Out of Time

by Deborah Truscott

  By the time we hung up the morning was half gone. I unlocked the door and went back out on the deck, carefully closing the door behind me. There was something ominous about the Colonel’s absence. A day or so ago I had devoutly wished for the vanishing house guest scenario, but now that I had it I was frankly worried. As much as I wanted to see the Colonel safely back where he belonged, I also wanted to say goodbye.

  I headed south along the beach. If the Colonel was truly missing, there wasn’t much I could do. It was entirely possible that the sun would set tonight and rise tomorrow and he would still be gone, and it wasn’t like I could report him missing to the police. For all I knew, the trap door had shifted its locus from the shed to the cottage. Somewhere between the bathroom and kitchen this morning, the Colonel might have plunged through the centuries to vanish in the past. It occurred to me there could be hundreds of doors scattered across the planet like rabbit holes, just waiting to swallow susceptible individuals. And clearly the Colonel was susceptible, whereas I, like most of the other billion or two souls on the planet, almost certainly was not.

  So there was that to consider. The trap door.

  And then there was the doppelganger.

  I paused for a moment, chilled even in the summer sun, and watched sea roll toward me. By this time I had covered nearly a mile of beach. There was nothing in sight, no cottages, not a single swimmer, just a lot of dunes and sand and empty ocean. I wondered uneasily if the Colonel’s phantom traveler had caught up with him at last. I wondered who he was, what he was, or whether he was even real. The breeze lifted my hair away from my face, and out of the corner of my eye I saw something further down the beach. It was a figure, I decided, turning to squint into the distance. Someone walking along the edge of the surf, coming toward me.

  It could be anyone, I told myself, and turned my gaze back to the sea. But when I looked again a minute later, I decided that the solitary figure was a man. Almost against my will I headed toward him, cruising down the beach with deliberate calm.

  It’s not the Colonel, I told myself. He’s gone and good riddance. End of problem. You’ve got your life back. It isn’t him. It isn’t. Please don’t be him. Please don’t. Please. Please.

  But it was him. Thank God, I thought, in all contradiction to my prayers a moment earlier. I pick up my pace, walking faster and faster until finally I was running. And then, scarcely fifteen feet away, I stopped.

  “Well?” he asked, halting his own (far more casual) pace.

  “Well what?”

  “You look as if you were going to say something.”

  “No, not at all. I just came for a walk. Imagine my running into you like this.”

  He cocked an eye at me. “I was thoughtless. I should have left a note.”

  “I thought something had happened,” I blurted out. “That you had found the door or that the—”

  Suddenly he was beside me, drawing my arm through his. For several moments we strolled silently back toward the house, my hand secured in the crook of his elbow, my palm against the muscles of his arm, my fingers resting lightly on his sun-warmed skin. “My dear Mrs. Finlay,” he said finally. “I beg you do not alarm yourself on my behalf. Should I ever find the door I would endeavor to tell you first, if I could somehow forestall my falling through long enough to do so.” He paused, then added, “I couldn’t leave you, madam, without farewell and thanks. It would be most uncivil.”

  The only reply I could think of was to tell him I would miss him when he left. But instead, I said nothing at all.

  He changed the subject. “I enjoyed the…ah…production last night. Tom Jones.”

  “Movie.”

  “Yes, movie. I must say, the mechanics of it are frankly incomprehensible. To conjure images … to record them on ribbon … to bring them to life as on a stage—”

  I smiled at him.

  “But it was wonderful,” he went on, referring to the film. “Exactly like the book. Well, much like it, at any rate. The dialogue, the narration. Sometimes verbatim.” He glanced at me. “You’ve read Fielding?” he asked.

  “Yes. In college once or twice.”

  He nodded thoughtfully, then sharply cleared his throat. “I’ve remembered something,” he said abruptly. “Last night, after the play — movie — I had a dream. It woke me up, actually, just before dawn, so I dressed and went outside.”

  “The dream triggered the memory,” I prompted.

  “It did,” he agreed, and kept on walking. When the cottage was became visible in the distance, he stopped and faced the sea. I saw the breeze ruffle his hair and shirt, and watched the shadows of the gulls play across the sand. The surf licked at my feet, receded, returned. Beside me, the Colonel shifted and I felt his eyes on me.

  “Have we a plan yet, Mrs. Finlay?” he said at last. “Because it truly is imperative that I return. And soon, I’m afraid.”

  I looked up at him in surprise. “Actually, I do have a plan. Roughly speaking. Why? What did you remember?”

  He turned away, but not before I glimpsed the sadness in his face. For a long moment he tracked a pelican swooping low over the water, wings almost beating on the swells. Suddenly the pelican dove for a fish, and the Colonel cleared his throat.

  “I have two children, Mrs. Finlay.”

  Of course he did, I realized suddenly. He was my age, a few years older. He had plenty of time to become somebody’s husband, someone’s father. And in any event, he didn’t simply spring to life full grown, either here or in his own time. He had parents and grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and siblings. Somewhere, Robert Upton had a family. Somewhere, Robert Upton had two children.

  “Tell me their names,” I smiled.

  Chapter 17

  They were Edmund and Nancy. Edmund was fifteen and Nancy was twelve. And they had been raised by an aunt and uncle in London since the death of their mother ten years earlier.

  “Beth is their mother’s older sister,” the Colonel told me later. We had by this time come up from the beach and were sitting out on the deck with cold cans of Diet Coke. “She and her husband have no children of their own,” he went on. “They’ve raised Nannie and Edmund as if they were their own flesh and blood, which I suppose they are, actually.”

  In the Colonel’s day, I realized, single men did not often raise small children on their own, especially if they were soldiers. It was not likely that the eighteenth century military establishment was particularly family-friendly.

  Then a thought struck me. “Your London connection,” I said.

  “One of them,” he said slowly. “The most important one.”

  “What else do you remember?”

  For a long time he was silent. “Anne,” he said finally. “I remember Anne.”

  Well. At last we were getting someplace.

  *****

  It took him a long time to tell me, and I didn’t have to see his face to know how painful it was. I could hear it in his voice. “I loved her all my life,” he said. “But there were … impediments.”

  “Like the Capulets and Montagues?”

  I was trying for lightness, but the Colonel took me literally. “Her family wasn’t grand enough.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “So my father said. Although not quite so crudely.”

  “Tell me about your father,” I prompted.

  He shook his head, meaning: I can’t remember, although clearly he remembered something.

  “Then tell me about Anne.”

  He smiled at me. “She was like sunlight,” he began. “Grew up at Snowdon Park — one of the cousins, an Emerson. Her family were dead, leaving only the two girls and — as it developed — very little money. The Snowdons didn’t care, of course. Raised the girls alongside their own children.” He paused. “Still, it didn’t suit my father.”

  “Why not?”

  The Colonel waved his hand dismissively. “My father is a baronet of little consequence and large pretension.”

  That summed it
up, alright. “So you do remember him,” I pointed out.

  “What I remember is growing up at Talbots, my father’s estate. Loved it. Spent my boyhood trailing around after my father and his steward. Knew every inch of it, how it ran. Everything.” He looked at me. “But it’s entailed to my older brother, of course.”

  “So you went into the army,” I prompted. “A haven for younger sons.”

  He chuckled. “Is it still so?”

  I shook my head no.

  The Colonel squinted into the sunlight. “I served with a squad of light dragoons on the Kentish Coast,” he said thoughtfully. “Looking for smugglers, actually.”

  “Did you find any?”

  “Oh yes. Quite a number. It was an amusing sort of assignment for a youngster. And then, when I got my first promotion, Anne and I eloped. I’ve been estranged from my father ever since.”

  “Was it worth it?” It was a tactless question, but the Colonel, who wasn’t much on tact himself, didn’t seem to mind.

  “Yes, it was worth it. Every moment was worth it. We were married six years, until Anne died of childbed fever. The babe was born too soon to live, and took her with him.” He paused. “After that, the children went to Beth’s and I went to India.”

  “What happened between India and America?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “When did you last see Edmund and—”

  “I don’t know.” He cut me off, annoyed at questions he couldn’t answer.

  “Was Talbots — is Talbots — in Kent?” Days ago, on our drive down from Pennsylvania, he had had a slim memory of traveling from Kent to London.

  “Yes. And my father’s name is James. My brother is Alexander.” Pause. “He prefers London to Talbots.”

  Suddenly, he got up and paced the decking. At the railing he stopped and looked seaward. “That’s all I remember. Oh, except that Beth married one of her Snowdon cousins. Richard has…banking interests.” He lifted a shoulder, demonstrating how much he knew (or cared) about banking.

  I watched him for a moment: this lonesome man, his face turned longingly to the sea. And then he said, “You mentioned a plan.”

  “It’s not much of one.”

  “Well, the only idea I’ve come up with,” he said, turning to face me, “is to return to Pennsylvania and thump around the shed, doppelganger be damned. Now tell me yours.”

  “I remembered something I read in the newspaper a few weeks ago. About wormholes.”

  The Colonel raised an eyebrow. “Pardon me?”

  “About wormholes in the universe. Theoretically, they’re supposed to enable people to travel from one end of the universe to the other relatively quickly. Like shortcuts.”

  “How long would it take otherwise? Without the wormholes?”

  “Millions of years. Billions, maybe.”

  The Colonel lifted an eyebrow. “How long via the, ah, wormholes?”

  “Less time. I don’t know how much less. Significantly, I guess.”

  “And what has this to do with me?

  “If there are wormholes in the physical universe,” I explained, “then maybe there are wormholes in time.”

  “Of course there are. Only we’ve been calling them portals,” he said. “Trapdoors. Rabbit holes.”

  “If scientists are studying the idea of wormholes,” I went on patiently, “then maybe they might have theories about time travel or—”

  “Oh, I see,” he said, his voice brightening with interest. “You’re quite right, of course. It would make more sense to…query the experts, I expect, than to go back to Pennsylvania and kick that garden shed apart. That is, until we’re armed with some ideas. A little knowledge, anyway.” He looked at me. “Is there much knowledge on the subject, Mrs. Finlay?”

  I shook my head. “In the last century there was a man named Albert Einstein. He came up with something called the Theory of Relativity, which is in part about time.” I broke off helplessly. Was relativity really about time? “He was a genius,” I went on. “Some people say he was the greatest mind in centuries. And there’s another man, still living, I think — a man in a wheelchair, terribly disabled. He wrote a book called…”

  I stopped. What was it called? And what was his name? “Hawking,” I supplied suddenly. “His name is Stephen Hawking, and people compare him to Einstein. His book about time is suppose to be…I think it’s supposed to take Einstein’s time theory even further. We could probably find it in the library.”

  “You have a library?”

  I knew he meant a private library, the sort with floor to ceiling bookcases, mahogany paneling and family portraits.

  “The public library,” I told him. “That’s my plan, actually, or part of it. To go to the library and do some research.”

  “Are there many books on the subject, do you suppose?”

  “Some, I’m sure. But there’re probably many more articles and scientific papers than actual books.”

  “Oh, yes. I see,” the Colonel replied with heavy irony. “And these articles and papers can be found at a library in a resort? Just like that? I would have thought they would be archived at universities or colleges or wherever it is your scientists congregate.”

  “Articles and papers can be found on the internet. And we can access the internet at the library.”

  “Internet. What is that?”

  Suddenly I began to laugh. How could I explain the internet, or computers, or any of this at all? Even if I could, it was absurd, the two of us researching theories about time and time travel. I kept thinking of all the math and physics that was involved in stuff like this, and I knew that we’d make more headway in the garden shed than we’d ever make in a library.

  I bit my lip and studied my fingernails, but I couldn’t stop giggling. And then the Colonel got it.

  “You have a point,” he said drily. “Clearly, we are that desperate.”

  *****

  I decided we would begin our research the following morning, which would give me time to prep the Colonel for modern libraries, computers and the internet. Unfortunately, we had no computer of any description at the cottage, but we did have one thing that might be useful, and that was Lila’s old, manual Olympic typewriter. After a frustrating search I found it buried in the coat closet behind the box of books Lila told me about earlier, and resurrected it on the kitchen counter. Typewriters are as related to computers as hang gliders are to space shuttles — but still, they have keyboards. If there is any trick at all for Making It in Twenty-First Century America, it is this: first, learn the keyboard.

  And after exclaiming over the machine for several minutes, the Colonel began to do just that, gingerly typing out his name on a sheet of paper while I tried to explain the concept of artificial intelligence this dusty old keyboard was supposed to represent, how it could link us to the rest of the planet, and what the internet actually was. It was a rusty, creaking sort of beginning, but I don’t think it mattered. He was getting the idea.

  Later that afternoon, I handed the Colonel an old spiral notebook of Lila’s (which contained a grocery list, a recipe for chowder, and a phone number with Phillip Olson’s name beside it), and gave him a ballpoint pen.

  Einstein, the Colonel wrote. He had a large, flowing script, I noticed, and after he wrote Einstein, he raised the pen from the page, studied it, then returned his focus to the paper. Hawking, he added under Einstein’s name. Then: Theories of Time. Wormholes. Search library for Hawking’s book, Einstein’s work. Related topics.

  “It occurs to me,” he commented off-handedly, his eyes still on his paper, “that this may take some time.”

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  “I could be here a while.”

  In fact, he could be here a long while, but I didn’t mention that. I didn’t need to.

  “I had hoped to go home sooner rather than later,” the Colonel continued presently, “but realistically, I suppose that’s not possible.”

  His composure was an act of will. T
he moment he remembered his children, his desire to return had become heart-breakingly urgent. But he was right. It wasn’t going to happen tomorrow or even next week, unless luck struck us blind from the heavens.

  However, I couldn’t bring myself to actually say that. “Let’s reserve judgment until we do a little research,” I suggested instead. “Tomorrow, after the library, we’ll have a better idea what we’re facing.”

  “And if it appears my return will take longer than we had hoped?”

  “You’ll need a disguise,” I told him, getting straight to the point. “If this takes weeks instead of days, wandering around questioning professors and poking in libraries for an indeterminate length of time, then you’ll need to disguise yourself as a twenty-first century native.”

  “You already knew this, didn’t you?” he remarked quietly. “It was part of your plan. The other part.”

  “Plan B,” I said.

  “You were waiting for me to realize it.”

  I was silent.

  “I quite understand,” he went on, “that I should not draw undue attention to myself while I am here. To do otherwise, I suppose, might prove awkward.”

  “It would be best to cruise below radar,” I told him, “so no one has an excuse to ask for your ID.”

  “My what?”

  “Identification. You’re clearly British, so official types would expect passports or green cards or citizenship papers. Even a driver’s license of some sort.”

  “Green cards? Driver’s license?”

  “Which you don’t have. Although,” I mused, “we might, at one point or another, decide to have them made.”

  “Made,” he repeated.

  “Counterfeited,” I elaborated.

  It hit me then what an enormous undertaking this was. Not the physics-of-time part, which we already knew was insane, or even the matter of manufacturing green cards and other salient papers. What staggered me was the challenge of guiding the Colonel through the mammoth complexity of modern life. I could not imagine where to begin.

  Think about it: If someone mentioned September 11th, for example, the Colonel would simply look blank. Who on the planet doesn’t know the words “9-11” or “Twin Towers”? Or what a Kindle is, or e-mail or…well, you get the idea. To create an effective disguise, the Colonel would need to know a little bit about a whole lot of things — more than two hundred years of things — and somehow, I’d have to make up for it.