“The colleagues of Dr. Porter’s day thought that this was a remarkable conclusion. However, a more skeptical group of scientists laughed at the idea. They questioned him most furiously. But where is this place? Have you spent much time there? They had a very good time laughing at his expense.
“For years after his initial conclusion, the best answer Dr. Porter could offer was that it had to be a transitional place, a common space existing somewhere between the traveler’s departure point and final destination. Unfortunately, Dr. Porter died before finding an answer that satisfied his critics. His eldest son believed in him and his work, though.”
I fidgeted in my seat. Edgar had a habit of turning even the most straightforward definition into a history lesson that took up the entire afternoon. I looked down at my lecture outline and sighed. We were still on the first couple of lines.
“And thus began Dr. Robert Porter, Jr.’s contributions to his father’s work. Dr. Porter, Jr. had grown up studying time travel under the direction and close supervision of his father. Hence, he was vastly familiar with his father’s work. The skeptics who had known his father—those who were still alive—scoffed at him for his efforts. They did not see what benefit there could possibly be from knowing more about the Blanching Effect. That was until Dr. Porter, Jr. proved that the bright white light is not just somewhere, but everywhere.”
Edgar paused. It was very dramatic. The gleam in Edgar’s eyes and his pure joy of sharing such an idea with me were the only things keeping me from rolling my eyes.
“Yes, everywhere,” he continued. “And everywhen. This, Dr. Porter, Jr. explained, was the reason why the traveling occurred instantaneously.”
I blinked. “Everywhen?”
“Yes, the bright white light encompasses all places and all times—the beginning, the end and everything in between, both temporally and spatially.”
“That’s interesting,” I admitted.
But it wasn’t useful. What really interested me was how to use the glasses rather than how they or time travel developed, the same way I’d been interested in learning how to use computers and Smartphones instead of building or programming them. The one time I’d directly asked Edgar how the glasses worked, he said that they were programmed to gather information and detect brain activity. Beyond that, the best answer I could get out of him was that “there are a lot of physics involved.”
By the time Edgar lectured me on the Blanching Effect, he’d repeated everything I’d already learned about using the travel glasses from Valcas—the search, the impact and the effects that the travel glasses had on the traveler’s eyes. Valcas seemed to have had a better understanding of what the travel glasses could actually do. Sometimes I wondered whether Edgar’s life’s work involved something else.
As Edgar droned on about doctors Robert Porter the Third and Fourth’s work—also not useful—something occurred to me. I waited until Edgar reached his next dramatic pause.
“Why didn’t Robert Porter, Sr. just travel to the future and find out the answers to the questions that his critics were asking him? He could have learned about the work his son did and told them about that.”
Edgar’s lips sagged into a frown. “That would be cheating.”
“How is that cheating? The people laughing at him could have traveled into the future and learned the same thing. They wasted a lot of time arguing about something they could have seen for themselves.”
“The past was meant to be observed rather than changed,” he replied.
“But I thought we were talking about going to the future.”
Edgar sat down in the easy chair. “Had Dr. Porter, Sr. or his colleagues traveled into the future, they would have returned very much changed. Anything heard or seen in the future would significantly impact the decisions they made when they returned to their present lives. This creates a high probability that they would change their futures.”
I stared at Edgar, completely lost. He smiled and stood up again.
“Calla, let’s try an exercise. Let’s assume that you used the travel glasses to travel to your future. Now imagine peeking in through the window into the home of your adult self.”
I closed my eyes and nodded, trying to picture myself as an adult with a few strands of gray hair and bags under my eyes.
“Let’s say that you see your adult self in the nursery, watching her children playing a game.”
I snickered, but nodded to let Edgar know that I was following along.
“There is a knock at the door. ‘I’ll bet that’s Father home from the market,’ you say to the little children. The present version of you looking in at the window is very curious to learn the identity of your future husband. You and grown-up Calla look over as the door opens.”
Edgar paused.
“The man that walks in is familiar. You’ve seen him before. He is older than you last saw him, but still very handsome. You recognize every feature of his face. He is…the most loathsome and terrifying person you know.”
My eyes snapped open. “Edgar!”
“Well, did you like what you found in your future?”
“No,” I admitted.
“So then what do you do when you go back to your present?”
“I would do everything I could to try to avoid Val…I mean, that person, so that I don’t end up marrying him.”
Edgar nodded. “By changing the past, you change the future not only for yourself but for others. Conversely, by visiting the future, you increase the likelihood of changing the past.”
I frowned.
“And that concludes today’s lecture.”
I reached over and placed the Blanching Effect outline on top of the stack of papers on the end table. Then I went outside for another long run.
WHEN I wasn’t outside exploring or listening to Edgar’s lectures, I passed the days just as I would have back at Uncle Al’s cottage. I read. I read a lot, sometimes while curled up on the love seat in the workshop, but more often outside near the still brook.
Edgar let me borrow anything I wanted from his library of textbooks, travel journals and diaries that he had collected during his lifetime. From these I committed to memory dozens of places in vivid detail, including seascapes, landscapes and architectures. I wished I had the ability to do the same with characters and personalities. After briefly considering drawing pictures of people and memorizing them, I abandoned the idea altogether just in case Valcas found the drawings and used them to find me.
What bothered me was that Edgar blamed himself for all the problems that Valcas and the travel glasses caused me. This, I felt, was my fault because in my own search for answers I’d brought my problems with me to Edgar and his home. Then I made no efforts to leave because I felt lost and helpless as to what to do next.
One afternoon, disgusted by these thoughts and the fact that I still didn’t have a plan, I went outside to where I could brood in private. I sat down on a patch of Kentucky bluegrass under an ancient cypress tree with plentiful clusters of reddish-orange seed cones. Hours passed, regrettably unproductive hours.
Instead of thinking about Valcas and the travel glasses, my mind wandered onto the topic of family. Edgar felt more like family to me than my own family members ever did. Mom left me on purpose after my father left both of us. Toward him I felt less of a sense of abandonment—I never got to hear his side of the story, and Mom wouldn’t talk about it long enough to fill me in on what his part of the story could possibly be. There had to be a good reason for his absence. Maybe he’d been in an accident. Maybe he was dead.
Then there was Uncle Al, who I knew was a good person who went out of his way to help me. But he didn’t want me around either. After Uncle Al contacted the police and helped me with the process of getting the Plaka Portraits removed from the internet, I overheard him talking to Mom about the incident on the phone. I was so embarrassed that I hadn’t mentioned it to her myself. The words Uncle Al used that night confirmed something I’d already expected, that I would event
ually need to leave the cottage and Lake Winston permanently. Hearing those words coming out of his mouth hurt me much, much more.
“I can’t live like this,” he’d said. “She haunts the house like a ghost—it’s gotten worse. When the girl turns eighteen, she’s out.” He’d finally openly rejected me.
With these thoughts on my mind, Edgar found me sitting under the tree with my head tilted up toward the sky, eyes closed, brows furrowed.
“Excuse me, Calla,” he said. “I made some mint leaf cakes and dandelion tea. Will you share a picnic with me?”
“Sure, thanks,” I replied, trying to shake off of the ugliness of what I’d just been thinking.
“Something occurred to me just recently.” Edgar coughed.
“Oh?”
“Well, yes. Let me just pour you some of this tea.”
“Thank you.”
“Calla, you are spending an awful lot of time on the running away aspect of your plans. Have you considered confronting Valcas instead?”
I cringed at Valcas’ name. “What? Why?”
“I’m just recommending a more offensive approach to the situation. You cannot, or rather should not, have to live a life hiding or tramping from place to place in constant fear. You can’t run away from him forever. Of that I am certain.”
I immediately wondered whether Edgar was rejecting me too, telling me to leave the workshop. I could feel my lips tremble as I tried to respond.
“How do I confront someone like him? Are you asking me to surrender to his plan? To marry him?”
Edgar’s face turned a shade paler. He had no response, but his brows were furrowed as if he was deep in thought.
“Excuse me,” he said. He walked away, leaving the basket of cakes with me.
I didn’t see him for the rest of the day. I avoided dinner. Instead, I wandered around the woods long after it grew dark. When I returned to the workshop, the lights were out and Edgar was already asleep.
The next morning I wasn’t sure whether I felt more rejected, embarrassed, scared or challenged to do something about all of the above. Edgar wasn’t in his laboratory, so I figured he was outside in his garden. I skipped my daily run. In addition to going to bed late, I was exhausted by a series of nightmares, all of which involved either being locked up or embarrassingly exposed. The more terrifying images from those dreams flashed in my mind, mercilessly taunting me as I groggily reached inside my backpack for my hairbrush.
My hand grazed the T-shirt I’d wrapped around the glasses and stopped. I removed the package from the bag and slowly unwrapped the T-shirt. A moment later, the glasses were on my face. I never did figure out why I put on the glasses after Edgar’s initial warning not to wear them unless it was absolutely necessary, but I suspected that it had something to do with his recent recommendation that I confront Valcas.
I stood there stupidly, knowing that I was standing still with no intention of traveling anywhere. I wasn’t searching for anything. There was no bright light—no everywhere or everywhen. The dark lenses obscured my view of the living room, leaving me feeling alone in a world of darkness.
I wasn’t alone for long.
An image of a person appeared against a white background. A lump formed in my throat. He stood out against the blank background like a cardboard cutout glued onto white canvas.
Valcas looked back at me with a crazed smile. I shuddered, feeling him see me through a pair of dark glasses that he too was wearing. He didn’t reach out or try to pursue me. He couldn’t—his hands were bound with metal shackles. One of his legs was roughly bandaged in gauze stained with dried blood.
His breathing was labored, but he spoke. “There is no distance that you can place between us that will promise you your safety. You abandoned any hope for security back at my palace. Enjoy the glasses, Calla. Whether you are with or without them, I will recover you.”
There were so many things I wanted to say to him—like the fact that he was a creepy scumbag who had no business having anything to do with my life. Oh, and that the shackles looked pretty good on him. Good luck trying to capture me bound up like that. But I couldn’t move my lips. The shock of seeing him paralyzed me.
Then he was gone. The white background with Valcas’ image on it disappeared. And so did everything else.
RELIEF WASHED over me each time I opened my eyes. I never saw or tasted any of the brightly colored liquids in my dreams. Vials of tonics appeared in front of me only when I was awake, followed by Edgar’s soothing voice.
“Drink up, Calla,” he said. “This will have you back on your feet again in no time.”
I lifted my head and sipped. The orange liquid was so bitter that it sucked all of the moisture out of my mouth. It tasted about as bad as the sour red one that made my lips pucker. Red and orange were better than purple, though.
The purple tonic didn’t taste bad. It was syrupy and vaguely reminded me of plumples. But after drinking it, I’d fallen into a deep sleep and dreamt that I was walking through an underground hallway lined with prison cells. Valcas was there, seething and straining against his bindings.
I moved on to another cell before he noticed me. Sandra Argan sat alone, wearing a pair of travel glasses. She laughed as she distorted personal photos of me into grotesque figures. I shuddered and kept walking.
In the next cell Valcas, freed from his shackles, stood in front of the door. He shouted at me through the window, tightly grasping its iron bars.
“You will never be safe! You will never be safe!”
He removed his glasses. The pupils inside his creepy blue eyes twisted into hypnotic spirals. They spun round and round, pulling me toward him. I screamed as the spirals grew larger. I gritted my teeth and resisted their pull.
The right eye spiral sucked me in like a vacuum, in through his eye and into another room. There, Sandra and Valcas, hand in hand, raised glasses of laramile in salute to a large audience of half-masked criminals with lascivious grins, all on a bright white background.
I refused to drink any more of the purple tonic.
“HE—HE saw me,” I blurted out one morning.
Edgar looked over at me from an assortment of glass tubing that covered one of the living room end tables. He stopped what he was doing and walked over to me.
“I was worried about that,” he said. “I found you collapsed near the love seat, barely breathing. You were clutching the travel glasses to your chest. You’ve been drifting in and out of sleep for two days. What happened?”
“I know you told me not to, but I did. I’m not sure why. I put on the travel glasses. He saw me.” I sank back onto my sweaty pillow, ashamed.
The inventor stooped over me, his weary eyes growing large. “Were you able to see Valcas?”
“Yes, he was in bad shape, injured. He looked like he was, maybe still is, a prisoner?”
Edgar considered this. “Could you make out where he was, Calla?”
“No. I only saw him. Everything else was blank, empty.” I squeezed my head with my hands, trying to numb the tension of a building headache.
“I see.”
The inventor shuffled through the chest of drawers and pulled out a small leather notebook that I hadn’t seen before. I strained to watch as he thumbed through its pages, noticing that unlike many of the technical notebooks at the workshop, this one was not in Edgar’s handwriting.
“Hmm, yes. Here we are. How very interesting. Likely, very likely. May I borrow the travel glasses?”
“Edgar, no! He’d see you too! Then Valcas would know that I’m with you. And then—”
“Calla,” Edgar interrupted, “these notes were written by a friend of mine who developed much of the technology used in cell phones and video game visors. I wonder whether this technology was later built into the pair that I modified for Valcas. The detail that I still do not comprehend is why you could see Valcas but not his surroundings. This leads me to believe that he also did not see your present environment.”
I va
guely began to understand that the travel glasses could also be used as a means of communication. “How long do you need them?” I asked.
“Let me start with a few hours. I never experimented with such a feature because I presumed that I’d created the only pair of travel glasses in existence. That, however, was a very long time ago.”
Just when I thought Edgar was going to space out, he added with an out-of-place chuckle. “Calla, it’s a good thing that you sought to find the creator of these particular glasses. Who knows what trouble you may have found if your search would have been broader.”
Edgar’s experiments on the travel glasses went on through the night. From the living room I could hear him muttering to himself. Just when he thought he’d found the answers he was looking for, he would stumble upon a new feature that would generate a fresh flux of ideas. This called for additional experiments. The cycle of discovery and further experimentation did not end until late into the next morning.
I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep until the glasses were safely returned to my backpack. I’d apparently slept a lot during the last couple of days. Since Edgar wouldn’t let me touch any of his experiments, I tried to be useful by making sure that he had a constant supply of tea. Meanwhile, I zoned out by rereading an old diary, a travel journal that was the closest writing to a novel available in the workshop.
Earlier, Edgar had told me that he purchased his collection of personal diaries and travel journals from various secondhand vendors before retreating to the workshop in the woods. His explanation, of course, triggered another Edgar-staring-into-space episode. For that reason, I made sure that I kept this particular journal out of sight. I was pretty sure he didn’t buy it. The diarist tenderly and fondly mentioned Edgar in it numerous times.
I ran my fingers across the journal’s smooth cover, remembering my own library of books still at Uncle Al’s cottage. Red leather covered tightly bound pages of thick parchment. Daylilies were etched into the leather, as well as “Se vedemo.”
The author had a heavy writing hand and wide looping penmanship. Weekly entries provided descriptions of an extended holiday taken throughout several regions of what is now Italy. The author signed each of her entries with her name, Shirlyn Hall. Shirlyn introduced herself in the diary as the sixteen-year-old daughter of an inventor from Folkestone, England.
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