by Zack Mason
Mark slipped her debit card from her wallet, stuffed his feet back into his shoes, and left home through the same back door he’d come in. Well, his former home that was.
It was awfully tempting to stay. But how could he? Impossible.
He kept moving, circling back to the approximate place he'd left his horse in 1890. When Kelly came out of the bathroom, she’d just think he’d gone on to work.
***
September 16th, 1890 – Lawrenceville, GA
The next step would be tricky to accurately guess. He needed to gauge the distance well so he wouldn’t pop up in the wrong place. He walked southeast, away from the county courthouse in the town square, down Clayton Street until he reached the old female seminary building, though it wasn’t so old right now. That was one landmark he knew wouldn't change over the next century and it was right across the street from his target in the future. Now, he had to imagine the modern scene in his mind to see how far he needed to walk
Doing some major guesstimations in his head, Mark decided to walk another four hundred paces angled 30 degrees to the left of the Seminary building. The father and mother of a family passing by shot him a funny look as he wandered across the street into the yards of some homes there. He knew he looked suspicious, yet it couldn’t be helped.
The surrounding field looked nothing like it would in the future, but it had to be the same place. It was the right orientation from the seminary. When he felt like he was at the right distance, he stopped and set his watch to:
010000P - 05312010
May 31, 2010 was a date after his children had been killed, but before he’d really been embroiled in the lawsuits that ended up costing him everything.
He pushed the button and felt his body forced to one side as he shifted. He must have tried to materialize in the middle of some object again.
“Hijo de mi alma!”
Mark found himself in what appeared to be the back stockroom of some business, apparently a music CD store. A young Hispanic woman screamed at the top of her lungs, eyes wide with fear. She fled the storeroom in a panic, yelling for help.
“Manuel! Manuel! Venga rapido! Apareció un tipo ahi atras! Socale, socale!”
Crap. He needed to get out of here.
He shifted back to 1890. That must have been Discolandia, which was an Hispanic music store located in the shopping center next to his target.
Mark retreated about a hundred feet toward the seminary and set the dial for a day earlier, May 30. No sense in trying the same day. Who knew if the girl would call the cops or not? This time when he shifted, his body slid upwards, and he was forced into a sitting position. Awkwardly, he fell back into a seat and realized he was now sitting in the passenger side of a vehicle in the shopping center’s parking lot.
Man alive. Why did this have to be so difficult? Hunkering down, he slipped out of the car and moved away as fast as possible. Ever his luck though, the car’s owner just happened to be returning to their vehicle at that very moment and they let out a yell, as any sane person would who’d just seen a stranger slip out of their car.
Great. Again, Mark shifted back to the empty field in 1890. Nausea came on strong and he vomited up what little food had been in his system. This was becoming entirely more difficult than it should be.
All right. Two strikes. This time he wouldn’t take any chances. He walked back to the seminary building and, laying his hand on its bricks, shifted to May 29, 2010, another day earlier. The seminary was one building which would stay right where it was for the entire century, a safe reference point.
He was now safely in 2010, in the right clothing, and all he had to do was walk across the street to the shopping center and to his goal. Why hadn’t he just done it this way this first time?
There it was, his objective in all its glory. The Bank of America ATM machine.
Using Kelly's ATM card, Mark withdrew $100 from his old checking account. He was glad he remembered her PIN number. It wasn’t stealing if you took it from yourself, was it? It sure felt better having a little cash in his hand again.
All of a sudden, a memory came to him. A memory of a $100 missing from their checking account early that summer. $100 neither he nor Kelly could account for. She’d lost her debit card around that time too. They’d assumed she’d just lost it somewhere and somebody else had withdrawn the $100. The bank had sworn the correct PIN had been used though, and he vaguely remembered them thinking the withdrawal had been made before they’d lost the card.
Was he simply planting these memories in his mind after the fact? Was it some kind of effort on the part of his subconscious to reconcile conflicts between his past and his present, or was the memory real? Would he remember the missing $100 if he hadn’t taken it now? Maybe taking the money actually altered the reality of his own past, or maybe his withdrawal simply triggered a memory of a forgotten event. How could he know for sure? The idea that his own memory might not be reliable was a concept he couldn’t allow himself to entertain.
Those were impossible questions and they’d have to keep for another day. For now, he would stay the course as planned.
He returned to the seminary building and changed the watch setting to shift him back from 2010 to 1970. However, pushing the button this time did not produce the all-too-familiar-yet-still-unsettling queasiness in his stomach. Instead, the watch just beeped and flashed like it had back in the woods. It had shut down again.
There must be a limit on how many times he could shift in quick succession. Mentally, he counted back, recalling each shift. He'd shifted six or seven times in the past eight hours. He'd have to keep better track of that and figure out exactly what was going on.
So, for now he was stuck in 2010, which certainly felt a lot better than being stuck in 1890. He was going to need a place to bed down for at least 24 hours until the watch cooled off or did whatever it did to reset itself.
He crossed town to the Lawrenceville Motor Inn and spent $30 on a room for the night. Another $5 went to a meal at McDonald’s, which left him $65 for the next day. At least, he’d gotten some food and a good night’s sleep. That motel bed felt like heaven compared with Red’s bunkhouse. He was getting downright spoiled.
***
Mark let a full 36 hours pass before making his next move. If he was going to go around disappearing and reappearing on a dime, doing it at night would make things a lot easier. Less witnesses.
At 1:00 in the morning, he sat himself on the historic courthouse steps in downtown Lawrenceville and set the watch to 4:00 AM, Oct. 17, 1970. In the darkness, no immediate differences jumped out at him after he pushed the button, but then he noticed all the old, ugly storefront facades around the square were back. The brick sidewalks were gone. Fowler's Jewelers was in business again. The building next to it which had burned down years ago stood once more without a lick of soot on it. The City of Lawrenceville had done a lot of restoration work to the downtown area in the 1990's, but for him, it was all undone now. Behind him, the brick courthouse walls were no longer their natural, rusty color, but were painted white, as they had been in 1970.
He bode his time for a few hours waiting for the town to wake up and then strolled to Edge's Café. He bought himself a hot breakfast for $2.00 and ate it slowly, thoroughly enjoying the southern flavors and giving the business world a chance to crank up for the day. Then, he walked to the small office building he’d been eyeing all morning.
Brett Harrington ran the investment office and served as the town’s main stock broker and financial advisor. His eyes met Mark with wary appraisal. Once again, Mark had forgotten to pay attention to the differing styles of dress. His 2010 clothing might seem very futuristic, or maybe just plain odd, to a 1970's man.
“Can I help you, sir?” Harrington was still trying to assess Mark as a person.
“I would like to purchase some shares in a company, please.”
“Have you ever traded with me before?”
“No, sorry. Sure haven’t.”
“Well, it’s pretty simple actually. We’ll just set up an account for you. Do you know the stock symbol of the company you want to purchase?”
“Uh, no.”
“What company do you wish to buy shares in?”
“Wal-Mart.”
“Is that a new company? Never heard of it.”
“Oh, you will.” He couldn’t resist that.
The stock broker raised an eyebrow, eyeing Mark even more quizzically. “I don’t mean to be rude, but those are some odd clothes you’ve got on.”
“I’m a bit eccentric. Please excuse the attire.” Mark was getting a little quicker with the off-the-cuff lies and hasty explanations, but it’d be better if he were prescient enough not to need them.
“Well, anyway, I’ll look up the symbol for you. I charge a 5% commission. How many shares did you want?”
“About $60.00 worth.”
He pulled three $20 bills from his pocket and handed them to Harrington. Harrington took them and then stared at the bills.
“Is this some kind of joke?” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
“What kind of stunt are you trying to pull? Did somebody put you up to this?”
“What do you mean?”
“These bills. They aren’t real, that’s for sure, but it’s the best job of counterfeiting I’ve ever seen, except for the fact that some idiot made Jackson too big and printed him off-center. Probably wouldn’t have spotted it if it weren’t for that.”
Mark mentally slapped himself on the forehead. Of course, the $20 bills he’d gotten out of the ATM in 2010 would look different than currency in 1970.
“Uh, yeah. Tom put me up to it, but you caught me.” Hastily, he snatched the bills from the broker and rushed out of the office. Tom put me up to it? Well, he figured the guy must know somebody named Tom. Mark ran back to the courthouse and ducked into an external stairwell at its back, where he shifted forward to 2010.
It took some effort, but after visiting a number of different shops, he was able to exchange the twenties for some beat-up $1 bills. The style of those had not changed over those forty years as the bigger bills had. If the broker were suspicious and examined them closely enough, he’d probably notice the $1 bills had been printed in years after 1970. That is... if he were suspicious. Mark would shift to one month prior to his first meeting with Harrington to avoid suspicion.
He spent another $10 on food and an outfit from Goodwill which would fit in better with the styles of the 1970's.
This time, Harrington didn’t bat an eye. Mark gave the broker only $40 this time, holding the last $10 for other unexpected expenses. Harrington took his information, and promised Mark the Wal-Mart shares would arrive in a couple of weeks if he wanted the physical copies. Mark did.
He shifted forward two weeks into the future and collected his shares from Harrington. Then, he walked across the street to Brand Bank, a bank he knew would still be around for decades to come. He opened a safe deposit box and left the shares inside.
Next, he opened a savings account, deposited his $10.00 with the teller, and then went outside. He slipped behind the building, away from the eyes of traffic, and shifted forward to September of 2011, his original present time.
Jumping around through the years could easily become disorienting. He needed an anchor, an unchanging reference point from which he could measure everything else. This time, right now, September of 2011, was his actual present. As he explored the labyrinth of time, he would need to come back here every now and then and just live his normal life. He would call this his home time.
September 17th, 2011 – Lawrenceville, GA
One more glitch stared him in the face. A driver’s license. He’d left his driver’s license behind with everything else he’d abandoned earlier in the summer. Of course, he’d need that license to retrieve his possessions.
It took a bit of finagling, but he reported his license stolen and got a replacement. When he finally returned to the bank, he was twice disappointed. First, over the past forty years, his original $10.00 had only turned into $44.67. Goes to show you what a savings account at a bank is worth, he mused.
The second disappointment was that his safe deposit box had long been closed out and the contents confiscated for failure to pay the annual fee for the box. 40 years of payments was apparently a little over $1,600.
Good grief. Why did this have to be so difficult? You’d think making money with a time machine would be easy.
Instead of using the safe deposit box, Mark could have just shifted from 1970 to 2011 with his Wal-Mart shares in hand, but then they wouldn’t appear to have aged at all and probably would have been treated as a forgery when he tried to cash them in. The Securities Exchange Commission might be suspicious of someone showing up with four original Wal-Mart stock certificates that looked like they’d just been printed.
Frustrated, Mark withdrew his $44.67 in 2011, shifted back to the day after he’d opened his savings account in 1970 and redeposited the money. When he returned to 2011, his account now had a balance of $244.18. Still not enough, but it was better.
He contemplated doing the savings account trick again, but that would mean he would have to deposit almost 250 one dollar bills at the bank back in 1970. Such a quantity would greatly increase the chances somebody would notice many of those bills were printed forty years after he was depositing them. It was very likely the federal bank which maintained the cash reserves for the community banks in the area would notice and they would trace the funny bills back to Brand Bank. It wouldn’t take Brand Bank long at all to remember who had deposited so many one dollar bills into their account. Tellers had memories and that kind of thing stood out.
Nope, he had to think of something else, and he had an idea that might just work. Mark withdrew some of his savings and walked seven blocks to the closest Wal-Mart where he purchased a number of potentially very useful items.
Ironic. He was using Wal-Mart to make money off of Wal-Mart.
***
April 16th, 1918 – Lawrenceville, GA
Mark pushed the glass door to the drugstore open and went inside. A tiny bell tinkled overhead as he entered. To him, the drugstore looked old-fashioned, though it was truthfully quite contemporary for 1918. Rows and rows of antique-styled glass medicine bottles lined the shelves along one wall and behind the counter. Other shelves and tables displayed common household items made of glass and iron, which again looked dated to him, but were correct for the period. He guessed this pharmacy simultaneously served as a sort of convenient store.
The floor was real hardwood, the kind of thin-slatted floor only found in older buildings, but this wood was of course not aged, did not creak, and smelled faintly of the linseed oil used to preserve it. The style of the entire decor was early 20th century, but none of it showed the wear and tear age brings. Of course, this was exactly as it should be, but Mark’s mind was still assimilating the reality of the years he was traversing and the new, fresh feel of all the older-styled items still struck him as odd.
The ambiance evoked images right out of a Normal Rockwell painting. An elderly woman chatted with the pharmacist, who stood behind the counter. A teenage boy sat with two pretty girls close to the soda fountain sharing some milkshakes. It felt homey.
The pharmacist was neatly groomed, his hair peppered with even mix of black and gray, and he wore a white coat as a uniform. He paused his conversation with the woman long enough to greet Mark warmly. His smile implied he would be the kind of man who would be popular around town.
Mark took a stool at the counter and ordered a soda, listening carefully to the different conversations around the store. Before long, the youngsters left and two middle-aged women came in chatting about everybody and their dog’s business. He’d only been here for a few minutes and already Mark was learning a good bit about social life of Lawrenceville in the 1910's.
Then, a lone mother in her early forties entered. Her face bore a look of desperat
ion that seemed all too familiar with its lines, wrinkles that were as yet still faint, but surely weathered deeper each year by some great burden life had heaped upon her shoulders.
She asked the pharmacist for more of her son’s pills — she’d run out. He retrieved a bottle from the shelf behind his head, and, with an air of panic in her movements, she paid and rushed out the door.
After she’d left, Mark inquired about her. In this age, the concept of privacy in medicine was non-existent and the pharmacist was more than happy to share his concerns for the poor woman and her family.
Her name was Lucy Henderson, the wife of one of Lawrenceville’s most prominent and wealthy businessmen, Thomas Henderson. Their son Jeffrey had suffered from a lung disease since he was a young child, and it only seemed to get worse every year. They had tried all kinds of medicines and remedies, but nothing seemed to work. Young Jeffrey just kept getting worse.
It was worth looking into. Mark bought a few random glass medicine bottles from the pharmacist, paid for his soda, tipped his hat, and left.
***
“May I help you?”
Her beauty was not flirtatious, nor glaring, but a regal beauty as one would expect from the wife of a prominent businessman. Her auburn hair was swept into a bun, a couple of streaks of gray in it the only sign of her real age. If she used cosmetics, she used them modestly.
“Yes, ma’am. I heard that your son Jeffrey has some difficulty with his lungs. I don’t mean to be presumptuous, but I think I may be able to help him.”
She was taken off guard, which was understandable.
“I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t understand. Are you a doctor? I don’t know you.”
“Of sorts. Please, I heard about your predicament. I am not sure if I can help, but if you will let me examine him, I may.”
