[2014] The Time Traveler's Wife

by C. Sean McGee

  “Doesn’t seem as scary at this time of the day.”

  “I only remember it at night,” said John. “I don’t think it’s the time of day. We’ve just gotten older.”

  “You remember it well?”

  “This was one of the strongest memories I had from my childhood. This house, Dracula, thinking, no, knowing, seeing and believing that Dracula was here and that he tried to eat all the children. It was so god damn scary. And the fact that, you know, no mums and dads seemed to care or even know like he was invisible to adults and our screaming and our shouting, nobody could hear and nobody ever came to take us inside, to keep us safe. I really thought it was real you know.”

  “Shit, me too man. I was tryna jump right off your chest half the time, wondering what the hell you kept getting us into and loving it, in a weird way. I wouldn’t have been anyone else’s nipple” John’s Nipple said, admiringly.

  “This was the first time I met Tracy. Didn’t really love her or anything. I was like five or something. But I remember her frizzy hair and her crazy laugh; how she’d hold her belly with one hand and slap her thigh with the other. I remember how I thought she was strange. I’d never known anyone with hair like that and with skin that color and who smiled so wide and so often. I remember I thought she was strange, but an interesting kind of strange. I wanted to know her. I wanted to be her friend.”

  “She thought you were a dork.”

  “I know. God, it took her forever to come around.”

  “Whatta you say? Shall we go up?”

  “I dunno,” John said. “My head is still kind of sore.”

  “C’mon. What are ya? A Coward? Knock on the door?” John’s Nipple said, egging him on.

  John smiled and so did his nipple. A light wave of trepidation shivered about them as they thought about creeping up the stairs as they had done as children and edging inch by inch towards the brown oak door, John with his left hand extended to rat tat tat on the door and his right hand gripping the wooden hand rail, almost catching every protruding splinter in his palm as he moved nervously, step after step.

  He almost felt as he did as a boy, daring to climb the stairs and knock on the door of Dracula; just him and his nipple. He felt the same air of sudden fright, expecting the door to burst open at any second and a caped and fanged monster to soar down the steps after him, thirsty for his blood as he sprinted down the road or down and alleyway or up the stairs of his house, towards the safe and secluded corner of his bathroom, between the toilet and the tub.

  When they reached the top of the stairs, John looked back to see how far he had come and when Dracula was to burst out, how far and in what direction he would have to run. When he was a boy, from the top of the stairs, the world about and the children below, the all seemed to minute and paltry. Now as a grown man, with longer legs and prescription lenses, it didn’t seem so vast anymore.

  And even before he lifted his hand to the door, he could feel a pain starting to swell inside his thoughts. Like the other pain, it wasn’t anything that he could bandage or put pressure on. It wasn’t the kind of pain that he could find. It wasn’t in his bones and it wasn’t in his skin or in his nerves. It was inside his thoughts and it was sharp and stabbing.

  “You alright,” John’s Nipple asked.

  “Let’s just do this” replied John, the pain now searing as he lifted his hand and knocked on the door.

  His heart beat fast.

  His stomach sank.

  He could hear the sounds of footsteps and he tried to imagine the Dracula that he had had in his mind since he was a boy; a savage beast of monolithic proportion with nails like jagged and rusted razor wire and arms as wide as a jumbo’s wingspread. He could feel now as he did then, calling the memory into his conscious mind.

  The air tasted the same.

  His nerves were identical.

  That same wave of fright pooled at that same point in his legs.

  “Who is it?” cursed an old man’s voice behind the brown oak door.

  “Get ready to run” John’s Nipple shouted.

  “I said, who is it?” the voice spoke again.

  John stayed still. He thought about running now, but he couldn’t. He had to wait until Dracula was out in the open. And then, when the monster’s long and pointed fingers were near his grasp, only then could he run. John stayed completely still, watching the door and griping the railing.

  The handle creaked as it turned.

  “Run” John’s Nipple shouted.

  “Not yet” John shouted.

  The door swung open.

  “Who is it? Who are you?” the voice shouted. “Who’s there? Who is it?”

  And then everything became small and insignificant once more. The steps became miniscule and the gaps between them passable. And Dracula, he was nothing more than a crooked old man, hunched over his cane and shaking his angered index finger at what he thought was an intruder, merely a lock of his own hair that the wind was blowing against and tickling his nose.

  He didn’t at all seem scary. How the hell did he think this little man was such a gargantuan monster?

  “What was I thinking?” he said, walking back down the steps with his nipple and ignoring the old man’s desperate plight to shake off his tickling intruder.

  “I guess when you’re smaller….” John’s Nipple said.

  And then the pain shot straight into his thoughts and t felt as if someone had poked a skewer through his ear and into his imagination and they, whoever they were, were twisting and turning the skewer until the memory wrapped into a tight spaghetti like bind and then they pulled the skewer out, taking the memory with it. John screamed as the pain shot through his mind as fiber after fiber was pulled from his subconscious as the memory was uprooted.

  “What’s happening?” he screamed.

  “Don’t fight it?” John’s Nipple said. “Let it go.”

  John screamed once and then fell to the floor panting. It felt like someone had ripped every hair out of his head in one foul swoop. He clutched his hand to his head and his hair was there, but there was no relief.

  “What the fuck was that?” John said, gasping for air.

  “We should get home.”

  John and his nipple walked towards the bus stop and waited in the late afternoon sun for the bus to come. John looked back at the street and at the house which for his whole life, had been a cornerstone in his identity, a story he always talked about with Tracy, whenever he talked about their childhood and how his was, in his thoughts, so magic and fanciful.

  “It’s just a fucking house,” he said.

  “It always was” John’s Nipple replied.

  “No. In my head, it was so much more. I thought it was so much more. But it was just a fucking house. And Dracula, he was just some hunched-over, blind man.”

  John tried to think about the house and Dracula as he would any other day, remembering how he, along with scores of other boys, crept up the stairs and when nearing the door, ran screaming and sprinting down the street in a flock of chaos and swirling arms. He used to be able to remember this moment like a scene in his favorite movie, one that he liked to imagine over and over again. He used to be able to remember it, but not anymore. And as he sat on the edge of the bench, he tried to call that vision of himself as a young man but all he could see what the image of a rickety old weather board house and a feeble old blind man, striking at his swishing fringe.

  “It’s gone,” John said. “The memory. It’s gone.”

  “Good riddance,” John’s Nipple said. “I hated that memory anyway. We can make better ones ourselves. How ya feeling?”

  “Strange.”

  “Good or bad strange?”

  “Changed,” John said.

  “Was it what you were looking for?”

  “It’s not the feeling that I thought would be here. It wasn’t what I wanted to feel.”

  “We can look somewhere else,” John’s Nipple said. “What did you want to feel?” />
  “I’m not sure,” said John.

  “Hey look, here comes the bus. We should get back home.”

  “You’re right,” John said. “You’re always right.”

  “I’m your nipple. It’s my job to be right” it said proudly.

  Increment IV – licks, grooves, sweeps and tasty fills

  When John arrived home, his car was in the driveway and Tracy was busy inside readying the table with pretty placemats and colored cups and plates that matched her spacey demeanor. He paid no mind to the car or as to how it got there for, like most things in his life, there is where it always was. He opened the door and as he walked through, he stopped in the doorway for a second and peered over his shoulder, back out onto the street where people and cars, constantly pressed for time, pushed and prodded their way through and around one another, beeping and shouting and waving their pointed hands in the hair as if they were shooing mammoth mosquitos.

  Then he looked back into his cramped house, the same strip of dull paint peeling off the walls, the same torn sofa they had bought when they first moved in together, still pushed into the same cobwebbed corner of the living room, the same piece of shit analog TV they’d had all these years that only picked up static and late night evangelism, and the small TV sitting on top that was half the size and black and white, but still, it somehow managed to suffice.

  He looked back over his shoulder again and everything outside was dull and grey and forward thinking. Everything was future driven. He pressed his foot out of the doorframe and onto the concrete in his driveway and instantly, he thought about work, but not what he had done merely, tomorrow and for every day that would follow, what he had still yet to do. He thought about bills he had to pay, about movies he wanted to see and about the places of which he would never be able to afford to travel.

  He thought about projects he would deliver, milk that he would produce, people that he would have to speak to, the invitations they would give him and the excuses he would use. He thought about the weather. Not the way it was with the sun setting off the divide, but about tomorrow, how it will be and whether he should water the garden bed in the morning before going to work, or tonight, when everyone finally goes home.

  Every thought was future driven.

  He pulled his foot inside, onto the doorway and then every thought ceased. And then, when he pressed his foot onto the stained and faded wooden living room floor, the first thing he heard was Tracy’s voice saying, “How was your day?”

  He looked over his shoulder at the future buzzing about outside and then he returned to see the woman he loved, and he lost himself entirely at the faint lines under her eyes, which etched, like the warm and bumpy grooves in an old record, a passage of time that they had unraveled and shared together. Some of the lines were cavernous and wounded apologies while others were infinitesimal fissures of avowing forgiveness and swallowed pride, in her soft caramel skin.

  “So… How was your day?” she asked again, in the past.

  Everything about her was the past; the way that she spoke, the way that she dressed (with her shuffling bare feet invisible under her long red gypsy skirt) and how she smiled, for she was always looking as if she was relieved that he was home, as if every moment was one of pained and delectable yearning.

  He looked behind again and he saw the future and then he looked back and embraced the past.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “This door,” John said. “It’s a portal, a worm hole. Outside, everything is tomorrow and me, my thoughts and my mind, they are busy shaping a future, visualizing it in my mind’s eye, and applying it to this canvas of the present. But it’s the future. And the result of that future” he said, with a look of shock, “the job well done, it will only ever be known to me in in the past.”

  “I didn’t understand,” she said.

  “I don’t see what’s so difficult,” said John’s Nipple.

  “Everything outside this doorway is the future and everything inside is the past. You are my history.”

  “I thought you said I was your future?”

  “So this door…” he said, caressing the wooden frame like an artist, their finished piece. “This door is a worm hole, a bridge between the future and the past. We are time travelers” he said, ecstatic.

  “Did you get the things I asked for?”

  “Fuck” he shouted.

  “I thought you might forget, so I picked some things up earlier.”

  John followed her around the house, observing her intensely as if she were an equation that he had just noticed.

  “I made this dress today,” she said, spinning in a circle; the dress, lifting to show her bare naked feet.

  “I always said she had talent,” said John’s Nipple. “Didn’t I always say that?”

  “You did,” said John, acknowledging his nipple. “You did indeed.”

  “Amor, have you seen my necklace?” Tracy asked. “I took it off earlier, but I didn’t come across it anywhere. Did you see it when you came in?”

  “It’s here,” John said, picking the silver necklace up from the coffee table.

  He held the pendant in his hands and unlocked it with his two stubby fingers and it was empty. The leaf he had given her when he was a young man, the single leaf she had carried close to her heart all these years, it was gone.

  “Where is it?” he shouted.

  “Sorry. I didn’t hear you” she said.

  “The leaf. Where is it?”

  “What? What leaf were you thinking of?” she asked confused.

  “Our leaf” he shouted. “The leaf I gave you, under the tree, when we were…”

  John stared at the empty pendant and then down at his nipple and then back at his wife who had since entered the room and had a look on her face as if he were talking utter nonsense.

  “What leaf Amor? You never gave me a leaf.”

  John stared deeply at his wife, deep into her eyes and at the lines on her skin, some of which had lightened and faded and even vanished, as if her skin were a balloon that had filled with an extra breath of life.

  “What’s happening?”

  “Did you have anything to drink yet?” Tracy asked, holding up a carton of Shante Creative Milk.

  “I fucking hate that shit,” said John. “Milk shouldn’t burn. Just, you know, milk and pepper don’t mix. They shouldn’t bloody mix.”

  “Amen to that brother,” John’s Nipple said.

  “Oh, I told everyone to come round at six so you know…”

  “What’s the time now?” John asked.

  “Well it was five fifty eight two minutes ago” Tracy replied, brushing her hand lightly over John’s. So light was it that John didn’t even notice that her hand passed right through his, like a ghostly shadow.

  Tracy wandered off into another room, preparing some snacks, drinks, and games. John watched her. He watched how she floated about like a grain of sand in a tiny puddle. He watched how her buttocks rounded and clenched as he leant over to pick up things from way down low and he watched how her supple breasts curved and shaped like smooth and unspoiled ranges. And he watched too, how her nipples stood round and firm and erect, even when she wasn’t cold or aroused. And he watched her, as he watched her every day of his life, and he felt as empty and content as he always had.

  “I love you,” he said, feeling nothing. “I love you,” he said again, this time shouting.

  “I heard you,” Tracy said. “I said I love you back. I said I love you even more.”

  He didn’t hear it, but he knew that she did. She always did. There wasn’t a moment they passed one another when they didn’t exchange such pleasantry; a thousand times and minute, one million times per day.

  “What’s wrong?” asked John’s Nipple. “I can always tell when you’re down.”

  “Look at her,” he said, lifting his shirt so his nipple could see Tracy, as her silhouette carved into the fading evening light.

  “What about her?�
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  “That’s just it. I know any other guy would die to take her out, to dine her, to dance her, to bed her, to make her cum, to make her sing, to make her shiver and shake with delight, to make her feel how she deserves to feel, how I wish I could make her feel.”

  “But you do. She loves you. You make her feel like that.”

  “But I don’t feel it myself. And I don’t think she does either. If she does, it’s just a memory of how I made her feel in the past. It’s not how she feels right now.”

  “But you love her right?”

  “Of course I do. I don’t deny that. I tell her I love her because I do, I do love her. It’s just… It’s been so long since I felt what our love was like, outside of fighting and almost breaking up of course. When everything is like now, calm and placid, without any fracture or worry, without any excuses or blasted apologies. I wish we didn’t have to almost sever, to feel the way we did the first time.”

  “Then think of her as delicate, as breakable, as something finite. Think of her as an egg” John’s Nipple said. “Look at her. Look at how she takes the carton from the fridge to the sink – with the utmost delicacy, as if every egg in that carton might smash and cover her and the floor in foul yellow decay. But look” John’s Nipple said, standing erect on John’s chest and pointing towards the kitchen counter where Tracy stood with the poise of a ballerina and the glare of a hangman. “She breaks the egg with such gentility. Even you do. I have seen you many times. All humans do, even the most brutish whose hands are all thumbs, they, like you and like Tracy, break an egg with delicate address. You need to think of her as an egg, something delicate, something fragile. You need to touch her gently as if the slightest coarse abrasion might peel away her skin. You must hold her – sure enough to keep her safe and warm but delicate enough as if her bones were made of sand and the slightest breeze, even a heavy breath, might blow her away so that nothing of her remains. You must kiss her as if her lips were a fine crystal that might shatter in the flurry of your typical orgiastic affection. Your love was and is a universe. The second you said I love you, your heart…”

  “Exploded,” said John.