Synchronic: 13 Tales of Time Travel

by Michael Bunker

  1990

  It felt like she fell into her thirteen-year-old body from a height, but in reality, she probably arrived as she had every other time she’d made a jump: smoothly, with no sense of change at all.

  Except every part of her body felt different. She had become so used to tautness, to muscles that were poised and inexhaustible at all times. To be in the slack growing body of a thirteen-year-old girl was wrenching.

  She had timed her arrival for the middle of the night, when she knew she would be in bed. The room was darkened and she lay under a layer of sheets. Her eyes traced the outlines of the blinds on the window and tried to find a recollection of them. She calmed her breathing. This was her old bedroom, she was sure of it. She felt around frantically for the time device in the bed. But it was gone. Her purse with the hundred thousand dollars was gone, too.

  So—her actions had changed the timeline. She wasn’t a time traveler anymore; she’d simply merged with her younger self, and would now re-live her life. Paul must have followed through on his threat, and gone back in time and never invented the device—or just never told her about it, or never became friends with her in the first place. Not surprising. Her efforts to get money to rescue her mother had been for naught, and worse, had contributed to Paul’s decision to go back in time and prevent her from ever obtaining the device.

  Or was that even possible? She’d gone back in time to way before their meeting at the track; if that meeting now never happened, maybe Paul didn’t go back and change anything. In fact, if everything went as she hoped, her life would be completely different. Maybe she would never even meet Paul.

  Which would explain why she didn’t have his device.

  Is that what happened? Would happen? She had no idea.

  What had he meant he invented the device because of her?

  Sarah felt carefully down the length of her body. She wore the tank top and flannel pajama bottoms that she would have been wearing when she was thirteen, not the dress she had worn to the track. Perhaps the device didn’t allow for the transfer of any “things”—only the device, and the traveler? Why had she never noticed this before? She cursed her own stupidity. All of her test trips had been short ones—to an earlier moment when she’d been wearing the same clothes, holding the same things—and because the device always moved along with her, she’d just assumed…

  But when she went back in time three days to Portland, she had arrived wearing her warm-up suit, not the jeans she had been wearing in Vegas. She had been so frantic to get out of there, she hadn’t processed this critical fact. So it was true: you can’t take things with you. Oh God, she had been so stupid. All her efforts to get money had been a complete waste from the start—and made Paul believe the worst about her.

  Paul. She might never see him again.

  But she was here, and she knew what was going to happen tomorrow, and that was all that mattered.

  Sarah rose and staggered in the direction of the bathroom, navigating by patches of light and dark, trying to remember which way to go in the dim array of doorframes and rooms containing sleeping bodies. Down the hall to the right? She pressed her hand against the hallway wall, tried to feel her way by grooves and bumps, her night mind grappling with a flood of conflicting body memories.

  She flicked on the light in the bathroom and nearly fainted at the sight of the blue walls, wood finishing, blackened grout, and peeling paint, so familiar yet so out of place and time, like an impossible caricature of itself. She looked in the mirror and reeled as if she had been punched in the gut. This creature with dark eyebrows, plump, pimpled skin, and wild, thick hair could not be her; the cheekbones she had become accustomed to seeing had been buried beneath youth.

  There was an insolence and an innocence to this image in the mirror. The sardonic undertones and lacerating self-judgment that decorated her adult affect had vanished, but so too had the confidence and the determined set of her jaw.

  She felt her mind and body start to spin out in strange grief at the loss of her thirty-three-year-old self, but she clutched the edges of the vanity, looked directly into the mirror, and smacked herself hard across the face.

  “Get ahold of yourself. You’re still old,” Sarah ordered under her breath. She probed her memories. They remained intact. She was still her thirty-three-year-old self. But then she felt the surge of something else: a willful, hopeful, impetuous, thirteen-year-old self. She was undeniably that girl too. A girl whose life would in so many ways end tomorrow. Had ended, she corrected. But perhaps not would.

  She wanted to sink to the floor and sob for her thirteen-year-old self.

  But she didn’t. Instead, she held on to the sink and stared fiercely at herself, like she would do again in a few years to sort herself out when she crawled into the house drunk, wallowing in sorrow and self-hate. Had done, she corrected again.

  She was here to change tomorrow. And everything.

  On the way back to her room, she slipped into Charlotte’s room. Her sister lay in her toddler bed, a tangle of blankets and stuffies around her, her blond curls matted across her forehead with the sweet sweat of babies.

  Sarah exhaled a sob and sank to her knees, pressing her lips against Charlotte’s soft, fat cheek. She wanted to crawl into bed with her and snuggle up to her sister’s warm, breathing body.

  “I won’t fail you this time,” she promised.

  * * *

  Sarah woke early the next day. Her mother and Jake got ready for work as expected: her mother wan and resigned in her pale green diner uniform, Jake agitated and hopped up in his jeans and tool belt. Sarah analyzed Jake’s moves coldly through a twenty-year lens of hindsight. She saw rage and contempt in the way he expected her mother to serve him, in his posturing around the kitchen, in his arrogance with his boss on the phone. How had she not seen this before?

  She recalled the fear and confusion of her nine-year-old self when her mother had introduced Jake as Sarah’s new father, and he’d moved into their house with his collection of guns and swaggered around as if he owned it and them. She had thought then that that was just what dads were like. She had commenced a campaign of appeasement, shifting ghost-like around the house at her chores, never talking back, trying in vain to avoid sparking his fury or mockery.

  But perhaps a killer is always easier to spot when there’s a body.

  The day proceeded as it had twenty-two years before. She fed Charlotte, cleaned the kitchen, and played with her tiny sister with damp palms. The run-down squalor of their home jarred her. Had she known then that they had been so poor? Or had everyone lived like this?

  The appointed hour came. The hour when Charlotte had declared that she wanted to go out and play in the sandbox. The hour before their driveway would be filled with emergency vehicles scattering red, blue, and white light over walls and windows. When emergency personnel, neighbors, her mother, and Jake would all be pointing their finger in blame at her. When they would find Charlotte’s small body in a small bend in the river half a mile downstream. When Sarah would want to die herself.

  Sarah proposed playing Strawberry Shortcake or Care Bears; she offered Lucky Charms and Barney. But Charlotte kept running at the patio door, exclaiming “Sanbo, sanbo,” before collapsing by the door in a minute heap of rage.

  So they went outside. Charlotte alternately tossed sand out of the sandbox, charged at the creek, and punched Sarah in the leg, in the obnoxious willful way of an adored toddler. Sarah shrank further inside herself as she watched Charlotte’s behavior. Had she been angry with her sister? Tired? Envious? Had any of these factors contributed to her decision to leave Charlotte alone in the sandbox?

  The river slid relentlessly past, a murky torrent of accusation.

  Or had it simply been about a boy, and teenage invincibility?

  The phone rang. Sarah still didn’t remember who it was she thought would be calling. She didn’t answer the phone.

  Charlotte played on in the sandbox, her candy-floss blond hair ripp
ling in the breeze. Sarah watched with a pounding heart, expecting that at any second fate would intervene and lightning would strike, the river would flood, or terrorists would come and carry her sister away.

  But none of that happened. Evening fell and her mother and Jake came home, and Jake strutted around the kitchen drinking a Budweiser, grabbing Sarah’s mother’s ass, and spouting about Saddam Hussein and the fact that the US should invade. And Charlotte lived on. And nobody knew that anything had just not happened. Sarah bit back sneering comments regarding the Persian Gulf War. Because, of course, it hadn’t happened yet.

  Instead of feeling relief that she had saved her sister—or rather, not been the cause of her sister’s death—Sarah felt profound terror. She had changed the timeline. Charlotte hadn’t died that day in August. But what if timelines were more robust than that? What if Charlotte was destined to die at Sarah’s own hand? What if it was only a matter of time?

  * * *

  As the days and weeks passed, and the Montana summer gave way to the reds and yellows of autumn, Sarah became more and more obsessed with Charlotte’s safety. She stood behind Charlotte while she walked, cut her food into tiny portions, and used Clorox on every surface in the house.

  And then there was the matter of her mother.

  Nancy Williams worked her tables in the Maryview Diner each day beneath a palpable mantle of exhaustion, tolerated Jake’s slights and cuffs because that was what she had come to expect from men, and went about her household tasks and mothering with a quiet edge of desperation. Sarah had wanted money to enable her mother to get away, to go to school, to have options. But that hadn’t worked out.

  Sarah had thought that saving Charlotte would change Jake, that he wouldn’t be so angry, so liberal with his punches. But she saw now that she may have been wrong. Perhaps Charlotte’s death had only exacerbated Jake’s deep-lurking fury and disdain for the world. Perhaps her mother’s death was still coming.

  * * *

  Sarah worked up the courage to approach her mother one night as she bent over the sink, finishing the dinner dishes. Jake was out bowling, and Charlotte was in bed. Sarah had already checked on her and then checked the patio door to ensure it was locked.

  “Mom, are you happy with Jake?”

  Her mother hunched her shoulders and twitched as if she had been shot.

  Her voice was sharp. “Sarah, that’s none of your business.”

  “It is my business. I don’t like the way he pushes you around.”

  “It ain’t your business. Since when did you become little miss worldly and hoity-toity? You see what it’s like with two mouths to feed. Jake’s all right. He’s the best we got. Don’t you go ruining it for me now.”

  Sarah’s adult sensibilities wanted to take her mother by the shoulders and shake her. The child inside her slunk away wounded. Perhaps she couldn’t change everything.

  * * *

  Sarah started to work out, train to be a long-distance runner, and study harder. She joined a bunch of brooding, socially awkward boys in the hunter-training course offered in their school. She would become a doctor and a bodybuilder, and she would learn how to use guns.

  Despite her chronic siege of apprehension, it was odd and yet exciting to engage in the activities of the teenage years without the saturation of grief and guilt that she had carried heavy on her shoulders the first time through. She occasionally let up on her Charlotte vigil to attend dances, hang with friends, and go out with boys. Always, she would rush back to the house before too long, tangled in a deep skein of guilt for something that hadn’t happened.

  It was strange, this living twice. She had thought she would have been better at it—that released from the undertow of tragedy and operating with adult knowledge and attitudes, she would be happy. But she discovered that redoing something doesn’t totally release you from the experience and memories—the reality—of the first time. She recalled the quote that she had posted on the wall of her office when she’d started running long distances: “You have to forget your last marathon before you try another. Your mind can't know what's coming.”

  She had changed the timeline. Her mind didn’t know what was coming. Yet still she braced for it.

  Nevertheless—and she was never sure why; perhaps it was the ongoing effort of playing the role of a teenager and being treated as one, or perhaps it was the chemical soup and biorhythms of youth—her younger self started to assert its dominance. The memories, habits, and confidence of adulthood faded, and she became more willful and reckless. She even allowed herself to feel, tentatively. Boyfriends, and friends that she’d never had, eked out a comfortable existence on the periphery of her life. She drank too much, partied, and made mistakes. She almost became a teenager—just one with a darker and more lengthy past than all of her peers. But she continued to train, study, and practice her marksmanship doggedly.

  * * *

  One night Jake grasped her arm as she emerged, wrapped in a towel, from the bathroom, her blond hair dripping down her back.

  “You better watch it. You’re starting to look like a she-man.” His eyes glittered with the sharp edges of six Budweisers. He had a handgun tucked into his pants, like he did sometimes when he “heard noises” in the backyard and had to protect his property, or spent the evening shooting beer cans off a stump.

  Sarah snatched her arm away and was pleased to see she had knocked him backward slightly.

  He leered at her and teetered a little. “Men don’t like a woman stronger than they are.”

  “I guess that’s their problem, then,” she said. She wanted to wipe that shit-eating grin off his face, wrench him to the floor, and break him. She wanted to eliminate any chance he would still kill her mother. There was no reason for him to now. He wasn’t deep in a tailspin of grief and alcohol. Charlotte was alive. Sarah repeated this to herself over and over.

  “Watch your mouth, girl,” he said.

  “Watch your ass, man,” she mouthed silently as he turned away.

  * * *

  The day that Jake had killed her mother passed without incident, and aside from occasional bouts of temper and a black eye delivered to her mother on Mother’s Day in 1993, Jake mostly saved his fists for bar fights. Sarah’s mother kicked him out a few times. But he would simply go and sit on the picnic table in the driveway and smoke—sometimes for hours—watching the house, until his cigarette was just a faint amber glow in the night and her mother felt bad, or scared, and let him back in. And Charlotte grew into a precocious and gorgeous drama queen, alternately adoring and raging at Sarah in the chronic, grating ebb and flow of sibling life.

  Sarah sucked in a small hollow swell of comfort. Maybe she had changed enough. Still, allowing herself to feel too much relief brought strange panic attacks and nightmares. So she was careful.

  But as the ghosts of her mother and Charlotte faded, and their real live selves became more firmly entrenched in Sarah’s mind, another ghost arrived to flit around the edges of her consciousness whenever she drifted in and out of sleep, daydreamed, or started to hope.

  Paul.

  Paul, with his witty, serious, and attentive ways; his deep-blue eyes and slender muscled body that had made her gasp when she finally saw it unclothed. He trailed her like a phantom through all her dates, all her encounters with boys. He had been so tender and passionate that one night. She nearly wept from wanting him, her mind a volatile cocktail of womanly wants and teenage hormones.

  Paul wasn’t dead; he existed somewhere. But at this point in time, he was only fourteen to her eighteen.

  He invented the device because of her. What had he meant by that? And then she had stolen it from him and betrayed him. There was no hope for a relationship. Except that he didn’t know what she had done. Might never know.

  She tried to convince herself that her mind had manufactured him—that her hazy adult memories had embellished him, bestowed him with astonishing looks and a sparkling personality, and tricked her into thinking she had
cared for him. But despite her best efforts, she couldn’t erase the curve of his jaw or the taste of his lips from her dreams.

  1995

  When the time came to select a college, Sarah found herself accepted with entrance scholarships to each place she had applied.

  She made noises about not going. About staying in Maryview with her mom and Charlotte… and Jake. Her mother snapped.

  “You have one chance to get out of this godforsaken life, and you are damn well going to take it. Don’t you dare live my life.”

  Her mother had probably meant “don’t you dare live a life like mine.” But there was the double meaning. For two lifetimes now, Sarah had been living three lives: her own, her mother’s, and Charlotte’s. It was probably unsustainable.

  Sarah chose the University of Oregon, with plans to go to med school at Oregon Health Sciences University, clinging to a scrap of hope that perhaps she could find Paul in a few years. But what would she say? “Hi, we knew each other in a different timeline. I stole your time travel device, and I’m really sorry. By the way, I think I love you.” She barely knew anything about his past, where he grew up, how to find him. Why had she never asked him? She knew he had done his master’s and Ph.D. at Portland State. But right now, he would still be in high school.

  She left Maryview with trepidation. But Charlotte was eight, and her mother was alive. Perhaps she could live her own life now. For the first time.

  2003

  In her second-to-last year of med school, Sarah took to studying in the physics department at Portland State. It required a commute. It was ridiculous; she felt like a stalker.

  She had tried to look Paul up during her undergrad. But there were too many Wendlands in the phone book, and the Internet hadn’t yet sufficiently evolved to the point where almost anyone could be found anywhere. She needed Facebook, Google, Twitter, or LinkedIn. She should invent one of them—and then, when she was a billionaire, find Paul.