The Unintentional Time Traveler (Time Guardians Book 1)

by Everett Maroon

That afternoon Jay found me in the driveway oiling the chain on my bike.

  “Whatcha up to?” he asked, craning his head around. He was as much a motorhead as I was into beetles.

  “Just keeping things lubed,” I said, rotating the pedals. I clicked the tin can, watching drops of oil fall onto the chain.

  “Sounds hot,” he said, licking his tongue over his lips, and we laughed.

  “Want to go for a ride?” he asked.

  “Nah, I have homework still. But you could come over for dinner. Mom’s got a chicken in the oven.”

  Jay was a secret omnivore, as his whole family was vegetarian. He was always happy to devour meat products.

  “I could handle that,” he said, sniffing the air.

  “You can smell it from that far away?”

  “Nope,” he said. “Just your pits and the oil can. But I thought it was worth a shot.”

  ***

  The Monday after the seizure study, I inhaled my cereal and washed it down with a small wavy glass of orange juice, ignoring the newspaper. Grabbing my lunch sack off of the kitchen table, I scrambled out to the street, knowing I was late for the bus. The driver, Miss Glover, never waited for anyone. We were lucky she even slowed down enough for students to climb aboard. She’d clearly chosen an occupation that would put her in close contact with people she detested, just so she could challenge us twice a day.

  Hearing the door bang shut behind me, my mother told me to have a good day. Through the screen door she was grayed out, slightly ghostly. I turned and saw the bus lurching down the hill. It would be a race to the corner. Would she break the speed limit in the subdivision? Her gunning engine answered me: Oh yes. It’s on.

  Our school bus was a Thomas Conventional model, built on an International Harvester chassis. Bright yellow, with a short, wide snout, it had a rear-loaded diesel engine with a lot of horsepower but not very good torque, and so it struggled on any serious incline. I pounded up the broken sidewalk, hoping I wouldn’t trip or slip on any wet leaves. I figured everyone on the bus was watching me, but I didn’t spend time worrying about what I looked like. I flew through the last ten yards, beating Miss Glover to the corner. I did a little dance as she opened the door.

  “All right, Inman,” she said, “stop celebrating and get on.”

  I walked around the front of the bus as the red lights clicked on and off. I’m sure I looked terrific panting up the steps, trying to catch my breath. I got ready for my classmates to start heckling me.

  In the second to last row, I took the only empty seat and set my bag between my feet. This was my usual spot, because although we grumbled about too many rules at school, we were predictable as hell. Jay flashed me a “hey” from the last row. Woulda been great to sit next to him but The Nosepicker always flicked his nonsense there, so we avoided that spot at all costs.

  “Spaz,” said Kiernan Maloney. He was a stoner, in my grade, which he accomplished by getting held back one year. It must have been a shock to him that toking up behind the football field bleachers wasn’t a fast path to the honor roll.

  Kiernan had fire-red, thick wavy hair, and freckles covered every inch of his head. Maybe in another school he would be the target of bullies because of all those freckles, but in my school, he did most of the bullying himself. I closed my eyes and pretended not to hear him.

  Sanjay poked me in the shoulder from the seat behind me. “Glover really had to slam on the breaks, man. Way to run.”

  “Thanks,” I said, turning around to face him. My heart was finally starting to settle down in my chest.

  “Did you do the algebra homework last night?” I asked.

  “Yeah, why?” Sanjay fumbled in his backpack and pulled out his tattered algebra textbook. Catholic schools like ours held onto things like math books way longer than the public schools did—in my textbook were the signatures of previous owners going back thirteen years. The more basic math books were funny because the word problems gave their age away, with crap like, “Timmy needs 37 bolts for his wagon. If Tommy has 2/3 of the bolts Timmy needs, how many bolts does Tommy have?”

  At some point our teachers relaxed about how carefully we handled our books, which we protected only with a brown paper grocery bag, taped to the hardback covers. Paper bags fell apart over the course of the school year, though, eventually disintegrating and revealing how beat up the book really was underneath. Jay’s algebra text was missing part of the back cover; mine bared the inside of its spine every time I opened it, and it smelled like wet dog.

  “I can’t figure out number twenty-four,” I said. Only the odd-numbered problems had answers in the back.

  Kiernan leaned across the aisle, his white teeth showing against the tan polka dots on his skin. “Are you two queers cheating? You wouldn’t be cheating, would you?” His undone tie dangled; Kiernan always waited for a nun or teacher to force him to finish dressing for class.

  “Do you hear something?” asked Sanjay, keeping his head turned away from Kiernan. I stifled a giggle. Kiernan huffed at us and sat back, and Jay rolled his eyes at me.

  We hopped off the bus, walking to the oversized front doors of the school.

  “I thought high school was going to be so great, but it’s just the same crap,” Sanjay said.

  “Why should today be any different,” I said.

  Two-thirty took forever to roll around because I couldn’t stop thinking about returning to the brain study after school. I counted down the hours. None of the doctors before Dorfman had held out any kind of hope for me recovering. My mother had never gotten over her seizures, after all, but at least her medication kept her seizure-free, if not kind of tired all the time.

  By the time I sat back down in the squeaky green vinyl chair, I’d mostly dismissed my weird hallucination, which is what I figured my experience was. Since it was a trick of my own mind, I thought it wouldn’t happen again. Brains were all just a gross mass of chemicals and electricity, and at least outside in the world, lightning didn’t strike the same spot twice.

  CHAPTER TWO

  MOM HELD ONTO my arm so I couldn’t leave the waiting room.

  “You’re such a strong boy,” she said. I translated this into “You’re as frail as a frozen petuna.” She often told me the opposite of what she was really thinking. She’d managed her own epilepsy her whole life, and was always on the lookout for new medications to get my seizures under control. When I was younger she often broke down crying about how she’d “made me wrong,” but other than that she didn’t really talk about her own childhood or her brain stuff. We didn’t have those conversations anymore, the ones with her blue eyes holding onto mine, searching for the defect inside me. I never knew how to respond to her desperation. I wondered if she’d ever talk with me about how she feared I’d get lost to my bad brain waves, but so far she hadn’t brought it up.

  “Mom, I’m almost fifteen. I’ll be fine.”

  I reached over and squeezed her wrist, telling her I’d be back soon, and handing her an issue of Time Magazine. Something with a politician on the cover.

  I waved as I walked out of the waiting room with the nurse because my mother still seemed nervous for me. Soon enough the machines would show the doctor that my heart was pounding, cause nothing beats having your body betray you to all the other people in a given room. Maybe by the time I was hooked back up to the chair, I would have calmed down.

  “Okay, Jack, we’re going to do the first part of the test now. Stay as still as possible. You know the routine.” Cindy flashed me a quick grin. She was a Cheshire cat who’d convinced herself that she was just a nurse. I wondered who else was in this experiment. How many of us knew the routine? Were they all teenagers like me? Did we all have the same type of epilepsy? I had no idea. Other than my mom, I didn’t know anybody with a seizure disorder.

  As soon as Cindy started pressing putty onto my head, body parts that needed scratching sprang up like thirsty weeds. I resisted, trying to imagine I was at the beach with warm ocean wate
r splashing over my feet. I could be a mean raft surfer. I didn’t realize I’d started smiling. I relaxed my muscles and listened to the needles on the machine scribbling out my faulty brain waves. If the doctor minded me falling asleep in the test, a nurse would wake me up. But sometimes they wanted to catch me napping; I wasn’t sure why.

  Some time later the recording stopped and the Dr. Dorfman piped up over the intercom. He had a new moustache today that made him sound different.

  “It’s time for the next part of the test. You okay in there?”

  I popped him a thumbs up. He had also gotten a hair perm since our last session and now looked like a cross between Wolverine and a standard poodle—two otherwise reasonably attractive beings that should have never combined into one.

  “Good. Okay, here we go, Jack,” said Dorfpoodle.

  A light started flickering on off, on off, on off, in rapid succession. Blinking lights were known to cause seizures, but no medical folks had ever used them on me.

  Tingles along my arms. I tasted a ham and cheese sandwich in my mouth, as if I’d just swallowed it. What the hell? I racked my memory for when the last time had been that I’d eaten anything approximating ham and cheddar cheese, but that was crazy, since I’d been sitting here for hours and it’s not like anybody tastes something in their mouths that they haven’t consumed in six months. Slow down little brain.

  I wanted to say something to the doctor—stop the test—or the technician—something is wrong. But I couldn’t open my mouth or move. The world jolted to the left, like the whole planet had crashed into a massive, interstellar iceberg, and then the room around me was gone. Replaced, somehow.

  I tried to adjust to the very bright sunlight. I was moving, fast, still feeling like I was at an angle to the ground. Running, that’s what it was. I stopped and grabbed onto the thing next to me to steady myself and my stomach. Maybe it was that stupid Monte Cristo sandwich memory. Monte Cristo sandwiches are greasy and gross, anyway.

  I sucked up huge swallows of air, and then I told myself I was stupid, because hallucinations don’t need to breathe.

  Adjust, adjust, I told myself. I stood up straighter and looked around. I thought I’d been clinging onto a tree, but examining it more closely, I saw it was a pole. I was outdoors, on a hillside, the same as the last time. Maybe the pole had been a branch before, but at some point it had been whittled down and sanded, the kind of woodworking project I could see myself having. There were depressions in the wood under my thumb. I looked and saw a name carved into the side: Jac.

  Jack is my name. It occurred to me that I should try pulling the wood from the ground. It popped out easily, and then I knew, like I’d only recently forgotten, that I had held the pole in just this way many times before. Calluses had formed on the insides of my fingers and palm where I gripped the pole. Not a pole. A stick. It was a walking stick. My walking stick.

  I’d been running over a well-worn trail of dirt with tall yellow-green grass on either side. I wore soft leather shoes and no socks. Moccasins again. This was one consistent hallucination. Go me.

  Behind me was a clearing, and past that a tiny village at the bottom of the long hill. Small wooden buildings bleached from constant heavy daylight lined up in a square, with small gray stones serving as a thin walkway between the structures. Most of them faced each other, built around the dusty courtyard. It was either early morning or late in the day, with the sun and moon passing each other in the sky. Birds chirped excitedly to each other but I couldn’t tell if they were waking up or squawking their goodnights. I mean, because I didn’t know anything about birds. Comics and car engines, okay, and bicycle gears, I had a sense of those, but chirping things and actual wildlife were not my forte.

  I got a little more oriented. The scene felt slanted because I was on a steep hill. Don’t anyone call me Einstein, I thought.

  I searched the space around me for other people. For the most part I had caught my breath. I’d never had a dream before where I had any sense of control over it, but here I was making decisions. So I trudged up the rest of the hill, feeling my quads resist the hard-packed soil of the narrow trail. Larger pebbles pushed against the tender soles of my shoes. If I was going to have a hella intense mind trip, I might as well check out the scenery.

  “You’re tardy,” said a woman coming out from a rambling, large yellow farmhouse on the left. “You worry me when you’re late.”

  In the small town there couldn’t have been more than two dozen buildings, but that was crowded compared to this. Up here was only this house, a bright red barn with white accents behind it, and expansive fields, until the land for the next farmhouse began, miles off in the distance, the silo next to it appearing only as big as my thumb.

  Water trickled somewhere, but I didn’t see anything like a river or waterfall. I looked for cars but all I saw were empty dirt or gravel roads connected around the courtyard, and one wider dirt road heading south out of town. The road collapsed on each side, the result of narrow wheels cutting into the soft ground on a regular basis.

  “Sorry,” I said, turning back to face her. I figured I should walk over to her, if we were going to have a conversation.

  “Sorry, who?” she asked. Well, wasn’t she precious?

  She put one hand on her hip and stared at me. She seemed young, or at least younger than my mother, but she also looked more worn out, with ruddy skin and a streak of gray hair running from the top of her head into a tight bun at the back. She had the same build as my mother—lanky, but also with the slightest hump at the end of her neck where it met her shoulders, as if she’d spent a lot of time bent over.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” I said.

  “Sweet Jackie,” she said, a small smile spreading on her lips. “Come on, I need your help with the heifer.” She paused. “Did anyone follow you?”

  Paranoid much? I shook my head and she led me around to the back of the house. A few strands of her hair had fallen out around the bun, so it looked a bit like the frayed apron strings that hung down at the back of her waist. We walked past a few busted wooden buckets lying in the dirt and what I figured were bushel containers, all of them empty and dropped carelessly on the ground.

  Nothing was familiar. And that was stupid of me anyway, since I was just in my head and not anywhere real. But this dream-mind gig didn’t seem to be based in any memory of mine.

  I thought about the valley—no green street signs, no traffic signals, no fire hydrants, no curbs, no telephone booths. I had a nagging sense that I should know why those things weren’t there, but now I was having trouble finishing my thoughts. It was just so bright out here—

  I woke with a start. Doctor Dorfpoodle was in my face, holding my eyelids open and checking my pupils with a penlight. I was surrounded by his massive sideburns. I could smell his perm. Perm didn’t smell so good.

  “Jack, there you are,” he said, sounding worried.

  “Yes,” I said, trying to push myself into the back of the chair to get some space.

  “You had a seizure,” he said, putting the penlight away. Maybe I should call him Captain Obvious. His hands free, he began to stroke his beard. “We need to put you under observation for a few hours. But the good news is, I think we’ve found the source of the abnormality.”

  “I don’t think I like ‘put you under.’ But this is good news?”

  “Well, you’re clever. Yes, it’s a positive development.” He didn’t seem as happy as he should be.

  He didn’t know how annoying he was. But because I still felt out of sync with gravity, I figured I shouldn’t tell him.

  “Put your head between your legs and take deep breaths,” he said. The nurse unhooked the wires from my head one by one as I sat with my knees up to my chest, my heels digging into the thin foam seat. Of course I’d learned to do this when I was three, but I pretended his suggestion was brilliant neuroscience I’d never heard before. I played with the worn out corduroy fabric at my knees.

  The doctor
looked at me. “I have to talk to your Mom, but you’ll see her soon. We’re just going to admit you for a little while. It’ll be okay.” He walked out and I waited to hear the door shut. I thought about my world history homework that I hadn’t started yet. Now Mom would have to go home and come back to get my text book. Sorry, Mom.

  “So I seized?” I asked Cindy.

  “Yeah, I’m sorry, fella,” she said, washing my scalp with a warm sponge. I waited for a fake smile from her but it didn’t come.

  She made a few more passes over my hair, and then another quick rinse in a small plastic bucket. Usually the nurses didn’t take much care to get the putty off of me, leaving me to scream in my own shower with a gallon bucket of shampoo and a loofa, but Cindy was working to get most of it out on her own. I wondered if she was actually nice. Maybe I should bother talking to her after all.

  Also, I had questions. “I was out a long time, huh?”

  “Oh no, dear, just a second. We were in here right away and you woke up on your own.”

  “A second?”

  “Sure, hon, just fifteen seconds total. You’re totally fine.”

  I felt like I’d been gone for at least five minutes. I wondered if I should tell anyone.

  ***

  At home, in my room, I couldn’t stop thinking about the hill and the woman in the apron. I could recall with clarity the detail of the flower pattern on the fabric, the smell of the earth, the sounds of chirping bugs, the crispness of the air and how it felt inside my lungs. I’d run up that hill, pounding away and stabbing at the ground with my walking stick. Why would a dream in a seizure be so thick with details? I tried to focus on the US flag that hung on my wall, the pattern of stars, one for each state. But I kind of looked through it instead of at it.

  I’d had weird non-memories invade before, all tied to grand mal seizures I’d had: a tool shed on fire, feeling the heat radiating toward me from the burning supports of the structure; getting to Contestant’s Row on The Price Is Right and not knowing how much to bid on a curling iron and a year’s supply of hair dye. In another seizure-dream I’d rowed across a broad, foggy lake in a leaky aluminum boat. Somehow, this experience was different. For starters, I’d never had the same false memory twice.