Well, that wasn’t good. I’d have to be really clever with my answer.
“Uh, you know, just figured that he might be,” I offered lamely.
Smooth, slick. Way to think on your feet.
Luckily, despite my charming improvisation, they seemed to accept that as believable. As they returned to regular conversation, I slid out from under Nicolae’s arm and slipped away towards the back of the club. A small, persistent tingle on the back of my neck triggered the sensation that someone was watching me. Hesitantly, I turned around and scanned the laughing, drunken huddle. No one was even looking in my direction, but as I headed toward my sleeping area, I couldn’t shake the thought. I chalked it up to nerves and the day that I’d had but, as I huddled up and tried to sleep, the feeling didn’t go away.
Chapter 14
Guilt is the most impractical feeling in the entire spectrum of emotion. It has simple rules: commit an immoral act, feel guilty. But what does guilt do? It inspires fear of punishment, fear of loss, fear of more guilt. Now, maybe an exceptionally strong and noble individual can shoulder their guilt and step up to accept the consequences, but that’s a rarity. Mostly, the guilty hide, backtrack, cover-up. The emotional turmoil that our psyche creates to chastise us into admitting our shameful actions merely prompts lies and denial, compounding the problem even further. Like I said, impractical.
Too bad that doesn’t make it any easier to bear.
****
I had nightmares that night. They started off pleasant enough, like most nightmares do, but like a piece of rotten fruit, the deeper I went, the worse it got. Tara and I were together again; happy, united, in love. An engagement ring crowned her finger, sparkling brilliantly against the Ohio sky. So brilliantly, in fact, that it blinded me for a second. As my vision returned, I found Nicolae in Tara’s place, admiring that same ring’s diamond. I was so dumbfounded by his sudden appearance that I failed to notice something: The ring wasn’t on Nicolae’s finger. He was holding Tara’s finger with the ring still on it!
The instant that the revelation struck me, Nicolae burst out in maniacal laughter, and I plummeted inexplicably through the floor. Down, down, until I landed in the middle of the robbery we had committed. Joe, or a figure the size of Joe, waved me toward the armored transport’s double doors in slow motion. My mind screamed warnings, pleading with my body not to open the doors, but my hands moved on their own. Once again, I stared down the barrel of a shotgun, but my focus shifted from the gun to the wielder, only to find myself gazing into Tara’s blue eyes. They weren’t filled with the mercy and kindness that I would have expected from her. Instead, I was greeted with what felt like an eternity of ice cold judgment and disapproval before the shotgun’s trigger clicked, the gunshot boomed, and I snapped awake in a cold sweat.
You know how it feels when you wake up from an intense dream, and you’re still confusing reality with the events of the dream? In this case, my only thought was of Tara and that frigid glare of disgust. She hates me, my subconscious moaned. She wishes I was dead. As my mind stirred to full wakefulness, I realized that wasn’t true. How could she hate someone she didn’t even know? I was relieved until I decided that that wasn’t any less heartbreaking.
I quickly discovered that mornings weren’t the only hours of the day that I had too much time to think. Nicolae and a few other members of the group lived here at the club, and I joined their numbers, since I had no other place to live rent-free. Well, that, and it occurred to me that I was now technically a wanted man, albeit an anonymous one. Living with the co-conspirators of my crime wasn’t ideal, but it was better than prison. At least for now.
What was I saying? It’s so hard to keep track. Oh, yeah. Basically, I ended up having hours alone with my thoughts every day. Nicolae did all of the planning for our heists, or “operations” as I took to calling them to ease my conscience. That left the rest of his crew to do whatever we wanted. Unfortunately, there was nothing that I wanted to do with that time. I was listless, drifting around the club, desperately hoping for someone to pop up and laugh, telling me that my life has just been a huge practical joke, and I could go back to how things were. I was rich now; Nicolae hadn’t been kidding when he promised me wealth. We all got our cut from that first robbery and the implication was that there was more to come.
Despite the money and the clubbing, I couldn’t have been more miserable. Every dollar I stole was another shovel of dirt out of the hole that I was digging for myself. Worse yet, as the weeks progressed, it became apparent that I couldn’t make it through a robbery without resorting to time travel to save my hide. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Diamond thieves don’t get hazard pay.
Months went by this way. Days of mulling about, a week of preparation, maybe a day or so of travel, then ten minutes of heart-pounding, adrenaline-filled action. And every time, something went wrong.
Heist 1: Didn’t look both ways crossing the street after a smash-and-grab in the Bronx and got run over by a mail truck.
Heist 2: The crew failed to cut the power to a display case wired to deliver high-voltage shocks to anyone touching it after closing.
Heist 3: Accidently got shot by Lydia after a communications breakdown.
I fixed all of them, of course, but it was getting ridiculous after a while. Was I really so incompetent that I couldn’t pull a single operation without getting hit, maimed, or blown away? Forget the legality of my actions. Strictly from a personal perspective, this was embarrassing. I was just glad that no one was the wiser.
April came and went in the same alcohol-and-adrenaline-soaked way as all the months had. I wondered, not for the first time, what my parents were doing. They had to know I was missing at this point. There was no finding me here though, and we were long past the investigation stage. Tara fluttered across my mind too as I gazed at the calendar. Had it really been almost a year since I shattered the most wonderful time of my life and had become a common criminal? I took a long pull from the bottle of Captain Morgan that I had just realized was in my hand. I had developed quite a habit recently. Not impressive, I know, but when push came to shove, I wasn’t sure that I could handle the raw guilt and pain that steadily accumulated as the crew’s heists continued. They told me it would get easier once I adjusted; it didn’t.
Regardless, I threw myself further into the black hole of my own sins. As I muddled through job after job, I stopped noticing details and let exhaustion and my constant buzz turn my activities into a hazy blur. By the time the last job rolled around, I was a shell of my former self.
Drunken. Guilt-ridden. Hollow.
I woke up that morning to the cheerful beeping of my five-dollar watch. Despite my increase in wealth since my arrival at the Red Door Lounge, I had found little to no use for it, so my clothes and accessories remained cheap. This watch was a red-and-black plastic affair with the “Made in China” sticker still stuck on the band. The LED display blinked as I turned off the alarm, shifting it back to its usual mode of time and date.
May 16th.
I suddenly felt old and world-weary beyond belief. It was a year to the day. I struggled to my feet and dressed with agonizing slowness. How could it be a year? I still could recall every second of that evening, still hear every sob. And yet, despite the tidal wave of emotion crashing against my chest, I prepared for another heist. I was, I realized then, numb. To everything.
Nicolae strode into the room like a man with a new lease on life, just as he always did. He flashed his traditional smirk, but I didn’t bother returning the expression. My drive was gone; my will had evaporated like a puddle in the Sahara. I barely heard his instructions to the crew, but I shuffled along with all of them into the afternoon sunlight outside the club. We drove a ways, but my mind was one year in the past, with a pretty blonde and a broken heart. Nicolae yelled from across an empty street and waved for me to join him, jarring me back to the present. It was all so pointless. I went all the same.
We got into a beat-up excuse
for a vehicle and pulled into the middle of the street, halfway over the double yellow lines. Abruptly, Nicolae stopped and parked the car dead center in the road. I was yanked out of my fog a little by this strange action. Why would he and I both be part of the blockade? Glancing over towards my companion, I noticed a gleeful, terrified expression on Nicolae’s face unlike any I’d seen before. It was frightening. My attention drifted away from him as the rumble of oncoming traffic reached my ears. Whatever vehicle was making that noise, it was big, angry, and picking up speed. A heavy-duty pick-up truck with a reinforced front bumper burst from around the corner and careened towards us. As my heart rate accelerated, my eyes caught sight of the driver. My mind whirled.
Joe?
Sure enough, it was Joe’s impossibly large frame behind the wheel of the truck barreling toward us. Panicked, I turned to Nicolae, only to find him staring back at me with that intense, fanatical spark in his eyes. With snake-like speed, he lashed out, pinning my wrist in a vice grip. I couldn’t keep up with what was happening.
“What are you doing??”
Nicolae squeezed, his grip tightening with searing strength.
“It’s time to find out the truth,” he hissed.
Desperate to escape as the truck raced towards its intentional collision with us, I fought mightily to slip from Nicolae’s death grip, but he would not surrender. With only seconds to spare, I did the only thing that I knew to do, the one thing that always managed to get me into trouble. I jumped but, this time, I wasn’t alone.
As the world reappeared, I lashed out blindly and flung Nicolae’s sweaty hand from my arm. We both dropped to our knees, weak and nauseous from the pressure of time-travel. For me, however, it had less to do with the physical pain than the mental state I was in. Some way, somehow, the impossible had occurred. Nicolae knew. He knew what I could do, and he had set me up! He had been willing to risk his own life in order to confirm what he suspected: that I had been cheating fate and death in some fashion.
As he wobbled to his feet, Nicolae’s eyes glittered with victory. His ashen face started to regain its natural color as he forced himself to walk toward me one step at a time.
“I knew there was something about you, kid,” he rasped. He cleared his throat. “I just never would’ve guessed this.”
I tried to avoid his ferocious gaze as I hoisted myself to my feet. Thinking as quickly as my pounding head would allow, I considered my options. Nicolae was circling me like a buzzard over a carcass and I knew for a fact Joe would be lurking somewhere nearby, ready to pounce at Nicolae’s command. Constantly turning my head to keep an eye out for that behemoth while also following Nicolae’s every move, I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to outrun this one. Even if I jumped, I couldn’t be sure that this was behind me. Nicolae had figured it out at some point, and I had no idea when he had first put it together. I’d never know if he still suspected me.
Desperate for an escape strategy, I decided to stall as best I could.
“What do you want from me, Nicolae?”
Nicolae licked his lips as a greedy expression flickered across his face, quickly replaced with his usual mask of arrogant nonchalance. He shrugged, smirking.
“With your gifts? Well….the world for starters.” He took another step towards me, as if about to put his hands on my shoulders. I shuddered and took a step out of reach. “With a little bit of creativity, there’s nothing I….we….can’t accomplish.”
I tried to stop myself, I really did, but my tongue moved without my permission.
“And if I say no?”
Nicolae’s face never lost its arrogance, but it hardened with crystalline anger.
“There’s no highway option, Mitchell. There’s just one way here. I trust that you’re smart enough to know what that is.”
I had a vision then. I saw my world controlled by Nicolae. I would spend the rest of my life as his personal reset button, sweeping up the messes of his increasingly violent and heinous crimes. Tara’s voice suddenly rang in my head.
“I can’t live in a world without mistakes or obstacles.”
Oh, the irony. Thanks to me, Nicolae would do just that. And me? My own life would become one colossal mistake. Crime after soul-sucking crime, each one worse than the last. I knew then that no matter what, I was done. I refused to live like this any longer.
I locked eyes with Nicolae and shrugged in a silent screw you. As his face contorted with uncontrolled rage, I sensed rather than saw Joe come hurtling out of my blindspot, charging me like a rhinoceros. Nicolae screamed obscenities and lunged at me, hands curled as if to hammer me into obedience. The blind ferocity in his expression triggered my own anger. All of the depression, guilt, and gut-wrenching fear of the past year pumped through my veins in one glorious moment of cleansing fury. As the larger men rushed towards me, I resolved that I wouldn’t go down before I had destroyed Nicolae’s repulsive, leering smirk for good.
Time seemed to slow as my punch began its course towards my blonde-and-blue haired target. It was only when Nicolae literally jumped toward me that I realized that it didn’t just seem slower than normal. Nicolae himself slowed as he approached, hovering impossibly in mid-air. Bewildered, I turned to Joe, who was in the middle of a ponderously slow step despite having been sprinting seconds before. But they weren’t the only ones caught in the invisible mire. Without warning, the air congealed around me. Panicked, I fought to escape whatever this was but I was trapped in elastic gel. With a roar and a last surge of effort, I shoved myself forward as hard as I could, stretching the air around me to its limit.
Then, without even a second to realize what was happening, I was boomeranged into the time stream and the darkness swallowed my scream.
August 19 th, 2012
Year 3
Chapter 15
Sun Tzu said “Know thyself and you will win a hundred battles.” Maybe that’s why people always think they’re losing the game of life. Those rare moments when you feel on top of the world are so easily replaced in your memory by the overwhelming amount of crippling doubt and despair. After centuries, I’ve borne more emotional weight than anyone, and yet somehow, I’m still alive. Well, functional, at least. But do I know myself? Not a bit.
I guess it’s not the hundred battles that really matter.
****
The echo vanished again, but I didn’t even try to stop it. Instead, I curled up into a ball and wept. With no one except the critters in the woods around to hear me, I didn’t hold back. Why was I here again? Here, of all the places in the world that I didn’t want to be! This was the worst location that the time stream could have dumped me. It was as if the universe wanted to mock me, or maybe punish me, for everything that I’d done.
Look, the trees murmured cruelly. Look how far you’ve fallen. Despite your gifts, despite everything that you could have done, this is the lot you have chosen for yourself: to lie alone and sobbing, driving everyone and everything good from your life. No matter what you do, you will always end up here.
After hours, or maybe days, I got to my feet, sore and exhausted. I could barely make out the blocky shape of academic buildings in the distance. The familiar campus encouraged thoughts of friends and classes and…..her…..to spring to mind. After the torrent of emotion that I had just experienced, I had no feelings left to spare except a dull ache of loss in my chest. As the sun set, I put Ohio State to my back once again as I walked away. I wasn’t going anywhere, I was just walking. I thought of Lewis Carrol suddenly. I had read Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass a bunch of times in high school, and I thought about a part that I had loved at the time. I’ll see if I can remember it now. Ah. Got it.
"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don’t much care where--" said Alice.
"Then it doesn’t matter which way you go," said the Cat.
"--So long as
I get SOMEWHERE," Alice added as an explanation.
"Oh, you’re sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."
I thought that was just some droll wordplay when I first read it. Now I could relate, and I didn’t care much for the feeling. As the forest grew darker around me, I plodded on, wrestling for control of my runaway thoughts. How did I end up here? I didn’t jump, not intentionally, anyway. And that whole thing with time slowing and me being flung around the continuum like a twenty-five cent bouncy ball was definitely not the typical jump sensation.
Remember, this was only Year Three. Despite regular use, I actually still didn’t know that much about my abilities. For all I knew, this was simply a bizarre and unpleasant side effect of using my powers too much. That was the prevailing theory that I had at the time, anyway. The truth was, I couldn’t have cared less. I was in the here and now, and I was miserable. I was so wrapped in my own thoughts that I didn’t realize how far into the woods I had gone. Only when the foliage suddenly gave way to a massive field of summer grass up to my eyebrows did I come to the conclusion that I had no clue where I was.
Now, I grew up in Ohio, so what I did next was incredibly stupid. If you know the Midwest at all, you know that it’s full of wide open fields. You know, the ones you get bored looking at on cross-country road trips. Any intelligent human being who understood the size of those fields would have thought, Hmm….maybe I shouldn’t wander into this expanse of land. I have no way of knowing what direction I’m going in or how long it will take to get out, especially since it’s getting dark. I shall steer clear. But, no sir, not me. I shrugged and marched right into that sea of summer wheat.
I didn’t like to jump forward much, for two reasons. One, I saw the movie “Click”, so I didn’t want to miss out on anything important. Two, I never knew exactly where I was gonna end up. For all I knew, after I jumped, I could find myself being dunked into a bucket of piranhas by a couple of circus pigmies. Unlikely, but you see my point. That said, after hours upon hours of walking, I was dehydrated and beyond exhausted. I had figured that if I just kept moving, I would find a stretch of highway to follow to food and shelter. Looking back, I ask myself why I thought my luck would start right then.
The Jump Journal Page 7