by Edward Aubry
“Yes,” she said, pushing my arms aside and sitting up. “Wanting it not to be true doesn’t make it not true. I am what I am. And what I am is her assassin. We came here to do a job. I want to do it and go home.” She picked herself up and began to march straight to the stroller. Carlton’s parents still didn’t see her.
She was too far gone for reason now. She had brought us here, consciously or unconsciously, and laid that decision at the feet of some god only she knew. Her imaginary holy mission would claim this child, and I had no faith anything but horror would come from it.
“Wait!” I cried. “You said killing baby Carlton won’t fix anything!”
“That baby,” she said, “is not Carlton.”
She blew out the mother’s chest in one shot. While the father was still reacting to that, mostly by attempting to flee, she shot him in the back of the head. It retained more of its mass than did the head of a ten-year-old boy, but not by much. Athena then put two bullets into the dead mother’s face, and two more into the dead father’s torso. She reached down and confiscated every portable object of value. Then she looked into the stroller. The baby was shrieking.
“I’m sorry,” she told him.
I walked slowly to where she stood. The cognitive dissonance effect had been enough to hide us through Athena screaming at me, but the noise from that gun, and the carnage in its wake, would not go unnoticed.
“Athena…” I said, with absolutely no idea how to finish.
Her eyes locked on me, Athena pointed the gun at Carlton’s dead father. “Stephen West,” she said. “Twenty-eight years old. Youngest of three sons, and the only one with no interest in politics or business. He used his wealth and influence primarily as a patron of the arts. In 2132, he founded the West Prize for Composition, an annual award for best new symphony by a composer under the age of thirty, and was partially responsible for a surge of revitalized interest in that form. Now, that will never happen.”
She pointed her gun at the remains of Carlton’s mother. “Leticia Kincaid-West. Twenty-two years old. A media darling from the time she was in her teens, went on to become the spokesperson for no fewer than six charitable foundations, one of which developed the first successful vaccine against breast cancer. The vaccine will probably still happen, but at a projected delay of eighteen years.”
People were finally starting to notice us. We might have had a minute before we were arrested or shot. Athena chose that moment to point her gun at the screaming infant.
“Desmond West. Five months old. He will now grow up an orphan, cared for by an extended family of means. He will, in fact, become a champion for preventing violent crimes, as the poster child of a horrendously brutal mugging. Or so the Project’s models predict. There is a forty percent chance that this will set in motion a series of events that has very unhappy results.”
In the distance, I heard a woman scream. There was no way for me know how many people were now giving us their attention without turning around, but I could not take my eyes off of Athena.
“Carlton West would have been born in 2120. Now he never will. The world is now safe, probably. All it cost us was the lives of two truly good people, and one baby the loss of his parents. Stephen and Leticia West never knew me, but I have known them for twenty years. They were good people. Wonderful people, whose only fault was bringing a child into the world with mental health problems they could never hope to fix. And for twenty years, I have begged for this day not to come.”
As I pondered the reality of knowing exactly how it felt to be a parent confronted with a child’s mental health problems I could never hope to fix, she pointed her gun at me.
“You did this,” she said. “You made this happen. You did it by cheating the rules of the universe to get yourself a girlfriend, and you did it by pushing back when the universe didn’t like that.” She bent down and trailed her fingers through the grass beside what was left of Leticia Kincaid-West. When she brought them back up, they were coated in red, and she held them out to me. “You did this, Daddy.”
There was nothing I could say. I wanted her to be wrong about me, but even in the face of her madness, I had no idea how to make myself believe that, let alone her. I could hear a siren.
“It’s time to go,” I said, holding out my hand to her, desperate to find a way to make any of this right, desperate to have my daughter back. “Please.”
“So go.”
I couldn’t leave her there. “Don’t do this to your mother,” I said. It was a guess. A good guess.
“You bastard.” She flashed out. Eight years from then, for her, a healed and remorseful Athena and I would make peace. I had already been there. This was the last time I would ever see my daughter.
I flashed out too.
went home. The house was still there. Carlton’s absence across history should have, in theory, wiped out everything I knew. Pathetic Future Me would never meet Helen, and I would never be brought here in his crazed attempt to win her. And yet, my home accepted my key.
I found Helen in the living room, staring at the fireplace. By all rights, she should not be here. Athena should have unhappened everything about our connection. But even through this, we were together. Somehow, the fact of our impossible baby superseded every other concern. God only knew what contortions to history had been necessary to preserve that without Carlton. The marks my actions had left on the universe were apparently permanent.
“Hello,” she said, her eyes still on the fire.
“Hey,” I said. At that, she did look at me. She looked different, though not in any physically describable way. She was every bit as beautiful as she had always been. But her eyes held some ineffable quality I had never seen there before.
“How long have we known each other?” I asked.
She thought for a moment. “Five years,” she said. “More, I think, for you. Eight? Ten? Do you even know?”
“No,” I admitted.
“We made a baby.”
I sat with her on the couch. “I know.”
“She’s changing me, you know,” said Helen. “I can feel it already.”
“Changing you?” I almost asked how she felt different, but at that moment, I really didn’t want to know. She told me anyway.
“Into something like you,” she said. She looked away for a moment, then turned back and stared into my eyes. “I think I am finally beginning to understand you. I… remember things. Things that never happened. Or that happened, and then didn’t happen.”
“Unhappened,” I prompted.
“Yes.” She nodded. “That’s it. Unhappened. I never really understood that idea before. Not like this, anyway.” She stopped there. Somehow Athena had given her the one thing I had spent so much of my life keeping from her: the memories of a traveler. I could only imagine how she felt. I had spent my life constantly adjusting to newly revised histories, but no matter how rapidly, I had only ever needed to contend with one change at a time. Helen was now confronted with dozens—perhaps countless—alternative pasts at once, all real, all remembered, and none valid.
“There was a man,” she said suddenly.
“A man?” I said. Silently, I begged her not to pursue that thought. Carlton no longer existed. Would never exist. Even after the scale of damage our war had wrought, my thoughts fell back to the petty fear that he would continue to compete with me for Helen’s attention, even from oblivion.
“Wasn’t there? A man named West. Westley. That’s not right. Something Something West. Let’s just say West. Wasn’t there?”
“Yes.” I offered nothing else, and for a moment it seemed she wouldn’t ask.
“He did things. Terrible things. And I loved him? Can that be right?”
I sighed. “Those are both true.” I wanted to tell her that she stopped loving him when he went mad. That her love for me overtook her love for him, and from that point she saw him only as a villain. But I couldn’t. I want to say I held back out of some noble desire to honor a vanquis
hed foe. The reality is I didn’t want to make her remember anything else about him.
She frowned. “But he isn’t anymore?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“And that’s good. Because, you know, terrible things?”
I laughed. “Right.”
She scrutinized me. “I love you,” she said. It was more a question than a declaration.
“Yes,” I said.
“You did terrible things. Is that what I do? Do I love men who do terrible things?”
I thought back on the last few years of my life. I had indeed done terrible things. To the best of my knowledge, no one had ever died directly at my hand, but I conspired with Athena to cause the deaths of thousands. Maybe more, directly or indirectly.
“I did necessary things,” I said.
She looked more deeply into my eyes, and frowned in confusion. “You think I mean the wars,” she said. “People died. Countries fell.” She shook her head. “Or something. Yes?”
“Something like that,” I said.
“I don’t mean that. You broke time. Didn’t you?”
This was my opportunity to lay blame at the feet of my older, wretched self. I did not take it.
“To be with you,” I admitted. “That doesn’t mean you love men who do terrible things.”
“No,” she agreed. “It means I inspire them to do terrible things.” Her words were angry, but her eyes softened then. “But I do love you.”
“I love you, too. Very much.”
“You do. And that makes me happy.” She tucked her arm through my elbow and rested her head on my shoulder. “Very happy.”
We sat there for a minute or two, which I spent hoping would never, ever end. I fought back the knowledge that Athena had grown up without a father. If nothing else, by now, I knew the past could be changed. We could unhappen that childhood. We could raise her as loving parents, and save her from the madness I had seen in her adult self. For that brief, silent moment, I allowed myself the fantasy of optimism.
“But you have to go now,” she whispered.
I thought back on all the times I had marched off to war with Athena, leaving Helen behind to worry, and then remember nothing. At that moment, this was what I heard in Helen’s voice, and it gave me great joy to reassure her.
“I don’t. I won’t ever have to go again.”
She sat up, away from me.
“Nigel, I’m asking you to leave.”
Even with every reason to foresee this, I still managed to let it surprise me. Perhaps it was the fact that this was the first purely coherent thing I heard Helen say in her fractured state of mind. Or perhaps I was simply a fool.
“Please don’t ask me to do that.”
She took my hand. “You don’t belong here. You never did. I always knew it. I knew, and it didn’t bother me, because I love you more than I ever believed I could love a person. But now I feel it. I feel it, Nigel, and it’s so wrong. Time is broken. The universe is slippery.”
“We can get past this,” I said. “Remember? Face it together?”
“Because that’s how we roll?” she asked. The familiar phrase appeared to shatter her moment of clarity, and I could see the chaos reasserting itself in her eyes. A tear formed and rolled down her cheek.
“Right.”
She shook her head, wiped away the tear.
“Not this time. I understand now. I remember things. Things I knew, and then didn’t know, and now I know them all at once. Some of them don’t make any sense. And some of them I can only remember in pieces. But I remember enough.” A note of bitterness crept into that last word. She stood then, and faced away from me. “How many times did the world end, Nigel? How many people died? How many times did they die? I remember plagues, and war machines, and nuclear bombs. I remember a cloud of ash blocking out the sun. So many people died, Nigel. And they died over and over and over again. And for what?”
I stood, and put my hand on her shoulder.
“They’re not dead anymore,” I said.
At that, she turned to face me, pulling away at the same time.
“But they are!” she shouted. “I know it! I remember it! I feel it! Just because they all got second chances, and third chances, and more, doesn’t mean I can forget. They died so that we could be together. How is that fair? How is that right? We did that to them. Both of us. We killed the world over and over to buy ourselves more time. I want to blame it on this man West, or a version of you that doesn’t even exist yet. But I can’t. We did this! You and I!”
“That’s all over,” I said. “We have a chance to start over now.”
“And have what kind of life, exactly?” she demanded. “I’ll always know how we got here! I will never be able to look at you without seeing the stain of what we did! What I caused!” As she said it, I could see that stain in her eyes as well. She looked away. “You can’t stay.”
I considered begging. I considered refusing. I considered pointing out that this was my house. I went with direct.
“I don’t want to go.”
“I don’t want you to go either,” she said. “But you have to.” Her lip began to tremble. “I look at you and all I can see is death. And I love you. And it’s killing me.” She put her hand to her mouth and closed her eyes, and for a moment I thought she might actually vomit.
“I have nowhere to go.”
“You have everywhere and everywhen to go,” she told me. And she was right. The module in my arm would outlive me, and never fail. I had learned that much about it over the years.
I made one last attempt.
“Helen, we can overcome this.”
Still looking away from me, she shook her head.
“I can’t,” she said. “You threw the universe to the wolves just to have me, and I can’t…” She broke down there, and through her weeping, was barely able to say, “I can’t.”
“This is my burden, not yours.”
“If you knew what was really coming, would you have given me up?”
I thought back to our aborted meeting with the older version of Carlton, his warnings, and his offer to save us from our own future.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly.
She let out a sound somewhere between a choked sob and a pained laugh.
“You don’t know.” She put her hand on my cheek. “But I do know. I know you wouldn’t have stopped it, because I never would have let you. Every single time I heard the tales of the monsters you slew, the only part of the story that mattered to me was the part where you came home. The horror was never real to me, because I still had you. I still had Athena.” She pulled her hand away and looked down. “But I see it all now. All the times I threw the world to hell to have one more day with you. I can’t live with it.” She looked up again, her blue eyes puffy and saturated. “I can’t live with you.”
Against her disappointment in me, or even her resentment, I might have stood a chance. Against her remorse, I was helpless. I truly did not belong there. I could counter-argue this all day long, and it would still be true. There was nothing to be gained but pain for both of us if I stayed.
“Okay,” I choked out.
She took a deep breath to control her tears. Then she reached into her pocket, turned over my hand, and put something in it. I held it up to see the box for her engagement ring.
“This was a gift,” I said.
“It was a beautiful gift, and I will never stop cherishing it,” she said. Then she curled my fingers over the box and pushed my closed hand to my heart. “But this is for you.”
Reluctantly, I put the box in my pocket. I could feel its weight pulling me down.
“Please tell my daughter you loved me,” I said. “Please let her know I gave you some happiness. Do that much for me, will you?”
Helen laid her hand on her belly, and smiled at me, one final time. Even in its sadness, and its pale shadow of the smile of wonder and joy that had so hypnotized me so many times, it was still the most beaut
iful thing I had ever seen.
“Of course.”
I closed my eyes, and silently asked to be sent to a random time and place. When I opened them, I was out of Helen’s life.
found myself on a beach. It was a sunny day, and there were a lot of people playing, swimming, and generally loving life all around me. The sea level air invigorated me almost immediately, and as much as I planned to spend the next fifty years wallowing in the misery of my failed existence, I found the moment did not lend itself to that. I was still wearing a sweater for the March weather, and I promptly pulled it off and left it on the sand.
There was a boardwalk and a pier. I had no interest in the rides or shops, but a walk out on the pier, to feel the salt spray on my face, held some appeal. There were a handful of people with fishing rods, complaining about how many more fish used to be here before the whatever random event they thought had driven them away and/or killed them off. I basked in the banality of their imagined problems.
When I reached the end of the pier, I found another man there, staring off to the watery horizon. He greeted me in a friendly, if distracted, manner. I was about to return the greeting when I realized it was Carlton. He was younger than when I last spoke to him in the café in Amherst, and quite a bit older than when I watched Athena explode his head off. I had asked for a random time and place, and this was what I got. Memo to self: be more specific. He showed no sign of recognition. I pressed the point.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Do I know you?”
He looked me in the eyes, with the strangest sort of confusion, like he was confused about the fact of being confused.
“Are there people who know me?” he asked. “I thought knowing was for other people. People who are realer people.”
This was Athena’s consequence. She knew if she were never born, the Athena I knew would become this phantom.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I mistook you for someone who exists.” He showed no sign of offense.
“You’re the first person who has ever seen him,” said an older woman with a fishing pole. “He’s not used to that. Probably has no clue what to think.”
