The Traveler: A Time Travel Thriller

by Fredric Shernoff

  I sat back in my chair, my mouth hanging agape. All the possibilities I had considered as I explored what was happening to me had been reduced to two. I was a time traveler, or I had completely lost my mind. The doctors didn’t think the second was a possibility, so what did that leave? My brain spun with the implications and opportunities. My true adventure had just begun.

  Chapter 5

  1

  The weekend after my time with Levi I drove down to my old camp, Shady Pines. It's a creepy name, I know, but the place was really wonderful, once upon a time. I had spent some truly great summers there between the ages of five and fourteen.

  Why was I there? I don’t really know. It was just something I did. I’d go back to the camp whenever I was troubled by anything in my life or facing a fork in the road. Right before Helena and I got married, we’d had a big fight and I’d run to the camp to decide my future. If not for the empty space’s calming effects, I might never have made the choice to follow through with the wedding.

  I guess I came to Shady Pines on that particular day as I considered the ramifications of my new abilities because I thought that by isolating myself from all the other troubles of my adult life I could see this one particular dilemma in stark definition.

  I pulled into the parking lot, a sea of grey stones that led to a cluster of trees on one side (the eponymous shady pines) and the asphalt of a township parking lot on the other. The whole place is actually township property these days. The guys who owned the camp hightailed it to Florida or some other hot spot and got a promise that the township would never allow developers to cover the land with single family residences.

  I parked the car and stepped out onto the stones. I felt a rush of memory. The pressure of the small rocks on the sole of my work shoes was gentle but it reminded me of a time twenty years earlier when a much younger Danny Wells had run across those stones on a trip to the bathroom during swim periods. On bare feet, the hot, jagged stones were not so kind.

  I followed the path to what served as a main entrance to the property. To my right was the long building we had called the "chuckwagon," where lunches were served and awards presented. Kind of a gathering place in addition to a cafeteria. Of course, that was in a long lost era. As I approached the building, I regarded its faded and peeled red paint with some sadness. The township had made good on its promise to keep the developers at bay, but nature couldn't be as easily restricted.

  On the right side of the chuckwagon were back-to-back bathrooms. One for the boys, one for the girls, both charmingly disgusting. To me, and maybe this speaks volumes about my fucked up personality, I preferred those smelly old stalls to the shiny white bathrooms that had been built out on the lawn. For all it’s newness, the thing seemed like an abomination to my sentimental sensibilities.

  I popped in to the old bathroom and used the rusty latrine. I have to say, before that moment I hadn’t known that porcelain could rust. The metal pipes, on the other hand, weren’t so much rusted as disintegrating. In the cracked mirror that hung above, I saw the bathroom stalls over my shoulder. The flaking paint was coated in campers’ graffiti, a constellation of small inside jokes and tags beneath a newer, broad message, “Superstar Rules” that was slapped across the whole thing.

  I washed my hands and left the bathroom. Walking out toward the expanse of grass hurt my soul, as it did every time I visited the camp. There had been a building standing in the middle of all that grass— a very old, white house that had been the camp's office and the nurse’s station. I missed that place because of what it represented about my experience at camp and about my past in general. It was a simpler time. I could remember being up in the attic of that building in computer club and staring with fascination at the simplistic graphics that danced across the screens.

  There had been a walkout basement beneath the old house which the camp had used for storage. Though I’d never been down there, the fact that it had been completely filled in with earth was unsettling. I shrugged away the unpleasant thoughts and kept on walking. I had some serious thinking to do, and I couldn’t get to it until I’d taken my tour of the grounds. Thinking always came after reminiscing. That’s just how I roll.

  I walked through the "girl's campus," a semi-circle of red bunks on concrete pads with a small pavilion in the center. In the off-season, the township was supposed to lock all the buildings, but they hadn't yet closed up from the summer. Township’s getting lazy, I thought. I entered the bunk at the far end of the semi-circle, next to the tennis courts. I remembered with a laugh being a camper who dreamed with his friends about being able to see into the girls' bunks.

  The screen door squeaked on its hinges and slammed shut with a crack of sound that violated the stillness, if only for a moment.

  I looked around the small room. Like the bathroom stalls, the walls were covered in camper graffiti in every color available in a box of markers, but these had the type of flair that only young girls could manage. On one wall was a recent entry, the phrase "I love Taylor Lautner" written over and over and over, down an entire vertical space between two studs of the building. Three feet to the right was, "Shadie Pins Rules!!!" Nothing like camp spirit, no matter how poor the spelling. Am I right?

  I kept scanning the wall, moving past: "Uncle Arthur's bald" (stating the obvious?) and, "Lily is AWESOME!" written in dark blue and accented with some kind of glitter explosion.

  Across the room from those gems and so much more written over thirty-some years were the words "Suzy was here '85." I sat on the bench next to that message and felt very old. I know what you’re thinking. Thirties are not that old. I understand that, sure. At the same time, I never really thought it would happen to me. Somehow, I though my childhood would last forever, even in the frustrating days of youth when I wasn’t so sure that being young was such a great thing. Yet there I was, all grown up after all, and much faster than I’d have ever imagined.

  2

  I left the bunk feeling pretty low. I walked down to the main pavilion, where the campers lined up and the counselors did a roll call, at least back in the good old days. On the rare overnighter at camp we would fill the space with sleeping bags. The same light fixtures that had once illuminated those sleepovers still adorned the ceiling of the pavilion, but they hadn't had bulbs in years and were so rusted that I wouldn't dare try to activate them. This wasn't a comfortable place to be at night any more.

  From there I passed the two swimming pools, one for older kids, one for younger. I had a dim memory of skinny dipping in the larger pool during an extended day, but I couldn’t really place when it had happened. Memory is a weird thing under normal conditions. My brain was so addled at that point from trying to adjust to traveling that everything seemed just a little surreal and uncertain.

  Past the pools I came to the sports area, consisting of a few basketball and street hockey courts, a beach volleyball setup and several round wooden rinks for a game called gaga. What had once been the penalty box of the street hockey court now contained the tallest weeds I had ever seen. I could remember a time before the courts existed at all and I remembered the excitement of the campers when they were built. I sat on the wall of one of the gaga circles and looked at my hand. I could see the faded scars across three of my knuckles. "Gaga knuckles" is what we had called them, the result of overzealous and imprecise attempts to hit the ball along the hard dirt.

  The campgrounds were so quiet. I could hear a few birds, but mostly I was left with my own thoughts. Though my brain had been my enemy in recent weeks, at the camp I was calm. Something about the environment centered me. Maybe my positive experiences there triggered that response or maybe it was just the hypnotic effect of the warm breeze.

  A man cleared his throat and shocked me from my meditative drifting. I looked up. He was in his sixties, or thereabouts, and very skinny with large aviator shades and a goatee. "Sorry to startle you," he said.

  "It's okay," I replied. "I tend to get lost in thought here."

&nbs
p; "Did you go here?" The man asked. "Back in the old days?"

  "I was a camper here when I was little," I said. I highly doubted he’d remember Danny Wells, super shy camper.

  "Ah, okay. You did seem to look familiar." I laughed in the kind of warm way that says you and I both know you’re full of shit but I truly appreciate the effort.

  The man took off his sunglasses, and I recognized him immediately. After all, children change quite a bit in twenty years but for the most part grownups still look familiar enough, even with a few more grey hairs and wrinkles. Besides, this wasn’t just any guy. The man standing before me was as much an institution at the camp as the big white house. ”You're Peter," I said. "The...groundskeeper? Caretaker? Sorry, I don't know the word."

  He shrugged. "Those are good enough titles as anything I'd come up with. Nice to meet you..."

  "Dan," I said. We shook hands. "Want to have a seat?"

  3

  "Sounds good to me," he said. He perched on the side of the hockey rink, about five feet in front of me. "So... you seeing the sights?"

  I laughed. "Something like that. I thought I heard somewhere that you'd moved away."

  "You heard correct. I went out to AC after the camp closed down. Figured I'd work in the casinos."

  "So, what happened?"

  "Ah, you know, things there have been pretty terrible for a while and getting worse. I don't know if you heard about the chaos at City Hall a while back, but it caused an increased police presence and crazy security at the casinos. I'm sure it's died down by now but I figured that was my cue to leave."

  I vaguely remembered hearing something about it, but I just nodded politely.

  Peter took out a pack of cigarettes. He shook one out of the box and put it in his mouth while he removed a lighter from his pocket. "Bad habit. Sorry."

  "Fine by me," I said. "So you left the shore and then what? You came back here?"

  "Not here, exactly," he said. "But back to Philly, yeah." He looked at the ground and took a long, slow drag of his cigarette. "Wanted to reconnect with my daughter."

  "I didn't realize you had a daughter. I remember a son..."

  "Yeah, I still talk to him often enough. He was what I guess you'd call a miracle surprise later in life. But my girl, my Jane, we planned for her." He paused. "We had a lot of plans, my wife and me."

  "Your wife... I don't remember her."

  "Nah, you wouldn't." He blew a puff of smoke out the corner of his mouth. It drifted and faded into the late day sun. "She died two years after Charlie was born. Cancer."

  "I'm sorry," I said.

  He waved my comment away with his free hand. "It is what it is. Anyhow, Jane and I, we never really saw eye to eye about most things. She was smart, you know? Always really good at school and whatnot, but she got herself in trouble a lot too. I think just to piss off her old man." He laughed. "Maybe that's a little...egocentric of me? I don't know. Do you have kids?"

  "Not yet," I said. "Maybe someday soon."

  "Good, man. Good. Don't be like me. Best advice I can give you."

  "So what was the breaking point?" I asked. "If you don't mind my prying."

  "She got involved with a guy I wasn't sure about. I tried to have a...heart to heart about it. She told me to go screw and that was the end of the whole deal."

  "Did she stay with the guy?"

  "Yeah, as far as I know." He sniffed and wiped at his eyes with the back of one hand, raising the shades out of the way as he did so. "I messed up, man. Just fucked up the whole damned thing. I'd give anything to go back and change it."

  Listen, I know what you’re pondering right now. I was thinking it too. I could help him. I could go back and talk some sense into his younger self, or something like that. But it only took me a second more to realize how unlikely it was that I could pull that off. Who knew where the hell I’d end up? And what if my talking to him kept this very conversation from ever happening? I thought that might just kill me or possibly destroy the universe. I wasn’t interested in finding out.

  "So she won't talk to you now? Since you've come back to Philly?"

  "I don't know," he said. "I don't have the balls to try calling her. She doesn't need me in her life. I'm just a washed up old man who made too many mistakes."

  "So why come here?" I asked.

  "I don't really know," Peter replied. "I think I wanted to remember a time when I meant something...when I served some purpose."

  "And what did you find?"

  He spread his arms wide. "All of this shit. This emptiness."

  I nodded my agreement. "It does suck, doesn't it? Like they stripped the heart out of the place."

  "I spent so much time here with my son," Peter said. "Jane was off at sleepaway camp or working or whatever during many of those years, but Charlie grew up here, really. I have memories of him playing in so many different parts of the camp, but there's just nothing there. Just..."

  "Grass," I finished.

  He laughed. "Yeah. A shit ton of grass."

  We sat quiet for a while after that.

  "So what about you?" Peter asked finally. "Why did you come here?"

  "Did you ever read The Incredible Hulk?" I asked.

  He laughed, surprised. "Not since I was a kid. Why?"

  "Well, when things get crazy he always gets drawn back to the place where the gamma bomb went off. The place he was created. It centers him."

  "And this place, this centers you?" A chuckle. "This created you?"

  I thought of my childhood. "Yes...no...I don't know. What I do know is it does something good for me."

  "I'd think it would make you depressed, man."

  "Maybe it does, a little. I'm guessing it's having that effect on you?"

  "Yeah, this was my home for a long time. I was friends with a lot of the staff...people actually cared. You know, they'd remember my birthday, Charlie's birthday, stuff like that. In this place I had so much family it could make me forget everything that was wrong with my real family. I guess that's pretty fucked up."

  I thought that maybe it was, but I also understood it. After all, I was the ass who came there to avoid the grief of the present day. "You can't be so hard on yourself about everything," I said. "The decisions we made in the past are what brought us to this point, but those experiences are going to be what instructs you going forward. The future is for you to choose."

  He didn't respond for nearly a minute. I thought Peter was processing my zen bullshit, deciding if my point made sense or not.

  "You talk like it's so easy to push all the regrets aside," he said, pausing to inhale from his cigarette. "You speaking from experience?"

  I laughed. “Maybe I am, but I don't think that it's easy. I guess that's part of why I'm here too. Regrets and trying to figure out my next moves.”

  "I hear ya," Peter said. "I wish I could just fix everything. I know I could move forward if I didn't have all this baggage dragging me down."

  He studied my reaction with a strange curiosity, then sighed. "I've taken enough of your time, man. I hope you can take what you need from this place." He smiled. "Hope you can 'center yourself.'"

  "You too, Peter. I hope you can get things straightened out with your kid."

  "Yeah. I don't even know where to begin."

  I really felt bad for the guy. He was so lost. So broken. He was a part of my past; a deeply ingrained part of the camp itself. Just looking at him spoke more about life and the universe's endless descent into entropy than even the recklessly miskept grounds around us.

  I walked over to Peter and shook his nicotine-stained hand. The deep sadness in his eyes made me feel a little silly about my own issues, but comparative pain never helped anybody. At least that’s my opinion of the matter.

  4

  After Peter and I had said our goodbyes, I walked down to the lake at the far end of the camp. I had spent endless hours out on that lake and on the dock. In the summer, with the trees in full growth, the lake and its surroundings didn't
look very different than they had twenty years earlier, despite the homes built around the perimeter of the property.

  The area was cleaner, that's for sure. In the past the approach to the lake and the whole dock were covered in goose droppings, left by the birds that lived in the pond in the center of the camp. Thanks to the township's meddlesome improvements, there's no pond there anymore, so no geese. Gotta love preserving nature by destroying a habitat.

  I walked onto the dock, feeling the wooden structure sink several inches into the water, and I sat at the end of it. I slipped off my sandals and sat cross-legged. I wanted so badly to make my peace with my past. Could my travels solve that problem for me? Could they fix this unexplainable regret?

  I missed the camp and I missed the child I had been. Being there, wandering around freely, it was almost like the specter of little Danny Wells was right there with me where I could watch him play with his friends. Still, it wasn't enough. I wanted to see him for real. I wanted to see all the places that had mattered to me. I looked over my shoulder at the endless green that had once been marked by so many buildings...so many sacred spaces. This camp wasn't my camp.

  I’m sure you’ve got an idea of me at this point that isn’t all that positive. Writing about this stuff now I feel the same way. For better or worse, that’s who I was. Maybe I could have benefited from intensive therapy and medication. What I had instead was something more powerful.

  With my eyes closed, I felt a familiar pulse in my temples, like the earliest wispy signs of a coming storm. The air around me began to feel less connected to the nerve endings in my skin. I knew what was happening and I wanted to let it continue, but I wasn’t ready yet. Somehow I pushed the feelings away. There was a strength and a focus developing in me and I was excited to test my limits.