| |
1
THOMAS LEFT ME BY the side of Dorothy’s house. All he said was, “Here you go, right where we departed.” Then he walked away, calling over his shoulder, “Remember, you fix it and you go home. After that, no more traveling.”
I nodded in agreement and understanding. He turned around and kept walking. With a crackle of some energy I couldn’t begin to comprehend, he vanished into thin air.
I walked back into the house and Dorothy was waiting for me. “Who was that strange man?” she asked.
I didn’t know how to answer. “What did you see?”
“I saw you walk around with that other guy, then you were both gone, and a few seconds later you were back. I can’t begin to understand what I’m seeing, and it’s very darn well possible old age has caught up to me and I’m losing my mind, but I’ll just ask you: did that man help you figure out what it is you need to do?”
“Yes,” I said, “I think he did.”
She grinned. “Well that’s just wonderful. Will you be staying a while?”
“Just a few days, if it’s no imposition. But I have to ask something of you, Dorothy.”
“What is it, dear?” She didn’t look too worried about what I might ask.
“I need you to go about your normal business. Don’t deviate from your schedule. Act as if I’m not here, and don’t make me any more meals or show me any kindness like that. Everything has to be as if I was never here, and you can’t ever tell anybody about this. Do you understand?”
“Not really, but I’ll do what you ask. Don’t think many people would believe me if I told them.”
2
The three days passed slowly. I was bored, impatient, and still trying to wrap my brain around the whole deal. I would go through phases of grief over my lost loves, and then my overly reasonable part would remind me that they were clones, not of the prime universe. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t like the other Daniel. I knew that these alternate versions were still real people. At some point, presumably after I met Suzy, most likely after I changed Danny enough to set his life on a new course, the universe had shunted me out to a parallel world. From then on, the woman I had known and loved and watched die was a clone. She was really the only Suzy I knew. Though I was convinced she had died in 2013, she was alive in 1993 and I thought about her every day.
Dorothy kept to herself as I had asked. I was going on Thomas’s guidelines and hoping that by minimizing my interactions I could keep myself in the prime universe. Finally, May 31st arrived. I said a brisk but, I hoped, warm goodbye to Dorothy and left on a long walk.
It took me hours to reach the bar where I had returned to the past. Even so, I had allowed so much time that I was there a half hour before the earlier, slightly younger version of me appeared. I sat at the edge of the parking lot and waited, my eyes fixed on the spot where the wormhole would open.
Finally, I heard the crackling and then I saw myself materialize on the blacktop in front of me. I had met myself as a child. I’d seen more than enough of a crazy alternate version of myself. This arrival though...it still shocked me a bit. This person was me. The same, adult version of Daniel Wells that I basically still was, just one who had experienced a hell of a lot less.
He sat with a happy smile, eyes closed, face turned toward the sun. I remembered that feeling, coming after my panicky inability to travel back from the twisted world that had created “Druggy Daniel.” This time, the smile faded quickly when his eyes met mine.
“What the...how...” he stammered.
“I guess I don’t have to tell you who I am,” I said. “What you need to know is that I’m a future version of you. I’m not an alternate version like the guy you just met.”
“How do you know about him?” He asked. Then he smacked himself in the head. “Of course. You’re me. Why are you here? What’s going on?”
I didn’t know how much I should tell him. I decided he had to know a certain amount in order to be convinced to keep to himself.
“You’re back a few months too early to intervene and stop yourself from attacking Jeff Berger,” I said.
“Okay.” He thought it over. “I’ll just wait it out. Maybe get a job.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought...well, obviously. The thing is, I meddled. Interfered with our younger version, and dated a girl I should never have met. I screwed everything up.”
He looked shocked. “You...dated? What about Helena?”
I sighed. “I know. I was here for three months. I acted like I had carte blanche to do whatever I wanted. It was a mistake. There’s an order to the universe. Small changes are okay but big ones can destroy everything.”
“How do you know that?”
“Take a walk with me, buddy.”
We trekked back toward my parents’ house, retracing the steps that my companion had just walked in an alternate 2013. I thought seeing the house as it had been before his (my) meddling would keep him calm enough to enable easy travel. I told him about Thomas and everything I’d learned about the confusing mechanics of the time stream and the origin of our ability. When we got to the house he sat on the driveway. I think he was so overwhelmed that he didn’t want to chance standing up and falling over.
“Does it make any sense to you?” I asked. “Do you understand why you can’t get involved?”
“It’s a lot to process,” he said. “You told me you screwed everything up. What was wrong when you went back to the present?”
“I don’t think you should know,” I answered. What I didn’t say was that I couldn’t bare to tell it again. “It’s a shitty bunch of events. An upsetting, horrible story. And it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you need to go back to the present and try again. You need to aim better, Daniel. And if you have to wait a day or two, even a week or two, just wait. Stay in your goddamned hotel room and don’t interact with anybody you don’t absolutely have to. Then, you call off our over-aggressive mutual friend before he beats that poor kid to death. Do you get it? What you have to do?”
He nodded. “Go back to that crappy alternate world and try again. Stay hidden. Call myself off the attack. Got it.”
I approached him with my hands out and helped him to his feet. I stepped aside, allowing him to have room for his travel back to the twisted present, and that was when I saw the beat up old car parked in the street in front of the house. Had it been there my last trip through 1993? I couldn’t know, but somehow a sixth sense sounded alarms in my head.
I opened my mouth to yell a warning to my other version but my voice was drowned out by the roar of gunfire. Three shots fired, three explosions shattered the stillness of the day. I saw myself stumble and fall, blood seeming to pour from everywhere. I looked down, expecting to see...what? Blood coming out of my own torso, maybe, or perhaps my body fading away as the universe erased my existence. There was nothing. Maybe my interaction with my other self had made him a clone instead of the past version of the real me? Despite everything I had learned, there was way too much about time travel that remained—and remains—way over my head.
3
I stood stunned as the drug-addicted version of myself walked around the side of my parents’ house and approached the prone form of yet another Daniel Wells, that one bleeding out in the driveway. If he had wanted to shoot me, I’d be dead. At that moment I had no ability to run, or react, or do anything at all.
“Well damn, this is surprising,” Druggy Daniel said as he looked from his victim to me. He seemed legitimately stunned. “Didn’t expect to see two of me.”
“What did you expect?” I asked. My voice sounded cold and mildly disinterested. I had killed my twin and yet there he stood.
“I’ve been waiting, you know,” he said, not ignoring my question but choosing to answer it in his own fashion. “For two goddamn years. Waiting for you to arrive at this very spot. I come here every day. I knew it in my head that you’d come here eventually.” How could he have known something I had only decided earlier that evening? He pointed to the other Daniel. “I didn’t plan to kill him, man. Really. I was going to watch and see what he did. But I heard you two talking. I heard what you told him to do.”
“And that made you shoot him?”
He shrugged. “How the fuck should I know what could happen if he goes back to my time? Or fixes everything? From what I heard you say you might be able to patch the whole damned thing back up and go on about your life. I can’t risk being eliminated from this world. I won’t! You caused everything that’s fucking awful in my life and now I want you to fix it for me. Give me a new life!”
I shook my head. “I don’t have the power to do that. I’m sorry for what I did but you might have just killed the only way I knew to put an end to all of this.” As I spoke, almost as if to put the exclamation point on the whole deal, the bleeding man on the driveway became transparent, first his skin fading away and then his organs. In seconds he was gone. The universe had reabsorbed him. “Do you see?” I yelled. “It’s bigger than you and me and who deserves whose life. We are destabilizing the entire universe, don’t you get it?”
His face tightened in anger. “I don’t give a fuck about the universe, you fucking bitch!” He yelled. “I want what I fucking deserve!”
He was approaching me aggressively with his pistol in an outstretched arm. I had no way to get behind him and attack like I had in Suzy’s bedroom. My heart was betraying me, racing along in an adrenaline-filled way that would prevent my ability to travel. Even with your fancy talent, I thought, you can’t save yourself. Then a thought occurred to me.
Druggy Daniel was only a foot or so away from me. I remained facing him, not backing down. “If you can’t fix anything,” he said, “I can still stop you from eliminating me. I’ll live a new life here in the past. Me...the only Daniel Wells left!”
I could see he was hesitating to pull the trigger. Maybe a small piece of the little boy I had been was still in there? I didn’t know, but I knew I had to act fast or I wouldn’t get the chance. I took a deep breath and felt a calm come over me. Was it the universe acting through me? Maybe. Whatever it was, I was completely in control.
“You’re not Daniel Wells,” I said. “You’re a fucking drug abusing loser who chose to blame all his problems on others and never amounted to a goddamned thing. You’re worthless.”
His eyes flashed with rage and he let out a curse that turned into a scream, “Faaaaaaa,” as he bolted forward and swung the pistol at my head. I stepped to the side, pulling his swinging arm down with both my hands. I studied that arm, that gun, all the details I could see, and somehow I travelled.