by Tom Upton
“Yeah, it does, doesn’t it?” I had to agree.
There was a long silence between us then. We just sat there on the bed that way. I really wanted to broach the subject of her mother with her again, but didn’t know how to begin; it had always seemed like an extremely tender topic with her. I was trying to think of a way to bring it up, and as I did so, I turned slightly away from her, stared at her room, and wondered at the starkness of it. She was sitting to my left and just behind me, and though I couldn’t see her, I could feel her there-- could sense her presence-- then I felt the bed move as though she were shifting positions to get more comfortable.
“Travis?” she said. It was almost but not quite a whisper.
I was still thinking about her mother, and the prospects of retrieving her, and what might be lost in the process; I was already certain that it would be like most things in life: a trade-off, for one thing gained, another must be sacrificed.
“Travis?” she said again, this time louder.
When I turned to look at her, she was right there, and she hooked an arm around my neck and kissed me on the mouth. Her lips were soft and warm, and though she’d taken me by surprise, it was in no way horrible experience. She pulled away, and I could hear her exhale and the shudder that went through her breath. She still hand her arm round my neck, and she rested the side of her face on my shoulder.
“It seems like I wanted to do that forever,” she murmured. “I know-- you think I’m crazy, probably. Or just plain weird. I don’t know, maybe I am.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You’re just saying that,” she said, and slid her arm back and withdrew so that she could set next to me on the edge of the bed.
“No, no, I’m not,” I said, earnest.
“How could you not, really?-- the way I act sometimes. I never used to care about the way I acted. I think I even believed I had a right to act badly. The things I put Doc through… It really wasn’t his fault he lost my mom. I realize that now. He was just being Doc, and a person can hardly help being what he is-- curious. It’s funny the things you realize when you’re locked alone in a room for long enough. You always end up knowing all you need to know to be able to live with yourself. When you get down to it, I guess, even that’s a matter of fate.”
She smiled weakly, then, staring down at her bare feet, which she swung back and forth just over the carpeting. I couldn’t keep my eye off the gold chain around her ankle.
“Your mother gave that to you, didn’t she?-- the chain.”
“Yeah,” she said glumly.
“You do know that it really might be possible to retrieve her.”
“I know. I heard that part.”
“Well, you sure don’t sound so excited,” I said. “I know I’m going on about it, but I just can’t understand why you’re not more excited.”
“I’m not stupid, Travis,” she said. “I heard all that business about paradoxes, too. I know what it means. We’d be going back to change history, and if history changes, then the present might change. We might not end up moving next door to you. We will never meet, and one day when we’re old and gray, we’ll see each other on the street one day, and never know there was a time we weren’t strangers. I sorry-- I just don’t want to the present to change. I know, it probably sounds pretty selfish, but in the here and now there are things I’m not willing to give up.”
“We don’t know that that will happen.”
“The truth is we don’t know what will happen,” she said, her voice edged with despair. “Don’t get me wrong. I really miss my mom, but… I don’t know-- maybe I’ve been in this damned artifact too long. Maybe the ways of the people who brought it here rubbed off on me somehow-- all that love at first sight stuff,” she said, and tears were already running down here cheeks. With her hand clasped to her mouth, she jumped up from the bed, and walked quickly toward the door. She had her hand on the doorknob but didn’t open the door, as if realizing there was nowhere to run and hide. She just stood there sobbing.
I walked up behind her and put my hands on her shoulders.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll figure something out.”
“Oh, sure, you’re just saying that to make me feel better, which is impossible at the moment. It’s not as if it really matters to you, anyway. None of it matters much to you. If I never move in next door, you’ll just go along your merry way. Having fun lifting weighs, or something equally meaningful. You won’t miss having somebody around who’s there to show you the right way to look at things.”
“Hey, who say it doesn’t matter to me?” I asked.
“Oh, you’re saying it does?” she said, cynically.
“Why wouldn’t it matter to me?”
She turned round and looked at me. She was wiping the tears from her check with her hand.
“You know, you answered a question with a question,” she said. “That’s never a good sign.”
“All right. I matters to me. Better?”
“I suppose.”
“We’ll figure something out,” I promised her. “There has to be some way around it.”
“What if there isn’t?”
2
At this point, I had to seriously wonder whether I was giving her false hope. There was a real problem trying to avoid a temporal paradox while retrieving her mother, and as keenly as my mind was now working, I couldn’t come up with a viable solution. Several senarerios went through my mind, but each ended the same way, more or less. If you change history, you change the present. It was like being in an inescapable trap. There was no way to retrieve her mother and preserve the current timeline. This dismal realization was further complicated by something I didn’t yet have the heart to tell Doc; in the past few days, it was becoming increasingly clear that the artifact wished to return home. It was, I thought, even attempting to enlist my help to achieve that end. It had long ago given up the idea of ever recovering its crew, had spent endless years buried under the Peruvian jungle, waiting and waiting. I was not certain how sentient it was, or whether its consciousness was similar to human consciousness. If it was, the degree of loneliness the artifact must now be suffering had to be staggering. It would have long ago left had it not been for the mere fact that it needed to receive such an order from a living pilot-- that was the way it had apparently been programmed-- and now, I was sure, it was willing to accept me as its pilot.
It was with these troubling thoughts on my mind that I suggested to Eliza that we go out somewhere, anywhere, just to get out of the house, just to get away from the problems if for only a belief while.
It was the end of August now, and carnivals were popping up all over the place. We stopped by my house, and I begged some money from my mother, who seemed more interested in asking Eliza all kinds of questions. She eyed Eliza with the cool bearing of a vulture waiting for something to die. Finally, when my impatience made it clear to her that she wouldn’t get the opportunity to grill Eliza, or to peck the eyes out of her skull, she grudgingly slipped me thirty dollars and let us go on our way.
There was a carnival at the Catholic Church about four blocks away. As we started to walk there, we had to pass before Eliza’s house. I saw the light in the basement window, and guilt tugged at my chest. I could see Doc sitting at his desk in the small dank office next to the laundry room. I could see him jotting out notes, trying to concoct some scheme to rescue his wife. I supposed that he missed her pretty much; he never spoke much about his wife, except in very general terms. I could gather no ideas as to what she was like, other than just his wife. I was sure that there were the usual emotional ties between them, but Doc never talked about sentimental episodes from their life together. Maybe he was just really private about personal things, or maybe talking about those things made him feel bad because he blamed himself for her loss. Whatever the case, whenever he spoke of getting her back, it sounded as though he were talking about retrieving a lost wallet or something.
With the sky darke
ning above, we walked silently down the sidewalk. I could feel Eliza glancing at me now and then, probably wondering what was going through my mind and if it had anything to do with her. She slipped her hand in mine, and seemed content that I held onto it and didn’t shove it away.
We finally reached the carnival. When I saw all the neon lighted rides rising out of the church parking lot, and heard all the excited cries of children having fun, I decided, really, that the last place I wanted to be at the moment was a carnival.
“What’s the matter?” Eliza asked, as I stood there staring across the street at the towering Ferris wheel.
“Would you mind if we just go someplace else?”
“I thought you wanted to have fun,” she said.
“I do, but it may not be possible,” I confessed.
“Well, whatever.”
So we ended up walking a couple blocks over to a hot dog stand. We sat on a picnic table outside the place, and eat hot dogs and fries that were very greasy but in a good way.
“What’s wrong, Travis?” she asked. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so-- sad.”
“It’s just the artifact-- it’s affecting me, too, I guess.”
“The artifact is sad?” She seemed mildly surprised. “I didn’t know that was possible.”
“Of course, it’s possible,” I said, a bit curtly. “Eliza, it wants to go home.”
“It does?”
“Yeah, it’s, like, homesick.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, and it wants me to help it.”
“How?”
“By giving it the proper set of commands.”
“Well, what about my mother?”
“As far as I can tell, it views the situation as problematic.”
“It views the situation as problematic? It does? And what exactly does it mean?”
“There’s no solution,” I said simply. “It can’t be done-- not neatly, anyway.”
“What did Doc say about all this?”
“I didn’t have the heart to tell him,” I admitted.
Eliza gave me a strange look. “Travis, is this thing communicating with you right now?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“This far away?”
“I don’t think distance has anything to do with it. The telepathic link is not broken, no matter how far away-- at least that’s the sense of it that I’m getting.”
“Well, what does it want you to do, exactly?”
“It wants me to set the coordinates to a time before you found it, and leave instructions for it to return home.”
“Ohmigod, that would mean that everything that happened afterward would be different-- absolutely everything.”
“Right. It would be as though you never found the artifact.”
“But that would mean we will never meet,” she said sadly. “That would be for sure-- no doubts about it. Finding the artifact is what led us to start moving all over the place. And if we have no reason to move, then definitely I would never move in next door to you.”
“That’s true, but then again, any plan Doc could possibly cook up will end the same way-- with us never meeting. Let’s face it-- that’s a certainty in any case. But the good part will be you will be reunited with your mother. It will be as though you were never separated. And you will not remember all this, because it will have never happened.”
We sat in silence for a moment, a heavy morose silence. Eliza pushed away the basket that held her food, which was half-eaten.
“It’s not fair,” she murmured. “It’s just not fair.”
“Maybe not, but then again, maybe that’s how it’s meant to be.”
“How do you mean?”
“Look, you say you believe in fate, right? Well, maybe that’s what fate is in this case. Maybe we were never supposed to meet. Did you ever consider that? You can’t believe in fate only when it sends you something you want, only when things turn out right. You have to accept what fate sends you or doesn’t send you, no matter whether or not you like it. Right now, what we might be doing is cheating fate. Besides, hasn’t that been what you wanted all along. How many times, already, have I heard you say that you wish you’d never found the artifact. It would only be correcting a mistake that had been made a long time ago. It would be putting things back to where they belong.”
“And nothing that’s happened in the meanwhile means anything?” she asked.
“Of course, it means something. It will always mean something.”
“What will it mean after it’s all undone?”
“I don’t know.”
“Nothing,” she said firmly. “That’s what.”
“We have now.”
“That’s not enough.”
“You know, in their language, they have no words for ‘before’ or ‘after.’ All they have is ‘now.’ And maybe they’re looking at things the right way. Maybe anything that anybody ever has is for now. What happened before is gone, and what will happen later is an illusion.”
“So where does that leave us?”
“It leaves us here, now, with these cold greasy French fries and half-drunk sodas, and, you know what, in my opinion, that isn’t bad.”
We sat in silence for a long time then. It was almost as though we were savoring the moment. She playfully kicked me under the table now and then, and gave me an occasional sly glance. Finally she sighed.
“Oh, Travis,” she said. “You are so maladroit. Don’t you even know when the time is right to tell somebody you love them?”
“Don’t forget,” I said. “I still have a connection to the artifact. Maybe I’m starting to think the way the people who built it think.”
“Oh, and what’s their deal on such matters?”
“If everything is perfect, nobody has to say a word.”
She considered this at length, biting her low lip.
“All right,” she said. “I see that, and it’s probably true. Still, I’ll bet it was one of their males that started that.”
We left the hot dog stand, then, and wandered aimlessly down the dark streets.
“What a minute,” Eliza cried suddenly. “I just had an idea.”
“Stop. You’re scaring me already,” I said.
“No, really, listen,” she said, growing excited and more animated, until she was walking backwards out in front of me, her arms flailing here and there as she spoke. “This is great. Why didn’t I think of this before? Look, if you do this thing the artifact wants you to do…”
“It’s the right thing to do,” I said, starting to suspect she was about to try to talk me out of it.
“Yeah, whatever-- that’s aside from the point I’m trying to make here. If you do this, then now-- tonight-- is the only time we have, right?”
“Assuming I do it tomorrow morning. I think it’s best if it’s done right away-- the sooner the better.”
“And once it’s done, it will be like none of this has ever happened, right?”
“Right,” I said cautiously. I noticed how her eyes were flashing in a very mischievous way.
“Well, that means tonight we can do whatever we want, right?”
“I suppose,” I said, now downright leery.
“We can do whatever we want without suffering any consequences.”
“Why? What did you have in mind?”
“I don’t have anything in mind in particular,” she said, still walking backward before me. “I just love the idea of it all. Isn’t it wonderful? Think about it. The freedom for one moment in time to do whatever you want to do--no matter how outrageous-- without having to worry about doing it. I’m not suggesting we go out and find a liquor store and knock it over, but if we wanted to, we could.”
“I could never hold up a place,” I told her, scoffing at the notion.
“All right, bad example. But think-- think over the possibilities. Isn’t there anything that you always wanted to do but were afraid to do because you knew you would get into trouble? Think about i
t.”
I was thinking about it. I found the idea absolutely frightening. Eliza was, after all, a person who actually drove a car off a cliff-- an act for which there could have been dire consequences. It was terrifying to think what activities she might dream up if there were absolutely no consequences.
“No,” I said. “I can’t think of a thing.”
She was doubtful. “You’re kidding, right? You mean you’ve done everything you ever wanted to do?”
“I didn’t say that. That’s not the same thing. There are plenty of things I want to do and never had the chance, but none of them would end up with me getting into trouble of any kind.”
“You mean you never, say, wanted to get even with somebody?”
“Get even? Get even for what?” I asked.
“For whatever they did to you.”
“And what would that be?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
“Nobody ever did anything to me.”
“Right,” she said, vaguely disappointed. “You know, you’re taking the joy out of this opportunity.”
“Sorry.”
“Well, how about other things.”
“Such as…”
“How about mooning. Wouldn’t it be a hoot to moon the cars passing by?”
I just looked at her.
“Right,” she said glumly. “Mooning is out, apparently.” She went on to list a number of things, for the most part zany, that we could do-- from teepee-ing Raffles’ house to letting the air out of all the tires of the squad cars in the police parking lot. All of her ideas seemed rather silly to me, and though one or another sounded amusing, I couldn’t get into the mood under the circumstances to try to do them. So we ended up going back to her house, where we sat in the dimly lighted living room, and watched videos-- old comedies for the most part-- and ate pizza until we finally fell asleep, there, cuddling together in the corner of the sofa. And when you get down to it, that might have been the best way of all to spend what little time we had left together.
3
When we woke the next morning, we were still entwined on the sofa. We had slept in such an odd position that when Eliza stood up she hobbled around for a few minutes trying to get the feeling back in her feet while I had a monumental crick in my neck that threatened to cause me to walk around for what little time I had left in the current timeline as though I were looking under the furniture for a lost quarter or something.
