Unhappenings (62 page)

“This is my burden, not yours.”

“If you knew what was really coming, would you have given me up?”

I thought back to our aborted meeting with the older version of Carlton, his warnings, and his offer to save us from our own future.

“I don’t know,” I said honestly.

She let out a sound somewhere between a choked sob and a pained laugh.

“You don’t know.” She put her hand on my cheek. “But I do know. I know you wouldn’t have stopped it, because I never would have let you. Every single time I heard the tales of the monsters you slew, the only part of the story that mattered to me was the part where you came home. The horror was never real to me, because I still had you. I still had Athena.” She pulled her hand away and looked down. “But I see it all now. All the times I threw the world to hell to have one more day with you. I can’t live with it.” She looked up again, her blue eyes puffy and saturated. “I can’t live with you.”

Against her disappointment in me, or even her resentment, I might have stood a chance. Against her remorse, I was helpless. I truly did not belong there. I could counter-argue this all day long, and it would still be true. There was nothing to be gained but pain for both of us if I stayed.

“Okay,” I choked out.

She took a deep breath to control her tears. Then she reached into her pocket, turned over my hand, and put something in it. I held it up to see the box for her engagement ring.

“This was a gift,” I said.

“It was a beautiful gift, and I will never stop cherishing it,” she said. Then she curled my fingers over the box and pushed my closed hand to my heart. “But this is for you.”

Reluctantly, I put the box in my pocket. I could feel its weight pulling me down.

“Please tell my daughter you loved me,” I said. “Please let her know I gave you some happiness. Do that much for me, will you?”

Helen laid her hand on her belly, and smiled at me, one final time. Even in its sadness, and its pale shadow of the smile of wonder and joy that had so hypnotized me so many times, it was still the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

“Of course.”

I closed my eyes, and silently asked to be sent to a random time and place. When I opened them, I was out of Helen’s life.

found myself on a beach. It was a sunny day, and there were a lot of people playing, swimming, and generally loving life all around me. The sea level air invigorated me almost immediately, and as much as I planned to spend the next fifty years wallowing in the misery of my failed existence, I found the moment did not lend itself to that. I was still wearing a sweater for the March weather, and I promptly pulled it off and left it on the sand.

There was a boardwalk and a pier. I had no interest in the rides or shops, but a walk out on the pier, to feel the salt spray on my face, held some appeal. There were a handful of people with fishing rods, complaining about how many more fish used to be here before the whatever random event they thought had driven them away and/or killed them off. I basked in the banality of their imagined problems.

When I reached the end of the pier, I found another man there, staring off to the watery horizon. He greeted me in a friendly, if distracted, manner. I was about to return the greeting when I realized it was Carlton. He was younger than when I last spoke to him in the café in Amherst, and quite a bit older than when I watched Athena explode his head off. I had asked for a random time and place, and this was what I got. Memo to self: be more specific. He showed no sign of recognition. I pressed the point.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Do I know you?”

He looked me in the eyes, with the strangest sort of confusion, like he was confused about the fact of being confused.

“Are there people who know me?” he asked. “I thought knowing was for other people. People who are realer people.”

This was Athena’s consequence. She knew if she were never born, the Athena I knew would become this phantom.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I mistook you for someone who exists.” He showed no sign of offense.

“You’re the first person who has ever seen him,” said an older woman with a fishing pole. “He’s not used to that. Probably has no clue what to think.”

She had her back to me. I watched her reel in her line and cast it again. “You can see him. Why can’t anyone else?”

“Cognitive dissonance, if you like the jargon. I prefer to think it’s the universe keeping him out of trouble.”

Her voice was familiar, but not immediately recognizable. But really, how many people could she be?

“You seem to know a lot,” I said. “You’re not one of them time travelers, are you?”

“Shifty lot, them travelers,” she said. “I hear they lost one a while back. Went rogue. Canceled the whole damn program after that.”

“Is that a fact?”

“Yepper,” she said. “Test pilot. They say it was the Time Madness got her.”

I walked over to her, and sat on the edge of the pier, my feet dangling in the spray.

“How long have you been out here, Andrea?”

She laughed. “You have no idea how it feels to see a familiar face. How have you been, Graham?”

“It’s Nigel, actually.”

“Like I don’t know that,” she said. “To answer your question, if by ‘out here’ you mean wandering time with no fixed abode, about thirty years.” I could see the prototype module now, strapped to her left wrist.

I pointed back to Carlton with my thumb.

“How many of those are there?”

“I’ve counted sixteen, myself. Kind of stopped keeping track of them when Athena took care of business. Sorry about that, by the way.”

“I’m okay,” I said. “Sixteen seems like a lot.”

“It was a lot when they were doing things. Now they just stare off into space. No one has any idea they’re there. They barely know it themselves. They have enough sense to steal food and clothes, and keep from soiling themselves, but that’s about it.”

I sat for a bit in reflective silence.

Finally, I said, “I’m a time nomad now.”

“I know,” she said.

“You looking for a sidekick?”

She laughed. “Hell, yes.”

We held hands, and flashed out.

traveled with Andrea for eighteen years. We went as far back as ancient Egypt, and watched the Pyramids being constructed from the safety of our cognitive dissonance cloud. We attended concerts by Beethoven, Louis Armstrong, and The Beatles. We watched the live news coverage of the first moon landing, and we stood on the deck of the Titanic, right until it started to tip. We ventured into the future as well, but as Andrea had discovered long ago, that direction was profoundly limited. We never managed to get more than twenty years beyond our starting point. My fifty-two year jaunt had been something of an anomaly, but was made possible by the technicality that I was just being moved from one past to another. There was never a real future involved.

At the end of that time, she retired. We set her up in a spectacular mansion with every manner of convenience, and private nursing care when she began to run down. After that, I was on my own.

Sometimes I would check in on the other versions of me out there. The one who replaced me in 2092 went the rest of his life without another unhappening, eventually becoming the professor I met in 2146. By then, he had overwritten some of that one’s memories, so the fact of manned time travel stopped being such a wonder for him. We stayed friends, but there’s only so much time one can spend with one’s self. Any of one’s selves. I have no idea what became of the Nigel from 2155 who set all of this into motion. If I understood the theory correctly, it seemed likely that the professor from 2146 would eventually merge with that one. Maybe his pain would be overwritten. Or maybe it would dominate. I chose not to find out. Whatever his destiny, I needed to distance myself from him. I needed to believe I did not have to become him.

Occasionally, I would get an unexpected visit from a younger version of Athena. These were usually by accident, extremely awkward, and confusing for her. She was not used to knowing less than I did. I wouldn’t say it was a substitute for healing the relationship we once had, now permanently fractured, but it was adorable, like watching an old home movie. She never stayed long, but every moment with her was a treasure beyond value.

I stayed away from Helen, or at least as far as she knew, I did. I kept tabs on her enough to know that when I left, she went on to be one of the driving voices in the Project. Apparently the entire time Athena had been taking her orders from them, one of the people giving those orders was her own mother. I wondered if that had any bearing on why they never did give her the kill order for Carlton.