THE
UNINTENTIONAL
TIME TRAVELER
Everett Maroon
Booktrope Editions
Seattle WA 2014
Copyright 2014 Everett Maroon
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No Derivative Works — You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.
Inquiries about additional permissions should be directed to: [email protected]
Cover Design by Greg Simanson
Edited by Danika Dinsmore
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to similarly named places or to persons living or deceased is unintentional.
Print ISBN 978-1-62015-207-2
EPUB ISBN 978-1-62015-303-1
DISCOUNTS OR CUSTOMIZED EDITIONS MAY BE AVAILABLE FOR EDUCATIONAL AND OTHER GROUPS BASED ON BULK PURCHASE.
For further information please contact [email protected]
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014902728
Table of Contents
COVER
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT PAGE
DEDICATION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
EPILOGUE
MORE GREAT READS FROM BOOKTROPE
For Emile and Apple,
and all of their someday adventures in time.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I appreciate all of the support from other writers I’ve received for this project, including in no discernable order: Susan Jane Bigelow, s.e. smith, Kyle Jones, Jesse Kuiken, Riley MacLeod, and Malinda Lo. Special thanks go to Danika Dinsmore for her insights during editing and her ability to host a pep talk. Perennial thanks go to Lea Mesner for her coaching and enthusiasm. Other thanks go out to Top Pot Doughnuts in Seattle and the Colville Street Patisserie in Walla Walla for sustaining me with pastry while I wrote copious drafts of the story. And of course I have to thank Susanne Beechey who is a terrific life partner and a quietly effective motivator.
CHAPTER ONE
I FIRST JUMPED back in time on September 22, 1980, just a few weeks into high school, only I didn’t realize it straight away. Time travel isn’t supposed to be possible. Besides, I like car engines and the trees that line the streets in my neighborhood—stuff I can touch, not crazy shit like physics or magic. So I just ignored my experience until it became more important for me to face reality than pretend it wasn’t happening. At least that’s how it seemed as I was being chased through a dusty farm town, wearing shoes so thin I bruised the balls of my feet. Hallucinations shouldn’t hurt.
Nope. It was a regular day at first. I woke up from my incredibly annoying alarm clock, which of course alerted King, our Golden Retriever, that he should burst through my bedroom door and lick me all over the face until I smelled like rancid dog. He followed me down the green hall like usual, standing behind me even when I whizzed into the toilet, lest, I don’t know, he miss out on any of my fun. He and I didn’t even notice anymore that the sink was wrapped in rolled up towels, held in place with duct tape. It had been that way since my parents had started letting me use the bathroom by myself.
I had epilepsy, see, which meant that on a surprise basis I lost consciousness as the neurons in my brain decided to start firing like a bunch of hyperactive kindergarteners hearing the recess bell. Problem is when they’re misfiring that way all my regular stuff like walking, brushing my teeth, or pretty much anything else would stop, I’d lose control, fall over, and start twitching. But like the padding over the hard surfaces around the house, I’d gotten used to having seizures, even if I wasn’t happy about them.
Sometimes—maybe half the time—the “episodes” gave me a tiny bit of warning, mostly by screwing with my sense of balance. The ground around me would drop out from under me, like a ship listing hard to one side. Watch me do this impression of the Titanic, folks! Or my own private earthquake. I mastered the art of quickly sitting down and putting my head between my knees, before I would fall over into humiliating twitchiness. Before the darkness could collapse over me.
In the kitchen that special day, my mother sat staring out the back window, surrounded by the orange flower wallpaper she’d hung a few years before. She drummed her fingers on the round table built by my father and me. There was a glob of varnish on one side that I liked to feel when I ate my breakfast, because it was smooth and irregular, and the wood underneath was more yellow. As usual, Dad had left the paper folded open to the comics section and put it next to my cereal bowl. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I didn’t read them anymore. I’d moved on to the X-Men and the Fantastic Four. Anyone with super powers, really. I wasn’t choosy.
“What do you have after school today?” asked Mom, still looking out toward the poplar trees behind our house. They’d turned bright yellow, but hadn’t started littering the lawn yet. It would be my job to rake the leaves when they fall. Joy.
“Nothing. I mean, hanging out with Sanjay, but nothing else. Why?”
Jay lived across the street from me. He was one of a very few people I knew who never teased me about my seizures, but we’d known each other since preschool. He was kind of an outcast, too, just because he was Indian. We had some stupid kids in our school district.
“There’s a new study at the hospital for children with epilepsy. I enrolled you in it.”
“A what?” I didn’t feel like any extra studying, so I hoped this wasn’t what she meant.
She turned to me. Her usual sad eyes looked bright today.
“They’re experimenting with a new process to see if they can cure some cases of epilepsy.”
“A process” didn’t clear it up for me. I envisioned the taffy-pulling machine in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.
“Is it a new drug?” I was on my sixth different pill. Most of them didn’t stop my episodes, but two of them were particularly awful. Pill Number One gave me delusions that I was a doctor, even though I was still a toddler at the time. Mom had found me behind the living room sofa, cutting at myself with a razor blade, announcing I was doing “surgery.” Pill Number Three made my extremities feel mushy and heavy all the time. I tripped a lot back then, which made for a lot of yuk yuks at my expense. The other pills just didn’t work all that well, but I definitely was not a fan of Pills Number One or Three.
“No, it’s like they have a new way of looking at your brain waves, and
changing them. Dr. Barett told me about it.”
Dr. Barett, my neurologist, was fresh out of some big name medical program, top of his class, said the nurses. He was nice and extremely fit, but he seemed to like nerve cells more than people. I wasn’t surprised that this juicy new experiment to fix brain waves was his suggestion. But “changing” brainwaves sounded . . . intense. I nodded though, since Jay and I could hang out any time we wanted, and forgot about the appointment until I came home from school, when Mom hustled me out the door, jingling her car keys in irritation, like they were a cow prod instead of a device used to ignite our Ford’s engine.
The first part of the study session was familiar to me, because every month since I could remember I’d sat in a similar oversized earth toned vinyl chair and let some nurse apply blobs of cold putty all over my head. The nurses smelled like soap and antiseptic and I tried not to inhale their breath as they hovered over my face. They took a long time to attach the long, thin wires all over my head. Unlike the nurses I had for my monthly checkup, these two women didn’t talk to me while they worked. I wasn’t sure if I liked the quiet or not. Finally I was ready for all of the electricity in my brain to be scratched out by a machine that looked like one of those boxes that measured ground tremors. Then for half an hour I sat as still as a scared rat while they watched the patterns of my broken neurons.
The second part of the study was different, longer, and involved the head of the study, Doctor Dorfman. He was a man with thick sideburns and gorilla hands, sending electrical signals to me to see if he could change how my brain responded. I could ruin the test if I moved so much as a pinky toe. I tried to come up with all of the ways that staying perfectly still could benefit me, but after two minutes had only listed Buckingham Palace Guard and mime pretending to be dead.
I sat frozen for something like ten minutes, which was a sure-fire way to drive me up a tree. Nothing like telling a guy to stay still to make him need to move as much as possible. My left elbow started itching, and my right foot was in full pins-and-needles mode. The glob of putty above my left eye oozed down my forehead as slow as a slug, or at least it felt that way. I tried to see the clock on the wall ahead of me, but with my glasses safely tucked away on the white counter behind me, I couldn’t make out the position of the hands. It was just as well; knowing the time would probably have made me obsess about how much longer I’d be stuck in the chair.
A metal click and then dull hum came over the PA, but I stayed still.
“How are you doing, hon?” asked Cindy, the lab technician. She had bright red hair not to be found in nature, and said everything through a smile. I liked her immediately.
My father had always said, “Smile and they never know what you’re thinking.” So I worried I shouldn’t trust her, for all of her grinning like a Cheshire cat. But since she’d asked me something, I answered her.
I hadn’t even spoken yet when the seismograph thing set up next to me went wild, scratching out thick, dark lines on the paper. Alerting the world: It’s alive!
“I’m okay. Itchy, and I think my right foot’s asleep.”
“Go ahead and scratch if it’s not your head, and shake your foot a little.”
I dug at my elbow through my shirt, which didn’t cure the itch, but it would have to do. I couldn’t dig under my sleeve without upsetting the wires that trailed from all over my head. I pounded my foot on the floor, trying to startle it enough to wake up. Scratching and flopping my sneaker around, I am so cool.
Without thinking, I reached up to stop the glop on my head from getting in my eyes. I knew better than to touch anything other than the tip of my nose, but once I’d started moving itches popped up everywhere, screaming for attention, and I forgot myself.
“Oh, hang on there, bucko,” said Dr. Dorfman, who’d come into the room from behind me. He put my hand down on the armrest. His touch was heavy and cold; his hand a hairy giant on top of mine.
“Don’t mess with the wires.”
I took a breath and relaxed, having heard this a million times before. He walked over to the machine, running his hand over his sideburns. A long strand of connected paper had piled up in the basket next to the small monitor, and he bent down low to snag the printout in the middle until he had a ribbon of it to examine. Cindy came out from the next room.
“There’s the abnormality,” I heard him say to her, pointing at the paper in a few places. “Let’s run one more test since he’s still hooked up, only this time I want to make a change to the stimulus.” They walked away, talking, and I was free to sneak in a scratch at whatever needed attention. At the moment, nothing bothered me. My body never cooperated. It didn’t demand much when I was allowed to deal with it.
The doctor was back at my side, talking loudly to me as if I had hearing problems, not a seizure disorder. He was a lot older than my regular doctor, though in Dr. Dorfman’s defense, my regular doctor was like a Calvin Klein model. Dr. Dorfman had gray streaks clumping together at his temples. Cindy said his work was the Rosetta Stone of neurology research, whatever that meant. I liked him enough, though nothing about stones seemed cutting edge to me. Weren’t rock tools invented by cavemen?
“Okay, Jack, we’re going to do just one more test. It’ll only take a few minutes.”
I nodded, sighed, and waited. Always with the “few minutes.” A buzz zipped along my spine, which caused me to jerk a bit, and the machine roared.
I lost all sense of the room, the wires, the cold putty. In a flash of painful light I was on a hillside, in mid-step, running up a dirt trail, holding something in my hand. I wanted to know the shape of it, but couldn’t figure it out. I had the impression that I held it a lot. Something felt wrong with how I was running, too, as if the effort it normally took to lift my feet had been recalibrated.
“Do you notice anything?” asked the doctor through the microphone in the other room. I blinked, saw the pale green walls around me and the fuzzy metal clock on the far wall. I was back. But of course I hadn’t left.
“I saw something,” I said. With each passing second, I felt less sure about where I’d been. Like a dream fading away.
“Can you describe it?” he asked, panting a little at the end of his question. He creeped me out.
I told him, feeling foolish, about the hill and the dirt path. A weird image came to me just then, that I had been wearing strange shoes. Leather moccasins, maybe. But I lived in these red Converse high tops. Why would I think of moccasins? Where did I even learn about moccasins?
He wrote down what I said, turning off his microphone partway through. I could see him through the observation glass, talking with Cindy. This would be a good time to know how to read lips, I thought. He stepped back into the room after a couple of minutes and told me I’d done a good job, clapping a hand on my shoulder. His palm took up all of the real estate I had there, but I sat there rigid. I wasn’t sure why I felt the need to be tough.
Cindy unhooked me from the machine; I was grateful to end transmitting all my brain waves to everyone in the room, even if people couldn’t exactly read my mind from the printout. She wheeled over a tray, and dabbed a hand cloth into a steel bowl of warm water. Wiping most of the putty off of my scalp and temples in silence, I noticed she wasn’t smiling anymore. I looked at a picture of Olympic swimmers on the wall in front of me. What the hell was this poster about, and why was it here, of all places? Were we supposed to aspire to athletic greatness even if we could have a seizure in the water? Finally I was done and Cindy nodded to me that I could leave, so I wandered back to the waiting room.
The doctor was talking to my mother, who was hunched over an issue of People. She looked up at him and waited for him to update her.
“Jack was great today,” he said, “and I’d like to see him next week if you can bring him in. I think we can isolate the source of his seizures.”
“Oh, really?” she asked, looking me up and down. “He’s such a good kid. It’s just terrible that he has to deal with these
episodes.” She paused. “I’d hoped he’d outgrow them by high school.” Meet my son, the sweet failure.
“Mom,” I said, in an attempt to get her to stop.
“It’s okay, Jack,” the doctor said, now grinning, except he looked kind of in pain. It was clear he didn’t make facial expressions all that often. “I’m really glad we got you in this study.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond, so I shrugged. But I was worried.
***
I’d almost forgotten about the weird sensation from the first day in the study. I stuck to my routine of Alert Against the Episodes. The rest of that week I took my little blue pills with even more care about timing, and watched where I was walking, as if I was extra prone to a seizure. Maybe my wonky neurons knew their days were numbered and would try to act up more than usual. I stared at my bike after coming home from school the rest of the week after the study session, refusing to pedal even to the edge of the subdivision. The dirt hills and slopes a couple of miles out of town where there was new construction in progress would just have to exist without me racing over them. I could feel little ninjas in my brain, getting ready to attack me the moment I lowered my guard.
Even though I stayed on watch against an ambush, I still had my routine to get through. Saturday morning as usual I stripped the padding on my bathroom sink and threw the towels in the laundry. One week was all it ever took for them to get moldy and the tape to disintegrate, and then little sticky gray strings would hang off of the towels, clinging to my hands and clothes. Not exactly the fashion statement I wanted to make. And that tape glue was wicked hard to get off my skin unless I wanted to bathe in lighter fluid, which was a bad idea for obvious reasons. So I tried to keep things tidy. After I’d repaired my bathroom I wandered around the house looking for tasks to do. It made it easier to ask for movie money if I could point to things I’d already accomplished.
The Unintentional Time Traveler (Time Guardians Book 1) Page 1
