The Map of Time

by Félix J Palma

  43

  Wells contemplated the ornate façade of Murray’s Time Travel and wondered again how this modest theater could possibly contain the vast stage set Tom had described to him of a devastated London in the year 2000. Sooner or later, he would have to try to get to the bottom of the mystery, but for the moment, he must forget about it if he did not want his adversary’s unarguable shrewdness to put him in a bad mood. Determined to push the thought aside, he shook his head and stood admiring his work for a few moments. Then, satisfied at a job well done, he began walking in the direction of Waterloo Bridge. He knew of no better place from which to observe the beautiful spectacle of morning.

  Cracks of light would soon begin to appear in the dark sky as dawn broke through, and there was nothing to stop him dallying for a few moments to witness the colorful duel before going to Henley’s office.

  In fact, any excuse was good enough to delay his meeting with his editor, for he felt certain Henley would not be overly pleased with the new manuscript. Of course, he would agree to publish it, but this would not spare Wells from having to listen to one of Henley’s sermons aimed at steering him into the fold of authors destined to pass into the annals of literary history. “And why not accept his advice for once?” he suddenly thought. Why not give up writing for naïve readers easily convinced by any adventure story, or any story that shows a modicum of imagination, and write for more discerning readers, those, in short, who reject the entertainments of popular fiction in favor of more serious, profound literature that explains the universe to them and even the precariousness of their existence in the centuries to come. Perhaps he should resolve to write another kind of story altogether, one that would stir his readers” souls in a different way, a novel that would be nothing short of a revelation to them, just as Henley wanted.

  Immersed in these thoughts, Wells turned down Charing Cross Road and headed for the Strand. By that time, a new day was slowly dawning around him. The black sky was gradually dissolving, giving way to a slightly unreal dark blue that instantly paled on the horizon, taking on a soft violet tint before turning orange. In the distance, the author could make out the shape of Waterloo Bridge growing more and more distinct as the darkness faded, slowly invaded by the light. A series of strange, muffled noises reached his ears, making him smile contentedly. The city was beginning to stir, and the isolated sounds hanging in the air would soon be transformed into the honest, relentless flow of life, an earsplitting din which might reach the outer reaches of space transformed into a pleasant buzz of bees, revealing that the third largest planet in the solar system was very much inhabited.

  And although as he walked towards the bridge Wells could see nothing beyond what was in front of him, somehow he felt as though he were taking part in a huge play which, because every single inhabitant of the city was cast in it, seemingly had no audience. Except perhaps for the clever Martians, busy studying human life the way man peered down a microscope at the ephemeral organisms wriggling around in a drop of water, he reflected. And in fact, he was right, for as he threaded his way along the Strand, dozens of barges loaded with oysters floated in eerie silence along the ever more orange-tinted waters of the Thames, on their way from Chelsea Reach to Billingsgate Wharf, where an army of men hauled the catch onto land. In wealthy neighborhoods, fragrant with the aroma of high-class bakeries and violets from the flower sellers” baskets, people abandoned their luxurious houses for their no less luxurious offices, crossing the streets that had begun filling up with cabriolets, berlins, omnibuses, and every imaginable type of wheeled vehicle, jolting rhythmically over the paving stones, while above them, the smoke from the factory stacks mingled with the mist rising from the water to form a shroud of dense, sticky fog, and an army of carts drawn by mules or pushed manually, brimming with fruit, vegetables, eels, and squid, took up their positions at Covent Garden amid a chaos of shouts. At the same hour, Inspector Garrett arrived before finishing his breakfast at Sloane Street, where Mr. Ferguson was waiting to inform him rather anxiously that someone had taken a potshot at him the night before, poking his pudgy thumb through the hole it had made in his hat. Garrett examined the surrounding area with a trained eye, searching among the bushes around Ferguson’s house, and could not prevent a tender smile spreading across his face when he discovered the charming kiwi bird someone had scratched in the dirt.

  Looking up and down the street to make sure no one was watching, he quickly erased it with his foot before emerging from the bushes, shrugging his shoulders. Just as he was telling Ferguson with an expression of feigned bewilderment that he had found no clues, in a room at a boardinghouse in Bethnal Green, John Peachey, the man known as Tom Blunt before drowning in the Thames, embraced the woman he loved, and Claire Haggerty let herself be wrapped in his strong arms, pleased he had fled the future, the desolate year 2000, to be with her. At that very moment too, standing on top of a rock, Captain Derek Shackleton declared in a grating voice that if any good had come of the war it was that it had united the human race as no other war had ever done before, and Gilliam Murray shook his head mournfully, telling himself this was the last expedition he would organize, that he was tired of fools and of the heartless wretch who kept smearing his building with dung, that it was time to stage his own death, to pretend he had been devoured by one of the savage dragons that inhabited the fourth dimension, dragons between whose razor-sharp teeth Charles Winslow was that very instant being torn to ribbons in his dreams, before waking up with a start bathed in sweat, alarming the two Chinese prostitutes sharing his bed with his cries, at the same time as his cousin Andrew, who was just then leaning on Waterloo Bridge watching the sun rise, noticed a familiar-looking fellow with birdlike features coming towards him.

  “Mr. Wells?” he called out as the man drew level.

  Wells stopped and stared at Andrew for a few moments, trying to remember where he had seen him before.

  “Don’t you remember me?” said the young man. “I’m Andrew Harrington.” As soon as he heard the name, Wells remembered. This was the lad whose life he had saved a few weeks before, preventing him killing himself thanks to an elaborate charade that had allowed him to confront Jack the Ripper, the murderer who had terrorized Whitechapel in the autumn of 1888.

  “Yes, Mr. Harrington, of course I remember you,” he said, pleased to see the young man was still alive and his efforts had not been in vain. “How good it is to meet you.” “Likewise, Mr. Wells,” said Andrew.

  The two men stood in silence for a moment, grinning idiotically.

  “Did you destroy the time machine?” enquired Andrew.

  “Er … yes, yes,” stammered Wells, and quickly tried to change the subject. “What brings you here? Did you come to watch the dawn?” “Yes,” the other man confessed, turning to look at the sky, which just then was a palette of beautiful orange and purple hues.

  “Although, in actual fact I’m trying to see what’s behind it.” “What’s behind it?” asked Wells, intrigued.

  Andrew nodded.

  “Do you remember what you told me after I came back from the past in your time machine?” he said, rummaging for something in his coat pocket. “You assured me I’d killed Jack the Ripper, in spite of this newspaper clipping contradicting it.” Andrew showed Wells the same yellowed cutting he had presented to him in the kitchen of his house in Woking a few weeks before. “Jack the Ripper Strikes Again!” the headline announced, going on to list the ghastly wounds the monster had inflicted on his fifth victim, the Whitechapel prostitute whom the young man loved. Wells nodded, unable to help wondering, as everyone did in those days, what had happened to the ruthless murderer, why he had suddenly stopped killing and had disappeared without a trace.

  “You said it was because my action had caused a bifurcation in time,” Andrew went on, slipping the cutting back in his pocket.

  “A parallel world I think you called it, a world in which Marie Kelly was alive and living happily with my twin. Although, unfortunately, I was in th
e wrong world.” “Yes, I remember,” said Wells cautiously, uncertain what the young man was driving at.

  “Well, Mr. Wells. Saving Marie Kelly encouraged me to forget about suicide and to carry on with my life. And that is what I am doing. I recently became engaged to an adorable young woman, and I am determined to enjoy her company and to savor the small things in life.” He paused and looked up at the sky again. “And yet I come here each dawn to try to see the parallel world you spoke of, and in which I am supposedly living happily with Marie Kelly.

  And do you know what, Mr. Wells?” “What?” asked the writer, swallowing hard, afraid the young man was about to turn round and punch him, or seize him by the lapels and throw him into the river, out of revenge for having deceived him in such a childish way.

  “Sometimes I can see her,” said Andrew, in an almost tremulous whisper.

  The author stared at him, dumbfounded.

  “You can see her?” “Yes, Mr. Wells,” the young man affirmed, smiling like one who has had a revelation, “sometimes I see her.” Whether or not Andrew really believed this or had chosen to believe it Wells did not know, but the effect on the young man appeared to be the same: Wells’s fabrication had preserved him, like a bed of ice. He watched the young man contemplating the dawn, or perhaps what was “behind” it, an almost childlike expression of ecstasy illuminating his face, and could not help wondering which of them was more deluded: the skeptical writer, incapable of believing the things he himself had written, or the desperate young man, who in a noble act of faith had decided to believe Wells’s beautiful lie, taking refuge in the fact that no one could prove it was untrue.

  “It’s been a pleasure meeting you again, Mr. Wells,” Andrew suddenly said, turning to shake his hand.

  “Likewise,” replied Wells.

  After they had said good-bye, Wells stood for a few moments watching the young man cross the bridge unhurriedly, swathed in the golden light of dawn. Parallel worlds. He had completely forgotten about the theory he had been obliged to make to save the young man’s life. But did they really exist? Did each of man’s decisions give rise to a different world? In fact, it was naïve to think there was only one alternative to each predicament. What about the unchosen universes, the ones that were flushed away, why should they have less right to exist than the others? Wells doubted very much whether the structure of the universe depended on the unpredictable desires of that fickle, timid creature called man. It was more reasonable to suppose that the universe was far richer and more immeasurable than our senses could perceive, that when man was faced with two or more options, he inevitably ended up choosing all of them, for his ability to choose was simply an illusion. And so, the world kept splitting into different worlds, worlds that showed the breadth and complexity of the universe, worlds that exploited its full potential, drained all of its possibilities, worlds that evolved alongside one another, perhaps only differentiated by an insignificant detail such as how many flies were in each, because even killing one of these annoying insects implied a choice: it was a insignificant gesture that gave birth to a new universe all the same.

  And how many of the wretched creatures buzzing around his windows had he killed or allowed to live, or simply mutilated, pulling off their wings while he thought about how to resolve a dilemma in one of his novels? Perhaps this was a silly example, reflected Wells, as such an action would not have changed the world in any irreversible way. After all, a man could spend his entire life pulling off flies” wings without altering the course of history.

  But the same reasoning could be applied to far more significant decisions, and he could not help remembering Gilliam Murray’s second visit. Had Wells not also been torn between two possible choices, and, intoxicated with power, had he not opted to squash the fly, giving rise to a universe in which a company offering trips to the future existed, the absurd universe in which he was now trapped. But, what if he had opted instead to help Murray publish his novel? Then he would be living in a world similar to the one he was in now, only in which the time travel company did not exist, a world in which one more book would have to be added to the necessary bonfire of scientific novels: Captain Derek Shackleton, The True and Exciting Story of a Hero of the Future, by Gilliam F.

  Murray.

  And so, since an almost infinite number of different worlds existed, Wells reflected, everything that could happen, did happen.

  Or, what amounted to the same thing: any world, civilization, creature it was possible to imagine already existed. And so, for example, there was a world dominated by a nonmammalian species, another by birdmen living in huge nests, another in which man used an alphabet to count the fingers on his hand, another in which sleep erased all memory and each day was a new life, another in which a detective called Sherlock Holmes really did exist, and his companion was a clever little rascal called Oliver Twist, and still another in which an inventor had built a time machine and discovered a nightmarish paradise in the year 802,701.

  And taking this to its limit, there was also somewhere a universe governed by laws different from those Newton had established, where there were fairies and unicorns and talking mermaids and plants, for in a universe where anything was possible, children’s stories were no longer inventions, but copies of worlds their authors, by some quirk of fate, had been able to glimpse.

  “Did no one invent anything, then? Was everyone merely copying?” Wells wondered. The writer pondered over the question for a while, and given it is becoming clear this particular tale is drawing to a close, I shall use the time to bid you farewell, like an actor waving good-bye to his audience from the stage. Thank you very much for your attention, and I sincerely hope that you enjoyed the show … But now let us return to Wells, who recovered with a start owing to an almost metaphysical shudder running down his spine, because his wandering thoughts had led him to pose another question: What if his life were being written by someone in another reality, for instance in the universe almost exactly like his own in which there was no Time Travel company and Gilliam Murray was the author of dreadful little novels? He gave serious thought to the possibility of someone copying his life and pretending it was fiction. But why would anyone bother? He was not material for a novel. Had he been shipwrecked on a tropical island, like Robinson Crusoe, he would have been incapable of even making a clay gourd. By the same token, his life was too dull for anyone to transform it into an exciting story. Although undeniably the past few weeks had been rather eventful: in a matter of a few days, he had saved Andrew Harrington’s and Claire Haggerty’s lives by using his imagination, as Jane had taken care to point out in a somewhat dramatic manner, as though she had been addressing a packed audience he could not see in the stalls.

  In the first case, he had been forced to pretend he possessed a time machine like the one in his novel, and in the second that he was a hero from the future who wrote love letters. Was there material for a novel in any of this? Possibly. A novel narrating the creation of a company called Murray’s Time Travel, in which he, unfortunately, had played a part, a novel that surprised its readers towards the middle when it was revealed that the year 2000 was no more than a stage set built with rubble from a demolition (although this, of course, would only be a revelation to readers from Wells’s own time). If such a novel survived the passage of time, and was read by people living after the year 2000 there would be nothing to reveal, for reality itself would have given the lie to the future described in the story. But did that mean it was impossible to write a novel set in Wells’s time speculating about a future that was already the author’s past? The thought saddened him. He preferred to believe his readers would understand they were meant to read the novel as if they were in 1896, as if they, in fact, had experienced a journey through time. Still, since he did not have the makings of a hero, he would have to be a secondary character in the novel, someone to whom others, the story’s true protagonists, came to for help.

  If someone in a neighboring universe had decided to write a
bout his life, in whatever time, he hoped for their sake that this was the last page, as he very much doubted his life would carry on in the same vein. He had probably exhausted his quota of excitement in the past two weeks, and from this point on his life would carry on once more in peaceable monotony, like that of any other writer.

  He gazed at Andrew Harrington, the character with whom he would have started this hypothetical novel, and, as he saw him walk away bathed in the golden glow of dawn, perhaps with a euphoric smile playing about his lips, he told himself that this was the perfect image with which to end the tale. He wondered, as if somehow he were able to see or hear me, whether at that very moment someone was not doing precisely that, and then experiencing the rush of joy every writer feels when finishing a novel, a happiness nothing else in life can bring, not sipping Scotch whiskey in the bathtub until the water goes cold, nor caressing a woman’s body, not the touch on the skin of the delicious breeze heralding the arrival of summer.