The Time Travel Chronicles

by Peralta, Samuel

  She talks about James Blunt and Kelly Clarkson, about Gilmore Girls and 24, about conspiracies and terrorists, about North Korean politics, about Middle Eastern food, about how her family makes their own tomato sauce.

  He talks about rotini, about patterns in nature, about Gödel and Escher and Bach, about Rachmaninoff and Paganini, about nautilus shells and hurricanes and satellite orbits, about integer series and golden means.

  Over coffee and dessert, she asks if he’ll accompany her to the Rex, the jazz bar where her friends are going that night.

  “I’ve got to go home tonight,” he says. “This was supposed to be a one-time trip. But I’m thinking—” And he stops here, for what feels like a long, long time. Then: “I’m thinking that I want to make it back next year.”

  “Oh no!” she says. “It’d be amazing, but I’m headed to Kandahar.”

  He looks stunned, like he doesn’t know where that is.

  “Afghanistan. I’m with the Canadian team at the R3 MMU. Combat operations field hospital.”

  He’s still speechless.

  “Oh heck, it’s only for two tours,” she says. “I’ll be back in a couple. How about we make a date for the future?”

  That seems to break the trance. But what he does next is unexpected. He takes off his medallion, takes her hand, and presses it into her palm.

  “Yours,” he says.

  September 17, 2007

  Southwest of Kandahar. Earlier that day, helicopters streamed like tremulous wasps into Zhari District, ferrying back remains from a shattered infantry battalion. Under her breath, another whispered prayer. Sometimes prayers are answered by a different god.

  Behind blast walls ten feet high, at the edge of the runway of the Kandahar Airfield, the NATO Role 3 Multinational Medical Unit, or R3MMU, is an assemblage of field-deployable hospital structures, shipping containers, canvas tents, and leaking plywood buildings.

  Despite this, the Canadian Forces Health Services team tasked with command of the R3MMU is on its way to the highest survival rate ever recorded for victims of war.

  But Cpl. Caitlyn McAdams, in the middle of her first nine-month tour, isn’t at her regular station that night.

  That week they’re short-staffed at the forward operating base at Ma’sum Ghar, so Cpl. McAdams and Cpl. Paul Francis are on temporary rotation there from R3MMU, twenty miles away.

  It’s a tiny clinic on the side of a hill near Bazar-e Panjwaii township, a stopgap measure in an area without another hospital for miles, where anywhere you turn might be a roadside bomb or an improvised explosive device, where snipers are as numerous as wasps.

  There’s a helipad down the dirt road, where a medevac chopper flies serious cases to the R3MMU.

  The statistics here, they’re not quite as good as back at the airfield.

  This is how she remembers that evening: the night air sweet, the sky bright with stars, the wind blowing warm across the desert. And then, an explosion from somewhere not far from the forward base. Minutes away.

  She drops her copy of Cien Sonetos, and everyone is running to their posts. In a spray of dust, there’s an all-terrain vehicle jamming down the road, stretchers barely hanging on to the front. The gates open within seconds, and the soldiers are unloading the two casualties from the Canadian ATV.

  In the cramped area, a team of about a half dozen works on the first casualty.

  Cpl. McAdams and another team join Warrant Officer Ian Patrick, who’s stripped down the second man on the stretcher-table and wrapped a foil blanket around him.

  The man is half-conscious, quivering, babbling something over and over. McAdams is passable in the Pashto dialect, but she can’t quite understand what he’s saying.

  While they work, stabilizing his breathing, bandaging his leg, someone’s talking in the background. “IED hit. The Afghan was driving supplies for our road construction site. That other one, he’s not from here, but he’s not one of ours.”

  Not Afghan. She looks again, and beneath the grit and sweat and blood the face is unmistakable. Her heart twists inside her. Leaning forward to incline her ear nearer his mouth, she understands what he’s saying—

  Her name.

  Work fast, fast, she tells herself. She should be detached, concentrating. Oh God, keep my hands from shaking. A chest wound, serious. Collapsed lung. Need to do an incision. She can hear gurgling as they open him up. Get a tube in, release the excess pressure.

  His body is torn, ripped apart by shrapnel. Left hand amputated—the one that held her own, one year ago, for just that fraction of a second too long. One leg gone from the knee down, the other from the hip. They can’t stop the bleeding.

  “Damn it, damn it, damn it!”

  At her voice, his eyes suddenly open. He sees her, and there’s recognition, and then he closes them. He doesn’t open them again.

  “Medevac!” she hears herself shouting.

  But it’s too late.

  September 19, 2009

  Honey-crisp apples, from a basket from her brother Joe, who’d served two previous tours of duty himself, and knew instinctively that for her this would mean home.

  A week ago, Joe had come out to meet her at the Forces base at Trenton, after her final tour. He’d driven up in his shiny new blue Astra, and waxed eloquent about the immensity of the deal he’d gotten on it, because the company was shutting down. Everything was shutting down—car companies, hospitals, banks. She wished she could shut down.

  Two and a half hours to her mother’s home in Port Credit. She’d piled everything in the back of the hatchback—everything that might remind her of the war, of comrades fallen and lost, of the horrors she’d left behind—wanting to focus only on her brother’s voice, the highway winding ahead, and home.

  A half hour into the drive, she realized she’d been playing with the chain around her neck, winding it and unwinding it around her fingers. On its clasp, the silver medallion roller-coasted down to her thumb. She began to weep.

  Honey-crisp apples. The one she bites into is lovely: tart and tangy. She finishes it, laces up her running shoes, and goes out the back, to the woods behind the house.

  The neck-chain swings underneath her shirt. She runs.

  Sean’s Canadian Forces identity disc had survived the blast. She could see it still—two rounded rectangular halves joined in a square, one half meant to be detached and sent to National Defense, etched in her mind like a gravestone:

  823-509-653

  S P FORREST

  NP O/RH/POS

  CDN FORCES CDN

  And on the reverse upper half:

  DO NOT REMOVE

  NE PAS ENLEVER

  When they found that it wasn’t a genuine I-disc, someone at the med unit thought he might have been from one of the intelligence agencies, but it turned out the I-disc wasn’t even a good counterfeit. The metal was wrong, too soft, the embossing uneven across the letters. The number had been easily traceable to someone else, an I-disc splashed out for sale on eBay.

  All that didn’t matter to Caitlyn. What was clear was this: he had come to find her, even if that meant going into the middle of a war zone. And now he was gone.

  She runs.

  The banks of the Credit River are embroidered with leaves. They crackle as she passes. The air is crisp, slightly chill as she breathes it in.

  She runs.

  She passes the birch at the halfway point, and pauses for a pulse check. Her heart is already pumping fast as she catches a glimpse of a man, dressed in black, standing on a promontory about fifty yards from her.

  She stops, and shields her eyes from the sun. A man from out of her past.

  It hits her like a defibrillator jolt, but her mind calms her down. Out of nowhere, he’d appeared before in another unlikely place, half a world away. If he was real back then, real in Kandahar—then why not right here, right now, in the middle of the woods behind her mother’s house, alive?

  “Is it you?” she asks.

  He comes closer.
“Caitlyn,” he says.

  She leans against a tree, breathing heavily. “Sean. You were dead.”

  “I’m not dead. Not now.”

  “But how?”

  “Can I come closer?”

  “How?” she shouts at him, backing off. “You’re not a ghost. I was there, two years ago. You were dead.”

  He takes a breath. “I traveled into that time. And the first time we met.”

  “Stay where you are.”

  “I can’t,” he says, but he stops moving toward her. “I mean… that first time, when we first met—that started out as a one-time trip. But I could only come back a year later, then it had to be now, and tomorrow it will be three years from now, and five years from then…”

  “Wait.” She puts up her hand. “Time travel. It can’t be done.”

  “Not now. But tomorrow, yes. Well, to a degree. It’s a limited time travel.”

  He stands there, not moving closer, not moving away, a steady point in space. But he continues. “You know how some satellites stay in the same place in orbit, where the gravity of the earth and moon balance each other?”

  She’s listening; not frowning, not confused, just listening.

  “It’s not fully understood, but those perfect balance points exist in space and time. They’re where and when a person can go in the past without hitting a possible paradox.”

  “Like the opportunity to kill your grandfather, meaning you’d never exist.”

  “That’s right. You can’t travel to a point where that might occur. When we first met, that was a non-paradoxical point.”

  “But you came to Kandahar. You died there.”

  “Time and space, they’re intertwined. The second non-paradox point in time was then, and you were where you were then. And I came back because—because I wanted to see you again.”

  She pushes herself off from the tree, turns, and runs. Past the birch tree, past the Credit River, home, home.

  When she decides to stop and finally turns back, night has fallen, and he is gone.

  September 21, 2012

  Three years later, she’s on a blanket on a beach in Salinas, California, unpacking a basket. Above her, gulls are beating their wings against a coastal spray.

  Now that she’s waiting for it, when it happens, she realizes that she can sense the return. The wind picking up, subtly, like a whisper. A swirl of waves in the distance, a subtle spiral. A shimmer, like a lens flare, in the sunlight.

  “You’re beautiful,” he says.

  She ignores that, and asks, “How long are you here for, this time?”

  “Sometimes it’s a few hours, sometimes a few days.” He shrugs. “There aren’t a lot of statistics.”

  “Explain it to me again, these points of balance, how they work,” she says.

  “S. C. Penrose, a professor at Oxford, worked out the theory of it. The next advance came twenty years after that, from a researcher at the Weyman Institute, Alex Morgan. He realized that practical transformation of the space-time sub-manifolds—”

  She is frowning, and he laughs. Easy, comfortable.

  “It’s complicated, but not,” he says. “The stable solutions are based on the Fibonacci series.”

  He picks up a piece of driftwood, and starts writing in the sand—

  1 1 2 3 5 8

  13 21 34 55 89 144

  She nods. “Every number is the sum of the two before.”

  “When you travel into the past, as you come closer to your own time, the interval between balance points becomes larger; otherwise you eventually do hit a paradox.”

  “But why does it work that way? With time, I mean?”

  “Nature is full of symmetries and patterns. They may be invisible, but they’re there. The way trees branch, the way leaves are arranged on a stem, the way a fern uncurls, the way a nautilus shell spirals out.”

  Her hands reach up to where her medallion hangs from her neck-chain.

  On the sand, he draws a grouping of squares, then a spiral—

  “The golden mean, the Fibonacci spiral—it’s the invisible pattern behind a nautilus shell. Why not time?”

  “That’s beautiful,” she says.

  He sits down beside her. “Look, I’m sorry for Kandahar. I didn’t know it would end that way. I just wanted to be there.”

  She doesn’t answer. It’s still something she wants to forget, along with many other things from that era of her life. She thinks of something, takes the driftwood, and crosses out the first four numbers in the sand—

  1 1 2 3 5 8

  13 21 34 55 89 144

  “So after this time, the next time I can see you will be in five years? On this day?”

  “Well, there’s a precession…”

  “Okay, I know. It’s not well understood.” She looks at him. “You guys haven’t figured out everything about this, have you?” It’s a statement, not a question.

  “We’re trying.”

  She sighs. “Well, now that you’re here, make yourself at home.”

  She holds out a honey-crisp apple.

  September 23, 2017

  She’s on the Bloor-Danforth subway line, on her way home late from work. Except for the conductor in his compartment, the carriage was empty when she got on, so she’s a little startled when someone sits down beside her.

  “I have a present for you,” he says.

  She flicks off the touchscreen of her e-reader, and looks up.

  He’s holding out a book. It’s a slim volume of poetry, an edition published—she notes with amusement, as she opens it—just a few years previously.

  “Where’d you get this?” she asks.

  “Bespoke Books,” he says. “Their motto is ‘Antiquities and print on demand.’ Paper is still pretty popular.”

  She turns to the page he’s marked with a ribbon, and reads:

  The Time Traveller’s Sonnet

  And there you are, at last: your eyes, your face.

  Just as swiftly, only a memory,

  a star irresolute, the lightning’s trace,

  a half-remembered verse of poetry.

  Still, you are what keeps my atoms in place

  against life’s centrifuge of anarchy:

  your smile, in its sadness a hint of grace,

  my hope, my manifold geometry.

  To be with you again, I would cross space,

  and time, to where began this circled journey:

  And there you are, at last: your eyes, your face.

  Just as swiftly, only a memory,

  a star irresolute, the lightning’s trace,

  a half-remembered verse of poetry.

  The train rounds a curve without slowing down, and for a second the cars jiggle around their connection and the lights go black. The train straightens out and the lights go back on.

  “Marry me,” he says.

  “Are you crazy? The next time we meet, I’m going to be older than you are.”

  “You’re not married, are you?”

  “That’s beside the point. Why?”

  “Because ‘you are what keeps my atoms in place against life’s centrifuge of anarchy,’” he says.

  “Sonnets,” she sighs.

  September 25, 2025

  She’s sitting on a park bench at Ron Searle Park, watching the children on the playground. Behind her, the sounds of volleys on the tennis courts. She’s scattering the remnants of an egg sandwich to the pigeons on the grass.

  When he appears, she flings herself at him, beating him on the chest. “What the hell are you doing here? Get away from me! I hate you!”

  As he backs away, a little girl hops off of the slide and runs toward her. “Mommy, Mommy!” She’s crying.

  Caitlyn hugs her, shielding her from the stranger, speaking to her softly. The little girl is still weepy, but she’s nodding. After a while, she’s back on the playground, this time at the swings. She swings in a wide arc—high, down, and back—kicking her feet down as they graze the ground, legs up again as
she swings up, high, down, back.

  Her mother is still fuming as she sits back down on the bench.

  Sean waits a few minutes before joining her—taking care to place some space between them. “I’m sorry,” he says.

  She says nothing for a long time. Then—

  “Shauna turned seven in June. And she doesn’t even know her father.”

  He’s not sure what to say. “Shauna,” he repeats.

  “Shauna Catherine. She doesn’t deserve this, Sean. She deserves a father who’s there for her, who can carry her on his shoulders, read her bedtime stories, teach her how to drive, give her away at her wedding.”

  He can’t say anything, hadn’t expected this.

  “It’s not fair to me.” There, she finally said it. “It’s not even as if you’re in Australia or England, and I can get you on the phone or fly to you. When you’re gone, you’re gone.”

  “Caitlyn, if I could come back and be with you here and hereafter, I would. I would move heaven and earth to be with you. I would die if that would bring me to you.”

  She is crying now, remembering Kandahar.

  “But I can’t,” he says, taking her in his arms. “This is our hereafter, this is our forever. To the limit of what God and physics allow, I will be with you.”

  The little girl swings high, then low.

  “I may go—but I’m still here. Love remains.”

  The little girl swings low, then high.

  September 27, 2038

  She’d been waiting for him at the church at St. Alban’s Road, looking back once too often at each of the faces filing in.

  Then she’d looked for him at the reception, at the mansion and conservatory at the northwest corner of the university.