by Anthology
I sat up straight again and I looked at the mirror behind the bar and I knew what I had to do. I had to stop the tampering. Just as I had stopped it before, three—no, four—four times now.
They might send someone else, but they might not, and I couldn’t take that chance.
I had to find the tamperer myself, and deal with him. If I couldn’t find him directly, if he wasn’t in this time period but later, then I might need to tamper with time myself, to change his past without hurting mine.
That’s tricky, but I’ve done it.
I slid off the stool and stood up, gulped the rest of my drink, and laid a bill on the bar—five dollars in the currency of the day. I shrugged, straightening my coat, and I stepped out into the cool of a summer night.
Insects sang somewhere, strange insects extinct before I was born, and the streetlights pooled pale grey across the black sidewalks. I turned my head slowly, feeling the flux, feeling the shape of the time-stream, of my reality.
Downtown was firm, solid, still rooted in the past and the present and secure in the future. Facing in the opposite direction I felt my gut twist. I crossed the empty street to my car.
I drove out the avenues, ignoring the highways. I can’t feel as well on the highways; they’re too far out of the city’s life-flow.
I went north, then east, and the nausea gripped me tighter with every block. It became a gnawing pain in my belly as the world shimmered and shifted around me, an unstable reality. I stopped the car by the side of the street and forced the pain down, forced my perception of the world to steady itself.
When I was ready to go on I leaned over and checked in the glove compartment. No gloves—the name was already an anachronism even in this time period. But my gun was there. Not my service weapon; that’s an anachronism, too advanced. I don’t dare use it. The knowledge of its existence could be dangerous. No, I had bought a gun here, in this era.
I pulled it out and put it in my coat pocket. The weight of it, that hard, metal tugging at my side, felt oddly comforting.
I had a knife, too. I was dealing with primitives, with savages, not with civilized people. These final decades of the twentieth century, with their brushfire wars and nuclear arms races, were a jungle, even in the great cities of North America. I had a knife, a good one, with a six-inch blade I had sharpened myself.
Armed, I drove on, and two blocks later I had to leave the avenue, turn onto the quiet side-streets, tree-lined and peaceful.
Somewhere, in that peace, someone was working to destroy my home, my life, my self.
I turned again, and felt the queasiness and pain leap within me, and I knew I was very close.
I stopped the car and got out, the gun in my pocket and my hand on the gun, my other hand holding the knife.
One house had a light in the window; the homes on either side were dark. I scanned, and I knew that that light was it, the center of the unreality—maybe not the tamperer himself, but something, a focus for the disturbance of the flow of history.
Perhaps it was an ancestor of the tamperer; I had encountered that before.
I walked up the front path and rang the bell.
I braced myself, the knife in one hand, the gun in the other.
The porch light came on, and the door started to open. I threw myself against it.
It burst in, and I went through it, and I was standing in a hallway. A man in his forties was staring at me, holding his wrist where the door had slammed into it as it pulled out of his grip. There had been no chain-bolt; my violence had, perhaps, been more than was necessary.
I couldn’t take risks, though. I pointed the gun at his face and squeezed the trigger.
The thing made a report like the end of the world, and the man fell, blood and tissue sprayed across the wall behind him.
A woman screamed from a nearby doorway, and I pointed the gun at her, unsure.
The pain was still there. It came from the woman. I pulled the trigger again.
She fell, blood red on her blouse, and I looked down at her as the pain faded, as stability returned.
I was real again.
If the man were her husband, perhaps she was destined to remarry, or to be unfaithful—she would have been the tamperer’s ancestor, but he might not have been. The twisting of time had stopped only when the woman fell.
I regretted shooting him, then, but I had had no choice. Any delay might have been fatal. The life of an individual is precious, but not as precious as history itself.
A twinge ran through my stomach; perhaps only an aftereffect, but I had to be certain. I knelt, and went quickly to work with my knife.
When I was done, there could be no doubt that the two were dead, and that neither could ever have children.
Finished, I turned and fled, before the fumbling police of this era could interfere.
I knew the papers would report it the next day as the work of a lunatic, of a deranged thief who panicked before he could take anything, or of someone killing for perverted pleasure. I didn’t worry about that.
I had saved history again.
I wish there were another way, though.
Sometimes I have nightmares about what I do; sometimes I dream that I’ve made a mistake, killed the wrong person, that I stranded myself here. What if it wasn’t a mechanical failure that sent the machine into flux. What if I changed my own past and did that to myself?
I have those nightmares sometimes.
Worse, though, the very worst nightmares, are the ones where I dream that I never changed the past at all, that I never lived in any time but this one, that I grew up here, alone, through an unhappy childhood and a miserable adolescence and a sorry adulthood—that I never travelled in time, that it’s all in my mind, that I killed those people for nothing.
That’s the worst of all, and I wake up from that one sweating, ready to scream.
Thank God it’s not true.
RED LETTER DAY
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Graduation rehearsal—middle of the afternoon on the final Monday of the final week of school. The graduating seniors at Barack Obama High School gather in the gymnasium, get the wrapped packages with their robes (ordered long ago), their mortarboards, and their blue and white tassels. The tassels attract the most attention—everyone wants to know which side of the mortarboard to wear it on, and which side to move it to.
The future hovers, less than a week away, filled with possibilities.
Possibilities about to be limited, because it’s also Red Letter Day.
I stand on the platform, near the steps, not too far from the exit. I’m wearing my best business casual skirt today and a blouse that I no longer care about. I learned to wear something I didn’t like years ago; too many kids will cry on me by the end of the day, covering the blouse with slobber and makeup and aftershave.
My heart pounds. I’m a slender woman, although I’m told I’m formidable. Coaches need to be formidable. And while I still coach the basketball teams, I no longer teach gym classes because the folks in charge decided I’d be a better counselor than gym teacher. They made that decision on my first Red Letter Day at BOHS, more than twenty years ago.
I’m the only adult in this school who truly understands how horrible Red Letter Day can be. I think it’s cruel that Red Letter Day happens at all, but I think the cruelty gets compounded by the fact that it’s held in school.
Red Letter Day should be a holiday, so that kids are at home with their parents when the letters arrive.
Or don’t arrive, as the case may be.
And the problem is that we can’t even properly prepare for Red Letter Day. We can’t read the letters ahead of time: privacy laws prevent it.
So do the strict time-travel rules. One contact—only one—through an emissary, who arrives shortly before rehearsal, stashes the envelopes in the practice binders, and then disappears again. The emissary carries actual letters from the future. The letters themselves are the old-fashioned paper kind, the kind p
eople wrote 150 years ago, but write rarely now. Only the real letters, handwritten, on special paper get through. Real letters, so that the signatures can be verified, the paper guaranteed, the envelopes certified.
Apparently, even in the future, no one wants to make a mistake.
The binders have names written across them so the letter doesn’t go to the wrong person. And the letters are supposed to be deliberately vague.
I don’t deal with the kids who get letters. Others are here for that, some professional bullshitters—at least in my opinion. For a small fee, they’ll examine the writing, the signature, and try to clear up the letter’s deliberate vagueness, make a guess at the socio-economic status of the writer, the writer’s health, or mood.
I think that part of Red Letter Day makes it all a scam. But the schools go along with it, because the counselors (read: me) are busy with the kids who get no letter at all.
And we can’t predict whose letter won’t arrive. We don’t know until the kid stops mid-stride, opens the binder, and looks up with complete and utter shock.
Either there’s a red envelope inside or there’s nothing.
And we don’t even have time to check which binder is which.
I had my Red Letter Day thirty-two years ago, in the chapel of Sister Mary of Mercy High School in Shaker Heights, Ohio. Sister Mary of Mercy was a small co-ed Catholic High School, closed now, but very influential in its day. The best private school in Ohio, according to some polls—controversial only because of its conservative politics and its willingness to indoctrinate its students.
I never noticed the indoctrination. I played basketball so well that I already had three full-ride scholarship offers from UCLA, UNLV, and Ohio State (home of the Buckeyes!). A pro scout promised I’d be a fifth round draft choice if only I went pro straight out of high school, but I wanted an education.
“You can get an education later,” he told me. “Any good school will let you in after you’ve made your money and had your fame.”
But I was brainy. I had studied athletes who went to the Bigs straight out of high school. Often they got injured, lost their contracts and their money, and never played again. Usually they had to take some crap job to pay for their college education—if, indeed, they went to college at all, which most of them never did.
Those who survived lost most of their earnings to managers, agents, and other hangers on. I knew what I didn’t know. I knew I was an ignorant kid with some great ball-handling ability. I knew that I was trusting and naïve and undereducated. And I knew that life extended well beyond thirty-five, when even the most gifted female athletes lost some of their edge.
I thought a lot about my future. I wondered about life past thirty-five. My future self, I knew, would write me a letter fifteen years after thirty-five. My future self, I believed, would tell me which path to follow, what decision to make.
I thought it all boiled down to college or the pros.
I had no idea there would be—there could be—anything else.
You see, anyone who wants to—anyone who feels so inclined—can write one single letter to their former self. The letter gets delivered just before high school graduation, when most teenagers are (theoretically) adults, but still under the protection of a school.
The recommendations on writing are that the letter should be inspiring. Or it should warn that former self away from a single person, a single event, or a one single choice.
Just one.
The statistics say that most folks don’t warn. They like their lives as lived. The folks motivated to write the letters wouldn’t change much, if anything.
It’s only those who’ve made a tragic mistake—one drunken night that led to a catastrophic accident, one bad decision that cost a best friend a life, one horrible sexual encounter that led to a lifetime of heartache—who write the explicit letter.
And the explicit letter leads to alternate universes. Lives veer off in all kinds of different paths. The adult who sends the letter hopes their former self will take their advice. If the former self does take the advice, then the kid receives the letter from an adult they will never be. The kid, if smart, will become a different adult, the adult who somehow avoided that drunken night. That new adult will write a different letter to their former self, warning about another possibility or committing bland, vague prose about a glorious future.
There’re all kinds of scientific studies about this, all manner of debate about the consequences. All types of mandates, all sorts of rules.
And all of them lead back to that moment, that heartstopping moment that I experienced in the chapel of Sister Mary of Mercy High School, all those years ago.
We weren’t practicing graduation like the kids at Barack Obama High School. I don’t recall when we practiced graduation, although I’m sure we had a practice later in the week.
At Sister Mary of Mercy High School, we spent our Red Letter Day in prayer. All the students started their school days with Mass. But on Red Letter Day, the graduating seniors had to stay for a special service, marked by requests for God’s forgiveness and exhortations about the unnaturalness of what the law required Sister Mary of Mercy to do.
Sister Mary of Mercy High School loathed Red Letter Day. In fact, Sister Mary of Mercy High School, as an offshoot of the Catholic Church, opposed time travel altogether. Back in the dark ages (in other words, decades before I was born), the Catholic Church declared time travel an abomination, antithetical to God’s will.
You know the arguments: If God had wanted us to travel through time, the devout claim, he would have given us the ability to do so. If God had wanted us to travel through time, the scientists say, he would have given us the ability to understand time travel—and oh! Look! He’s done that.
Even now, the arguments devolve from there.
But time travel has become a fact of life for the rich and the powerful and the well-connected. The creation of alternate universes scares them less than the rest of us, I guess. Or maybe the rich really don’t care—they being different from you and I, as renown (but little read) twentieth-century American author F. Scott Fitzgerald so famously said.
The rest of us—the nondifferent ones—realized nearly a century ago that time travel for all was a dicey proposition but, this being America, we couldn’t deny people the opportunity of time travel.
Eventually time travel for everyone became a rallying cry. The liberals wanted government to fund it, and the conservatives felt only those who could afford it would be allowed to have it.
Then something bad happened—something not quite expunged from the history books, but something not taught in schools either (or at least the schools I went to), and the federal government came up with a compromise.
Everyone would get one free opportunity for time travel—not that they could actually go back and see the crucifixion or the Battle of Gettysburg—but that they could travel back in their own lives.
The possibility for massive change was so great, however, that the time travel had to be strictly controlled. All the regulations in the world wouldn’t stop someone who stood in Freedom Hall in July of 1776 from telling the Founding Fathers what they had wrought.
So the compromise got narrower and narrower (with the subtext being that the masses couldn’t be trusted with something as powerful as the ability to travel through time), and it finally became Red Letter Day, with all its rules and regulations. You’d have the ability to touch your own life without ever really leaving it. You’d reach back into your own past and reassure yourself, or put something right.
Which still seemed unnatural to the Catholics, the Southern Baptists, the Libertarians, and the Stuck in Time League (always my favorite, because they never did seem to understand the irony of their own name). For years after the law passed, places like Sister Mary of Mercy High School tried not to comply with it. They protested. They sued. They got sued.
Eventually, when the dust settled, they still had to comply.
But
they didn’t have to like it.
So they tortured all of us, the poor hopeful graduating seniors, awaiting our future, awaiting our letters, awaiting our fate.
I remember the prayers. I remember kneeling for what seemed like hours. I remember the humidity of that late spring day, and the growing heat, because the chapel (a historical building) wasn’t allowed to have anything as unnatural as air conditioning.
Martha Sue Groening passed out, followed by Warren Iverson, the star quarterback. I spent much of that morning with my forehead braced against the pew in front of me, my stomach in knots.
My whole life, I had waited for this moment.
And then, finally, it came. We went alphabetically, which stuck me in the middle, like usual. I hated being in the middle. I was tall, geeky, uncoordinated, except on the basketball court, and not very developed—important in high school. And I wasn’t formidable yet.
That came later.
Nope. Just a tall awkward girl, walking behind boys shorter than I was. Trying to be inconspicuous.
I got to the aisle, watching as my friends stepped in front of the altar, below the stairs where we knelt when we went up for the sacrament of communion.
Father Broussard handed out the binders. He was tall but not as tall as me. He was tending to fat, with most of it around his middle. He held the binders by the corner, as if the binders themselves were cursed, and he said a blessing over each and every one of us as we reached out for our futures.
We weren’t supposed to say anything, but a few of the boys muttered, “Sweet!”, and some of the girls clutched their binders to their chests as if they’d received a love letter.