by Paul Siluch
This was the first time she had paused to consider: should she follow the former friend’s advice?
There was Michael, possibly the poster child for a martyr husband, in her present, and in her future if she let it happen. Michael, who would give her the world if that could heal her. Michael, who, by helping her, would be hurt the most by her.
Then there was her mother, in her past, and in her future that wasn’t a true future. Her mother, who, no matter how close Cindy got to her during those stays in the past, would never be a mother to her the way she was before she died. Her mother, who seemed so real to her during these visits to the past was actually no more real than an afterimage in Cindy’s life, the one she should be living with Michael.
Michael tried to complete her, to hold her together as well as he could. He tried to make her happy. Her mother, conversely, though through no fault of her own, kept enlarging the gaping hole in Cindy, and every instance they met in the past, continued to tear little holes in her. There was no “complete” when she was with Mom. It was as though each interaction patched one tear and ripped several more in her heart.
But, there was no cure for the malady of yearning. There was no filling an unfillable void.
Cindy wandered down the hall, saying hello to the night clerk, before going out the front door. Once she cleared the block and turned into an alley, she activated the band and slipped to the year 1936, the year Mom was born. She presented herself as an immigrant servant to the family, accepting no payment except for room and board. It was almost as though they recognized some kinship in her - or else a good bargain - and took her in. She threw herself into the role with abandon; this was, after all, her true family, her ancestors to whom she owed her existence. She met relatives who had long passed on before she was born and connected with those she hadn’t known well because she’d moved to Canada when she was so young, and with whom she had lost contact after Mom died.
Cindy considered what an amazing family history she could write with her new insights and knowledge. Perhaps after this last jump she would return to her own time and do a degree in Chinese history. Her temporal journeys would come full-circle. It was a lovely thought.
There wasn’t a whole lot of time for musing, however, given the hard life of a servant and the onslaught of World War II. She was put in charge of the children prior to the outbreak of war, but when Japan invaded and occupied Hong Kong, after an earlier capture of Guangzhou, Cindy felt more like a bodyguard, being responsible for her charges’ welfare, protecting them on the vicious streets of the city, or the untamed countryside of the New Territories should they have to flee there. Luckily for her, there were just two children to be looked after: her mother and her mother’s cousin - the uncle, whom she had taken to lunch a scant fifteen hours ago, was but a young boy then.
Life was precarious and food was short during those years of war and occupation. The family owed much of their survival to Cindy and her stamina fueled by growing up on a twentieth century North American diet. She dodged soldiers, scouring the streets for any food and necessities, often giving up her meager allotment of nourishment to everyone else. As the weeks wore on to months, then years, the strain weakened her body. By pure will and serendipity did Cindy survive the war, pulling through a debilitating case of pneumonia and avoiding being murdered or raped. In fact, the entire family - her grandparents, mother, a great-aunt, a great-uncle and her own uncle - endured mostly unscathed through a miraculous whim of the universe. Some former neighbors and family friends were not so fortunate. There were days when Cindy thought they would never smile again nor know the joy of living.
Though it didn’t seem possible, eventually, the war ended. The city and its denizens rebuilt bit by bit, and life settled back to nearly normal. Cindy relished the days watching Mom grow up, taking her to school, and seeing her make friends with other children. She grew close to her uncle too, delighting in his interest in science. She had many conversations with him about physics and mathematics; he alone among her family was receptive to her discussions. The grown-ups, even as they valued and cared for her, never acknowledged her intelligence. He believed what she told him with the seriousness of a child open-minded to a trusted adult.
It was almost idyllic for a difficult life but it was not to last. When her mother was around thirteen, Cindy had what she thought was a recurrence of pneumonia until the coughing became non-stop and blood spilled forth from her lungs. Because she’d become almost like family in her role as a nanny to the children, they insisted on taking her to the hospital. She knew their finances were still recovering and resisted until they told her she could no longer be near the children if she didn’t go. The doctor diagnosed it as tuberculosis. Her misdiagnosed wartime pneumonia during the war had really been the primary infection stage of tuberculosis.
It was too late to do anything for her. The war years, and the 70 chronological years her body carried, left her with no strength to fight a battle with the bacilli in her system.
As a last favor, she asked to speak to each of her charges alone for a few minutes. The children came in, one at a time, wearing flimsy fabric masks over their mouths and noses.
With her own mother, Cindy conveyed how she cared for her more than she’ll ever know, and that some day, she’ll have a daughter who will love her more than life itself even if she never says so as a child.
With her uncle, she told the truth about her own life - how one day, physics and math will allow her to do something that was fairytale-like to him then. She pressed an envelope in his hand. He hung on to her every word.
“I will do everything exactly as you instructed,” he said.
Cindy knew he was an honorable person who’ll fulfill her wishes. “It’s been a pleasure knowing you…Uncle,” said Cindy, barely audible.
His lower lip quavered. He bowed to her and left the room. Curse those stiff Chinese customs and curse her contagious illness. She would have liked to give him a hug. She would have liked to give Michael a hug too.
Michael…Oh, Michael, please forgive me.
♦♦♦
It was 7:30 a.m. The curtains held the morning sun at bay, but a few rays peered in around the edges. The phone rang, jolting Michael awake. He stared around in confusion.
“Cindy?”
No answer.
He picked up the phone.
“Mr. Kincaid, good morning. Mr. Lee Kwok Cheung would like to speak with you.”
Michael yawned. “I don’t know a Mr. Lee Kwok…” Then he remembered Cindy’s uncle from lunch yesterday. “Oh wait, I do.”
“I’ll transfer him,” said the efficient voice with a clipped British-Chinese accent on the other end.
“Hello, Michael. I hope I didn’t wake you.”
“Good morning, Mr. Lee. No, no; it’s…er…7:30. I should be up anyway. Looks like Cindy is up and has gone out already. Did you want to talk to her?”
There was a silence.
“No, I wanted to speak with you, Michael. May I come over in a half hour?”
Michael scratched his head. “Sure, Mr. Lee. I’ll see you around eight, then?”
“Yes, around eight. Good-bye.”
Michael looked around for a note from Cindy but found none. He assumed she’d stepped outside for a walk and decided to shower so he’d be presentable when her uncle arrived. In the middle of the shower, he remembered what she was doing before he went to bed last night. “Sunnuvabitch,” he said.
Cindy still hadn’t appeared by the time eight rolled around. There was a knock on the door. Uncle was punctual.
Michael opened the door and shook hands with Uncle who proffered a box. “I brought you some pastries in case you’re hungry.” His English was not perfect, but was far, far better than Michael’s non-existent Chinese.
“Doh-tseh,” said Michael. Thank-you was one of the few phrases he knew. “Please come in.” He offered Mr. Lee the only chair in the room while he sat on the bed. “Cindy hasn’t returned yet, but I
’m sure she’ll love these pastries.”
Uncle looked uncomfortable. “Michael…” He cleared his throat and tried again. “Michael, I’m afraid Cindy won’t be coming back.”
The color drained from Michael’s face. Uncle pulled a thin envelope yellowed with age from his coat pocket, followed by the familiar metal band. He handed both to Michael, neither of them saying a word.
While Michael read the note, Mr. Lee re-lived a scene as vivid as if it happened only yesterday…
He stood next to Cindy, wan and weak in hospital bed. The gray skies outside matched the mood within. He held the envelope that she’d just handed him.
On the thin rice paper were written the words “To Michael Kincaid, Room 117, Sou Sing Hotel, Chuk Yuen. June 20th, 2003.” As Hong Kong continued to be under British jurisdiction, Kwok Cheung had had compulsory education in English in school, enough to recognize the letters, but not enough yet to understand their meaning.
“Promise me, please, that you will deliver this envelope to this place on the exact date written,” Cindy said.
“I will know whom to give it to?”
Cindy suppressed a cough. “You will when you get to that age.”
“Who is this person?”
A tear trickle off her jaw line. She looked surprised as though she hadn’t been aware that she was crying. “You will know by then too. You will have had lunch with him the day prior to the delivery date.” She smiled in sad memory.
Kwok Cheung looked at the envelope in his hand.
“Do you believe me?” asked Cindy.
He met her gaze. “Yes.”
Cindy looked satisfied. “The note inside is for him. And he will understand.”
He nodded.
“As well, in my room, in my personal bag, you’ll find a metal band with dials on it. It’s wrapped in paper on which I’d written an explanation for you in case something like this came to pass. Please safeguard the band for me. When you take the letter to ‘Michael,’ take the band too. He worked on it with me; he’ll want it back.”…
Mr. Lee’s eyes welled as the memory played out in his mind.
Michael looked at Cindy’s handwriting, with its even and mild slant that, except for the slight shakiness of the lines, gave no hint as to what was to come. At first, he could understand what she was explaining, but as he read on, the words began to swim on the page. He couldn’t process words like “tuberculosis” and “dying” and “forgive.” He felt as though all the air, as well as his emotions, had been sucked out of him. His mind went blank.
Uncle dabbed at his eyes with a handkerchief. “I knew about her time travel research. I have not worked on it myself. I believe that it will bring nothing but misery.”
Michael nodded, still mute.
Uncle stood up. “I know you want to be alone with your grief right now but there are some things you need to consider. Cindy made sure the night clerk and the security camera saw her leave the building last night. In case she didn’t make it back to her timeline, she wanted to give you an alibi. You and I can report her disappearance to the police. She will be a missing persons case that will be forever unsolved.”
Michael went through the rest of the week, and the police proceedings, in a daze, his mind unable to get a grip on much of anything around him, which was a blessing as the averted gazes and the whisperings of “poor man” in a tone that transcended language differences would have driven him insane had they penetrated his shell-shocked brain.
On the day before he was to fly home, Uncle took him to a cemetery. He led Michael to a small stone with only a Chinese name and “1949” written on it. Michael had the worst urge to kick the stone and scream in rage at it. Instead, he gave Mr. Lee a hug which he knew broke protocol but he could be excused as a “guai-lo,” an uncouth white guy. To his surprise, Uncle hugged him back, which released his pent-up desolation. He cried as hard as Cindy had after her first time jump, but she was not there to comfort him as he had for her.
After he returned home, the first thing he did was to call the department and tell them the police-report version of the story. The second thing he did was to go to the shed where he took an axe and hacked up the Transverse Entropy Apparatus and the portable armband into a thousand tiny pieces.
When he went back into the house, even though it was a warm night at the onset of summer, he built a fire in the fireplace and tossed “Motherless Daughters” into the flames, page by page.
Ω
About the Author
Since her memory is faulty anyway, Teresa Robeson uses hyperbolized recollections and experiences in creating stories. And what is fiction if not embellished truths? She invites the reader to guess which parts of “Unfillable Void” were based on life and which weren’t. Teresa’s publications and art can be found at www.teresarobeson.com.
Boomerang
by Russell James
“Robbie, what are you so down about?”
Robbie Rainier hadn’t said three words to Nadia since they sat down to dinner in the cafeteria. He gave his broccoli an indifferent shove with his fork.
“I tried not to make a big deal about it,” Robbie replied. “But tomorrow’s my Boomerang Day.”
That’s what they called it at the Bridenbaugh Institute. The last day of your invited stay, the day you walked away from the compound after a year of work, when you returned to join the real world.
“Oh, no,” Nadia said. She brushed her brown bangs back from her eyes. “Your research, it is complete?”
Robbie shook his head. “Is a historian’s research ever complete? Especially here?”
Nadia had been there three months, but no one counted up from their arrival day at the Institute. They counted down, and not with the anticipation of a soldier winding down a combat tour, but with the dread of a death row inmate. Nadia, a 2053 Moscow University graduate, studied the fall of the Roman Empire. Robbie, a Cornell grad, specialized in the Great Depression. They often compared these great economic upheavals in their limited free time.
“This place, it is historian’s dream,” Nadia said.
“Well, tomorrow, I wake up from my dream,” he said. He’d recently grown a full beard to cover the alarming wan pallor he’d acquired without enough sunlight. He was a small guy, but he’d still lost weight these past few weeks. Meals had been missed, sleep skipped, all in the quest to maximize his remaining time in the archives.
“You will miss them, no?” she said. “Your diarists?”
“Well, yes.” Robbie hadn’t thought about it before, but he would.
Personal diaries were the heart of the Bridenbaugh Institute’s collection, located one hundred and fifty miles from anywhere out in the Nevada desert. The journals were augmented by extensive supporting collections of original documents like newspapers, magazines and photographs (technology permitting). The invited visiting historians, all fresh from grad school, had the chance to intimately explore their era of specialization through the eyes of participants.
Over the year, Robbie hadn’t just better understood history, he’d better understood the diarists. The detailed journals of Benjamin Adams and Maureen Harrison covered years. Institute matriarch Geraldine Bridenbaugh only brought the most exceptional finds in for study. After twelve months of dissecting the lives of two who survived the worldwide economic upheaval, it was as if he knew them.
“Where will you go?” Nadia said.
“I have a tenure-track position at the university back home,” he said. There was no pride in his mention of such a prized position. “Builders start construction on my new house in two days. I was all excited about at first, but now…”
Silverware clattered behind them. Two tables away, a stout Japanese researcher with circular glasses organized the dirty dishes on his tray. He stacked them by size and precisely centered each one over the plate below it. He flipped shut the dog-eared notebook at his side. He scooped it and the tray from the table. As he shuffled out the door, he placed his tray in the
wash cart and barely looked up from the floor.
“Akako studies your era, no?” Nadia said.
Robbie waved her off with his index finger. “No, no. We just cross paths. I study the Great Depression’s impacts, its people. He’s strictly 20th Century economics. The Great Depression is just a stream of statistics to him. But the man can crunch some numbers.”
Robbie looked up at the clock. The sweeping red second hand stoked his anxiety.
“I’ve got to go,” he said. He pushed back from the table and the chair squealed against the marble floor. None of the other dining researchers looked up at the sound. A distracted minute here was one less with the materials.
He returned to his cubicle station in the Stacks, one of dozens in the silent maze within Tempus Hall. He sat at an architect’s desk bathed in the glow of specially tuned neon lights. A foot-wide circular magnifier hung from an arm off the right hand side.
The quality of the document before him made him sigh. Maureen’s journal sat open to October, the Black Friday day when the market melted down. She even saved several newspapers from the New York City street vendors that day with her diary. Her journal handwriting was beautiful, not as overwrought as many of her contemporaries. Robbie had noticed her writing style improve through the years. He imagined her, over time, feeling more comfortable trusting her feelings and observations to the fountain pen and written page. If only she knew how important her words would be one hundred and forty-two years later.
Robbie paused before rolling on a set of thin rubber gloves. He stole a moment, broke protocol, and caressed the edge of one page with his bare index finger. He closed his eyes and focused on the page’s surface imperfections. In that second, he felt as if he had touched the past.
