Nearly an hour later, my feet beginning to bleed, I stood at my front door. The cold air whipped at my face as I reached out a frozen hand and pressed the doorbell. I waited for what seemed like an eternity. Finally the door opened, but it wasn’t Helena who greeted me. It was a very old Asian woman. She stared at me like I had three heads.
“Is…is Helena home?” I asked, knowing the answer before the question had formed on my lips.
“No Helena here,” the woman said. “Don’t want no trouble.”
I held up my hands. “No, no, I’m no trouble. I just…I need to call my wife. Can I use your phone?”
She looked at the bloody wounds on my knuckles as I put my hands back down. “Phone no work. You go home now.”
“Please,” I begged. “I just need to make one phone call and I swear I’ll be out of your sight.”
She considered, sighed, and stepped back to allow me to enter. “Phone’s in kitchen. No funny business.”
I stepped into my house. It no longer looked like mine. From the decorations to the paint and carpet, this was a different place. An old phone was mounted on the wall. I took the receiver from its base and listened for the dial tone. I dialed Helena’s cell phone number. It clicked as someone picked up after the third ring.
“Hello?” a man’s voice said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess I have the wrong number.”
I hung up the phone. Shoulders slumped, I walked past the little old woman. “You make call?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Nobody home. Thanks anyway.”
I left my house behind. I didn’t know where else to go so I decided to go to the only other place I called home. My parents still lived in the house I grew up in, at least in the timestream I came from. By the time I got to their front door it was dark. I had a great relationship with my parents and I couldn’t imagine it would be any different here, no matter what had happened since I last saw my younger self twenty years earlier. I rang the doorbell. I was unbelievably relieved when my mom came to the door.
My first thought was that she looked much older than the woman I had seen just a week earlier when Helena and I met my parents for dinner in one of those visits Helena always gave me a hard time about but went along with anyway. My mother had grey showing in her hair and her wrinkles were deeper than they had been before my trip to the past. She recognized me immediately but looked irritated. “What, Danny, did you lose your key again?”
“Mom, can I come in? I…” I tried to figure out what I could possibly say. “I can’t go home right now.”
She looked concerned, and then concern melted into annoyance. “Danny are you high again? You’re home right now.”
“High? What? Mom, what do you mean?”
She sighed. “Oh, great. Well, whatever it is, I guess you’d better rest it off. Come sit down. Your father’s finishing up dinner. I take it you already ate?”
“No, actually. Would it be too much to ask to have something to eat?”
She laughed bitterly. “Too much to ask? No, Danny, in the range of things you’ve asked of us the past few years, this is not too much to ask.”
I was confused, but I followed her into the house. At first I thought with relief that it looked similar to how I remembered it. Then I realized that it really looked similar to how it had looked when I was growing up. In the normal timeline, my parents had renovated the whole place after I had married Helena and went out into the world. I wondered what had happened to their lives because of my intervention. Did they not have enough money? How was that possible?
I followed my mother into the family room. My dad was sitting on the couch watching television and eating a microwaveable meal from a plastic tray. He barely registered my arrival. I sat down in a worn chair that I hadn’t seen in years. My mom departed for the kitchen, leaving me and my dad to an awkwardness only broken by Alex Trebek providing questions in the form of answers. It seemed Alex was unharmed by my tampering with time.
I kept trying to think of something to say to my father. I wondered why he was choosing to pretend I wasn’t in the room. Under any other circumstance I would have called him out on that kind of behavior, but I knew instinctively that whatever had happened in this timeline had hurt him…my mom too. I wasn’t going to start an argument under those conditions.
My mother returned with another microwaveable meal. A tiny portion of turkey next to an equally tiny portion of hard mashed potatoes in gravy. Some kind of apple thing served as the dessert portion of the meal. She handed me the hot tray and a fork and she sat down facing me on the edge of the sofa.
“So…” she started, “I see you’ve trimmed your facial hair. What happened this time?”
“I don’t know what you mean.” I meant that sincerely.
“Don’t be coy with me, Danny. Your knuckles are caked with blood. After everything your father and I have been through, you can at least try to show the tiniest bit of respect.”
“I do respect you, mom, really! I’m just…confused. There’s something wrong with my memory.”
Again a look of concern formed and quickly converted to a look of anger. “Damn it, Daniel! Didn’t we tell you over and over again that all those goddamned drugs would ruin your brain? You used to be so smart…” She covered her eyes and began to cry.
“You’re making your mother upset,” said my dad. “I think you should go to your room.”
“My room? I live here?”
“Only because we’re stupid enough to still care about you,” he said.
I got up and sat next to my mom, putting my arm across her shoulders. “I’m really sorry, guys. I just don’t remember much of what happened. I never meant to put you through anything.” I took a deep breath. I was truly scared. My time traveling power seemed to have vanished, and the little conspiracy theorist in my mind who had once tried to convince me I had brain cancer now announced a new idea: maybe everything I thought I knew about my life up to this point had been a lie brought on by drug abuse. Maybe when I thought I’d returned to the present I had really just woken up in an empty parking lot in my real life after coming down from some kind of a high.
I had to figure out what had happened in this timeline. I had to know if this was my real life. “Mom,” I said, “what happened to Jeff Berger?”
She startled as if I’d slapped her. “You don’t remember?”
“It’s a blur,” I lied. “I remember he got hurt. I don’t know the rest. I feel like…like it’s important, somehow.”
She got a look on her face like I had rekindled hope. Maybe hope that I’d made some kind of breakthrough. I wondered how many times over the years she’d had brief moments of hope just like that. The thought broke my heart.
“Danny,” she said, sounding like she was talking to a small child, “Jeff was bullying you and a man came and attacked him to save you, but he took it way too far.”
“What happened to him?”
“The man? Nobody knows. You said he told you to run and then he ran off in the other direction. You gave a description to the police but nobody ever found him. They think he might have been a guy who checked in at the Jenkintown Hotel earlier that day but that tip didn’t lead them anywhere. The investigation dried up.”
“I meant…what happened to Jeff?”
“Danny…you know what happened. Jeff died. Lingered in a coma for a while and then died. A thirteen year old boy with his life cut short like that… you never recovered from the experience.”
I didn’t know what to say. When I had traveled, even when I’d arrived in 1993, I had this sense of freedom, like nothing really mattered. It didn’t feel like the real world. The thought that I’d beaten a kid to death hit me hard. Even though I knew the timeline wasn’t the “right” one, it was still real. Painfully real. I still wasn’t convinced that it wasn’t the true reality. The drugged delusion theory sounded more reasonable the more I thought about it.
“I’m so sorry,” I muttered.
<
br /> “Danny,” my mom said, and now she sounded like the Nancy Wells that I’d known my whole life, “Danny, we’ve been telling you this for years. It wasn’t your fault. If you’d just listened to us, all the rest of this could have been avoided.”
“All the rest of what?”
Now my father came over and sat down in the chair next to mine. “We’ve always known that all these problems you’ve had, all the drug use, it’s all tied to the guilt you felt over Jeff’s death.”
“And my drug problems… are they the reason you didn’t get the upgrade on your house?” I realized as I spoke how confusing that must sound.
“What upgrade?”
“I meant, well, you know. Was I the reason you guys couldn’t afford a better life?”
“Well…” my dad considered his words. “Look, you know we’ve spent a ton of money with all the rehab programs and the court fees and all the other crap these past years. But we’re your parents and we made a choice to love you and take care of you no matter what.”
“No,” I said, getting up from the chair. “No. This is all wrong. This is my fault and you shouldn’t have had to pay for this. I’m going to solve this problem right now.” I closed my eyes. Please travel, please travel, please travel. Nothing.
“Honey, just sit back down,” my mom said. She looked frightened. She must have really been wondering how many drugs I was on this time. I did as she asked. “What’s going on with you?” she asked me.
“This wasn’t supposed to be how life went,” I said. My heart was pounding so hard I could hear it in my ears. I couldn’t think clearly. I knew I was rambling but I couldn’t stop. “I hated Jeff, sure, I mean he treated me like shit all through high school, but this isn’t a fair trade!”
“High school?” My mom asked… “Jeff died in seventh grade, Daniel.”
“I need to get out of here… I’ve gotta fix this.” I got up and moved to the door. My parents called after me, begging me to come back, but I couldn’t sit there anymore. I missed Helena, as strange as that must sound, and I hated myself for all the lives I’d ruined. Jeff, my parents, even this timeline’s version of myself. I’d broken everything. I had spent so much time fearing the destruction of the world but in that moment I saw that the world at large could keep on spinning even though my world was gone. It was humbling. It was terrifying.
I ran to the door, my blistered feet beginning to holler again. Where could I possibly go? I was scared that the power was gone, and even more frightened that it had never existed to begin with. That voice in my head kept producing theories. Were you really the man who beat Jeff to death? the voice said. Or were you just a scared little boy whose mind is so far gone from guilt that he’s convinced himself he traveled through time and attacked a teenager? Which sounds more plausible, hmm?
I ran, stumbling down the street as my mind shouted at me. Nothing made sense anymore. There had to be a solution. There had to be a way to prove decisively if I had really time traveled or not. Suddenly, I had it. The other Daniel Wells! If he existed, maybe sleeping off a bout of drug abuse in an alley somewhere, I’d know for sure that I wasn’t from this reality. I had to find him.
Where to look? I knew nothing about my other self. I didn’t know where he would hang out. All I knew was that he still lived at home with my/his parents. I turned and started walking back to the house. I couldn’t risk my mom and dad seeing the two Daniels together. I hoped I could get back before my counterpart arrived home. Finally I came back in sight of the house. The porch light was on and there wasn’t any additional car in the driveway, though that didn’t necessarily mean anything. I didn’t know if the other Daniel was allowed to drive.
I waited in the bushes alongside the driveway. I tried hard to get my breathing under control, so that maybe the pounding in my temples would diminish. I sat there for over an hour, long enough for my hands to start to freeze again, despite my efforts to rub the circulation back into them. Finally, I saw a man walking up the street with no purpose in his stride. He wore baggy jeans and a bulky hoody pulled up over his head. I recognized myself instantly, despite the scraggly beard.
That settled it. I wasn’t from that timeline. I knew with almost full certainty that events had transpired the way I remembered them. I can’t tell you what a relief that was for my addled brain. So, what next? I had to determine why my power was broken and then I could leave that disaster of an alternate reality behind, except… would that world really disappear once I fixed things in the past? I had no way of knowing. It was possible that it had always existed, along with infinite other permutations and potential variations. That kind of thing is still above my pay-grade today and was even more so back then.
Even if I was visiting a foreign version of my timeline, I felt responsible for that world. In particular I felt responsible for that world’s version of Daniel and his parents. I’d seen the pain in their eyes. I had to try to fix some of the problems right then and there. That meant confronting my broken self. I stepped out of the shadows and walked toward the man in the hoody. “Hello, Dan.”
What happened next could be best described as a series of surprised reactions. He startled from the sound of my voice. Then he saw me, and his eyes widened as he realized that I looked just like him. And then…something else. Something I hadn’t actually considered. He had suddenly determined that he wasn’t just looking at himself. He was looking at the man who had beaten Jeff Berger to death in front of him, and the man was here, twenty years later, dressed and looking exactly the same, blood still caked on his damaged knuckles.
I wondered if that’s why “other Daniel” wore a beard. Maybe his subconscious had started to see the similarities as he aged and had wanted to protect him. Well, that protection was gone. He struggled to speak. “You…me…what…”
He fell to his knees on the driveway, hands out in front of him as if to ward off an attack. “Daniel…Dan,” I said, attempting to pull off the band-aid in one quick motion. “You’re right. We’re the same person. I’m a time traveler and I tried to help you in 1993 but I made everything a million times worse. I’m so very sorry.”
He looked up at me, tears in his eyes. “This can’t be real. Fucking drugs are frying my brain.”
“That may be, but I’m telling you, I’m real. This is real, and it’s not the life you and I are supposed to have. I screwed up. Bad.”
I wasn’t sure he believed me completely, but I think he was convinced that he had grown into the man who had killed Jeff Berger. That made him at least listen to what I had to say. “You… you came from that time? Just before you got here?” I saw him eyeing the blood on my hands.
“A few hours ago. When I left you at Tookany I came back to my present, only it wasn’t mine anymore.”
He nodded. I thought that was a good reaction. “What are you going to do?” he asked me.
“I wish I knew. I’m having trouble traveling right now. If I can figure that out, I’m going to go and stop myself from intervening.”
He thought it over. “Those fuckin’ kids were pushing me around. Maybe they would have really hurt me eventually.”
I shook my head. This poor guy was still in so many ways a scared little kid. “They wouldn’t. I’m from the original timeline, remember? Those kids are a pain in your ass for years, especially Jeff, but in the end they move on and so do you. Their lives don’t become too much, and you do better. Certainly much better than this.”
“I’m supposed to move out of here?”
I laughed. “Of course. And you’re married to an amazing woman named Helena.” I didn’t think telling him about my marital strife would help. He had it far worse.
He straightened up and I saw him slip into his usual character, the mask he wore over his damaged true self. “So you’ll make all this right, yo?”
I tried not to react to his ridiculous put-on street speech. “I’m going to try, but right now I can’t leave. I’m not really sure what to do.”
He sh
uffled his feet and looked at the ground. “Well, how bout grabbing a drink at the bar?”
“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea for either of us.”
“Come on, twin brother,” he said. “How often does an opportunity like this arrive? Let’s shoot the shit.”
2
We sat at a bar called “Dirks.” People gave slight double takes when they saw us, but nothing too extreme. It was as my counterpart had said: we were like twin brothers. We each ordered a beer. I had a sense that alcohol was low on the list of substances that this other Daniel passed through his system with some regularity.
“How did you go down this path?” I asked, trying to phrase my question in a way that was not too on-the-head critical.
“You mean how did I fuck up my life?” Daniel asked with a bitter chuckle.
I didn’t reply.
“There’s not much to tell,” he said. “You crossed my path at a…complicated time. I was all kinds of screwed up heading into that school year… but I guess you know that part.”
I nodded.
“So here’s the thing,” he continued, “you showed up out of the blue and beat the shit out of the dude who was bullying me. Was gonna keep bullying me, according to what you said. But I saw that happen and thought that I had brought that punishment down on him like some kinda curse from God or some shit. Cause you know why? I had hoped for it. Prayed for it, that something would take Jeff Berger out of my life. I wanted him to get hit by a car or something… sometimes I’d fantasize about beating the shit out of him just like you did.”
“I know,” I said. “I know. Remember, we were the same person until that point split our lives. I had those same thoughts. But you didn’t cause what happened to him. You were just a victim caught in the crossfire.”
“Yeah well I know that now, thanks,” he said. “And people said all that kind of shit to me. Psychologists and shit. Fucking bitches. Telling me to express myself. Well, I found other people like me. People who ‘society’ didn’t understand.” He slipped back into his false street voice. “They showed me a whole new world, yo.”
The Traveler: A Time Travel Thriller Page 8
