by Helen Fisher
* * *
A CRACK OF light through the curtains hurt my eyes, rousing me. It was nearly midday, so almost three times as long had passed while I slept as when I was in the seventies with my mother.
This fact gently spun the web of an idea as beautiful as a spider’s creation on dewy grass. If three hours was the amount of time that passed here in the present, no matter how long I spent in the past, then what was stopping me from staying in the past for a lot longer?
I mean, a lot longer. Like Lucy and the others in Narnia, could I live my entire life twice over? Even in my groggy state it didn’t seem like a good idea. But if it were possible, then I’d have to make a list of pros and cons; the potential of the idea invigorated me. Before I pursued my options, I needed to get the basics done: call Eddie, shower, dress, and eat. Then I’d make the bed, and then… then I’d set my mind to everything I needed to do, and everything I could do. But before I even put pen to paper, I knew that the task at the top of my list was to get my engagement ring back, as soon as possible.
But I wasn’t going alone. I wanted Louis to come with me to Elizabeth’s.
I drove to Louis’s place and parked in the drive. I’d never been to his house before, and I’m not sure what I expected, but it was spotless; I guess I thought it would be messy, because blind people can’t see dust, and therefore can’t see the need to clean and tidy up. He led me into a lounge that was soothingly pale: soft, light-gray sofas and a cream carpet, with a large vase of white roses atop a white, glazed coffee table, around which he stepped with practiced dance moves—side, side, forward—before he sat down.
“Your place is not what I expected, Louis,” I said, shuffling my cardigan off and backtracking to hang it on a peg in the hallway.
“What did you expect?” he said.
“I don’t know.” I plonked down into a wing chair beautifully upholstered in a gray-and-mustard geometric pattern. “I thought, man living alone, it would be more of a bachelor pad: sagging sofa and empty beer cans thrown in the corner, that sort of thing.”
“I can’t have clutter, I’d just be tripping over it all the time. My sister’s an interior decorator and she ordered the furniture and everything; we designed the layout together. She says it’s quite a clinical look.”
“It’s very clean-looking, very peaceful. I love it.”
“See the flowers,” he said, pointing slightly left of them.
“Beautiful. Who are they from?”
“When I know I’ve got a visitor, I call the lady next door, and she cuts me some flowers from her garden, puts them in a vase, brings them round, to take the edge off that clinical look. She’s my cleaner too.”
“Well, she does a great job, I can confirm that,” I said.
We went into the kitchen, also very white and shiny, and Louis put the kettle on.
“Your kettle’s red,” I said.
“Whatever that is,” he said.
“It’s a nice spot of color in here.”
When he poured the tea, he put his finger over the edge of the cup, so he could stop pouring when the water touched it.
“My hands are clean,” he said, as if I was worried he might contaminate my drink. “I hope you don’t mind, it’s just the most practical way to do it.”
I didn’t mind, of course. We sat at the kitchen table, which—unlike everything else I’d seen in the house so far—was old and wooden, worn pale from being scrubbed daily for years and years. I ran my hand over it; it was impossibly smooth.
“This was my mother’s,” he said, in response to the whooshing sound my hand made on the surface, and he smoothed his hands over the tabletop too. “I think of her whenever I sit here. She was always in the kitchen, so it’s fitting.”
“I went back again,” I said. Louis stopped what he was doing, which wasn’t much, but there was a sudden extra stillness to him, as though he’d detected a faint scent in the air.
“You mean, back in time?” he said, and then made a faint snorting sound, which surprised me.
“Yes, I visited my mother again, and my younger self.”
“When?”
“The day before yesterday. I stayed a couple of days. But get this.” I leaned forward conspiratorially. “When I got back to the present, the same amount of time had passed as when I went back in time for less than a day. Just three hours.”
Louis shoved his chair back and fetched a packet of chocolate cookies; he fumbled for the little strip that opened it at one end, and took one, pushing the packet toward me.
“Okay,” he said, hesitating. “How come we’re doing this here and not at work?”
His question threw me, but only for a second. “I’ve taken a couple of days off, because I didn’t know how long I’d be gone this time, but it’s turned out to be almost no time at all. And I couldn’t wait to see you and tell you what happened, so that’s why I called.”
Louis frowned and tipped his head to one side.
“Plus,” I said, “I’m really glad I did, because I love your place, and now I’ll be able to picture you at home.”
“Okay,” he said, leaning back in his chair with a sigh. “Let’s hear it. What happened?”
I launched breathlessly into the whole thing: getting stoned with my mother, and how I’d thought about stealing the roller skates but ended up exchanging my engagement ring for them; the sticky toffee pudding and my mother’s premonition that she would die young; her request that I look after Faye if that happened, and the nugget of information about my father.
Louis methodically ate cookies with the air of a bored judge while I talked, and when I stopped, he wiped crumbs from around his mouth.
“So,” I said. “What do you think?”
He exhaled deeply. “Wow, well, you’ve given me a lot of information there, Faye, I’m not sure where to start. I’m impressed at the detail.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said.
His eyebrows arched and I momentarily wondered why, before my stomach sank like a ship.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” I said, my voice suddenly small. I put a half-eaten cookie on the table and my hands in my lap, like a chastened child. I wanted to cry.
“Faye,” he said. “What’s going on here? You don’t expect me to believe all this is actually true?”
I looked up at him, my eyes full of tears, but they were wasted on him; as far as he knew, I was stony-faced. “You think I’m lying to you? Why? Why would I do that? Do you think I’m nuts?” The tears were clearly audible in my voice.
“No, I…” He stumbled over his words. Looking truly confused, he reached out his hand, searching for mine. I put my hand onto the table so he could find it, and let him hold it.
“You’re my friend,” he said. “But I assumed this story was part of one of those experiments you do.”
“What?” I said, lost.
“I don’t know, it was fun and interesting when you first told me about it, and I’ve been thinking about it since then, and we’ve talked… I mean, I had to come up with a reason why you would tell me something like this.”
“How could it be an experiment?” I said, my voice sharp. “What are you talking about?”
“You’re always doing experiments, comparing blind and sighted people. I’ve been trying to work out what all this is about, and the best I could come up with is that you have designed a scenario to test for differences in the logic and problem-solving skills between blinkies and nonblinkies. You have done vaguely similar studies before, not quite as unusual as this, but still. I thought I was doing quite well, I came up with some good ideas—you know, regarding time travel and so on.”
“Yes, you did,” I said, very quietly. “You came up with some very useful ideas.”
“And so I’m wondering why you would come here and talk about it on private time, rather than at work, where we get paid for having conversations like this.”
“I thought you believed in me, Louis,” I said. “I was kin
d of relying on it.” I let go of his hand and bunched my fists under the table.
“So you’re saying to me that all this stuff is really happening to you?”
“Well, either it is, or I’m crazy,” I said. There was a long silence.
“It could be both,” he said. “It could be happening and you’re crazy.”
“True,” I said, and sniffed.
I chuckled, half laughing, half crying. And he laughed gently too; his laugh was one-third apology and one-third disbelief, and I couldn’t give a name to the last third of his laugh.
But this was not really a laughing matter. Not to me. This was life or death. Or more accurately, life and death. And it felt like I’d just lost the only person in the universe I could talk to.
Despair hit me like a punch in the stomach, and loneliness, like treading water in a deep, dark well, knowing that no one could hear my cries and I wasn’t going to see Lassie peering over the top to reassure me help was on its way. A howl surged up from deep inside me. Primal. Feral. Desperate. I called out no words, but the sound that forced its way into the room and filled it said everything about the way it felt to not be believed, to not belong, to have no way of proving your innocence, your story, your truth. For the only time in my life, I felt like a kind of god who wanted to demand faith.
“I’m telling the truth,” I wailed, and Louis shifted back in his seat, bolt upright, looking horrified.
“It’s all real,” I said, but this time my voice was broken and small.
In the silence that followed my outburst I heard a distant lawn mower and wondered what it would be like to feel normal again.
“Listen to me,” Louis said, his voice heavy with sincerity. And then he said nothing, although his mouth opened and closed a few times in aborted attempts to respond.
“What?” I said, my voice a croak. My shout had scratched my throat.
“I don’t think you’d lie to me. So either you’re telling the truth, or you really are…”
“… crazy?” I finished his sentence. “I know.”
“Yeah. It’s one or the other, definitely not both. But in fact, despite the madness of it all, Faye, my dear friend, I don’t believe you are crazy. It’s just hard. You know? Hard for me to believe without some bit of proof. I’m a scientist. Faith is not something I’m that good with. But I’m going to try, okay? I’ll try to totally believe you.”
The temperature behind my eyes rose and tears slipped down my face. Louis didn’t know, so I told him. “I’m crying,” I said.
“You okay?”
“I think so.” I was emotionally exhausted and hadn’t realized how very alone I would be if I didn’t have Louis. “I need you, Louis.”
“Look, let’s have some more tea,” he said. “Or how about a beer? Have a couple, leave your car here, take a cab home. You can have a bite to eat if you want, as Eddie and the girls are away.”
“Can you cook?” I said, sniffing.
“Not really, but I’m an excellent microwaver,” he said, with a comical gesture in roughly the direction of the microwave. I noticed it was the only thing in the kitchen that had a smudge on it.
“Sounds good, a beer would be great,” I said. “Thank you.”
We got comfy in the lounge; the beers popped open with a hiss, and when we talked it felt like we were starting again. Louis asked me questions and we took it more slowly. He said the way I had told him what happened was like a trailer from a film, all the highlights; he said he wanted to know everything.
And what we got talking about most was philosophy. In particular, by going back and changing things, would I have changed the present? In fact, Louis very carefully asked me if I had spoken to Eddie and the girls since I’d returned, and he breathed a huge sigh of relief when I said I had.
“Oh God,” I said. “I didn’t even think about that. You were worried that Eddie and the girls might not even exist anymore?”
“I wouldn’t know what to expect. Look, the first time you went back, it was an accident, so if things had changed when you returned, you couldn’t really blame yourself. But the second time you went back, you chose to do it, and you did a lot of stuff, you spoke to people about the future, you gave your younger self a present. You gave away your ring, Faye.”
I looked down at my wedding ring, and the pale mark where my other ring had been.
“I can’t get my head around that ring,” he went on. “If you gave away your engagement ring in the nineteen-seventies, then how would Eddie have been able to buy it and give it to you when he proposed? If that woman, Elizabeth, has had it all this time, how would it have been available to Eddie?”
“I didn’t think of that.” I drained my beer, and Louis, recognizing the sound of a bottle being emptied, got up.
“Another?”
“Thanks,” I said. While he was in the kitchen, I called out, “So do you think I might have changed things in the present that I don’t know about yet?”
“I’m not sure,” he said, coming back into the living room with a couple of cold beers, dripping with condensation. “I mean, who knows which theories are true? If any. There’s the butterfly effect, which is where tiny changes have large consequences, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can change the course of a tornado. That kind of thing.”
“I read a book to Esther about a year ago, where this child goes back in time to the dinosaurs and accidentally steps on a bug, and then when the kid comes back, everything’s different, the world is not a very nice place. The kid has to go back again and make sure to not step on the bug, so that things in the present can go back to normal.”
“Wow, that’s kind of sinister for a kid’s book,” Louis said.
“All the good ones are.”
“True. Well, you seem to have done a lot more than step on a bug, and in fact you may have literally stepped on several, but so far you haven’t noticed any changes?”
“No,” I said. “The thing is, I actually feel like some of my actions were required in order to ensure that the present is the one I’m familiar with. Like the roller skates. I don’t think I would have had roller skates and got so into it as a teenager if I hadn’t been given them as a child—but who would have given me those exact roller skates, if not myself?”
“There’s another time-travel theory I heard about, might be relevant,” Louis said, getting up and walking out of the room. “Come on.” I followed him upstairs to a study. This room was also pristine (the filing was to die for), but the decor was darker, the walls and carpet were dark gray, and there was a very comfy-looking black leather office chair, which Louis sat in.
“Do we need a light on? What’s the time?” He fumbled under his cuff for his watch. “Nine thirty, still light?”
“It’s fine,” I said, pulling a chair from the corner in order to sit next to him at the computer. He tilted the screen in my general direction; there were images of a variety of guys, looking for love. Louis started tapping away, and another window opened up.
“I’ve got a screen reader on, and it’s fast, so just ignore it if you can.”
Louis, like most blind staff at RNIB, had a screen reader at home too, a computer program that reads the text off the screen. Now, I’m not going to suggest that blind people have better hearing than sighted people, but when they get used to those screen readers, blind people have the program set to such a high speed that it’s pretty much impossible for the uninitiated to understand it. So when Louis pulled up a web page and the screen reader kicked in, it sounded like gobbledegook, a loud electronic rattling purr, and I jumped.
“Hang on, I’ll just turn it down a bit,” Louis said. “I’m looking for something in particular, something I was reading a few weeks ago, bear with me.”
I waited while he pulled up web pages and typed in search words. He was looking up theories of time travel, and images flashed up on the screen of the DeLorean from Back to the Future and the sled-shaped machine with the red-velvet seat and the round contra
ption on the back from the original Time Machine from 1960. Then Louis paused on a screen that looked a little more scientific and scrolled down—I couldn’t understand the garbled speech that he was skipping through—then he stopped.
“This is it,” he said, and he slowed the screen reader right down. It was a bit like listening to a lecture by Stephen Hawking, not only because of the voice but because of the subject matter too. At first I could understand, but then there was a lot of stuff about paradoxes and I got lost in the jargon. When the screen reader finished, Louis turned to me.
“I think that last bit seems the most reasonable explanation,” he said. “Especially seeing as you’re still here, and nothing major, or even minor, seems to have changed as a result of you going back and forward in time, even though you were messing about quite a lot back there.”
“What’s the bottom line?” I said.
“Bottom line: you can’t change what’s happened, because it’s already happened. You wouldn’t be able to go back and kill your parents before they had you, because you exist. Simple.”
“So the fact that I grew up with that pair of metal roller skates…” I said.
“… happened precisely because you went back in time and gave yourself those roller skates. It’s basically a self-fulfilling time-travel theory where anything you do to try to change the past ultimately only causes the events that happened, meaning that time travel can never change the future, or the present.”
We watched a couple of online videos about wormholes and traveling faster than the speed of light, and pretty soon my mind was swimming. I couldn’t take any more, and I told Louis so.