An Echo Through Time: A Novella

by Nicholas Licalsi

  “The Lighthouse Cafe. Where you were planning to go with Gretchen before you died.”

  The memories flooded back. My tongue acted faster than a whip, and I didn’t feel like it was under my control. “Is Gretchen alright?”

  “She’s alive, but a little emotionally scarred,” he explained slowly. “Seeing your significant other get hit by a car will do a number on you. But of course, you understand that. It happened to you twice.”

  My vision began to come into focus. I was able to see the man as he looked at his massive metal wristwatch.

  The man looked up, and I saw his face for the first time. He had a full head of hair, and a square muscular build. His face was shaded by a five o’clock shadow. It was the familiar face behind Gretchen’s recent deaths.

  Before I could react, he said, “4:48 and 37 seconds. Your vision is back.”

  “Who the hell are you?” I asked. My pulse quickened, and it irritated all of my heightened senses. My mind shouted at me, He failed to do his job, and now he’s back to kill you and Gretchen.

  “I’m Todd Rungson,” he said with a toothy smile.

  I stared dumbfounded at the man who claimed to have the same name as me, but a different face.

  “I’m you,” he said with a hint of condescension. He smiled like he knew that I couldn’t comprehend the situation. “I’m an older version of you, but I am still the same you. Lifetimes ago, I sat where you sit and had the same conversation with the man I am now. One day, you will do the same thing to a younger version of yourself. The conversation is always the same, but don’t worry about taking notes. When the time comes, the words will flow out of you the same as I’m saying them.” He smiled. “I can feel them coming out right now. After lifetimes of it happening, it still tickles my mind.”

  This man is absurd, I thought.

  “I remember sitting there thinking, this man is absurd. Then the man across the table brought it up. This whole conversation is an echo through time.”

  “What the hell is going on?” I asked, taking a sip of coffee.

  “I killed Gretchen thousands of times.”

  I missed my mouth with the drink and spilled coffee on my lap. The burning sensation spread through my legs. It felt like it was branding my thighs, but I didn’t care. In a level tone I didn’t feel, I asked, “What did you just say?”

  “I killed Gretchen thousands of times,” he repeated. “Most of the time, I made it look like an accident. But I needed to do it often enough to draw your attention. I had to keep you from killing yourself. I figured nothing would get your attention more than killing your high school sweetheart. Then I needed to give you an opportunity to die naturally. By showing up and doing the dirty work myself.”

  I shook my head in confusion, but the man kept talking.

  “I’d say it didn’t take as long as I expected, but I was in your shoes at one point, and I knew exactly when you would end up dying. How does it feel?”

  I felt the endorphins of waking up alive drain from my body as my mind flooded with rage. “How can you sit there across the table and claim to be me? You look nothing like me. Not to mention, how can you claim to have killed Gretchen? I know I can’t cross over my timelines and change my past.”

  He nodded his head, as if everything I had said made sense. “We, I, you, the pronoun doesn’t matter,” he waved his hand in dismissal, “have spent thousands of lives acting like we cared about the human race. We tried to save it, change it, guide it, and it always ended in destruction. Eventually you got to the point where the process was pointless. But the truth is I never cared about humankind, and neither did you. It’s too big to care about. But you can care about one girl. Any teenage boy can do that.

  “In the end you were willing to put down more for her than you ever sacrificed for the entire human race. The bright side of all this is that you got to die at the end of this. Sure, you still tried to save yourself, but luckily we couldn’t because of that punctured lung.”

  I nodded my head, remembering the overwhelming pain of not being able to fill my lungs with life-giving oxygen.

  “Luckily the rules change once you die. Which was the whole point of this exercise. Once we experience our first death, our power goes to a whole other level.”

  “Our power? What do you know about it?” I blurted out.

  He shook his head, and I knew he wasn’t going to give me a straight answer. “I can’t tell you anything, because I had to figure it out on my own. You’ll need to do the same. But honestly, I don’t know much more than you do. I don’t know where it comes from, or what it truly enables us to do. I have never met anyone besides myself that can do the same thing as us. If there are others out there doing this, they’re hiding in the nearly infinite multiverse, or they don’t exist. I don’t know which is scarier.

  “For some reason, our first death unlocks new abilities. I assume it’s because our consciousness becomes fully untethered from a body for the first time. By cutting that tie, we can now exist inside our own timeline and change our appearance. That’s why I look like a thirty-year-old man, but not a thirty-year-old Todd. You could do it too, if you wanted to. I would recommend you do it, since you now exist in a timeline where you have died.”

  “That shouldn’t be possible,” I said.

  The man laughed loud, and the people next to us looked over their shoulder at him. “None of this should be possible,” he said, gesturing around the room. The table next to us went back to ignoring him after they saw he was motioning at the room.

  “We can take a breath and be in another universe. We are three-dimensional beings that can move through time, space and dimensions. Our minds weren’t designed to handle this.”

  He was being condescending and arrogant, and I glared at him to let him know that much.

  With a wave of his hand, as if to dismiss my face, he said, “Have you ever tried to visualize how we interact with the multiverse?” The question was rhetorical, because he was me and he knew I’d spent a few lifetimes studying it. “There’s an array of universes that we can live in. The multiverse is like a table with multiple fish bowls on it. We were never limited to a single bowl like most humans. We can hop from one to another in a single breath.”

  “Yeah, I know that. What’s your point?” I was becoming impatient and irritable.

  “I’m proof that we can exist in the same timeline, so you’re wrong. It is possible. And, now that you’ve died, our only limitation is that we can’t see the edge of the bowl or the table it’s sitting on.” His eyes wandered and seemed to be musing about this higher-dimensional table. “Maybe with some time I’ll be able to see it, but death doesn’t unlock that ability. Despite my many attempts.”

  “How much older than me are you?” I asked.

  He chuckled at the question. “You know we don’t pay attention to that stuff. I’m old, but for all I know, we’re both young. Five hundred thousand years old still rounds down to nothing on an immortal’s lifeline.”

  “We’re immortal?” I asked, stunned. I had always assumed that I could die. But now, experiencing it, I determined we were at a minimum harder to kill than normal humans.

  “I’ve seen more evidence that we’re immortal than proof we aren’t. I’ve died nearly every way imaginable, and I’m still here to kill you. Maybe there’s some multidimensional weapon out there that will wipe us from existence one day, but for now, nothing made by man can kill you. I’m living proof of it.” He gave me a half smile.

  “Why didn’t you just hunt me down and kill me in the first place? Or let me kill myself?” I asked. “There obviously aren’t rules against that, since you killed me in the end. You could have spared thousands of teenage Gretchens if you did it that way.”

  The scruffy man scoffed at me. “Gretchen’s lives were a cheap price to pay for what we got out of the deal. Besides, mortals are worthless. You should have seen enough of them to realize that by now. There are a near infinite number of them. Nothing makes them
special. Even the celebrities, billionaires, politicians, and other ones who seem special aren’t. They each have thousands of clones across the multiverse. Humans are just parts of the machine that woke up, gained consciousness, and started building tools instead of running naked through the wild. Their consciousness is not rare, but ours, a consciousness that can move through time and space, is unique and exceptionally valuable.” He picked up his coffee cup and held it in his hand.

  “Why did you waste your time killing someone who wasn’t special, then?” I asked, getting him back on track. “If Gretchen is worthless, then you wasted all that time plotting ways for her to die just to kill me in the end. Why not shoot me and have it over with?”

  “We’re immortal. We have nothing but time. If anything, killing Gretchen was an exercise in killing boredom.” He grimaced as he said the words, but tried to cover it with a sip of coffee.

  Picking up on the expression, I said, “This doesn’t add up. What are you not telling me?”

  The man put down his cup with a loud thump. His eyes flared with passion and he said, “I did it because it’s what the Todd before me did. You don’t understand that time is a river and the current will sweep you away, regardless of how much you fight it.” Then, as quickly as it started, the blaze was reduced to an ember. “Just drop it. You’ll understand why it has to be like this soon enough.”

  “Fine,” I said with a glare. “What do I do next?” I asked, not expecting my future self to give me instructions.

  “Well, in this universe and every other one that you haven’t visited yet, Gretchen will live through high school, and you don’t have to kill her. Unless you want to,” he added with a dark smile. “But in all the realities you’ve seen her die in, you need to be the one behind her death.”

  I froze across the table from him. His statement made sense. Someone had to be behind her deaths. It still wasn’t what I wanted to hear, and it was yet another shock to my overwhelmed system. “What if I don’t want to?”

  “Like I said, you’ll understand why it has to be like this soon enough. Fate will push you to do it, even if you don’t want to. In a way, you have complete and total control of time now. You can cross over your timeline, but you still can’t change the past. Since all time is someone’s past, you’re going to feel like you have a lot less free will.

  “Don’t let it bother you too much. The characters in a movie aren’t going to change their course of action, but we still enjoy watching it. And pretty much everything you end up doing will be something you had planned to do anyway. Our life is basically an exceptionally well-scripted play. It was like this before, but you never realized it. No one realizes it.”

  “Is there anything I end up doing that I won’t want to do?”

  “Aside from killing Gretchen?”

  I nodded. I didn’t know which one was more surreal, being told I’d be able to see all my moves before they happened, or having to kill the girl I’d watched die a thousand times, even tried to save in a few instances.

  “I’ll let you find out on your own, whether you even consider a single mortal life valuable. After a while, you won’t.” He looked like he was in pain when he said those last few words. Then he tacked on, “I’m proof that eventually you won’t.” He gestured at himself. He wrapped it up with, “I should go. It was good seeing you. The two of us won’t ever meet again. Maybe an older version of ourselves, but those won’t be us now, will they?” He shrugged off his question. “But you’ll inevitably get to enjoy this meeting in the future from my side of the table.”

  I sarcastically replied with, “Good to see you too,” as I watched my future self get up and leave. He left me with more questions than answers.

  I sat back in my chair and finished the rest of my coffee. The fortissimo of flavor faded, and I sat there thinking about what I had just experienced, and how my life once again changed forever. Was this what it was like to learn about my powers the first time? I wondered.

  As I thought about this, I felt a path lay out in front of me. It wasn’t a golden trail of sparkles, or even a visible path. It was like the feeling of a sneeze before it comes but amplified through my body. It was merely each atom of my body wanting to move out of this chair and across the coffee shop. I knew it didn’t need to happen right now, but it would be happening in the future.

  * * *

  My vision gazed in the direction my body wanted to go, and I saw a girl sitting at a table alone with brown hair that dusted her shoulders. What reality is this? I wondered. Not knowing if I could still connect to a default Todd, I tried to hook into one.

  It was a gamble, since I was no longer tethered to a body, according to my future self. I couldn’t find one, but that didn’t necessarily mean I was dead. My body pushed me toward her table. Fearful that the default Todd was going to meet her, I again fought the urge to go. I didn’t know what kind of hell would break loose if a default Todd saw me. That had never been able to happen before, since I was always connected to a body.

  I fought the urge to move with my fear, but eventually, it became unbearable. I went toward her, like a spring coming out of compression, my feet walking me toward Gretchen. I got there and confidently took a seat, even though I didn’t want to.

  “Hey there,” I said. The words came out barely louder than a whisper. The words were being pulled from my throat. I hoped the rest of my life wouldn’t be me regurgitating lines from a play. However, something in me longed to say those words, and so many more.

  Gretchen looked up. She was wearing a sweater, and her face had no makeup on it. There was no hiding that she was in rough shape. It took her a moment to focus on me, and then when she did, she couldn’t register who I was. “Is this a dream?” she asked.

  “No,” I said shaking my head. “I’m here.”

  “I’ve been having dreams that you didn’t die. Sometimes you’re alive and crippled. Other times I get hit by the car instead of you. Most of the time we’re living like normal, and nothing changes.” Her thoughts were racing, and her sentences reflected that. “They found the guy who did it. He killed himself and left a note admitting his guilt. You’re not here right now, are you?”

  “I am here. This is real,” I assured her, speaking slowly, as if to not startle a deer. “But it’s complicated. I’m not sure you will believe me or even think I’m sane when I’m done explaining.” I had brought the subject up once before, but it was under much different circumstances. She was receptive once before, but the Gretchen across from me was timid and seemed fragile. She had just lost me, and I didn’t think she could handle that explanation.

  “I don’t think I’m sane right now. You’re dead. I went to your funeral.” She was about to start crying, her almond eyes welling with tears. “I saw you...”

  I put my hands on hers to stop the words that were coming. I could tell the levee was about to break, and I didn’t want a scene in this coffee shop. “I know what you saw. It all happened. I died, at least that body. But I’m weird. I have a...” I paused to look for a word that didn’t sound ridiculous, couldn’t find one, and found the ridiculous word fall out of my mouth: “superpower. I can move through time and space. A side-effect of this is that I don’t die when my body dies.”

  A thousand other thoughts crossed my mind. I thought about how I could never return to my parents, or anything the default Todd was a part of. But there was a way to live in this world with Gretchen, assuming she believed me. I found my mouth saying, “I’m not dead. I’m alive. You’re not crazy.” My mind was now going faster than hers. I felt my mouth start up again. “I want to be here with you.”

  I thought about the words. They were true. I would have said them, and by looking at the relief on her face, I could see that it was the right thing to say. “I just can’t and won’t look like Todd anymore. It would be too conspicuous.” I looked down at my hands, worried she didn’t like who I’d become, who I was bound to become. “But I can change my appearance. I could look simila
r, or however you want. I’ve lived my life looking every way imaginable. White, black, Indian, even as a leper to see what it was like.” I looked up from my hands to see her reaction.

  She was beaming. “That’s how I know it’s you. You always say the most ridiculous and unbelievable things. Even in my dreams I couldn’t get this part right. I always thought you were doing it for the shock factor.”

  I shook my head. “Nope. I meant everything I said. If anything, I told the truth, only changing the details if I knew they wouldn’t make any sense.”

  “You didn’t think I’d be able to understand.”

  “I don’t even understand what I can do,” I said. The words felt natural coming out of my mouth.

  “Could you be eighteen and go to college with me next year?” she asked, seeming to be amused by the ability to pose the question.

  “I could be fifty and be your sociology professor,” I replied.

  “Ew,” she said with a laugh. Then a serious expression rolled in like a fog. “Todd, you’re like a superhero, or a demigod. You can change your face, you can’t die, and apparently, you can time travel. Why would you want to be with me?”

  My answer was simple, and I would have been able to explain it even if I wasn’t following a script. “Because of all the people in all the universes that I’ve been to and all the lives I’ve lived, you’re the only one that took the time to focus on me and care about my wellbeing. And because of that, I found hope and was finally willing to give up everything for you.” Then I explained the first time I came back to visit her, the focus she had put on me, how we had left class to go to the park. I told her what I wanted to do, and explained how she had bargained and convinced me to stick around. Then I brought up the bricks that landed on her.

  “I was supposed to be hit by that car, wasn’t I? You died for me? Did you know you were going to come back to life?” she asked. She understood more than I expected.

  “No,” I answered slowly, “I didn’t know. But I didn’t care by that point. I’d seen you die so many times before.”