Synchronic: 13 Tales of Time Travel

by Michael Bunker

  That word. She’d use it every once in a while. Reset. I didn’t know what she meant. Anyway, she graduated a year early. They couldn’t really keep her.

  Once she got out of high school, she came back to life a little. She talked more. I was the only high school friend she stayed in touch with. She said I was her constant. How would she say it? “Sandy, you’re the one thing that never really changes, no matter how many times I go through this.” Go through what? I’d ask. “Never mind,” she’d say. “You never believe me.” How could I not believe her if she never told me?

  She went to community college for a while. You have no idea how embarrassing that was for kids from my high school. Catherine could have gone anywhere. Yale or whatever. I went to Northridge. She took a couple classes at night and worked. Secretarial stuff—she was a doctor’s receptionist right before I graduated from college. She still lived at home.

  And then all of a sudden she had money, lots of money. She moved out of her folks’ house and stopped going to school. Her parents asked me about it. “Is Catherine into drugs? If it’s drugs you have to tell us so we can help.” Drugs. It was okay to get help for that. Betty Ford and all those guys had just gone into rehab.

  So I go to her and say, “Catherine, what’s up? Where’s it all coming from? Your parents are asking questions and you’re gonna get your ass thrown in the Betty Ford clinic or something.” She smiled and said, “Yeah, I’ve got it all right here, let’s go.” Big accordion-type folder right there next to her purse, like she’d known I was coming.

  So we drove down to Catherine’s parents’ house, and she spread it all out on the dining room table because it was the only space big enough, and she had bank books and account statements and all this financial stuff. She’d been playing the stock market. She was already worth more than a million bucks. I just said, wow.

  Her dad understood all the paperwork, which was good because I didn’t. He said, “How’d you do this?” She said she had a good memory. Meaning what? She just shrugged and said she’d kept an eye on some companies over the years.

  Some of the stock buys went back to when she was in high school, the year she changed so much. She’d put her babysitting and birthday money into the stock market, forged her dad’s signature to get around the under-eighteen thing. Boy, was he mad. She said, “How mad can you get when I’ve made so much money?” I think it still took a few years for him to start asking her for stock tips. She was never wrong. Never.

  Catherine bought this house, right on the water, just when the market was at its lowest. I loved coming here to visit. I can’t believe she left it to me. I just can’t believe it. We lived further inland. Now that I think about it, I was still living there when you and I started working together, right after Gene left. Catherine told us when to buy our first house, and then when to sell it, but Gene wouldn’t listen and he handled the money. We got hosed like you wouldn’t believe.

  After the divorce, you bet I listened to her. He screwed me out of everything and I had to fight all the time to get my support payments on time. Catherine’s advice was the only way I got Josh through college.

  I know, I talk about it too much. You’d think by now I’d be over it. She told me not to marry Gene, and I did it anyway. She said I married him every single time and it never worked out. I thought she was talking about karma or something, Catherine said woo-woo stuff all the time.

  I always wondered why she didn’t go out or anything. At first I thought maybe she was gay, and I told her she could tell me if she liked girls, I’d never tell anyone. This was when being gay was like the worst thing. She said, “No, I just can’t go through it again.”

  I said, “Dave didn’t break your heart that bad, did he? Let it go. We were fourteen.”

  That wasn’t it, she said. “Last time I decided not to get involved and it didn’t hurt so much when I reset, so this time I thought I’d do the same.” Reset. I didn’t ask by that point, it was just Catherine. We’d stopped talking about it.

  Anyway, a couple nights before she turned fifty, Catherine called me up and said can I come over the night before her birthday, have dinner. Sure, why not. Empty nest, not doing anything. I’m not dating, that’s for sure. Done with dating. Catherine was alone and she seemed pretty happy. Painted a lot. See the one over there? That’s me. She painted it when we were thirty. Yes, the nude. She got me drunk and talked me into it. Anyway, that’s my story.

  Catherine never painted those kids, though. I never even saw her draw them after high school. Then that last night before her birthday, the night she and I had dinner together here, she pulled out these boxes. And then she started pulling out portfolios, one after the other after the other, all the way from when we were sixteen to that afternoon. “You always asked me why I draw these kids,” she said. “I keep drawing them because I’m afraid I’ll forget what they looked like. Right around the beginning of 2011 I start drawing them a lot, more than usual, because if I reset again I have to start over. I want them fresh in my mind.”

  I said, “You used to talk about resetting, and I don’t know what that means. I mean, I know what it means, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She smiled kinda lopsided and said I wouldn’t believe her but it didn’t matter, either way she’d be gone tomorrow. I started to get a bad feeling and said, “Okay, then tell me.”

  She said they were her kids.

  “You don’t have any kids.”

  “Not this time,” she said.

  I got so frustrated! She’d said stuff like that for years, since we were teenagers, since just before she left high school. “What the hell happened to you, anyway?”

  Then she told me the weirdest thing: she said she went to bed the night before her fiftieth birthday and woke up on her sixteenth. She said it’d happened over and over again. That’s what she meant by “resetting.”

  Well, what the hell am I supposed to say to that? “Like… like one minute you’re fifty, and it’s 2011, like now, and the next minute it’s 1977 and you’re sixteen? How do you pull that trick?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I wish I did because this is the seventh time I’ve had to go through this and I want it to stop.”

  And I’m like, “Why would you want it to stop? You get to be young again just when your body starts falling apart and life’s getting really shitty! Why would that be a bad thing?”

  I was saying it, but I didn’t really believe it. Life doesn’t work like that. But she was my best friend, my oldest friend, and I was scared stiff worried for her at this point. I thought, I better just keep her talking.

  Catherine banged the table so hard all the drawings jumped. “Because of them,” she said. “I was stupid the first few times and kept trying to get my kids back.”

  It went like this: The first time it happened, she left Margaret and Jessie behind. She found their father, I don’t remember his name, and tried to marry him again. But she was twenty outside, and fifty-four inside. She wasn’t the same person he’d fallen in love with. She didn’t get past the first date.

  So she started drawing the two kids she wouldn’t have that time around and married this other guy instead, and they had the twins, Amanda and Tim. I guess twins ran in his family or something.

  I don’t know where she got this stuff. She was obviously really creative, but if I’d known this was what was going through her head this whole time I would’ve worked a lot harder to get her some help, I mean, almost thirty-five years of this.

  Then she had Maya with this guy from Santa Cruz one time through, and Aaron with a half-Puerto-Rican guy from New York the next. Emily was her last, with someone named Louis, who she said was the one she’d loved most of all. I guess that’s why I remember his name.

  Every time she “reset,” she’d draw the kids she left behind so she wouldn’t forget them. She said it’d been so long, she was starting to forget what Margaret and Jessie looked like. God, that just gives me the shivers.

  I kind
a laughed and asked her, if she got married five times was I ever a bridesmaid? She said I was her maid of honor each time. Sometimes the matron. Once, she said, I was pregnant out to here.

  I was freaking out by then but I stayed calm on the outside. I was thinking maybe she started drinking before I got there or something. I guess it must have shown on my face, because she said I never did believe her, and she’d told me five lifetimes already.

  “Maybe I’ll believe you next time,” I said.

  Catherine looked so sad. She said, “I don’t know what happens when I reset—if I die in the life I’m leaving or if it all just disappears like it never happened or what. And I don’t know what happens to you, like if you just kept going all those other times in a different time line. I hope so. I don’t want to think you or my kids just disappeared because I reset.”

  She asked me to hold still. She started drawing me holding my glass of wine, and I finally noticed the pile of textbooks on the end table. Calculus, biology, Spanish, history, chemistry.

  I got really creeped out. I decided to stay the night because, Jesus, something’s broken in her head. Maybe in the morning I could get her into treatment or something but right then the only thing open was the ER and we were sure as hell not going there. She didn’t seem violent or even all that agitated.

  So I said, “Time for bed, honey, let’s put you down and I’ll stay in the guest room. Tomorrow’s your birthday. I know it’s early but you’ve had a little too much. It’ll be better in the morning. I’ll clean up out here, okay? And then we’ll go out for birthday dinner tomorrow, the sushi place on the pier.”

  She said she wouldn’t be here in the morning.

  I said, “Sure you will, honey, I’ll be right here with you, nothing’s going to happen. No one’s going to make you reset, or whatever.”

  She said, “If I’m right, I won’t reset this time.”

  Wow, what a relief, I’m thinking, maybe it’s something that comes and goes. So I put her to bed. I just wish I’d stayed in the room with her. I wish…

  Hand me the tissues, please?

  So.

  So I put her to bed, and I sat on the back deck. It was a gorgeous night. I finished the last of the bottle of wine. Catherine had really, really good taste in wine. Taught me a lot.

  And then I went to bed.

  When I woke up the next morning, she was dead. The coroner said it was sleeping pills, way stronger than you can usually get, but Catherine had a lot of money. Stupid amounts of money. She could get her hands on anything. She drank a bottle of vodka on top of it. She hated vodka.

  There was a note. She said she was sorry to leave me with this mess if things actually kept going after she was gone. She didn’t believe in suicide, but thought maybe if she died just before she turned fifty it’d stop the reset. That word. She said she wanted to make sure I was okay, just in case I was still here, and to look in her old accordion file.

  That’s where we found a copy of her will. Her parents were already gone and she was an only child. She left me everything. The house, her stock portfolio, her savings… everything. I’m set for life.

  It was awful, the way they picked me apart at the inquest. I wish you’d’ve been here. No, no, that was a once-in-a-lifetime trip, Janelle, don’t you dare feel bad. Catherine left behind plenty of evidence to clear me—she put stuff in places I could never have gotten to. She’d planned this for a long time. The executors finally gave me the keys two months ago.

  I just gave my old place and everything in it to Josh, and got myself all new furniture. I think his wife’s pissed off because I didn’t buy a fancier place for them, but she can go to hell. My grandbaby Tomas has a trust fund now. He’ll get it when he turns twenty-five. I don’t think it’s good for kids to grow up with piles of money and everything handed to them. I don’t even want him knowing the trust fund’s there. And if Josh needs help I’m here and he knows it.

  All Catherine’s stuff is in storage, except the boxes. Well, I got out the paintings and put them back up, too. I don’t know what I’m going to do with the boxes. I don’t even know why I brought them home from the storage unit. I just keep thinking about the children Catherine thought she had. I looked through all the drawings last week for the first time. I have my favorites pulled out in a separate portfolio. I might frame them.

  Look at this little round-faced girl in a straw hat. She turns into a beautiful young woman with an impish smile. That’s the one she called Jessie. Looks just like Catherine. And then this little guy, Aaron. What a stubborn face. Grew up to be a handsome boy in his later pictures. He always looks kind of gangly. I think he was still a teenager when Catherine reset. Reset, or…

  I don’t know. I don’t know.

  But this is the weird part, Janelle, the part that just gives me goose bumps. I found this box when I went to the storage unit. It’s labeled “Sandy.” A note inside in Catherine’s handwriting said, “These are so I don’t forget all the versions of my best friend.”

  There aren’t as many drawings in it as there are in the kid boxes, but there’s plenty. In the pictures I’m fat, I’m thin, I’m pregnant, long hair, short hair, dyed hair, with kids, with Gene, after Gene. None of them look like I do now, or like I’ve ever been, but they’re all definitely me. Each one has a little description, like me in a cast with “Sandy’s broken leg” written on the back, or me in a bathing suit with “Sandy in Acapulco” on the back. I’ve never been to Acapulco. Never broke my leg, either. Okay, so maybe she made up a bunch of stuff about me, too, right?

  But then this one. “Sandy with her daughter Chelsea”…

  Oh, Janelle.

  I’ve never told anyone this, ever, and don’t you ever repeat it to Josh. I always wanted to have a daughter, but I had a son instead. I love him, I love him terribly, but I always wanted a daughter, and I wanted to name her Chelsea. I never told anyone that, not even Catherine. Oh, look at how pretty she is. All that curly black hair. My eyes. Dimple in her chin, like Gene’s mom. I wanted a daughter so bad…

  Excuse me. No, it’s all right, I’ll be okay, the whole thing just makes me sad. She was just… she was a really good artist, huh?

  Tomorrow’s Catherine’s birthday. I know she couldn’t have reset like she said she did, but sometimes I wonder if she’s sixteen again, drawing me with the glass of wine in my hand so she doesn’t forget.

  I miss her. I bet I always miss her.

  Well. We should eat. Let’s have dinner out on the deck. You’ve been to Acapulco. You can tell me about it, I’m thinking of going in the spring.

  And I’ll open a bottle of Catherine’s wine. Amazing wine. Really, really good wine. She always knew which years were the good ones.

  A Word from MeiLin Miranda

  “Reset” is based on a recurring daydream (daymare?) in which, like Catherine, I am flung from my current life back into high school. At first, it was fun to think about. At my age, starting over again with a grown woman’s maturity and a teenaged girl’s vitality is an irresistible idea.

  In time, it dawned on me what a horrible fate it would actually be. I’d have to sit through high school again, for starters. But worse, I would lose the life I have now with my husband and daughters, who are the joy of my existence.

  It horrified me. I couldn’t shake it, so I wrote this story to stop the daydream. It worked, but I still can’t read this without crying.

  My main series is a sprawling epic fantasy family saga filled with magic, sexual politics and intrigue set in a Victorian-like world. Its books weigh heavy in the hand.

  By contrast, my short stories are under five thousand words and almost always set in the present or future. They tend toward magical realism rather than straight-up fantasy or science fiction. Though I am considered a pretty funny person, they’re also invariably melancholy. I don’t know why that is. Perhaps it’s some inner melancholy that expresses itself only when the words available are limited.

  I’ve been a writer all my li
fe. I wanted to write fiction but worried about letting anyone see my true self. The writer cannot help but expose that self to the reader, and I was afraid readers would mock what they saw.

  So I went into journalism instead and was miserable. I did it for a long time anyway; at least it was writing.

  In 2006, I died and was revived—a long story for another time. As I floated between this world and the next, along with my anguish over leaving my family came the awful realization that all the stories I had inside me would remain untold. When they brought me back, I knew what I had to do, scared or no. Recovering my health is a fight I’m still waging, but in late 2007 I was well enough to start writing fiction. I dove in with a ferocity that startled even me.

  I’m not afraid any more. The worst that can happen has already happened. If someone doesn’t like what they sense of my heart, I won’t die; they can always close the book (though I hope you like it, reader). I’ll keep writing anyway, until I die for the final time.

  The Laurasians

  by Isaac Hooke

  Horatio Horace, Adjunct Curator of Paleontology at the Museum of National History, was hard at work deep in the bowels of the museum. His team had been extracting this particular specimen for weeks now, ever since the delivery truck had dropped off the huge chunk of sedimentary rock, and in every spare moment Horatio had returned here to his love.

  Ah, paleontology. He wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. Paleontology was like a surgery of sorts: removing a dressing of stone to reveal the fossilized bones of a majestic titan underneath. It was delicate work, and required men and women of a particular bent. The biggest requirement was patience.