The Time Travel Chronicles

by Peralta, Samuel

  * * *

  After that night, I didn't set foot into the shop for a week. Instead, I glanced at it from the window of my room during the night — a dark shape against the slightly lighter background of the meadow behind it. An emptiness had spread through our house during that time. My stepmother was a ghost, busily moving from room to room, organizing my father's belongings. My sister was consoling her but I could see that it was her who needed consoling more than anyone. She and my dad had had a difficult relationship. It didn't help that when she was a teenager, I began to want to help him in his shop and therefore spent much more time with him than she ever did. Now I could see in her the regret of never wanting to listen to him when he spoke about the furniture he'd built or the iron gates and door hinges he had made.

  I rarely went downstairs anymore except when I had to eat or do chores around the house. I spent most of the time up in my room, doing homework or looking at the shop from my window. When I lay in bed at night, my thoughts always went back to the notebook. Why did my father tell me about the drawer if he knew I would never be able to build the machine? The question kept me up at night and even my days were filled with trying to answer it. He had written the manual for me but it was clear he had intended to build it with me, not have me try it all by myself. In the hospital, he probably thought I should have it to remember him. But I didn't want to remember him. Remembering him was too painful. I wanted to see him again. I wanted to feel his gentle touch on my shoulder when I worked on a project in the shop, hear his words of encouragement when I burned a hole into the steel or the welding rod got stuck in the bead.

  I caught myself thinking about the items on the list and where to get them. A 12 Volt/700CCA car battery, the magnets, a six-by-six foot piece of metal fencing, a few copper connectors, about thirty feet of one-inch galvanized piping, a seat cushion (if needed), the display of an analog alarm clock and a few other things I could get at our hardware store. If I were to try to build it. Which I wouldn't. But as much as I tried not to think about it, I couldn't stop. I had forty two dollars and seven cents in my savings box. That would barely be enough to get the magnets. If I wanted to do this, I needed to get a job. But I didn't want to get a job because I couldn't possibly build the machine. I paced back and forth in my room, but this made me even more agitated than I already was. Eventually, I sat down on my bed and, just as I did sometimes, opened The Time Machine without any particular page in mind.

  "I told some of you last Thursday of the principles of the Time Machine, and showed you the actual thing incomplete in the workshop. There it is now, a little travel worn, truly; and one of the ivory bars is cracked, and a brass rail bent; but the rest of it is sound enough. I expected to finish it on Friday, when the putting together was nearly done, I found that one of the nickel bars was exactly one inch too short, and this had to be re-made; so that the thing was not complete until this morning."

  I closed the book again. Should I try it? I'm not sure what happened at that moment but something inside me gave way. I couldn't hold out any longer. I guess the pain over not being with him was greater than the fear of building a machine that would, in the end, be just that — a machine with no purpose but to have made a fool out of me. I got dressed and went downstairs.

  "Where you going?" I heard my stepmother call from the living room.

  "I'll be right back. Just going out to the shop."

  I'm sure she didn't want me to go. It was almost ten o'clock at night and tomorrow was a school day. But she couldn't forbid it either. I felt for her at that moment. Her loss was mine and while I stood at the entrance door, we were joined in our grief over whom we had loved the most in this world.

  The shop was cold. Freezing. I could see my breath when I turned the lights on. I kindled a fire and warmed my hands for a while. It would take a half hour for the room to become comfortable. Better get to work. I decided to clear one half of the shop to have an area where I could place all the needed parts. That way, I could see what was missing and add to it without losing a sense of where everything was. I also wanted to get an inventory of what tools I might need so that I could move the rest to the opposite wall.

  It occurred to me that the notebook didn't mention any finishing work on the metal. No metal rasp to soften the edges and joists, no steel wool to smooth out the welding lines. My dad was never about appearances. It didn't interest him. He always said that appearances hide the truth behind them. In everything. I never understood this until much later. Whenever we spoke about our book, my dad would give me one or two items from his philosophy about time. Like the Traveler in the book, he would speak with great conviction, sucking on his pipe once in a while to give me time to think about what he had just told me.

  "It only appears," he would begin, "that we are bound to three dimensions and that the fourth — time itself — is a given and cannot be changed. I don't accept that. I don't believe that. And neither should you."

  I loved listening to him too much to interrupt him, even though I understood but a small portion of what he told me back then.

  "Time travel is a constant. We are always traveling through time. Right now, at this very moment, we are traveling through time. Otherwise we would be frozen in that very instant and no longer exist. We can only be here if we move through time. Who says that we cannot accelerate the speed of travel? And if one object moves forward in time and the rest doesn't, the object will disappear. Just like if you and I would have a race, and you, because you are much faster than me, would move ahead and eventually be gone from my field of vision. You would not occupy the same moment with me anymore."

  I moved the belt sander and band saw all the way to the wall next to the door. Both machines were heavy and it took me a long time, sitting on the floor and pushing them, inch by inch, with my feet. I cleared the area of all the leftover piping and metal pieces and moved them toward the wall as well. Then I swept one more time. I used a piece of charcoal from the forge and drew a square with four equal parts inside. One was dedicated to the centrifugal rotor, one to the battery compartment and controls, the third to the chassis, and the fourth to the rest — the seat, the display, and other miscellaneous parts. For the next three hours, I arranged what I found in the shop and applied it to the sections. I thought we had more than we actually did but at the end of the night, I had a list with tools and items I needed to get.

  After school the next day I went to the hardware store. Paul McGuiness, the owner, knew me from the countless times I had accompanied my father and, later on, was sent on errands to get parts for the shop.

  "How are you doing, kiddo?" he asked.

  "I'm okay," I replied. “I think.”

  Paul had cried at my dad's funeral. He had known him since they went to school together forty years ago.

  "What you got?" Paul finally asked me.

  I gave him the list with items. He looked it over.

  "You sure this is right?" he said. "What's this gonna be after it's done?"

  I hesitated. He looked at me for a while over his reading glasses. Then he wordlessly got up and began to collect the material.

  "I actually just wanted to see how much it all costs," I said. "I don't have the money right now."

  "Your dad had store credit," he replied as he added up the items at the register. The amount came out to $134.45. "It was a bit more than what this comes to so I'm adding a few packs of WL-20 welding rod. I think you might need them."

  "Thank you," I said.

  "How are you gonna get the stuff home?"

  I hadn't thought about it. It didn't even occur to me. I had some space in my backpack but that wasn't nearly enough.

  "Wait here a moment," Paul said.

  When he came back a few minutes later, he was wearing his jacket and held his car keys in his hand. "I'll drive you. There are a few eight-foot, one-inch pipes outside as well."

  We left the store. He turned the sign to 'closed' and locked the door. I helped him load the piping onto the
truck and we drove off.

  "Are you doing okay in school?" he asked.

  "Yes."

  "You were always a good student. Your dad told me. He said that one day you'd be an engineer and build large and beautiful things. But for that you'll have to stay a good student. I know these are tough times and if you can't stand it at home or somethin', you're always welcome to do your homework in the store."

  "Thanks," I replied. I smiled at him briefly. He was wiping his face the whole ride to my house. I didn't say anything, didn't know what to say. When we got there, we unloaded the parts and leaned everything along the outside wall of the barn. When he left and drove past the house, my stepmother talked to him for a few minutes. Then he drove off. My stepmom waved to me. I waved back. She disappeared into the house.

  * * *

  When we had dinner that night, my stepmother asked me if I wanted to earn some extra money doing minor chores at Mr. McGuiness's store. He could use a hand. My eyes must have lit up at that moment because my stepmom smiled at me for the first time in a while. I'm sure she didn't know what to do with me other than to tell me not to set the shop on fire when using the welding equipment. I’m sure she was glad I would have some supervision in the afternoons.

  I started at Paul's store a few days later. We agreed on minimum wage. I thought it was more than fair. I wasn't officially old enough to work but he said he'd give me cash every week. I had a few more costly items on my list, including the battery, the magnets, and the 50 Amp wire. Paul told me that he could help me with the wire and the connectors and would give them to me at wholesale.

  From then on, every day after school, I walked straight to Paul's store. I was able to do most of my homework during homeroom and worked from three to six in the afternoon. Afterward, I went home, ate, and went straight out to the shop. During that time, around the beginning of December, I began to build the chassis. The galvanized pipes needed to be cut to length and welded together according to the drawings. It was difficult without a second person there but I made a contraption with a few sandbags from outside to hold the pipes in place while I welded them together. I made good progress and after a week, I was mostly done.

  Then I realized something: Were I to leave the machine in this part of the shop—and assuming that I'd successfully travel back in time—I would end up right on top of the belt sander. There was no place in the shop where I could position the machine without creating chaos the moment I landed. I would have to move it to a place where it wouldn't bother anybody. Behind the barn, and accessible through a door, there was a storage area. It was freezing cold in there but there was enough space to fit the machine without having to disturb anything. I decided to build the individual components in the main shop and put everything together next door. But the chassis was already bigger than the relatively narrow door. I'd have to go outside through the double doors and around back to the sliding door of the storage area.

  The other problem was the weight of the individual parts. The rotor, once the magnets were attached, would probably be really heavy. The same for the chassis. I needed something to help move the components. I found a palette that seemed mostly intact, and a rusty, beat-up shopping cart in one corner of the storage room. I took the wheels off and mounted them onto the palette. The wheels were rusty but sufficient.

  That Friday evening, I moved the chassis onto the palette. It was barely big enough to hold it. On Saturday morning, I worked at the store and went home with seventy-two dollars and fifty cents and a 50 Amp wire. Paul had subtracted the seventy-eight dollars for the wire, purchased at wholesale price, from the one-hundred and fifty dollars and fifty cents I had made during that week. The seventy-two dollars and fifty cents wasn't enough for either the battery or the magnets. It would probably take me an additional three weeks to come up with the money. That would put the completion date right before Christmas. I thought about asking my stepmom if she'd order the magnets for me in exchange for the money. But I decided to wait until I actually had the money in hand. The battery I could get at the car parts store in town.

  If the chassis was fairly easy to weld together, the centrifugal rotor was a different story. The instructions talked about forging a three-dimensional blade, not unlike a fan blade, out of the plate I had found in the drawer. I had never done anything like it. I was afraid I would burn out the material and render it useless. The magnets were to be placed along a semi-circular shape that was open at the top. The fan blade would then be centered inside the magnets. "If done correctly, the magnets should hold the blade in place without any further assistance," it said in the instructions. If done correctly. I began to doubt my ability to do this. The chassis was crude work. I had welded pipes together many times before. But this wasn't a task for an apprentice. It needed the hand of a master. Someone like my dad.

  For the next few days, I couldn't make myself light the forge and begin. Instead, I sat in the shop unable to do anything. I wasn't ready. I shouldn't have started. I simply couldn't do it. Even Paul noticed my change of mood and asked me a few times if everything was all right. I nodded each time, certain he wasn't able to help me.

  "You know, your dad thought very highly of you," he said one day while we moved bags of salt from the back to a spot near the front door of the store. "And I don't mean only as a person. He spoke highly of you as an apprentice. Her heart is in the right place, he said. She can figure anything out. The more challenging, the better for her."

  "He must not have known what I can or cannot do," I replied.

  "Do you really believe that?" Paul asked.

  "What do you mean?"

  "Do you think it likely that a master blacksmith of nearly forty years does not know what his apprentice can or cannot do? Or is it more likely that he knows precisely what your limitations are and how to overcome them?"

  I wanted to say, "Yes, it is likely. And not only is it likely, it's true. He doesn't know my limitations. Only I know them." But I didn't say anything, mostly because I didn't want to offend Paul, knowing of his deep friendship with my father.

  "A master only becomes one through the very mastering of what he was not able to master before. Otherwise anyone can call himself that. The taller the task, the further the learning carries you."

  When he placed the last bag of salt onto the stack of other bags next to the door, he stretched his back and wiped his hands on his pants. "If your dad thought you could do it, I'm sure you can. Whether it's easy or not, doesn't matter, does it? His confidence in you should be enough to erase the doubt in your heart."

  Paul sent me home two hours early that day. He assured me at the door that I would still get paid for the time. I went home, emptied the dishwasher, and helped my stepmom put away groceries.

  "So what are you doing out there in the shop every day?" she asked.

  I stopped for a moment and looked straight at her. I could almost see the cloak of sadness surrounding her.

  "I'm building a time machine so I can go back and talk to Dad."

  She started to cry. I didn't know what else I could have told her except the truth. I made tea in a thermos and brought a couple of apples and a jar of peanut butter with me to the shop.

  Then I lit the forge.

  * * *

  I worked for seven hours straight. In the end, I couldn't feel my shoulders and lifting the thermos seemed an impossible task. I left it in the shop that night. As I lay in bed, I could still feel the heat of the scorching coals in my face; the smell of the thick leather gloves was still on my hands. I took the noise of hammer on steel with me to my dreams. I'm coming to you, Dad. I'll see you soon. I'll see you very soon.

  I went back to the store the next day after school. I was tired and sore but I didn't want to miss more than the two hours from yesterday. Paul had made hot cocoa in his tiny little kitchen. It was only three in the afternoon but the sky had darkened already. A few flurries of snow had fallen. He asked me how it went last night and I gave him the short answer. "Good," I said,
hoping he wouldn't detect the insecurity in my voice. I didn't really know how it went. I’d finished the task but I had no idea what the outcome would be. I’d basically put together parts with no way of knowing how it all would turn out.

  We put up Christmas lights around the bay window, which was just me handing Paul the individual string lights and, at the same time, holding the ladder so he wouldn't fall over. We’d been working quietly for a while, only interrupted by a few questions he asked and me giving him very short answers, when he stopped and turned toward me.

  "May I ask you another question?" he said.

  "Sure," I replied.

  "You know I'll help you in any way I can, right?"

  "Yes. Thank you."

  "I owe it to your father. But not only that. I think you're a bright kid and... you've been through a lot... with your mom and now your dad. My question is..."

  I saw that he was looking for the right words to use. Part of me wished he would stop there and not say anything.

  "Forgive me but... what are you building?"

  I didn't answer for a while and Paul didn't say anything either. I think he wasn't sure if he should have asked. When my stepmom asked before, I didn't think about it much. Maybe it was the way he asked. His tone of voice was kind and genuinely concerned. Up until now, I hadn't questioned what I was doing. I’d only questioned my ability, not the fact that I was doing it. I had followed the instructions from the notebook blindly. His question stirred something in me — something I didn't think about before. The last couple of weeks, I was too busy going forward and the task itself had blotted out the purpose of it. What was I doing? Did I truly believe it possible to build a machine that would bring me back to my father? To tell Paul the truth seemed silly all of a sudden. And in saying it out loud to him I would expose the lie and realize that there was nothing on the other end of this, that I had sent myself on a fool's errand. I couldn't stop the tears from coming. Pain suddenly washed over me. My wish to see my father again had made me blind to the reality of it.