Unhappenings (13 page)

“I’ve had five years to work it out,” I told him. My exploits with Penelope sat poised on my tongue as clarification of my understanding of time travel, but something held me back. By all rights, I should have been able to trust him, but I couldn’t let go of the fact that Penelope had always been kind to me, and that my only encounter with this version of me ended with him pushing me into a puddle. He nodded thoughtfully, and did not further pursue that topic. For a brief instant, my stomach lurched as I realized I had just successfully, and literally, lied to myself.

“Cornell?” he repeated. “What happened there?”

I shrugged. “Didn’t get in,” I said. “Didn’t get in anywhere.”

His frown deepened. “That’s… that’s not possible.” He stood, visibly rattled, and walked to a window, carefully scrutinizing every object he passed on the way. After staring out onto the library courtyard for a few moments, he said, “I have no memory of this.”

“The library?”

He turned and met my eyes. “This event. This conversation. I don’t think it ever happened to me. How can that be?”

Of all the excellent reasons I had right then to feel uncomfortable, the one that trumped all else was the notion that this man—this version of me—had traveled through time what was probably dozens of years, at least twice, and somehow expected me to have answers for him. There were so many things I wanted to ask him—any reasonable person would beg for an opportunity like this—and yet somehow, horribly, I was the one with upper hand.

“Lots of things happen that I don’t remember. And lots of things I do remember unhappen,” I said, “but you know that.”

He stared. Not good. “I don’t understand what you mean. I don’t understand any of this. Is this even the same timeline?” He clutched his head. “This is never going to work.” My earlier assessment that he was less crazed started to unravel.

“Why are you here?” I asked, in a desperate attempt to push this in a coherent direction.

He buried his face in his hands. After a very long, very audible sigh, he looked up and began to speak in a tone so even it barely seemed natural. “I came back here to tell you about the Time Travel Project. I did not anticipate that you had already deduced its existence from my earlier visit. That was incautious of me, but what’s done is done.”

He paused there, and it was all I could do to keep myself from screaming at him. The only constant fact in my life had ever been that what is done is never, with any certainty, done.

He soldiered on. “In fact, it may be fortuitous that you are already aware of it. That will save me a lot of work persuading you. Because here it is, Nigel: I need you.” He let that hang between us.

“In what way could you possibly need me?” Those words were out of my mouth before I fully processed how confrontational they were. This entire encounter was beginning to play out as a darker version of my association with Penelope. The thought that I might be put in a place where I would be expected to choose sides was too horrific to contemplate at that moment. To my profound relief and confusion, his next words put me in a much different place than that.

“I need to you to help me correct the flaws in the process. Time travel was my brainchild. Every facet, every functional aspect of the theory, every path to application, was mine, and it doesn’t work.” He choked on that last word.

“But… You’re here.” Again, I withheld that I was an experienced traveler already.

He shook his head. “There are bugs. Bad bugs. It doesn’t work the way it is supposed to, and we are deep into it now. If we don’t find ways around the gaps and flaws in the process… A lot of people are going to die, Nigel.”

“Die? What are you talking about?”

“I can’t give you specifics. Not yet. I’m sorry, but I need your help before it’s too late.”

Setting aside what ‘too late’ could possibly mean in this context, none of this made any sense.

“Why me?” I asked.

“Because you already have the background to begin forming the theory. I know you do, because this is when I started pulling it together. Right now, your insights are pure. They are not dulled by age, or cynicism, or politics. I need to go back to formula on this. I need to go back to you. Given the resources that I never had the first time around, and the benefit of my own mistakes…” He rocked his head, looking for the words. “You’re the only hope I have left.”

I was speechless. There was no way I could have this conversation extemporaneously. Evidently, he already understood that.

As he stood to leave, he said, “Don’t answer now. I am going to give you two months to think this over, and then I will be back. Think of questions for me during that time. Good questions. Lots of questions.” He walked to the door without further discussion. Just before he closed it behind himself, he looked back and said, “I know you can do this, Nigel. And I also know you want this, more than anything else in the world. Think about it.” Then he was gone.

So much weighed on me at that moment, but nothing as severely as the fact that I had just lied to myself, repeatedly. Nothing, that is, but the certainty that while I was lying to myself, myself had been lying to me.

rom there, I had two months to consider the most important question of my life. Of course, it wasn’t at all the question I was supposed to be considering. That question, as to whether I wanted to circumvent every scrap of common sense about how the universe was supposed to work and throw myself into time travel research to make possible something that I had already been doing for years, was easy. Oh my goodness, yes, I wanted to do that. The more pressing question I would need to consider was how I could possibly trust the man who had made me that offer, despite the fact, or especially because, that man was me.

Everything about his manner suggested that everything he told me was a clumsy fabrication. Unfortunately, I had no guess as to his true intentions. Perhaps I could play along just to get access to the research he was asking me to assist. Logically, there was no chance he could be planning to harm me in any way. That was comforting, apart from the abundance of evidence that time travel did not operate in any manner that could be remotely considered logically consistent. I would never be able to gauge the true danger I would be placing myself in. The only issue was the level of recklessness I was prepared to exercise.

I pondered all of this on my way home that afternoon. By the time I got to my parents’ house, I realized I had completely forgotten to prepare my fictional job search report. My hesitation to go inside and face them with nothing to show for my day lasted only as long as it took me to remember that in a few days, or weeks at the outside, none of this would have happened anyway. Lying about looking for work would be exactly as useless as actually looking for work. Work would find me soon enough. For today, I would feign depression about my circumstance to buy some sympathy. If that didn’t work, plan B was to simply not care what they thought, and patiently wait for them to never have thought it.

With that level of indifference, I entered my home, and found my mother talking to Penelope in the living room.

It is difficult to convey on just how many levels this sight caught me off guard. For starters, Penelope had consistently kept her own existence as secret as possible from everyone I knew. To see her casually chatting with my mother flew in the face of years of surreptitious behavior. I had only a split second before my mother greeted me and inevitably attempted to engage both Penelope and me in conversation, in which to determine (or wildly guess) exactly which version of Penelope this was. From the smile on her face, she clearly expected me to be happy to see her. I struggled to recall the last encounters I had with her, in various stages, and could not place one in which we had parted comfortably. From my frame of reference, working backward, I had seen her at fiftyish, deeply sad and apologetic; eighteen, furious and defensive; and early twenties, severely embarrassed. My best guess under pressure was that this was the eighteen version.

“Nigel!” said my mother. “You have a visitor.”

“I can see that,” I said, with my best attempt at a natural smile. “What have you two been talking about?”

“You, of course.”

I laughed politely. My mother gave me a look of serious intrigue. Unlike my father, she had never been particularly invested in my career choice. All she ever wanted was for me to be happy. If physics did that, then she supported my choice. But that’s where her interest in science began and ended. She was a medieval history professor, and had little use in her own life for any idea that was less than eight hundred years old. One such idea, of course, was that every human needed companionship. Like everyone else, she was oblivious to my failed high school romances. From her perspective, I had never shown an interest in—or at least any success with—girls. On more than one occasion, she asked me very frankly if I had any luck with boys. She needed me not to be lonely. The fact that this young woman suddenly materialized must have been nothing less than a long-awaited miracle to her.

There were so very many things that could go wrong in the next few moments. My top priority was to end the small talk and get Penelope out of there where we could talk without fear of dragging my parents into a world they had no idea existed. My father might have had some hope of understanding what my situation had really been all these years, but there were few people in the world less like me than my own mother. I didn’t even really look like her. She was all curly red hair and freckles, framing the roundest face in the world. My possible changeling status was a running gag in my family for longer than it could ever have actually been funny. If I hadn’t been such a perfect duplicate of my father’s sharper features, it might even have been cause for investigation. Honestly, this virtual stranger in my living room looked more like my mother than I did. Given that she and I were practically from different worlds, I couldn’t even hope to predict how she would react to the truth.

“You’ll have to help me out,” my mother went on. “This young lady says she won’t tell me her name until you introduce her.”

Good grief. Setting aside my irritation over the fact that Penelope had persuaded my mother to play that game—it would have been child’s play to take advantage of Mom’s need to have any sort of girl in my life whatsoever—that simply confused the issue for me further. I had no idea what her name was, of course, and without the clue of what name I was calling her at the moment, I had one fewer way to place her. In every encounter with her youngest version, I had always called her Penelope. In every other encounter, I had called her variations of “Hey You.” Our explicit agreement was that I not concern myself with her name, and that someday I would simply happen across it. It never quite made sense to me. Cornered now, I chose an alternative.

“Her name is Una.”

Una’s face held steady in an expression probably intended to convey glee, but was easy for me to see as surprise. I interpreted that to mean I had never called her this before. Given my immediate resolve to call her this for the foreseeable future, that would mean until this moment she had been Penelope. Eighteen then, or near enough. Like so many of my management tools, this was a complete guess.