“MAN, PLEASE!” I snapped, feeling a fresh burn of rage across my face. “You expect me to believe that crap?”
“Yeah, I do, because it’s the truth.”
I started to get up. Cato grabbed my arm, forcing me to remain seated. I huffed out a sharp, mocking bark of laughter. “Next you’re gonna tell me there’s a terminator coming from the year 2126 to kill me, right?”
“There are no such things as terminators, at least not in my time,” Cato replied with a straight face. “But there is something called temporal mechanics, which makes time travel—among other things—possible.”
I shook my head at him. “I gotta give it to you. You’re a hell of an actor. You almost got me convinced you actually believe you’re from the future.”
“Actually, 2126 is my present. I came from my present into this year, which is your present, but it’s the past to me. My birthday is March 2, 2109, so your present is way before I was even born.” He reached impatiently for his watch and started tapping gently at the dial with the tip of his finger. “Look, we don’t have forever here. I’ve got to prove to you that I’m telling the truth, so how about we take a look into your past.”
He held out his left wrist with the watch on it. Tiny red shafts of laser light twisted above the dial in an intricate dance, and then an image appeared in the air, neatly framed as if on a thirty-inch square screen. In the image a boy lay on a bed beneath a Hurt Locker movie poster, texting with a friend. His room was cluttered as hell and the windows were bright with yellow afternoon sunlight. I was stunned by what I saw because the room was mine, and the boy was me.
I was about thirteen years old in the image, sporting a high-top fade that I loved at the time but, in retrospect, looked so ridiculous now I felt a twinge of embarrassment having Cato see me that way. But I also felt apprehensive, because the moment shown in the image was one I remembered very clearly. The friend I was texting, Eddie Lang, had just found a video on his older brother’s phone showing his brother having sex with a girl. Eddie had uploaded the video and shared it with me, and I’d watched it right off because the older brother was hot. Eddie was texting about the girl’s big bare boobs and how sexy her moans sounded while I kept thinking happily about the flashes I’d seen of his brother’s naked body. And then, just as I remembered, the image showed Dad walking through the open door into my room.
“Gavin, you got a second?”
Caught off guard, I shoved the cell phone into my pocket. “Oh, yeah, sure, Dad. What’s up?”
Dad looked strong and healthy in the image, as limber as an athlete crossing the room. It made my heart hurt now that he lay destroyed in some hospital room. He sat on the bed next to me, an uncomfortable look on his face.
“Listen. The other day, I was cleaning up this pigsty of yours. I wasn’t snooping or anything, but when I moved the bed to vacuum under it, I found a box of magazines. You know the ones I’m talking about?”
I watched the shame and fear burn across my thirteen-year-old face. I’d ordered the magazines from a gay porn site, sending payment via snail mail in the form of a money order with funds saved from my allowance. The pictures in the magazine were all taken directly from porn flicks, so they were pretty graphic.
The thirteen-year-old me was speechless. At the time I feared my dad would beat the shit out of me, even though he’d never put a hand on me out of anger before. But Dad didn’t look angry or upset, just uncomfortable, as if he wasn’t sure about what he was doing or something.
“I want you to know,” he went on when I didn’t answer his question, “that I’m okay with you being gay. Knowing this doesn’t change the way I feel about you. You’re still my son, and I will always love you. But I’m a bit worried about some things. Did somebody give you those magazines?”
“Uh… no, Dad.” I told him how I got my porn stash.
“Okay. Are you having sex with anybody?”
“No. I’m not having sex. I swear.”
“Calm down. I’m not angry at you. I just want to make sure you’re not getting yourself into any trouble. We talked about STDs and getting a girl pregnant… and I guess we don’t have to worry about the pregnant part now. But still, the thing is, if you’re going to have sex, you have to protect yourself by always using condoms.”
“I know, Dad. And if I have sex, I promise I’ll use condoms. I promise.”
“Good. That’s what I wanted to hear. Now, son, the other thing that bothered me is… why didn’t you tell me you’re gay?”
“I don’t know. I guess I was afraid.”
“Of what? Me?”
“Well… I didn’t know how you’d react.”
Dad nodded. “I can understand that. You remember my cousin Lee Anne? Maybe you don’t, she died not long after your mom did. Lee Anne’s father, my Uncle Rob, caught her with another girl when she was fifteen and literally threw her out of his house. My mother took her in, and I still remember how Lee Anne looked that day she came to live with us, crying, shaking, her mouth bleeding where Uncle Rob punched out one of her teeth. I knew then I’d never do that to a kid of mine, no matter what.” He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed firmly. “Don’t be afraid to come to me, Gavin.”
The image froze then and winked off as if a switch had been flipped. I looked at Cato as he lowered his wrist, surprised but suspicious.
“You’re wondering how I could show you a specific moment from your past,” Cato said, seemingly reading my mind. “That’s another wonderful feature of temporal mechanics. Our techies can look backward into time and map out whole days from moment to moment—”
“You think I’m stupid, man? Nobody can look back in time. Somebody gave you that video recording. The Feds filmed my dad and me, had us under surveillance or something. Hidden cameras in our house. That’s how you got footage of us.”
“Why would the federal government do that? Your dad’s just a security guard. He never broke any laws. And neither did you, not when you were thirteen. Do you really believe anybody would go to the trouble to secretly film a simple conversation between you and your dad just so I could use it three years later to trick you? How about I show you something farther back in time, from before there were any cameras? You can see what was going on in Detroit on this day in 1715, or you can see Columbus when he first landed his ships on the American coast.”
“I’m not buying this. I don’t care what you show me. With computers, you can fake any kind of footage.”
Cato sighed, and then he laughed. “Damn, Gavin. You’re really making this hard. I’m going to have to do something a little drastic.” He raised his watch again and traced his finger around the dial three times. Then he hooked his arm around my shoulders.
Everything blinked.
The cell was gone. So was Escanaba.
WE WERE crouched low on top of a building. It was cold but sunny, a steady breeze whipping past us, and I immediately wrapped my arms around myself. I recognized the street below. This was downtown Detroit, but it looked strange. Some of the facades on the surrounding buildings were different. Gone were the sleek glass and steel features I was used to, replaced with blocky concrete slabs. People stood in huge crowds on either side of the wide avenue below us, wearing coats and hats. Some were black, but the majority of them were white. They were all waving and cheering at the long line of cars parading slowly down the middle of the street. The shiny new cars were all old-fashioned, bulbous, and humped with circular headlights mounted over snubbed grilles. The car at the front of the line was a long blocky white convertible, and it was flanked on both sides by four cops riding funny-looking, old-timey black motorcycles. The top on the convertible was down and four middle-aged white men dressed in suits were inside. The man in the seat behind the driver seemed to be sitting on a stack of books or something, because he was a bit elevated over the others in the car. He had both arms raised and was smiling from ear to ear as he turned back and forth, waving at the happy crowds. He looked vaguely familiar, and I began wondering where I’d seen him before.
I didn’t have a clue what was happening below or how we got here, my brain so disoriented I couldn’t even think what question to ask. I looked helplessly at Cato.
Cato gave me a cheerful smile and nodded toward the white car. “That man waving his arms is Dwight D. Eisenhower. He’s on his presidential campaign swing through Detroit, circa 1952. I don’t think it’ll be a spoiler for me to tell you that he’s going to win the election by a landslide.”
I turned back to the parade. We were only two stories up, so I had a pretty good view of the four men riding in the lead car. I’d seen pictures of Eisenhower in my history book. The man in the gray suit, sitting elevated and waving his arms at the crowd, was definitely Dwight D. Eisenhower. Living, breathing, and very real.
I looked at Cato again, my brain buzzing as if I’d just seen the parting of the Red Sea.
MAYBE TWENTY minutes later, we sat side by side on the roof, our backs against the wide brick shaft of a chimney. Thin streamers of smoke rose from the chimney, ghostly against the blue sky, and the air smelled faintly of burned wood. I shivered. Casually, Cato draped his arm across my shoulders.
“Are you okay, Gavin?” he asked.
“It’s true. Everything you said is true.” I’d watched the car carrying Eisenhower until it rounded a corner several blocks away and disappeared from view. I still felt dazed. “We’re really in the year 1952.”
“Yeah. We moved through time and space. We’re hundreds of miles from Escanaba, which is still a boys’ boarding school at this point.”
“How did it happen? What brought us here?” I looked at the watch on his wrist. It was small but seemed to be an ordinary timepiece. “Your watch is some kinda time machine?”
Cato laughed. “A time machine in a watch. Hmph. That would be ironic, or cliché, or something. No, the actual machinery the techies use to move people through time is huge. It’s as big around as a city. Don’t ask me exactly how it works, because I’m not a techie. I do know that it throws atoms and quarks and neutrinos and other stuff like that at super speed and smashes them together to tear holes in space-time. Through those holes, we can look back along the centuries and then move people to and from any point on the past timeline that we choose.”
“Wow. What about the future? Have you gone, like, a thousand years ahead? Do we get flying cars and warp speed, and do we live forever by transplanting our minds into androids?”
“The machine doesn’t work that way. We can only move into our past and back to our present. Scientists haven’t figured out why the machine won’t open a tunnel to times ahead of our present day, but they’re working on it.”
“Okay. You say your watch isn’t the time machine, but I saw you play around with the dial before we jumped back to 1952.”
“The watch is for communication. I can reach other TIA operatives in whatever time period they happen to be in. I can access the TIA network for information. And I can send instructions to the techies in 2126 when I want them to move me from one point in time to another.”
“So why do you guys do it? Travel into the past? Are you trying to fix the bad things that have already happened?”
Cato looked appalled. “Shit no! That’s the first commandment of time travel. Thou shalt not fuck up the past. You’ve heard of the time traveler’s paradox, haven’t you? A man moves back in time to meet his father as a little boy and kills him. But by killing his father, he makes it impossible for himself to be born so he ceases to exist. But if he never existed, then he never traveled back in time to kill his father. So that means he was born and he did make the trip back to his dad’s boyhood and killed him. Which knocks him out of existence again, and on and on and on.” He rolled his eyes drolly. “You get the point. Altering a past event can alter reality itself. Killing Eisenhower now would change the whole course of history, and the world you left in 2017 would be a hell of a lot different when I take you back to it.”
I was confused. I also liked the feel of Cato’s arm around my shoulders, and looking into his face was nice. He had a great face. I leaned into him and said, “But if you can’t make any adjustments to the past, why travel back at all? There doesn’t seem to be any point to time travel.”
“The TIA has a lot of mission goals. Most of them are classified, and I’m not cleared to know what those are. But there are two nonclassified missions. One is direct observation of certain events to clarify historical records. The other is recruiting, which is the mission I’m on now.”
“What do you mean?”
Cato looked at his watch again. “Sorry, we are running out of time, Gavin. In exactly six minutes, the guard is going to bring your dinner to your cell. You need to be there when he does, and I have a couple of things I have to take care of in the year 1913. I’m going to have you sent back to your cell. It’ll be a while before I see you again, but we will be visiting your father on schedule. I promise.”
“Wait a sec…,” I started to protest, but Cato was already tracing his fingertip around the dial of the watch. He looped his arm over my shoulders again and hugged me hard, reality blinked around us….
…and I was back in my dingy cell, sitting on the edge of the cot, alone.
A few minutes passed; I’m sure it was exactly six. The outer door to the solitary wing opened, footsteps approached steadily, and the CO appeared at my door, holding my dinner tray. He seemed surprised.
“Goode, you must be hungry. This is the first time since you’ve been in here that I’ve seen you sitting up and ready to eat.” He unlocked the door, handed me the tray, locked the door again, and walked back to his post.
Dinner was a lukewarm hamburger on a roll with sides of limp fries and carrot sticks. I ate slowly, thinking of Cato, time travel, my dad… and changing the past.
IT WAS late, long after lights out. I lay on my back in my cell, hands behind my head, eyes closed but unable to sleep.
The same thoughts kept circling through my mind. Those thoughts formed an impossible, crazy plan. Maybe it could work, under the right set of conditions. Yeah, it just might work—if it didn’t depend so much on chance and circumstance.
A sigh floated above me. I opened my eyes.
“Good. You’re not asleep,” Cato whispered.
His CO uniform looked crisp as ever, and even in the dead darkness, he was bright-eyed and alert, almost on edge. I was glad to have him back. “Hey. Here, grab a seat.” I sat up and moved over to make room on the cot for him. “I didn’t think I’d see you again for at least a day. You said it would be a while.”
“I’ve been gone for three days. I know for you it was only a few hours, but for me it was days.” He took off his cap and looked at me eagerly. “My boss wants me to take some downtime after finishing the mission I was just on, but I couldn’t wait to see you again.” He hesitated. His gaze turned inward, and I could tell he was weighing options in his head. A few moments later, he focused on me again. “When we were sitting on that roof in 1952… was it my imagination or were you… into me?”
I gave him a modest smile. “You’re hot, and it’s been a long time since a guy put his arm around me that way. It felt good, so yeah, I was into you.”
He sighed again and leaned over to kiss me on the lips, which surprised me so I flinched before kissing him back. “The night guard is asleep at his post,” Cato said after pulling away. “He’s going to miss his regular patrols tonight and won’t look in on you until 5:47 in the morning, just before his shift ends. Come spend the night with me.”
I would have protested (maybe), but there wasn’t time. Cato grabbed his cap, looped an arm over my shoulders, and circled the dial of his watch with his finger.
The cell vanished around us.