Steel and other stories [SSC]

by Richard Matheson

  I reached Bedford Avenue; it was there! I turned right and started up the block. My gaze leaped hungrily across the way. There! Two girls sitting on the porch steps of her apartment house!

  One of them was Adeline.

  I jarred to a halt, aware, for the first time since I’d begun running, that I was panting for breath. I stared across the avenue. It was her, wasn’t it? Yes, it had to be. Her hair, that golden wreath around her head. It was unmistakable. To me anyway. The vision had been imprinted in my brain for sixty-seven years.

  That brought me up short. I wasn’t fifteen anymore. I was an old man.

  No, that wasn’t so! I looked up at the window of my mother’s bedroom. I couldn’t see from that angle. Without a thought, I crossed the avenue and looked up again.

  There I was at the window, gazing intently at Adeline. I drew in a shaking, almost gasping breath. Can you imagine what it would be like to see your own younger self? Your actual younger self? And know what that younger self was thinking?

  And yet I didn’t know. I wasn’t there—inside his head, his brain. I knew what he was thinking but I wasn’t inside his brain. A minor discrepancy perhaps, but, to me, all important.

  I had to act as what I was at this moment: eighty-two-year-old Richard Swanson. Determined to not only see the past up close but change it. I turned and walked closer to the porch where Adeline was sitting with her friend, the little Italian girl named—I couldn’t remember her name, was it Luisa? I thought for a second, that younger Richard might be watching me approach the porch. How could he miss it? Wouldn’t he wonder who I was? Wouldn’t it disturb him? Was I breaking one of the cardinal rules of time travel—making contact with the past? No, I told myself determinedly. It was a rule I’d come up with myself. No one had transmitted it to me. So to hell with it. To ruddy, bloody hell with it! I was here. With Adeline. I could change everything.

  I stopped in front of the porch and gazed at her, my angel. She was still that. Memory had not deceived. She was beautiful. Incredibly beautiful. I love you, I thought. I’ve always loved you.

  They had seen me stop; now saw me staring.

  “What d’ya want, old man?” the Italian girl demanded.

  That puts me in my place, I thought.

  Then occurred the most horrible event in the entire experience.

  The same tongue-tied inability to speak which had assailed me in the delicatessen that afternoon now took place again. I wanted—desperately—to tell her who I was. That my younger self was, at that very second, gazing at her through a window across the way. That he loved her now and that I, the old man standing in front of her, had loved her always. That, somehow, she must speak to my younger self. Get to know him. Love him as he loves you. Now. This year. And always.

  I couldn’t say a word. Was it me or was I prevented from speaking because I had, after all, broken that rule of time travel?

  How long I stood there, a mute statue called wordless love, I had no idea. It must have been long enough to disturb her though. “Why are you staring at me?” she asked.

  Because I love you, damn it! yelled my brain. But my tongue, my voice? Still paralyzed.

  Then Adeline said one thing I will always remember, always cherish.

  “Are you all right?” she asked. Concerned. Loving. I will never forget that.

  Her words were disfigured in a moment by the Italian girl snapping, “Get outta here, old man! We’ll call a cop!”

  That did it. The moment was lost. Without a word—completely unavailable to me anyway—I turned and walked away. Cursing myself inwardly. For Christ’s sake, go back and tell her what she has to hear! If you don’t, that poor, speechless sap in the window will never say boo. And all will be lost. As always, dammit! As bloody always!

  ~ * ~

  I don’t remember how I got back to Flatbush Avenue. Not a step of it. I know I must have passed the police station, the Edison store. Not a glimmer of recollection. Only one thing remembered. Sitting on one of the steps to our old apartment.

  And seeing myself walk by.

  My immediate inclination was to shrink back in startled avoidance. Not that much of a problem since he had already passed me by.

  How do I describe my feelings at that moment? There was a fascination, no doubt of that. But also discomfort, even dismay. Why? Think of it. You—eighty-two—looking at your fifteen-year-old self walking by. Moments of distress at the duplicate reality. Two of you, one fifteen, one eighty-two. How could the confused sensation be allied? No way. I had to just accept the anomaly.

  Then it struck me: I had a choice. There were no hard and fast rules controlling time travel. I was free to act as I chose. I could alter anything at will.

  So I stood quickly and hurried after myself. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? It is crazy. The whole experience was crazy. With one exception.

  It happened.

  So there I was, my old self striding confidently (willfully at any rate) after my young self. “Richard!” I called, suddenly remembering that the gang at the Y called me “Swanee.” Would he respond to that nickname more readily? Probably not.

  He didn’t turn, kept walking. I recognized his stride, smiling as I remembered how my mother described it as loose and wobbly. It was that.

  I called his name again. This time he heard me and stopped to look around. I approached him—and let me tell you about the uncanny encounter of standing inches from your own younger self. The feeling goes beyond description. It was, at once, thrilling and frightening.

  “What is it?” he asked. Not too politely. Who was this old guy and what did he want?

  I tried to start what I meant to say, suffering an abrupt dread that I was about to face the same dumbstruck inability to speak that I had experienced in front of Adeline. I fought it off. I would not let it happen again! “I want,” I began, then faltered, “I want to help you,” I blurted.

  “Is this some kind of charity?” My fifteen-year-old self asked suspiciously.

  I felt a tremor of amusement. I’d always had a skeptical nature. I had to smile. My show of diversion didn’t please him. He turned away. “No, don’t,” I said abruptly.

  He turned back. “Listen, sir,” he said. The sir did not sound at all polite.

  “I want to speak to you about Adeline,” I said.

  He stared at me. “Who?” he asked. He sounded far more aggravated than curious.

  Mentally, I jumped back in my own time. Had this ever happened to me when I was fifteen? I was sure it hadn’t. This was something else. Something else entirely. I was transcending time travel.

  Which strengthened my resolve to say, “The girl who lives across the street from you. The one you look at from the window of your mother’s bedroom.” There. I’d said it. Time was changed.

  My fifteen-year-old-self was looking at me with deep suspicion written on his face. He didn’t speak.

  “You have to speak to her,” I told him.

  “What are you, a detective or something?” he replied.

  I, my dubious teenage self, replied.

  “No,” I said, amused again.

  He didn’t react well to that amusement either.

  “Listen, mister,” he began.

  “No,” I interrupted him. “You listen. Adeline—”

  “How do you know her name?” he demanded. He was really suspicious of me now. Was it all going wrong?

  I couldn’t let it go wrong. So, mistakenly or not, I countered him. “You don’t know her name, do you? You don’t know anything about her.”

  “Listen, mister,” he started again.

  “No, you listen, son!” I broke in again. (Of course, he wasn’t my son, he was me.) “You have to speak to her. Stop staring out the window and go to her when she’s sitting on her porch. Get to know her. Tell her you love her. That you want to spend the rest of your life with her. Don’t make the same mistake Idid! You’ve got to—”

  “Mister!” he cried, cutting me off. “I don’t know what you’re t
alking about! All I know is you’ve lived your life! Now let me live mine!”

  He was right, of course. I knew it in an instant. I had no right to mess with his life. I knew that he would never speak to Adeline. Would live his life without her. My attempted intervention was a waste of time. Would he even remember it? Doubtful.

  I watched him walk away from me, my young self leaving me behind. Living his own life. As he had a perfect right to do. Unhampered by me. I’d tried in vain.... Time travel? Bah! Humbug!

  Unless....

  Unless it taught me something. But what? Leave yesterday alone, maybe. No point in trying to change the past. It’s gone. Only in memories. Which are, face it, indelible; not subject to rewriting.

  ~ * ~

  I walked back to the house. It was still there. I rang the deafening bell and the old lady opened the front door. Somehow, it was 2009 once more. I didn’t have to climb back through the window. “I’ve decided against renting that room,” I told her.

  She didn’t seem surprised. “Thought you might,” she said, then shut the door.

  I walked back to Miriam’s house. She’d returned from the market and was unloading groceries.

  “Where you been, Dad?” she asked.

  I kissed her on the cheek. “Went for a walk,” I told her.

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