”

  “Doesn’t really matter,” she said. “I’m only telling you because I’m glad I got here when I did. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I was from the future. I mean, when I was Penelope.”

  “I know what you mean. You’re apologizing for something you did, what, thirty years ago?”

  “At least. I still wanted you to hear it. That time I saw you and knew I had accidentally let it slip… I tried for months to get back to that point in time, to tell you how sorry I was, but I couldn’t. I was shut out. But now… Nigel, you will see me again after this point, many, many times. Most of those times we will be allies, close friends even. And most of them will be good times. But I… I think this is the last time I see you. And I just want to say I’m sorry. I’m sorry for a lot of the things that are about to start coming your way, and I’m sorry for what happened eight years ago. I wasn’t well then, Nigel. Not well at all. It’s been very difficult to own that. And I’m better now. Much better. But then… Just… When the thing from my eight years ago finally plays out for you, whatever you are thinking at the time, whatever you are feeling at that moment, try to remember…”

  She looked down. A single tear dropped into her coffee. After a beat, she took another sip from it. Quietly, she said, “Try to remember that someday after that, I came back here to tell you how sorry I am.” She stood, and as she walked past my seat she put her hand on my shoulder to stop me from getting up, or following her. “How sorry I am,” she repeated, “and how much I love you.”

  She kissed me on the forehead, and drifted out the door.

  enelope’s words of warning and apology haunted me, and her timing was dreadful. I was just finishing out the last few weeks of my undergrad career. With some carefully honed tools for maintaining a real social life under my belt, and feeling like I had some kind of handle on the unhappenings that had plagued my life for years, I looked forward to striking out into the world with a reasonable facsimile of normality. Not to be, apparently.

  I did what I could to maintain stability in my schoolwork, and withdrew a bit from my friends. Whatever crisis loomed for me, I already knew I would outlive it to at least my one hundredth birthday, but there was no telling what could yet happen—or unhappen—to the people around me.

  It was about a week before I graduated that I got my first taste of what she meant by the things that were about to start coming my way.

  It was late in the evening, and I had just eaten dinner with Pete. He and I had begun to drift apart. That was entirely intentional on my part, but he had no way of knowing that. This get-together was something of an olive branch from him, and I humored it. In truth, that was a friendship I had come to value deeply. The fact that I was passively ending it was entirely for Pete’s protection, and I was sorry to see it go.

  As we left the restaurant, Pete told me he needed to walk back to one of the physics labs to check on an experiment he was running for Dr. Ainsley. I had managed to avoid that professor entirely since his attempted arrest of me years earlier. Pete knew all about that, as did everyone who was a student at that time, but he assured me Ainsley would be nowhere near the building, so I went with him. When we got there, he asked me to wait outside.

  “I’m not supposed to let anyone near the equipment,” he said. “It’s some sort of weird classified thing.”

  “Really? He trusts you with top secret research?”

  Pete laughed. “He absolutely does not. Honestly, I don’t even have a clue what this is all about. Twice a day I take some readings and answer a few observational questions, which usually amounts to recording the same exact numbers over and over again, and noting that nothing has changed. Part of me thinks this isn’t even a physics experiment, and that I’m really a subject in a psych study on pointless activity. This is how I earn my stipend, so I don’t ask a lot of questions. Whatever it is, he has told me absolutely nothing, and sworn me to secrecy about it. If he knew I was telling you even this much—especially because it’s you, by the way—he’d probably have me drawn and quartered. Stay put. I’ll be right back.”

  As I waited for Pete outside the building, I began to feel a tingle in my left arm. It was the same sensation I felt during some of my travels through time with Penelope, and once or twice I felt it just prior to her arrival. I had come to think of the implant as my trick knee that can always tell when a storm is coming. I paced nervously, wondering if she was about to appear and if I would finally have to introduce her—or explain her—to Pete. But she didn’t come. The tingling carried on, and began to take on a pulse-like quality, which was new. I started to rub my arm, as a reflex.

  “Are you okay?” asked Pete. I jumped, a bit startled, and realized I had been scanning the area so intently and nervously for any sign of Penelope that I had completely forgotten about him.

  “My arm hurts,” I said honestly. If he was asking whether I was all right, he must already have seen me rubbing it anyway.

  “Did you do something to it?” he asked, and as he spoke, in simple curiosity he took a step toward me and leaned in to look for an injury.

  The tingling suddenly shifted to stabbing pain, and I yelped. Pete jumped back, clearly surprised and concerned, and the pain stopped.

  The sensation wasn’t coming from Penelope; it was coming from Pete.

  Whatever covert experiment Ainsley was running with Pete as his lackey was generating the same field around him that Penelope always carried with her. The futuristic technology I had been using for two years was no longer so futuristic. It was to be the eventual product of research and development going on in real time in my own school.

  Time travel was starting to happen.

  nd then I graduated.

  I finished in the top quarter of my class, which I thought was pretty impressive under the conditions in which I had spent my four years of study. My parents took me and about a dozen members of my extended family out to a very expensive restaurant, where I ordered a whole lobster. It was a pretty good day.

  My diploma was framed within the next week. Lacking a proper office in which to hang it, I chose to display it on the wall of the living room in my parents’ house. It was a genuine source of pride to read the words “Bachelor of Science in Physics.” Every morning before breakfast I would head into the library, and read the entire document, whispering the words softly to myself.

  And every day, in recognition of the fact that—very much against my expectations—it was still there, I would finish by whispering, “At least for now.”

  y diploma turned out to be permanent. Unfortunately, it was about the only thing from that part of my life that was.

  During my senior year, I applied to, and was accepted into, a Masters program at Cornell. I wasn’t due to start until the fall semester, so I spent much of the summer relaxing, and planning to relocate. My displacement—physical this time—was a refreshingly simple ordeal, and preparing for it made me feel pleasantly normal for a change. Toward the end of July, my father carefully broached the topic of how long it was going to take me to start looking for a job. To anyone else preparing to move out of state for graduate school in a month, such a suggestion would be confusing. To me, it was all too clear. A search through my correspondence from that year soon turned up the rejection letter from Cornell in my saved e-mails, along with similar letters from several other universities.

  It was surely an act of remarkable restraint that my father’s inquiries about my future plans were as kind as they were. The conversations we must have had about my universal rejections from graduate schools were probably awful for both of us, and I
was at least partially grateful not to have actually experienced them. Dad was always deeply invested in my prospects as a physicist. His own field had been computer science, and he had been fortunate enough to be exactly the right age to ride the cascade of developments in artificial intelligence that transpired in the 2060s. Had he graduated two years earlier or later he would have missed what was a very narrow window of unprecedented opportunity in his specialty. While he never wished for me to follow directly in his footsteps, I was his only child, and the possibility that I would follow science of some sort was a point of personal delight for him. I know he often saw me as a younger version of himself. We even looked strikingly similar. Same skinny build, same unmanageable hair (although unlike him I did ultimately get to keep mine), we even had the same taste in eyeglasses, at a time when those had gone nearly extinct. When I finally asked for optic surgery, it nearly broke his heart. I can only imagine how he must have crashed at my apparent washing out of a career in science.

  With grad school suddenly no longer an option, I did indeed begin to look for work. This proved significantly daunting. My intent was always to pursue a PhD and spend the rest of my life steeped in research, exactly as my father had hoped, preferably in time travel applications. I never had a plan B.

  How short-sighted of me.

  Fortunately, my parents were people of means, and there was no real urgency for me to be employed, at least from a survival perspective. Nevertheless, it was unacceptable to them, and to myself, for me to begin a career as a layabout. My first choice was to put my physics degree to work, especially as I was now planning to start the grad school application process all over again, and I wanted to be able to build experience to make myself a more desirable candidate. Partly on the strength of my background, but largely as a result of my father’s connections, I was able to get a job as a research assistant, which he found encouraging. That lasted for nine days. On day ten I woke to discover that I had been working for three weeks as a tech support person for a communications firm. The next few days were an embarrassing sequence of incidents in which I needed to be retrained on very simple matters. Eventually, I settled into the work.

  That job lasted for ten weeks. Then, abruptly, I was a substitute teacher at a private high school. Seven weeks after that, I discovered that I really worked as the electronics manager at Sears. A few weeks after that I was unemployed, and had always been. A few more weeks along and I was suddenly, retroactively, a cashier in a grocery store. The unhappenings continued in cycles of four to eight weeks, and each was progressively more discouraging than the last, as my new jobs drew me further and further away from science.

  This went on for over two and a half years.

  he spate of unhappenings I experienced after graduation had a very different character than anything I had seen previously. Many of my losses over the years had been profound, and there were occasional, if brief, patterns. My experience with girls in high school was the most obvious example of this, as was my rotating panel of physics teachers, but both of those were sporadic, even at the time. This crisis of new and surprising occupations every few weeks—sometimes switching in shifts of only a few days—was the longest sustained obstacle in my life to that point. The fact that it was so consistent, and prolonged, coupled with the specific timing that the barrage began immediately after my school days had come to an apparent end, made it impossible for me to continue denying the inescapable. This was no mere obstacle; it was a sustained attack.

  Penelope, in every age at which I encountered her, always refused to tell me the cause of our unhappenings. Sometimes she claimed she didn’t know, other times she simply dodged the question. All she ever shared freely was that she and I shared that experience, along with at least one other person, possibly more. Eventually I learned to stop asking, but the more times she spirited me away to “run a fix,” the more convinced I became that we were engaging in some sort of covert, time travel combat. I wondered how many of my own unhappenings were “fixes” being run by some unseen foe.

  More than once I wondered if that foe might not be Penelope.

  Adding to that nagging thought, I received no visits from her during this stretch of my life. The oldest version of her I had yet encountered assured me we would meet again, many times, but I had seen no sign of her since that day. I could not bring myself to believe that she had been playing me for nefarious purposes this whole time, but it would have been very gratifying to see some evidence of that.

  It became clear that I was not going to be allowed to pursue my PhD when every attempt I made to submit applications to schools was immediately undone. It was equally clear that I was not destined for any sort of rewarding employment, or a career in any type of science. The jobs through which I was rotated were all menial, or middle management in companies that held nothing of interest to me, and that was when I had a job at all. I spent a fair portion of those days unemployed, to various degrees of parental disappointment. All of this combined to weigh me down with a despair that my dream of becoming ‘Dr. Walden’ and spearheading the research that would lead to time travel was not to be. It was a terrible conceit on my part, but I had spent the previous five years certain that my destiny was to be the sole scientific mind to be credited with the most significant discovery in human history. It turned out that my true destiny was to be a bystander.

  Then I met myself for the second time, and everything changed again.

  It was during one of my stretches between jobs. I told my parents I was going out to look for work, then camped out at the public library. Soon enough, I would be assigned a random job that I might even be able to maintain long enough to see a paycheck. Until then, any genuine job hunt would be an absolute waste of time. Usually I would bypass the terminals on the main floor, and hide out in the print collection. Apart from the librarian who worked there, no one ever took an interest in it, leaving it peaceful, pleasant and private. That was where he found me.

  “What are you doing here?” I heard myself say. In the light of day, and out of the rain, I could better see his face. It had the same gray stubble I had seen in drunken closeup, and I could now see his hair, long, completely gray, and not particularly kempt. It was impossible for me to know if he was wearing the same clothing as the last time we met, but his hair looked like it was just drying out. The weather outside was sunny and very cold. Five years ago we had an awful encounter that was probably an hour ago for him. He seemed less crazed now, but I wouldn’t say that reassured me.

  “Hiding from your parents,” I countered.

  He froze, a confused frown on his face. Whatever conversation he thought we were going to have, it wasn’t that one.

  “No,” he said, “I mean why aren’t you at Cornell? I was just there. They said you never enrolled.” He took a moment to look around the room, perhaps to confirm we were alone, perhaps just to get his bearings, then pulled up a chair. “You know who I am,” he said. It was difficult to tell if he meant it as a question.

  “I’ve had five years to work it out,” I told him. My exploits with Penelope sat poised on my tongue as clarification of my understanding of time travel, but something held me back. By all rights, I should have been able to trust him, but I couldn’t let go of the fact that Penelope had always been kind to me, and that my only encounter with this version of me ended with him pushing me into a puddle. He nodded thoughtfully, and did not further pursue that topic. For a brief instant, my stomach lurched as I realized I had just successfully, and literally, lied to myself.

  “Cornell?” he repeated. “What happened there?”

  I shrugged. “Didn’t get in,” I said. “Didn’t get in anywhere.”

  His frown deepened. “That’s… that’s not possible.” He stood, visibly rattled, and walked to a window, carefully scrutinizing every object he passed on the way. After staring out onto the library courtyard for a few moments, he said, “I have no memory of this.”

  “The library?”

  He turned
and met my eyes. “This event. This conversation. I don’t think it ever happened to me. How can that be?”

  Of all the excellent reasons I had right then to feel uncomfortable, the one that trumped all else was the notion that this man—this version of me—had traveled through time what was probably dozens of years, at least twice, and somehow expected me to have answers for him. There were so many things I wanted to ask him—any reasonable person would beg for an opportunity like this—and yet somehow, horribly, I was the one with upper hand.

  “Lots of things happen that I don’t remember. And lots of things I do remember unhappen,” I said, “but you know that.”

  He stared. Not good. “I don’t understand what you mean. I don’t understand any of this. Is this even the same timeline?” He clutched his head. “This is never going to work.” My earlier assessment that he was less crazed started to unravel.

  “Why are you here?” I asked, in a desperate attempt to push this in a coherent direction.

  He buried his face in his hands. After a very long, very audible sigh, he looked up and began to speak in a tone so even it barely seemed natural. “I came back here to tell you about the Time Travel Project. I did not anticipate that you had already deduced its existence from my earlier visit. That was incautious of me, but what’s done is done.”

  He paused there, and it was all I could do to keep myself from screaming at him. The only constant fact in my life had ever been that what is done is never, with any certainty, done.

  He soldiered on. “In fact, it may be fortuitous that you are already aware of it. That will save me a lot of work persuading you. Because here it is, Nigel: I need you.” He let that hang between us.

  “In what way could you possibly need me?” Those words were out of my mouth before I fully processed how confrontational they were. This entire encounter was beginning to play out as a darker version of my association with Penelope. The thought that I might be put in a place where I would be expected to choose sides was too horrific to contemplate at that moment. To my profound relief and confusion, his next words put me in a much different place than that.