by Alex Myers
"I thought we made a connection."
"A connection? If you’re feeling something, maybe it’s gas.”
"From the first moment I looked into your eyes….”
"Oh please, Mr. Riggs, I don’t have time for false sentimentality."
He wasn’t used to working this hard. Bedding Miss Nancy, was quick and clean, with no strings attached, plus he even got a break on the rent and fresh bed linens. This one, though, was an unpredictable pain in the ass, as well as the owner’s daughter. Then he perceived a glimmer of hope—she had remembered his name.
"So are you trying to tell me that our conversation was run-of-the mill, mundane, quotidian . . . something that happens all the time in your day-to-day?”
“And what if I am?” she asked.
“I wouldn’t believe that for a second, ma’am. I knew you were going to talk to me that day before you ever started walking my way. Now, what I didn’t expect was that you were going to talk to me just to feed your ego."
“There you go again. I know the word ‘ego.’ It’s Latin for ‘I’ and there’s a French word ‘egoisme’ meaning ‘second self,’ but I’ve never heard it used in a sentence like that.”
“Maybe you’ve been hanging out with the wrong kind of people.”
"Cocky, aren’t we?" she said with a smile and once again came closer. She was dressed as if she had been riding, wearing tan riding pants, a billowy white shirt, and knee-high, dark leather boots.
When she moved, she seemed to float rather than being propelled by her shapely long legs. She sat on a mound of dirt that Jack had piled and dangled her feet into the hole he’d been digging. She never once took her eyes from him and smiled a closed-mouthed smile, more like an upside down frown, which Jack found irresistible.
"Why haven’t I seen you lately?"
"Because I haven’t been here. I’ve been on another buying trip for the company."
She danced between being the most open and closed person Jack had ever met. He continued. “Did you get a chance to talk to your father about me?”
“I might have mentioned you to him, in passing. I need to find out a few more things about you first.”
"I missed talking to you," he said, wiping the sweat from his forehead. "I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought about you."
"Funny you should bring that up,” she said slyly. “I've thought a bit about you too. As a matter of fact, on my trip to Washington this past week, I met another man who had gone to William and Mary. Strangely, he said he’d never heard of you."
“It’s a big school.”
“Not that big. He looked to be about your age; he’d even studied the sciences. He claimed to know everybody, yet your name was not familiar to him.”
Jack looked away, shaken by her words. The two of them were silent, the breeze the only thing that passed between them.
"Quitting time," the new yard foreman yelled in the distance.
"Are you going to be honest with me, Mr. Riggs?"
“Somehow I feel my future employment is riding on how I answer your questions.”
“If your ambition is to continue to dig ditches, then I’ll walk away and that will be the end of it, for me and the company. I wouldn’t expect that you would ever advance beyond being a day laborer.”
“And does that mean between us, also?”
“First of all, there is no us. We are merely acquaintances, if that. And yes, as I stated, ‘for me and the company.’”
Jack knew she wasn’t bluffing. A woman who had a wall around her the way she did wouldn’t tolerate anything less than honesty. “Do you trust me enough to take a walk with me?” he asked.
CHAPTER 12
February 1856
A Phone
“I suppose I can trust you as far as the river. You don’t seem like a murderer, but I don’t want to get too far away,” Frances said.
Jack lagged a step or two behind. “Great, maybe I can wash a little of this mud off.” There was a part of him that wanted to tell his story—the real story, but that would be suicidal or at least get him fired.
They walked in silence to the edge of the river. Even though it was only February, lush green grass covered the bank and Frances found a place to sit as Jack waded into the water to his knees. She sat with her legs pressed against her body and her arms crossed over them, as tightly wrapped and closed off as any woman Jack had ever seen.
“Man, this water is cold,” Jack said as he washed the mud off.
“This time of year, of course it’s cold. So, what is your story, Mr. Riggs?” Her voice was both taunting and impatient. She looked away, but not before a look of irritation crossed her face. She hugged her knees, closing up further. Her silence and attitude weren’t making it any easier for him.
“I haven’t been completely honest with you.”
“That’s an understatement! What are you trying to hide? What’s your secret? Are you running from the law?”
“It’s nothing like that. I wish it were that simple.”
“Wife and family?”
“No . . .”
“Then what is it?” she said. She stood, walked to the edge of the river and kicked a spray of water in his direction.
He had been wearing his sport coat to work in, using it for warmth more than looks. The coat was soaked so he took it off and tossed it on the shore. His iPhone slid out of his pocket and landed a foot in front of her.
Her face grew serious and she got down on her haunches to look at it. “What’s this?”
“Something I wish you hadn’t seen,” he said stepping out of the river. He swiped his face with his hands, stood on the bank, and looked down at her. He couldn’t think of a good lie, so the truth seemed the only way out.
“What I’ve got to tell you is the most inexplicable thing I’ve ever had to tell anyone in my whole life. It’s a story so unbelievable that I’ve been trying to come to grips with it myself for the last two weeks.” He looked at her for signs of encouragement. “Would you please look at me?”
She glanced at him briefly, then her eyes traveled back to the foreign object. This time more sternly, she asked, “What is this?” She stood turned his way but kept her arms crossed.
“Frances, I’m not from here.” His voice was fragile and shaking.
“That’s obvious!” she spit out.
He worked off his nervous energy by pacing. “I don’t mean from Virginia or even New York. What I’m trying to say is that I’m from a place so completely different from here—a place so foreign, so alien—that we dress differently, act differently, heck, even think differently. I have never been more out of place in all my life.”
She looked at him as if he were a salamander who had just risen up on its hind legs and started speaking. “Say it!” An electrifying shudder reverberated through her.
Jack knew he was on the edge of a huge cliff and one wrong move, one wrong word would change his life forever. Every day he’d expected to wake up and find that this had all just been a dream. For the first week, he’d fought his situation and this past week his thoughts had turned more to living in it. He was starting with a clean slate—no, with more than a clean slate; he had a slate that had many of the answers already on it. He could make a difference here—a big difference. But he would need help.
He grabbed his phone and with all the bravery he could muster and said, “I’m not from 1856.”
CHAPTER 13
February 1856
He Tells Her
“There, I’ve said it. I thought if I didn’t tell someone soon I’d explode.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Self-exploding?”
“No, you utterly ridiculous man. What do you mean, you’re not from 1856?”
“Just what I’m saying. I’m from the future, and this is the past—over a 150 years in the past.”
She stood with her mouth open, alternating between staring into his eyes and down at his phone without saying a word
. She was searching his face for the truth. After what seemed like forever to Jack, she finally said, “And how did this supposedly happen?”
“I’m not really sure. I’ve been over that a million times myself. There was a thunderstorm—really severe—and a bolt of lightning....” He put his phone on his flat hand and came to stand next to her. She gave a slight jump, not knowing what to think of the black shiny object. He pressed the button on the top and the phone started to boot, with the silver Apple logo in the middle of the screen.
The object absorbed her. She watched in silence, clearly enthralled, and gave another slight jump when the screen and all the app icons came into view. “It’s colorful,” she said.
He stood shoulder-to-shoulder with her so she could get a better look. “It’s my phone.”
“Phone?”
“A personal communication device . . . a machine like a telegraph that allows you to talk to other people.”
“A talking telegraph? Where are the wires?”
“There are no wires; it’s wireless.”
“Talk to other people? Talk to me with it.”
“Well, I can’t. I can only talk to other people who have one.”
“Let’s see you talk to one of them.”
“I can’t because in 1856, no one else has one.”
“Pretty convenient trick. You have a device that can talk to other people, but you’re the only one who has such a device.”
“Well, that’s not all it can do.” He hit the first MP3 he came to;, it was one Ashley had loaded by Psy called ‘Gangnam Style’ and music began to play over the phone’s small speaker.
Frances Sanger recoiled as if from witchcraft. Then she looked startled. Then she looked impressed.
“And that’s just one of the other things it can do. Watch this . . ..” He started the camera app, took a picture of her, and then pulled it up on the screen.
“A picture? A color picture?” She was visibly astounded.
“Plus look at all these books.” Jack showed her his iBook’s library.
“A whole book?”
“I have hundreds of books, whole books, every word of them.” He closed the library and started a science program called “iElements” that had an interactive periodic table in it, and then the 2012 World Book Multimedia Encyclopedia. He closed it and scrolled through pages. “Look at these. These are apps, err, applications . . . little programs that can do things. I’m not doing a very good job of explaining it.” He closed the phone down, shutting it completely off to save battery life.
After a long pause she asked, “Is this some kind of time machine or something? Is this what you used to come back in time?”
“No, there are a million of these things around and no one has ever reported time travel to the Genius Bar. I’m sure this had nothing to do with it. I was just driving in a car—a, um, horseless carriage—in a big thunderstorm. Next thing I know I woke up here in the middle of a field and everything changed—really changed. Maybe it was the thunderstorm or a weird energy field; for all I know it was this bump I took to the head. This past weekend I traveled back up to the place where it happened. There was even another thunderstorm, but nothing. I really don’t have a clue.”
They sat next to each other without speaking. She seemed to be absorbing and understanding everything he’d said, and Jack took that as a good sign. That and the fact she wasn’t running for help.
“So what’s it like?” she finally asked. Her voice was softer now, almost pained.
“I spend half my time thinking I’m out of my mind, and the other half that I’m crazy. All I want to do is get back. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, and there’s no one I can go to for help.”
“I don’t mean that. What’s life like in the future?”
“Oh, that,” he said. “It’s hard to explain. All the little things I used to take for granted would set your time on its ear. I used to live in what you call Seatack and we called Virginia Beach, and this couldn’t be further away from what it’s like in my time. That’s why I’m dressed so strangely.”
“So, it is really different?”
“My gosh, so completely different—it’s like magic.”
“Magic? I don’t understand,” she said.
“Let me find a way to explain . . . OK, how about this? In the history of mankind, if you think of all the advances that the human race has made, more have been made in the last thirty of my years than in all the previous years combined. And I’m talking fire, the wheel, everything.”
Frances’s eyes grew dreamy. “I remember the first time I saw a player piano. It was like—“
“Magic, exactly!” he said and watched her smile. “This pace of accelerated growth continues.” He seemed to drift as he reminisced. “There are horseless carriages we call automobiles. They travel three or four times as fast as the fastest horse can run—some even faster. They can travel hundreds of miles without stopping. There are machines that fly through the air carrying people and things all over the world. Some are so big they can hold over five hundred people at a time. We call these things airplanes or jets. You’ve seen my telephone. In my time, nearly everyone in the civilized world has one. You can talk to nearly anyone, anywhere in the world, instantly.”
“Slow down. You’re giving me way too much information way too quickly.” She licked her lips, purposely pausing to slow the conversation. And then she asked, “Those are all things. What about the people? Have they become more magical? Are they different, kinder, wiser?”
He thought a minute before answering. “If you’re asking if people are more aware—sure. Most everyone, at least here in America, finishes high school and quite a few go on to college.”
“That sounds wonderful.”
“We’ve set foot on the moon, for Christ’s sake.”
“The moon?” she said incredulously.
“The moon. That happened before I was born.”
“So people travel back and forth to the moon?”
“Ah, no. We haven’t been back there since I was a baby.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. Why?”
“At first we went to prove it could be done. It cost billions of dollars. I guess there wasn’t a compelling enough reason to go back.”
She looked away and didn’t speak for a while. Then she said, “But with all these wonderful things, surely people don’t go to bed hungry? And war? War has to be a thing of the past?”
He grimaced. “It’s worse than ever.”
“And that magical stuff still doesn’t make a difference?”
“Not really, and I guess that bothers me too,” Jack said. He noticed that Frances had turned his way and seemed as open and as understanding as he had ever seen her. “I can’t comprehend how everyone says they are outraged by war—yet it still happens.”
She seemed confused. “Why does it still happen then? Does everyone just say what they think everybody else wants to hear?”
“You almost have an excuse nowadays. Compared to my world, you’re totally isolated.”
“Isolated? What do you mean by that?”
“The most horrible thing in the world could be happening one hundred miles away and you wouldn’t hear about it for days—possibly weeks—or years if it’s on the other side of the world.” Jack sat aching with a pain he’d felt for a long time. In spite of his knowledge, in spite of his intelligence, in spite of his opportunities, he’d always felt so ineffectual. He felt like he had never made any difference. That the world wasn’t a better place because he was in it.
Frances put her hand on top of his and patted it. His pain was still there, assuaged a bit because of her nearness. He felt his eyes begin to well up. His strong emotions were caused not only by the topic of their conversation, but also by his lifelong, self-imposed isolation. The emotions of the last two weeks now overwhelmed him. He felt his throat constrict and before he could control it, a tear rolled down his cheek. He tried quickly to wipe it but not before she sa
w it.
Clearly, Frances Sanger was not used to seeing a man cry. At first, she shrank from Jack, but then stiffly she moved closer and put her arm around him. After a while she spoke. “I believe you. Do men in 2012 go around crying all the time? Why are you so upset?”
“I wasn’t crying. That was something in my eye.” Jack looked at her, thoroughly pissed at himself for letting his guard down, and he could see the consternation on her face.
“You have to understand,” she said. “In my family, crying is considered a weakness. Women are taught not to cry. And men! Why, my father would cut off his arm before he’d cry.”
She took her arm away from his back and then replaced it. She looked for a handkerchief and when she couldn’t find one, she offered the hem of her dress for him to wipe his eyes. “I’m so confused,” she said. “Crying means you’re weak—but you don’t seem weak.”
After a while, Jack cleared his throat and pulled himself together. “I believe,” he said, “that each of us is put on this earth for a purpose—however big or small. I’ve ignored my purpose . . . I feel like I’ve been given some gifts. I also feel like I’ve been running away from them my whole life.”
“It seems to me that with all this thinking about things, you’re going to drive yourself crazy. Why don’t you just do the things that you need to do?” Frances asked.
She walked away from him. When she turned, she looked as though she’d made her mind up. “I’ve always been a person of action,” she said, “and when you see a problem, you need to do something to fix it. If you are going to find the answer as to what brought you here, you’re not going to do it by torturing yourself. While you’re here, you need to be here— mind, body and soul. Do you not realize how you can use your knowledge of the future to help the world of today?”
He lifted his head and looked into her compassionate eyes. “This is so screwed up!”
“Wait a minute . . . how much do you know about my time now?”
