by Chris Eaton
***
It was all ridiculous to Chris Eaton. Henry Code was only nine, which seemed an improbable age for someone to discover the secrets of time travel or even, given the possibility that he may have come from a time where time travel was more prevalent and that every second home had their own machine, to have been trusted with the keys to one. But this was, as he explained to Chris Eaton, the curse of being his father’s son, seeking to atone for acts he’d never done, looking to fix the wrongs of the past, and of his own hubris. On the run, Faramundo was able to continue his experiments unhindered, possibly accomplishing even more because he no longer had to keep up any pretext. As it turned out, time travel was remarkably simple. Predicting where the greyness would manifest itself became as simple as predicting a rainy day. They were there all around us, these fourth-dimensional holes. But they were mostly suspended in the air, having come in contact with humans only a small number of times, on the rare occasions that their presence had coincided with passing planes, sometimes damaging them to the point that they fell from the sky and other times causing them to vanish completely, which finally offered a plausible explanation for The Bermuda Triangle.
Henry was never quite sure where his father had hidden them for so many years, but from years of his own research, he knew that his needs would have been very specific: computers more powerful than what he could safely and affordably order for his home, materials which at that point only existed as rumors and hearsay, rooms large enough to house various superconductors, and a large radar dish. And this narrowed his list of possibilities down to only a few locations, all of them decommissioned military stations, like the site in Montauk, NY, in the abandoned underground Air Force base under the wildlife preserve where they’d supposedly been conducting electromagnetic experiments on homeless and runaways for decades before finally giving it up. Faramundo still spent most of his time in the field hunting the manifestation down, and would leave his wife and newborn alone for weeks underground, returning with new data and freshly shoplifted sandwiches. Once, Faramundo was able to find a buyer for some abandoned military technology he had found, and this financed their travels for at least a year or two, but the guilt that followed him after that was too great to try it again. So they returned to living hand-to-mouth.
On these trips to the fog, Faramundo first experimented with sound, shouting messages into the sky that he thought might be useful if they reached him in the past: “The secret is in the Norse variant!”; “Marry Celeste!”; “Don’t kill the boy!” But there was no way to measure success. Then he realized he could wrap notes around rocks, with coded dates on them and instructions for the finder to mail them to a secret post office box or, in the case that they traveled back to before he could register one in his name, to his childhood address back in Spain. In case they went back even further, he provided additional instructions for whomever received it to hide it in one of his favorite childhood spaces. It was logical to assume none of these experiments had actually reached that far, because he couldn’t remember finding any notes from himself back then, but he supposed it was also just as likely that someone from the past had merely balked at such intricate directions and huffed the rock back into the woods or river where they’d found it. And eventually he gave that up as well.
The real problem was the effect the grey fog had on everything inside it, not only clocks, obviously, which only measured the time differential, but on all organic material as well, which held on to the present like a man falling off of a cliff. The key, he’d always believed, was the Norse variant, which was a theorem put forward by three Scandinavian mathematicians in the late-nineties relating to what they called zenotic conclusion points, a reference to a combination of the Achilles and the tortoise paradox and the arrow paradox. They felt that it was possible to be completely motionless, and in fact, believed that motion and uniqueness were both illusions, that all was one and continuous and if one could break down this illusion/paradox, the whole world would be opened up through a limitless supply of undiminishing power: zero energy. This zero energy, he believed, was the main force at work in the fog. By harnessing it one could do almost anything because slowing things down to a perfect standstill opened up Einstein’s theory of relativity to infinite possibilities on most other planes. By remaining perfectly still, one could be instantly transported to any place or any time.
The only issue was the matter of zero time. The exact moment in time at which a dimensional shift occurred would act as a reference point for the mind and body, like an elastic band, creating greater tension in psyche of the traveler the further he or she moved from the reference point of their departure. Although it was possible to shift zero time, especially in inanimate objects, the human mind tended to lock itself to its original timeline; the concept of moving in time is, otherwise, too much to accept. Most humans can not move with zero time, cannot flow in synch with the time shift without it affecting them relatively, so that, if you travel to the future, you don’t emerge from the fog as the same young man who entered it, but as the older man you might become had you progressed through the same years like anyone else. Imagine tracing a line on graph paper and then suddenly lifting the pencil from the page and dropping down somewhere else. Despite not having travelled all that distance from the starting point on paper, you are still now the same distance as you would be had you actually drawn the line in the first place. The measurement would be the same, but void of memories. Faramundo’s first guinea pig, the Cajun, was no spring chicken, but he died because his body could not handle the forty-year leap forward and he suffered a stroke in transit. On Faramundo’s second experiment, the volunteer only traveled forward a few days; but when he reappeared, someone had parked a car in his arrival spot and the roof severed him in half. Finally Caravito, whom they thought was safe because he was young and they had discovered a fog out over the water, he just couldn’t handle the concept of himself as a drastically older man, could not reconcile the idea that he was even twenty years older without any memory of how he’d gotten there. The person he saw in the mirror was not him. And because memories are our link to ourselves, our identity, our anchor, he returned a complete vegetable, unable to perform even the simplest tasks like breathing. Because of the loss of memories, he forgot who he was, what he was. He lost himself. A person is not a point on two or more axes, but the sum total of everything in between. Without any in-between, we are empty vessels, unable to survive, blowing away like formless smoke.
When Caravito’s body was discovered off the coast of Massachusetts, it would have been impossible to trace DNA or fingerprints back to Faramundo. His previous record was as clean as a fresh gold sample plate. But he was also far from competent when it came to disposing of his failures, renting the boat to dispose of Caravito on a credit card, or thinking it might be enough to empty Garcia’s pockets before tossing his body in an alley behind a movie theatre, and eventually this was what caught up with the Spaniard. When he was finally captured and arrested for pocketing twelve dollars worth of chocolate bars and soda, the police officer realized that the quiet man in the back of his car had been the subject of a massive manhunt for years, suspected of multiple murders and/or kidnappings.
As he was put to death for his crimes, his wife and child still underground and unaware of his situation, his main regret was that he had never achieved a full understanding of the exact trauma of time travel on the human experience.
***
“I never felt like a real person,” Henry said. “Always hidden from other people, in my own world, outside of the real world, and I suppose, in some ways, I never really existed at all. I had no birth certificate, no passport, had never been treated in a hospital or registered in a school or daycare. My mother schooled me underground, and there was never any chance of me becoming sick or injured because I was so insulated from the rest of the world. No viruses, no stairs, no playgrounds, no early sexual experimentation. My room, in fact, was a padded cell, left from the days when
so many of the base’s experiments would go mad, with a door that essentially disappeared into the rest of the padding when it was closed, and even though I obviously must have slept on the floor, because I am well aware of gravity and how it works, I would often wake up and wonder if, during the night, not that I could even tell night from day in this place, I had rolled up onto the wall, or the ceiling, so identical was any one aspect of the room to any other. I was, in effect, in a world without the general rules of the first three dimensions, with nothing to tell me that I was even under New York, or Arkansas, or Colorado, or Atlantis, and lived only in the fourth.
“The only thing that I knew was the time (which was displayed in most rooms and hallways, to the second, via large, rectangular boxes with blocky, red, digital numbers) and the year (which was sometimes displayed in similar boxes but also because of a calendar my father kept in his main workshop, checking off each day to monitor how long we’d been in hiding), without contact with anyone outside, without direct sunlight. At any given moment I knew precisely when I was, but not where, which was the opposite to my later problems.
“When my father failed to return from his last trip, my mother insisted we stay put and wait, although I suspect she knew something was up, because to pass the time she told me stories, mostly about my father, but also my uncles and aunts, of which there were many, at least on her side, my grandparents, and even about people before that, as if knowing my place in history might somehow help me discover who I was. Of course, I already knew my place in time and longed mostly to get outside, but I listened to her whenever she tried to distract me because she was my mother. And I loved her. And really what else did I know? Then, once she was satisfied that I knew my personal history, she took me to my father’s lab and sat me in front of his notebooks, where I learned about all of his discoveries as well as the murders. You couldn’t call them by any other name.
“If I had never known any other world, then it’s also safe to say the only language I knew was my father’s research. I effectively took over exactly where he left off and became him.
“In my mother’s suicide note, she made it clear that the future of my father’s legacy was up to me.
“But I wasn’t nine when I discovered the secrets of time travel. Nor was I twenty-nine, or even forty-nine, but more than seventy years old, subsisting on a nearly unlimited supply of powdered food I had discovered on a lower level, possibly left there in case of nuclear attack. Unable to find an exit, I worked on creating my own machine, using my father’s collected data to approximate the effects of the fog in the lab, sending small inanimate objects forward or back by a minute, or registering a three percent slowdown in time on symmetrical crystal oscillators. Small victories, I know, but still, I was encouraged to continue. Then after nearly fifty-six years of looking at the same numbers on the same blackboard, while God knows what happened in the world above me, whether or not it even still existed, I suddenly had it, the Norse variant, staring me in the face like it was a signpost. The rats I discovered with the food survived all tests, and within another few years I felt I was ready. Unfortunately, even with the years of proof-checking, I had still miscalculated in certain key areas, still not covered every base. My father’s partial successes had all been trips to the future, because that’s what the grey fog seemed most often to do, but I was going back. I had a job to do. Had I simply decided to travel back in time a few years, or even a few days, perhaps looping and looping those days ad infinitum, I might have eventually discovered a way out, and then made a killing on the stock market, or betting on the Super Bowl, or even the National Spelling Bee, for that matter, it didn’t matter. If personal gain had been my goal, breaking the fourth dimension could have been my equivalent of a blank cheque. To prove to anyone what I had accomplished, however, what my father had accomplished, I had to go back further. Predicting several years of sports winners would be tacked up to luck or coincidence, a party trick, like catching coins off your elbow, or downing someone’s drink without touching the glass.
“I needed more, needed to solve the mystery of what had happened to my father, and even more so, needed to save the men who had given their lives in trust to his calculations. I had to go back further. So I set the date of my anacronópete to April 9, 2001, and made calculations to hopefully place me somewhere above ground, and the next thing I knew, someone was changing my diapers.
***
It took Henry several years to figure out what had happened – years of rehabilitation in which his body refused to function properly, unable to hold a pencil or chalk or use any other sort of computer. All calculations had to be done in his head, which took even longer, and led to more mistakes. He was discovered in a ditch. Someone he never knew brought him to the local police station, who brought him to family services, who stuck him in a home. Eventually, he was adopted by a couple who could not have children because one was barren, or the other had been previously married with children, or had had an operation, or perhaps it was some reason they wouldn’t discuss with him. Eventually he realized the problem of travelling to the past, that not only had his body gone back in time but, unable to separate himself from the movement of time, it had also reversed itself in its growth. It was lucky for him, in fact, that he hadn’t tried to go further, or he might have ceased to exist entirely. And so he considered himself fortunate, even if he was now trapped in this useless body without any access to his workshop or many of the materials he would require that wouldn’t even be discovered for another decade or more, and no means to go searching for his father to warn him even if he did have access to research that could help him find where his father – and his mother, and yes, even himself – might be hiding.
Then he realized how much this new couple loved him, how much his involuntary smiles brought joy to their lives, and every morning when he woke he couldn’t wait to see them, so he called out in his primitive cry, and when they entered his room, he kicked his legs uncontrollably and rolled partially from side-to-side, and laughed, until he was able to communicate with them in small ways, faking a cough to get their attention, or rubbing his eyes to say he was tired. And when his teeth began to force their way back through his gums, they held him. And when he spat up in the middle of the night, filling his nose so that he nearly choked on it, they were there to hold him again, and nurse him, and sing to him and swing him until he fell asleep again. And gradually, he gave up on the idea of being able to change the past and began to enjoy his new present.
It was all crazy, Chris Eaton said. It was insane. She asked him a series of questions. Who was the President in his time? Who won Super Bowl L? But he only bowed his head and apologized for not having paid more attention. Also: Why hadn’t his mind also reverted? How was it that he was still the same man, with the same memories and capabilities, just in a child’s body? He shrugged. A soul, perhaps? Or perhaps our consciousness exists on a plane with further dimensions still. Maybe this is who we really are, and this body is nothing different than a car or airplane, some kind of irrelevant vehicle. His was not to wonder why but to use what he had been given, and take full advantage of a life surrounded by loved ones and experiences instead of the one he had lived before, trapped alone under the ground for seventy-odd years. Besides, it was all the same life, wasn’t it? Once upon a time he had been Henri Costa, but now he was Henry Code, and he supposed, since zero energy really removed all dimensional barriers, he could just as easily have come back as his father, or the president, or a bug, or her. Time travel is not only possible, he told her, it has already occurred. Over and over. In our past. In our future. In fact, past, future, they’re both the same thing, each one ending where the other begins, and there’s this monumental event, this Big Bang, which is supposed to explain how everything began, these rivers and deserts and tear drops and secret longings, except it really only creates more questions. Like what was there before that? And before that? And what about us? Our births? Does our identity come into being in those first mome
nts of corporeal existence? Or does it exist in some prior form? Like a seed? Or a soul bank? Does it exist after us, before us, or does it even matter? Are we any different from one another?
Far in our future, as the universe completes its massive birthing contraction, progressing and compressing, growing and dying, it will contract black holes like chicken pox. The universe only needs to shrink to the smallest fraction of its normal size for the relative density to make black holes as common as humans, or flies, viruses, each one a singularity among many, and then eventually there will be an explosion, like the trapped fumes of a corroded Simca van, all you need is one tiny spark, jumpstarted by two stray molecules eventually colliding with each other, the space between them rendered infinitesimally small and unavoidable, and the spark will set off a chain reaction, in the centre of one of those singularities, at the centre of a universe so small we’d probably never notice it, and the shock waves will actually travel along the tendrils of the singular wormhole back in time to what we think of as the first three seconds and it will start all over again. The Big Bang. God.
But that, of course, is just one possibility among infinite, and these millions and billions and kajillions of singularities are all operating simultaneously, starting over and over and over, opening themselves up to countless repeated lives, always room for one more, out of sequence, taking you back three days, then three years, then thirty, then a minute, then a million, as if filling in the gaps, like defragging a computer, or the memory of a dying man, until all the pieces make a life, and even if the life you’re currently living is horrible beyond belief, none of it really matters because eventually your life is gone as you know it, like the busking magician brought before Napoleon who was told that his life was over unless he could produce true magic, in one year, a wand or elixir or magic coin, that could make the emperor feel happy when he was sad, and sad when he was feeling happy, so dramatic had his mood swings become that he sought to control them just as he had seized control of all Europe, and the street huckster, who up to now had made a living off people with three cups, a ball and some clever distraction, was sent back out into the city, and naturally he thought about running, just maintaining his vector right out of Paris and France and Europe and who knows, maybe eventually reaching China or Africa or Siberia or the Atlantic, he wasn’t sure which direction he was even pointed, but he knew, as all Europeans knew, that the Emperor would eventually find him, that Napoleon had achieved everything he had ever set out to do, so running was futile, and he turned his mind to the task at hand. For one year the magician travelled France and Europe and who knows, not running or hiding but searching, out in the open, seeking out the wisest men of every village he encountered and emerging with nothing but directions to a man in a neighboring village that was said to be even wiser, consulting with doctors and shamen and witches and priests, fortune-tellers and conjurers and clairvoyants and even an exorcist, all of whom had nothing for him, and when he returned to Napoleon’s palace on the anniversary of his sentence, he could not even look up from the floor, and he said, Emperor, My Emperor, for the past year I have traveled all of France and Europe and who knows, and I have spoken to doctors and shamen and witches and priests, and even an exorcist, and in all of that searching, I was unable to find anything for you. Until, that is, I was on my way back to the palace, and I was stopped by a blind idiot trying to peddle his wares. He had no answer to my question, but offered me one of his rings, which were all identical, because there is always one thing that each person can do well, even a blind idiot, with the same inscription that he had pressed into it himself, and suddenly I knew the answer: We’re all in the same boat.
