Unhappenings (17 page)

And so, day in and day out, we would send sub-atomic particles on their suicide missions, Oscar would mock me, and Andrea would teach me. Those were good times. It was difficult to tell how much data the two of them were gathering that was truly new to either of them, but I was gathering some data of my own that was likely more useful. One of the measurable effects of the jump field on surrounding space was only measurable by me. It made my arm tingle. That sensation made me realize that this whole charade was actually two charades. I would most certainly be doing time travel research, but not the research I had ostensibly been brought here to do. My doppelganger had no idea he had brought me here with an ace literally up my sleeve.

I had given myself all the resources I would need to finally learn how to operate the working time machine in my arm.

s the months passed by, my focus gradually shifted from finding a way to get back to that exact point in time to concocting a plausible explanation for what I was sure would be a noticeable change in my appearance when I got back. I knew I hadn’t aged enough to shock anyone, but I realized that I had no idea how long my hair was that day, or how much I weighed, or any of a dozen other tiny variables to which I had given no thought. Whatever I looked like then, I certainly wouldn’t look like that on my return.

More than once, I considered the possibility of staying here. In five months, I had experienced no unhappenings at all. I was starting to believe traveling into the future had somehow made me immune to them, or that I had finally outrun them. If I went home, my life would fall right back into the hot mess of uncertainty that had pushed me to the brink of insanity. On the other hand, I would never see my parents again. They would never know what happened to me. By 2144, they were surely dead, although I had managed to resist the powerful temptation to find out how and when they passed on. Resisted it so far, anyway. But I found that as much as I loved them, as much as I already missed them and would surely continue to miss them, my potential regrets over not returning to them were far more about their sadness to see me go than my own homesickness. I wished they could know what life here was like for me. I wished they could understand how much I needed it.

Of course it did occur to me that my staying in the future could cause a paradox. I assumed at some point I would need to return home, to eventually grow old and become the version of me that brought me here in the first place, but I wanted there to be a way I could stay here. Having gotten no indications to the contrary from my older self, I started to let myself believe it might just be possible. By that point, I had grown so addicted to a life where things that happened stayed happened, I was simply not able to embrace giving it up, or invite reasons why I would have to.

Even more addictive was the fact that my new friendships were stable, comprehensible, and in no way based on me perpetuating a lie about why I always seemed confused. Well, unless one were to count the implicit lie that I was somehow from that time. Compared to pretending I had a disorder, that really didn’t feel significant.

At first, my only interactions were with Andrea and Oscar. I would go to work, enjoy my time with them, and then retreat to my apartment to finish out the rest of my day in solitude. Eventually though, I started meeting people. It was not by design. I assumed from the start that the amount of contact I had with future people should be as restricted as possible. But that was never explicitly spelled out for me, and it began to seem less and less urgent. At first it was just casual awareness of people who had the same routines I had. People who ate at the same times and places. They did not have names, but we came to recognize each other and small talk became a progressively comfortable experience. From there I would occasionally see one of them out of context, and conversation was inevitable. Eventually, some of them started introducing themselves.

No one ever stopped knowing who I was. No one ever disappeared. No one ever suddenly had a completely different relationship with me. No one ever retroactively died. It was absolutely intoxicating.

I never lost sight of my true goal, and every opportunity I got to covertly study my implant, I did so. But while that was happening, without fully realizing it, I had begun to think of myself as Graham.

mong the people I was starting to get to know socially was Wendy, an undergrad who worked part time at the security desk to my building. At first, I saw her three days a week, for about thirty seconds at a time. I don’t think we exchanged a single word the first two months I was there, but I definitely noticed her. Her curly brown hair and petite build reminded me of Leslie, one of my three erased high school romances, and she had the most delightful smile. Eventually we got to a place of polite hellos. As I became more comfortable with my social interactions, we progressed to small talk. At one point, I asked her what she was reading. It turned out to be
The Catcher in the Rye
. I had never read it, so I downloaded it out of curiosity. That turned into brief but frequent discussions of that book, and eventually two others.

When the spring semester ended, and most students departed for the summer, Wendy stayed on and went full time. As I was now seeing her every day, our conversations began to last beyond a few seconds in passing. In longer doses, it turned out she had an extremely sharp wit. I started to linger at the end of the day for five or ten minutes, chatting with her, and watching her find new ways to make me laugh.

One day, I stayed for nearly twenty minutes, talking about a book. Several people came and went during that time, and I became concerned I was distracting her from her job, so, I asked what I somehow imagined was an innocent question.

“What time do you get off work? Do you want to get a cup of coffee or something?”

She smiled at me mischievously and said, “Are you asking me out?”

It was impossible to tell if she was joking. I countered with, “Don’t get ahead of yourself,” which was the right response, because she laughed. We did indeed have coffee when her shift ended, and spent about an hour deciding what we would read next, among other topics.

I had grown so accustomed to the notion I would never date again, I somehow convinced myself the rest of the world understood that too. Evidently, I had left Wendy out of the loop. If I had been paying any sort of attention, I would have seen this coming from very far off. Having been confronted with it now, it was easy enough to replay the past few weeks and identify signals I had missed.

My first reflex was to shut her out of my life from that moment on. That was so obviously impossible given our work situation I revised that position to an elaborate system for keeping her at arm’s length. But the longer I spent concocting ways to phase our conversations out to nothing, the more I began to question the point. I had by then spent half a year in a new life that never unhappened. I had every reason to believe being in my future had finally cured me of the affliction that had haunted me since adolescence. My reasons for pushing women away no longer seemed to apply. Wendy and I had a lot in common. She was cute, she made me laugh, and she was taking an interest. Maybe it wasn’t such a terrible idea to consider.

That I was literally fifty-six years older than she was somehow never entered into my thinking. Nor did it cross my mind that I had no business experimenting with romance across the time stream.

And so, perhaps recklessly, I dipped my toe in that ocean. Wendy and I began to have coffee at the end of the day two or three times a week. She did not repeat her joke about me asking her out, because it became clear pretty quickly that we were both trying to figure that out.

And then one day I lost my keys.

For an hour, I tore my apartment asunder trying to find a small metal ring with three other tiny pieces of metal attached to it. One of them opened my mailbox, one opened a locker in the lab complex, and one was entirely for show. I could quite easily have lived without any of them. The problem was that I always, always put them in a dish on my kitchen counter when I got home. This day they were not there. An hour later, when they turned up behind my toilet, the third key, the one that was just for show, was gone.