The Time Traveler’s Wife
A short story by
C.SeanMcGee
The Time Traveler’s Wife
Copyright© Cian Sean McGee
CSM Publishing
‘TheFreeArtCollection’
Araraquara, Brazil 2015
Second Edition
All rights reserved. No sneaky business. No unauthorized anything.
All artwork and layout by c.seanmcgee
Author Foto: CarlaRaiter
Editing by AnnaVanti
Woman Photo: Victor Tongdee
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This short story was inspired by the song:
‘Every Day is Exactly the Same’ by Nine Inch Nails
…written under the influence of:
Book of Souls: Folio A by Secret Chiefs 3
For keli, nenagh and tomás
1.61803398874989484820458683436563811772030917980576286213544862270526046281890.......
“You ever driven all night, really tired. You know, so tired that even if were to crash, you probably wouldn’t even feel a thing anyway? And then you get home or wherever the hell you’re going and you take the keys out of the ignition and you think to yourself, ‘how the fuck did I get here?’ You can’t remember a bit of the journey. You were asleep or dreaming the whole time or something. You don’t know if you leaned into any of the turns and you can’t be sure or not if you ran over an animal or a mother pushing a pram across the street. The only thing you know is that you’re pretty sure this is where you’re supposed to be; home or work or the supermarket. You just, can’t remember for the life of you, how you got here. You ever felt that?”
“Sure. I try not to drive tired, on account of it being so dangerous, but yeah” Stefan said, sipping his Mocha, “I once drove through the night when I was in university with some friends you know, back in the days where you’re reckless and living like there’s no tomorrow. So anyway, we….”
“I feel that way about my life,” John said, twisting his cup back and forth, his cold and untouched coffee spilling in a single line down over his index finger and onto the table.
Stefan was waving at a group of guys who had just piled off a coach and were slapping each other’s backs and high fiving one another as they joked out loud about celebrities they’d love to fuck and how they’d do it to them. None of them seemed to notice, but that didn’t matter to Stefan. He kept waving anyway as if they had as if it was just their way and he made a strange gesture with his fingers to no one in particular as if he were asking for two of something.
“So who would you fuck?” he asked, turning back to John.
“I don’t know man. Whoever.”
“No, seriously. Let’s say you could fuck whoever you wanted and you could fuck them whatever way you wanted and they weren’t you know, gonna make you feel dirty about it or nothing. Who would you fuck? How would you do it?”
John and Stefan sat on the steps to the office building. Neither of them were in the way of passing workers but Stefan’s lingering stare and twitching ear grasped the lapels of busied and personal discourse, silently begging, like the basketball player nobody wants, to be picked to give his opinion, to share his thoughts and to laugh as heartily as he saw the other guys doing.
“I can’t remember a single choice I ever made,” said John, now shaking the cup so that the cold coffee stormed like a raging sea. “I mean, I know who I am and I know what I do. I know what I have to do and for what I have to do, up to know, I know exactly what I’ve done and what I’ve still yet to do. And I know when it’s gonna be done. I just don’t know how the fuck I came to this point. I don’t know if I decided all of this or if it just settled around me while I was sleeping or something.”
“I’d fuck Jennifer Connelly. She has this natural beauty you know. Seductive and shapely but natural at the same time. Not many women have that. Like she could be your neighbor or teaching your kid in school and yet at the same time, she has this super sexy side with massive tits and you just know she’d make you cum in a second. Yeah, I’d definitely fuck Jennifer Connelly. I don’t think I’d want to do anything nasty, though. Probably just hold her or something. Spoon maybe.”
“I think I’m suicidal, but I’m not sure.”
“But if I did have to have nasty sex. I don’t know. Oprah maybe. Early nineties Oprah though. Frizzy hair, sugar on her fingers. No, wait, Ricki Lake. She was fucking hot, even when she was chubby. Can I bang two?” Stefan asked, looking to John with genuine concern rasping his brow.
John was staring at his reflection on the tips of his shoes. He always kept them at such a shine and his pants; they were never wrinkled and were ironed just right, so the pleats stuck out like the fold in his favorite novel. His shirt was a little big for him, but he tucked the length of it into his pants and lightly tugged on it so the fold hanged in a cool and professional manner over his buckle.
And his tie, it was the only one he had ever bought. It cost him nearly a hundred dollars at the time. It was silk, and the color and pattern made it look like someone had spilled extravagant art down his neck and along his chest. Its color was faded now and its texture was coarse; its fibers splitting into ugly tufts, looking less like a piece of art and more like a shitty sketch, etched on the back of a soiled napkin.
“We live and we die,” said John.
“If I could fuck them both, I’d probably fuck Ricki Lake in the ass and I’d lay Oprah on Ricki Lake’s back like a table cloth and I’d just eat that early nineties pussy,” Stefan said, blowing raspberries into his hand as he mocked his ravenous sexual appetite. “And I’d have to have Donahue commentating. He could be in the back, jerking off and talking about how big my cock is. But I don’t know” he said, perplexed. “I don’t if I’d cum in Ricki Lake’s asshole or on Oprah’s tits or if I’d try and shoot on their faces you know. That would be hot.”
“I think maybe I’m depressed,” said John.
“God. Lighten up It’s called ‘Who Would You Fuck?’ Not ‘How to be a Kill Joy’. What’s gotten into you anyway? You’re normally a lot more chipper than this. You’re so…”
“Choose your next words carefully,” John thought, imagining himself taking Stefan by a clump of his hair and beating his face against the rounded edge of the red bricked stairs.
“The opposite of full of life,” he said, between sips of his Mocha, not noticing the twitch and tremor in John’s eye as he stared at the different groups of guys and gals coming off of buses and coaches and piling out of cars. “Today’s gonna be a good day, I can tell. I can feel it.”
“I don’t care.”
“We’re gonna get our bonuses. Just in time too. Have you seen the cost of sliced pepperoni? Its daylight robbery I’m telling you. That and the cost of socks, which the kids just tear holes through every second they get. You’ll see, when you and Tracy decide to stop kidding around of course. You’ll see what I mean. Have you talked about it much? I mean, does she want kids?”
“I don’t know,” said John.
“What about you? One, two, four?” Stefan scoffed.
“I don’t care.”
“But I tell you, John,” Stefan said, hardly listening, “if the bonus comes through… You know… Everything kind of evens out and…”
“Stays exactly the same” John said, spilling his cold coffee to the floor, watching the black liquid trickle over the edge of the step and cascade onto the bowing weed below.
“Exactly. If it aint broke…”
Both men picked themselves up and made their way into the foyer and then crowded by the elevator
with Stefan pricking his ears to the tune of the current theme. Although they mostly worked on separate floors, the suited workers were always engaged in such delicate debate as if they had scholarly or juvenile ties, going from political polemic to that shit hot new song from Nine Inch Nails, the house remix, not the original, and why wearing white speedos was no longer gay.
“So what did you guys get up to on the weekend?”
He was talking to John, but Stefan’s voice and attention traveled around the elevator carrying into the creeps of whispered conversations, trying to make its presence pertinent.
“Nothing really,” said John.
He tried to think, not for the sake of Stefan but for his own curiosity. What had he done? Had he really done nothing or was this just something he had become accustomed to saying?
On Friday, he and Tracy watched a movie. They hadn’t seen it before, but everyone was raving about it. It was a copy of a copy of a copy and he couldn’t remember if he enjoyed it or not, or if he had seen the original. The actors were all famous though so at worst; it would have been comfortable to be around people he knew even if, in the movie, nothing much happened.
“Yeah us too. You know. Once you get kids everything really gets set in stone. It’s like finding your north as if one day some guy comes up to you and hands you a compass and then everything makes sense. You have your direction. Up at seven,, take the kids to practice, back for lunch. Mow the lawn. Eat. Get into trimming the hedges. Oh, I spoke to Jeff my neighbor; he popped his head over the fence the rascal. That was unexpected. Yeah, he’s pretty much the same. So then in the afternoon my littlest wanted to…”
He carried on like this for the entire ride. He must take notes. He’d have to. No-one could remember all that. Maybe he was just used to it. After all, he’d had the same weekend for the last eight years. If he didn’t know off by heart know, well….
“See, I don’t know if I’m bored or I’m upset. I don’t know. I never learned this at school. I learned how to do so much shit that I’ll never have the capacity, the chance or the fucking will to do. I know how a crane works. I can peel a potato eight different ways and I’m a little more than average at playing Green sleeves on a recorder. I can speak French, Dutch, Mandarin, Portuguese and English. I can read and write in eleven types of computer code. I can even unhook a bra. Yet, I can’t tell the difference between being bored and depressed. And If I am bored then I just need to do something. I just need to keep myself busy. But if I’m depressed and the things I’m doing are making me feel this way, then at the end of the day, I’m only gonna feel worse. So I don’t know what to do.”
“This weekend?” asked Stefan, louder than before. “Well come over,” he said, having assumed the gist of John’s admission. “We’re having a barbeque for Thanksgiving.”
“You always have a barbeque for Thanksgiving,” John said, picking at a rough hair poking out of his nose. “And I’m always there. And I sit in the same god damned seat below that stupid mosquito killer and, know LED doesn’t attract mosquitos right?”
Stefan was trawling the other guys and gals, seeing if anyone was nibbling at his bait.
“And we always eat the same five buck steaks and the sausages always have charcoaled ends. And we spend the whole night talking about how things were and then we settle on the fact that that’s ok. That it’s fine, that we’ll never get to think or act or feel that way again. And then you tell me about your fucking kids and you force one of them to do some retarded fucking dance that you can tell they are not comfortable in fucking doing man, but you push them. And probably by themselves, they get it but who gives a fuck, that doesn’t matter. Fact is, you get drunk and tell them to do that funny thing and to do that dance, that dance they do. And they fuck it up, and you laugh royally, and they cringe and squirm like dry shriveled sponges, and you open another beer, and the sausages start to burn, and then at some point, I get the courage to say fuck it, we have to go.”
“Of course you have to go,” said Stefan, catching only the last words. “Anyway, you gotta see this thing the kids have been working on. It’s ace. It really is. I swear, now I know most parents say this, but my girl, she has talent you know.”
The elevator opened on the top floor, The Dairy Parlor. All of the workers were there, gathered in their departments and their teams, bunched up together, gossiping and laughing as Managers, dressed in gumboots and yellow rain coats, kneeled before each person, attaching wires with small electrodes to each person’s cheeks and sneakily, under their garments, to the tips of their nipples.
And in the laps of each person, The Managers placed reading paraphernalia. For some, it was a newspaper filled with headlines of war and disparity. In others, they placed thick plastic books with short, simple to follow stories of playing pets and busy farm animals and with mounds of fur and brushy hair, for the reader to stroke, before they turned each page.
John fidgeted as the electrodes were placed on his nipples; the cold, or maybe his boredom making him uncomfortable. When he moved, The Manager let go of the clamp and it bit down hard on his shrinking nipple and he screamed.
“Watch it” he shouted.
The Manager said nothing. They never did. He just realigned the clamp and called in another manager to hold John still so that they could finish getting him prepared. They had so much work to do after all.
As he sat in his cubicle, the electrodes lightly stimulated his left nipple causing his thoughts to flurry, John sat still, watching a television screen in front of him but not watching it at all. There was a video playing of his thoughts and there was a device beside the television that was recording everything. And from one of his nipples, his creativity oozed in a thick creamy liquid from a thin transparent tube that curled around his body and his chair and fed into a silver bucket that rattled with every drop.
“We’re planning our next vacation,” said Stefan, his screen showing a video of a group of armed Jihadists, synchronized dancing. “October, ‘32”
“You realize that’s decades away right?”
“You book in early, you get the best rates. Prior preparation prevents poor performance, Doug.”
“It’s John.”
“Exactly. You have to know what you’re doing so you can do it well. So you don’t have to think about what you’re doing. You can think about whatever you want.”
“That’s why I can’t remember anything. Not that it matters.”
“Everything matters. That’s why we do it.”
“I don’t need to remember anything because nothing ever changes. Everything is the same. This” John said, looking at his cubicle and realizing that he had spent almost half his life in here, being milked daily of his thoughts and his ideas.
“This what?” Stefan asked, his screen now sowing a football match and two dogs mating, in the corner of the goal square.
“We do the same thing every day. We come here. We sit in this stall. We get milked and for what? Where does it go?”
“In the bucket,” Stefan said.
“And then what? Our ideas are mixed, watered down and pasteurized and then packaged and labelled and branded and sold to some other poor schmuck in some other city in some other part of the world. He drinks our Creative Milk and we drink his. So what’s the point?”
“It’s your job. Stop analyzing things. Anyway, you can’t drink your own Creative Milk. It’s not good for you. Maybe if you were like on a desert island or something. But…” he said, making a disgusted face. “I couldn’t,” he said, shaking his head and tongue protruding like a poisoned cat.
“Do you think about dying at all?” John asked, his television screen now looking like a mirror, showing his pale reflection looking back at him, frowning miserably.
“Me? I can’t see the point. The wife does. I don’t really pay much mind. It doesn’t faze me. You’d have to get her roots under a microscope to find her true color. Not my thing, though.”
“We live and we die,” John said, the
image on his screen showing just a grain of sand. “That’s it. The most significant event in my life is my death. And everything else….”
“I wanted to do something different but then, why take the risk? So we’re thinking of going with the same resort. If it aint broke…”
“If every day in my life is the same, if one week is no different to the last then what’s the point?” John said, peering round his cubicle wall into Stefan’s. “If there’s nothing new, if there are no more synapses, if I can’t taste cumin again for the first time, if I can’t ever taste cold on my tongue again for the first time, if I can’t feel or fuck or speak like it fucking matters, then what’s the point? If I have already defined every dimension of my every sense if there are no more surprises, then why delay the inevitable? Why shouldn’t I kill myself now?”
“You should have kids.”
“What the fuck will that prove?”
“It’ll even you out. Be critical on someone else, takes the focus off yourself.”
The image on John’s screen was now of a house that he used to live next to when he was just a boy. The image was fuzzy, just like it was in his thoughts. The memory had been with him his whole life, that of gathering at the steps of this building each October and running for dear life with the other children as from within the house, a dark impervious figure with a black cloak and sharp fanged teeth took flight from the doorway and chased the children down the street.
He had few memories of when he was a boy but those that he did have; they now played out on the screen before him. There was Dracula, his neighbor, and how tried to kill all of the children and how nobody, not even his own mother and father, ever said a thing.
And then, the memory of watching his friends all climb onto the sinking mound of mud of dirt in the adjacent park and wishing he could but feeling trapped, as on the screen and in his thoughts, the young boy in his memories stared down at the bright red skates that he wore on his feet, the reason he couldn’t climb that mound.
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