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1
I CAME HOME FROM my Shady Pines adventure ready to go on a true, long journey to a different era. That begged the question: How exactly does one go about planning a trip through time? It’s not quite as simple as planning a vacation, not that I was ever any good at that either. For one thing, packing seemed like an impossibility. I knew to choose my attire carefully, now that I had somehow unlocked the secret of traveling with clothing. Even so, I didn’t believe that I would be able to move an entire suitcase with me.
After my research into Levi Berm had revealed what I was actually doing I had tried to take my cell phone and wallet with me. I made several quick trips in my backyard. With each trip the weather or time of day changed. Usually my house was still there. It was over fifty years old by 2013 and had made it through many an era. Occasionally I found myself deep in the woods with no homes in sight. Often the wallet would come with me. The cellphone never showed up. I decided to add my keys into the mix, though I knew I’d have no real need for them on most trips. The keys alternated with the wallet. I couldn’t seem to bring both with me at the same time no matter how I visualized, squeezed or combined the items.
My theory was that my ability to travel had a limit that could be reached by amount or complexity. The cellphone just had too many little components to make it through and my skill wasn’t yet developed enough to bring two or more items at the same time. I thought maybe this was something I could improve with practice as I exercised that oversized portion of my brain. Even a genius needs to study.
So, no, for the time being I didn’t think I could pack a suitcase. That meant one set of clothes and my wallet. I realized after all my experimenting that the phone didn’t make much sense anyway. If I travelled anywhere prior to the previous decade there would be nothing for the phone to connect with.
A second complication was picking a destination. My experience thus far had been very random. I believed that I could hone in on a particular era if I concentrated properly. Maybe not a particular day, almost certainly not a particular hour, but I had a hunch that I could target a year with some precision. I wanted to travel in a location that would let me quickly and easily identify the time period in which I’d arrived.
I decided on the grassy hill behind a small store on route 611 in Waldorf. Directly across the road was a pharmacy that had been around at least my entire life. As far back as I could remember it had a large clock in front of the building and the date was underneath. When I was younger the date was displayed on some kind of small panels that an employee slid in and out each day, but recently it had been renovated with a digital readout. I was going to rely on this to tell me the time period in which I’d arrived.
When I considered all the possibilities for my travel, I entertained a million different options. I was horribly afraid of mucking with the timestream. My brief foray to the 1930’s had altered, albeit subtly, the course of Levi Berm’s life. I didn’t want to hurt anybody or make anything dramatically different. Most of all, as an avid fan of science fiction I knew to be careful about creating any kind of conflict that would prevent the initial travel from ever taking place. My trip to the past had changed some things but apparently nothing that would prevent me from being born and living out my life in the correct way, culminating in my departure from the office complex parking lot.
I didn’t know if I was capable of doing something like killing Hitler before World War II, a popular time travel fantasy. The logistics of traveling over there and getting close enough were beyond my scope. Then there were some things that I physically could not change. Hurricane Katrina, the recent Atlantic City disaster, any of that “act of God” type stuff was out of my hands. I supposed I could warn people, but then there was that whole pesky unravelling of the world concern. It was the same fear I’d had about trying to help Peter patch things up with his daughter, albeit on a slightly different scale.
So, then, what was the point? If I wasn’t going to change anything, that left exploration. I didn’t seem to be able to move into the future, which was contrary to most physics studies I’d read that said it was travel to the past that was most unlikely. So if I was going to explore, it was going to be the past. I knew from the fall through the shower door that I could be injured in my travels. I had no reason to believe that I couldn’t be killed as well. That kept me from wanting to go too far back or to any era too dangerous or unfamiliar. Maybe I’d develop the confidence for that kind of a journey later.
I debated and debated. I wanted to do something cool, but I wanted to be safe and smart. My decision was made for me while I waited for my car to fill up with gas. The radio, which had been blaring a mix of hits from the “‘90s, 2000’s and today,” shifted from some crap from the last decade and faded in on the familiar piano arrangement of 10,000 Maniacs’ take on that old Springsteen song, “Because the Night.” I felt an all-too-usual pang of nostalgia for my childhood. I knew in an instant what I was going to do. I was going to go back to the Waldorf of the early 1990’s. I would feed the beast of past remembrances and return to the present day a refreshed and relaxed man. Maybe I’d sneak a distant peak at my younger self, just for fun, but definitely no interaction!
What I didn’t realize at the time, excited as I had become, was that the beast of past remembrances has a sister species, the beast of past regrets. Feeding that monster could not be done from the safe distance of inaction.
2
It was a brisk day at the tail end of autumn when I was finally prepared to travel. The early chill of winter had already set in, so I let the weather serve as additional motivation. The chance of finding myself in a warmer part of some year served as a nice enticement to get me over the trepidations involved with what I was about to attempt.
I had spent a month or so planning the whole thing out. I didn’t need to tell Helena anything about my plans. It seemed that if any time passed during my travels, it was fairly minimal. I might have slipped a few minutes during what I guessed was nearly an hour spent in the cornfields and home of Levi Berm, or maybe not. Hard to say. Either way, this trip I was about to go on would last a week. I expected to arrive home on the same day I’d left.
I became stuck for a while on the issue of money. I couldn’t last a week in the past without money for food and shelter, and I couldn’t use the cash I could bring back with me from 2013. Modern money seems to me to resemble play money more than the bills of the past century. I had no doubt people would balk at the site of my present day currency before even noticing the future date printed on the bills. Realizing that I needed older money I visited the bank and simply asked to take out a thousand dollars in bills from the 1980’s. It hadn’t occurred to me how bizarre a question that was. The teller, a young woman with pink hair stared at me as if she thought I might be joking.
“Sir,” she said, “most of the money we have available is very recent. We can’t just give you bills from a particular year.”
“Well, I just want a particular decade,” I said, leaning on the edge of the counter in an attempt to be smooth and confident.
“Just the same, sir, we can’t accommodate you. I do apologize.”
I looked up and saw myself in a mirror. I didn’t appear so much smooth and confident as threatening and a little awkward. I straightened up, embarrassed, and thanked the woman for her time.
I turned to leave the bank, feeling defeated. Then I saw something on the wall. I walked over to one of those little rooms where they sign people up for fancy accounts. An African American man about my age in a dark suit looked up at me. “Hello, sir,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
“That money framed on the wall, how old is it?”
He scratched his chin. “I’m not sure, sir, I think it’s from World War II. Around that time, at any rate. You want to buy it?”
“Is it for sale?” I counted two twenties and a ten. Fifty dollars wasn’t going to get me very far.
“I’ll have to check with the manager,” the man said. “What do you want it for? Are you a collector?”
I forced a laugh. “Oh, no, it’s pretty ridiculous, really. I bet a friend I could come up with older bills than him. These seemed pretty old.” I thought my story sounded horrible, but the man laughed along with me.
“Alright, let me check and see what we can work out.”
An hour later I was standing in the parking lot carefully removing the bills—which I’d bought for a hundred dollars—from their protective glass. I put them in my wallet without folding them. This was a good beginning, but I would need more. As I got back in my car, I saw the back of the wooden plaque that had held the cash. The label had the address of a collectibles store just down the street. I went down there and found exactly what I was looking for. I picked up nearly a thousand dollars in hundreds and twenties that were printed between 1972 and 1987. It hurts to think how much I had to put on my credit card to make the deal happen.
I had considered jumping further into the past and investing the money. That way I could pull out modern bills in ’93 and have made a boatload in the process. Unfortunately there were just a ton of hiccups I couldn’t think my way around. Without proper identification I was going to get turned away at best and in some serious trouble at worst. Key to my time traveling strategy was remaining an anonymous spectator. I didn’t want to open up accounts and make permanent changes to the world, no matter how small.
Without an investment plan I doubted that the vintage World War II money was going to be very useful in 1993. That left me just shy of a thousand bucks to rely on for a week’s stay. I wasn’t going to be able to party like a rock star, but I thought I could make do.
I also went online and researched all of the major lottery drawings in Pennsylvania in 1993. I printed a sheet of tiny numbers and folded it up, storing it in my wallet behind the cash.
So that took care of my money worries, more or less. That only left a few complications. For one, my goal of anonymity meant that I could never put myself in a situation where I would need to properly identify myself in the 1990’s. Danny Wells was a kid back then. My social security number, if I somehow found myself needing to use it, would ping that record and get me in plenty of trouble. I was confident I could jump back to the present but if the police even notified my family that someone had tried to steal young Danny’s identity...that was playing with my timeline in a way that made me uneasy.
I committed to stay no longer than a week and to conduct myself just like any vacationer. I’d stay local so I wouldn’t need to rent a car. I would pay only in cash, and avoid any situation where I’d have to present identification. Seemed easy enough. I was just going to spy around and reminisce. Even in 2013 adults were always wandering around town by themselves, and in the 1990’s I imagined there would have been far less worry about what those lone men were doing.
I wasn’t sure exactly when I should make my trip, but Helena decided it for me. We had one of our fights, a particularly bad one, on a Monday night in December. This time she was angry because her boss had yelled at her for something or other and when she came home I made the mistake of asking what we were doing for dinner.
“How do you have the nerve to ask me about dinner?” she asked.
“Well, I just wanted to know what you had in mind. I’m happy to go pick something up or, you know, make eggs or something if you don’t feel up to cooking.”
“You know,” she said, “it would be nice to come home once in a while from a long day of work and have dinner plans all prepared for me.”
That’s when I started getting heated. I always have that breaking point when my temper gets the best of me. “I work all day too,” I said. “It would be nice if you’d take a minute from your pity party to acknowledge that I actually contribute.” Same old argument I always made.
“You don’t want to go tit for tat with me, Daniel,” Helena said.
“Watch yourself,” I warned. “I’m really not in the mood for this shit. You know everything I’ve been dealing with.”
“Oh, boo hoo,” she mocked. “Do you know how sick and tired I am of you feeling sorry for yourself and taking it out on me?”
“I didn’t take anything out on you!” I yelled. “I was just here minding my own business when you came storming in like an angry bitch!”
“Fuck you,” she said. “I want you to leave.” I wish I could say that that was a shocking development, that we had escalated things to the point that she crossed some line, but she spoke like that to me regularly and I had been pushed to that point myself more than once. It was pretty sad.
“This is my house too, Helena,” I said, venom in my tone. “Why don’t you leave?”
“Whatever,” she said, moving toward the stairs. “Just go out. I don’t care where you go.”
I went to a bar and nursed a beer for two hours while I stared blankly at the sports highlights on television. I loved my wife but I hated her at the same time, and hated myself for hating her. She was just impossible to live with. When we had met and our relationship had really heated up I felt so lucky, like everything in my life had directed me to that point in time. I wished I could go back to feeling like that, but those feelings seemed far distant.
The next day, Tuesday, December 17, 2013, I took a personal day from work, but I didn’t tell Helena. I drove to the location I had scouted, wishing the whole time that I had the power to transport my car with me. I decided the exercise would be good, and my modern vehicle would no doubt raise suspicions. I parked the Camry safely alongside the small jewelry store. I stowed my phone and identification in the glove compartment, which I locked. I dug a small chunk of earth out of the grassy hillside, and placed my keys beneath. I replaced the dirt on top and hoped I would recognize it later.
With all those preparations complete, I stood dressed in an old leather jacket, jeans and a polo shirt. I closed my eyes and focused all my energy on visualizing myself and my clothing some time in the early 1990’s. I felt the uncomfortable sensation in my temples and the rush of my body displacing from the timestream. My journey was underway.