by Alex Myers
Every year on your birthday, I have made the trip to this chapel and have placed an updated correspondence in this box for you, replacing the one from the year before.
On the evening that you were shot, our wedding night, I told you the news that I was pregnant with what would be our daughter—Emily. She was a fine woman and lived a good life until the Lord called her away 10 years ago, at age 63. She married an admirable man named William Gleich, and together they had three girls, all of which are extraordinary people. They range in age from baby Carla at 30, Terry Lynn at 35, to the oldest, Valier, at 38. Valier and I are the closest; she and her husband John live with me, helping me with my affairs. They themselves had two children, now 12-year-old Louis and a now 18-year-old named Martha that is set to marry an able man named Phillip come next spring.
He had to pause for a second. Jack’s whole being shook. His grandfather and grandmother’s names were Phillip and Martha, and he had a great-uncle Louis. He remembered stories that his great-grandmother’s name was Valier and always thought how beautiful and unusual a name it was. The coincidences were too high; he knew what this meant. Mustering all his strength and wiping his tears, he continued.
I know you have figured this out as I have that this life, our lives, travel in some strange circle. That perhaps the only way you could travel to your future was by confronting a demon from your past.
So, you see my love, you have left behind quite a legacy, and you have touched people you never were able to meet.
I fear that this year will be the last for me to make the pilgrimage to our little church. My health is failing, and the pain in my joints makes it impossible to walk without my wheelchair. I feel like I’ve lived long enough.
I always held out hope that somehow you would find a way to come back to me, but now I’m afraid that the next time I see you, it will be in another place. Until then, I’ll never forget a single detail of your loving face, your smile, the way that you looked at me with love. I’ll cling to your memory like I would to a life preserver in a stormy sea. It wasn’t until I met you that I realized I had never been able to give myself completely to any man, to anyone. My heart continues to ache because I didn’t realize this until after you were gone.
Our good friend, Samuel Clemens, once told me that love is as real as if it were made of the very earth, and like the earth, it is forever. So, even if you do not hear my words now as I speak them out loud, this letter will have to do.
You’ve taught me how to love… and for this, even in my darkest of moments, when hope seems hopeless, I will say the name “Jack” and know that, if even for the briefest of shining moments, I had and I knew love.
I say all these things standing behind you in time, speaking softly into your ear, hoping that you’ll turn around and come back and take me into your arms and hug me into tomorrow.
I could see your love for me was shaping the person you were becoming too. Together, we grew spiritually closer, and I could see you becoming the man you were destined to always be. I only hoped I could be the woman I was when I was with you in all the rest of my life.
I bless the day I met you, and I thank God that he let me. I’m a better person for the time we spent together.
I have waited for so long, but I feel my wait is coming to an end. I am waiting for you in time.
Love, your wife,
Frances
“I knew that was your car in the parking lot,” Brent Hopwood said. He walked up to Jack and moved in next to him on his walk back up the beach.
“How could you tell?” Jack asked, wiping away his drying tears.
“Besides being the only one in the lot other than mine, there is an Enterprise Rental sticker on the bumper.”
“Should have been a detective.”
“You seem better than you were before.”
“I guess it was more cathartic than I thought it would be,” Jack said.
“I read the letter. From what I could see, at least you have answers.”
“I still have a million questions—like how I was able to go back, and why?”
“I think it’s pretty simple: you went back to stop the Civil War, and you succeeded,” Dr. Hopwood said.
“I don’t think so,” Jack said, stopping to pick up a stone. It wasn’t until he skimmed it into the water that he realized this was probably the same place he skipped a stone 150 years ago with Frances.
He turned to look at Dr. Hopwood. “I think I was sent there to learn a lesson about love, and myself. To discover that I had the capacity to love and for me to give of myself.”
“I know if I would have had a say in the matter, I would have sent you back to save my grandfather. Maybe you went back to save your own life. Whatever the reason, so much good came out of it.”
It wasn’t until the next day Jack realized that neither he nor the letter had ever said anything about the Civil War. With the change in the time stream, Jack was the only person on Earth that could have known if there ever was a Civil War in the United States. How had Brent Hopwood known? By the time Jack got back to the Fort, not only was Dr. Brent Hopwood not there, he had never worked there. From what Jack could discern, Dr. Brent Hopwood didn’t exist. Jack had an odd feeling that it wasn’t Hercules driving that UPS truck that sent him back on his time travel journey, it was this man that called himself “Brent”, and whether or not he was Hercules’s grandson was anybody’s guess.
I look at these words today and there is almost no recollection of the events and a diminishing emotional attachment. If I didn’t have the letter, I might not believe me. I have recorded these memories and feelings into my VITU unit before they leave me like a half remembered dream.
As I started to remember more of this life (Johnny’s or Jonathan’s) Jack’s seems less and less real. I only know this because I mentioned it about a million times in my VITU recording. The cemetery of Jack’s past is filled with unmarked graves.
I may seem callous or cold, but I have changed too. I like the name Jack—I like what I remember of him. When I meet new people I have them call me Jack and to the old people that knew me, well there wasn’t that many of them. Something that bothered me that I failed to mention was when I woke up from my coma in the hospital, I was all alone. There were no family or friends, nothing—zippo.
I decided to change that. See in this time stream my mom never committed suicide and we have reconnected, sort of, but she doesn’t know she’s my mom (it’s complicated). I’ve got a best friend named Bill that I realized meant a lot to me, and spend most of my days getting immense pleasure making all my big piles of money do the most good. I don’t have a girlfriend yet, I thought I’d give that side of my life a little break.
I can remember one thing, one thing that transcends while nothing else does, and that is I remember being loved. So, if I really did go through all this, and some days I’m still on the fence, I can say this for sure—it was worth it!
Jack Riggs
October 21, 2013
Norfolk, Virginia
THE END
TIME CHANGE
BOOK THREE:
The Way Back
BY
Alex Myers
“I never did anything worth doing by accident.”
~Thomas A. Edison
“Get your facts first , then you can distort them as much as you please.”
~Mark Twain
“With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.”
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
CHAPTER 1
January 11, 1880
The ice crunched under his feet and the cold and humidity held down the smoke and stench of the city. A freezing sleet fell on Lexington Avenue, covering the sidewalks, the iron balustrades, the steps leading up to the posh brownstones, and his heart.
He didn’t care about saving the life of this woman he had never met. The wife of the former collector of the Port of New York would die in the next twelve hours and her husband would be dev
astated. The vial in his vest pocket under two layers of overcoat needed to be above ninety-five degrees and below one hundred five or the tiny swimmers inside would die—if die was even the word for it.
Speaking of dying, he had enough of the elixir in the vile to inject some into the husband and cure him of the Bright’s disease that was just coming to life in his kidneys and would slowly kill him over the next four years, that and the never-ending mourning for his wife, Ellen.
Yes, he could cure him, but he wouldn’t. There would be too many questions, like why inject a healthy man with an anti-pneumonia drug? It didn’t matter much anyway because he would probably have to kill the man a year from now, next December, right before Christmas.
The lights from the first three stories of the five-story brownstone lit up the icy sidewalk and street outside. There was no need to check the address; this was number 123. The seventeen-year-old son, Chester Junior, in his first year at Princeton was inside as was his ten-year-old sister, Ellen. There were two doctors, two household employees, and the sick woman’s rich, matronly mother. The doctors would be the hardest to fool. He was no doctor, but he had killed one earlier—shot him in the face—not with a gun, but with an aerosol that induced an almost immediate coronary thrombosis. A heart attack that looked like any other 1880 heart attack. He had forged a letter that he now carried in his pocket from the dead doctor, which said that he and his medicine were the only hope for the dying woman—at least that much was true.
He stopped in front of the reddish-brown Romano–Tuscan house and steeled himself for the performance he was about to give. He wasn’t a nice man, his face wasn’t formed that way, and there was no smile on his lips or laugh lines around his eyes. It took concentrated effort to be friendly—he could pull it off—but there was nothing natural about it.
He took one step onto the frozen stone step. With his gloved hand, he grabbed the ice-covered iron railing. He looked up at the huge cornice overhang supported by ornamental brackets. Above, there were massive stalactite-type icicles ready to break off and skewer the unsuspecting person below.
It was 3:00 a.m.; the blazing lights from windows linked together by stringcourses were like unblinking, bloodshot eyes trying their best to hold back the darkness. Occasionally, people and shadows moved across second-floor windows. The floor seemed to be the center of all activity in the house and above each window there was an elaborately treated stone entablature. They looked like gravestones waiting for a name.
He pounded on the heavy wooden and glass door, creating a greater sense of urgency and drama than he would have by just ringing the bell. His whole performance would be for effect. He pounded so hard the uneven, beveled plate glass of the door shook in its moldings. He waited, and then pounded some more.
“Who is it?” a man screamed as he came down the grand entry steps. As he descended the stairs, his eyes filled with consternation. He had on a vest, white shirt, wool pants, tie, and his sleeves were rolled up to his elbows. He reached the landing and the men stood looking eye-to-eye.
“Have you no respect? It’s the middle of the night. Who are you?” The man inside demanded, opening the door.
Without answering, he reached into his pocket and produced the forged document. It stated that he was a doctor and scientist at M-Con, the Medical Center of Norfolk, a facility owned by the Riggs Corporation, and it was on the cutting edge of medical discoveries and treatments.
“Did Doctor Kleinhouse not call ahead to tell you I was coming?” He knew Doctor Kleinhouse was the two doctors’ immediate supervisor at NYU, and there was no one available at M-Con who would be available to verify his identity.
“No, he did not.”
“I promised to do this for him as a favor, what is your name?”
“Doctor Prescott,” the man said, looking up from the document.
Inside the house, the man’s face softened and he said, “Come right in, it’s looking grave.”
He followed Doctor Prescott up the stairs, confidently knowing that not only did he look the part of a doctor, but he had the proper demeanor too. It also helped that there was no one at Doctor Klienhouse’s office to reveal that his documents were forged.
Heavy astringents and sulfur attacked his nostrils as he neared the sick room. Five people, one of them with a 104-degree fever, made the air in the room thick and moist.
Upon entering the room, a man stood quickly and met them inside the door. “Doctor Prescott, what’s the meaning of this? Who is he?” He was a smaller man neatly dressed in a heavy wool suit.
Doctor Prescott handed the man the forged papers. After reading the documents several times, he moved the group into the hallway. He said, “I’m Doctor Liciki, do you really think you can help?”
“I guarantee it. The patient will be on her feet by this time tomorrow.”
“I hope so, because otherwise, by this time tomorrow she will be in a pine box. Her husband is a very powerful man with deep connections, and her death will be met with much scrutiny upon all of us.”
“Within one hour her fever will lessen and she’ll improve exponentially after that.”
“I hope so for everyone’s sake,” Dr. Liciki led the way into the room, beckoning them to follow. “Mr. Arthur, this is Doctor Riggs from M-Con. He has a drug to save your wife’s life.”
The sturdy, large man sat in a chair, hunched over his wife, delicately holding her hand. He turned, and his chubby round face framed his bloodshot black eyes. He’d been crying and didn’t care who knew. He was fastidiously dressed and his huge mustache and side-whiskers were precisely trimmed.
“Doctor Riggs, if you can save my Ellen, anything I have, and anything I ever will have shall be yours.” He blinked hard trying to keep fat tears in his eyes.
He just smiled and took off his overcoat. Chester Junior, who went by his middle name Alan, was consoling his younger sister in the far side of the room. Both kids looked exhausted, and the young girl’s cry was just a whimper.
He removed what looked like a metal encased cigar from his inside jacket pocket. Carefully, he unscrewed the tube and withdrew the glass hypodermic needle. He pulled the vile out of his inner vest pocket and held it up to the light. It glowed a phosphorescent yellow, which told him that his body’s warmth had provided the perfect temperature for the nanobots to survive. Drawing a half pull on the vial, he looked at Ellen and decided to pull yet another quarter. She was bigger and sicker than he had thought.
He moved in, grabbed the sick woman’s arm, pulled out a rubber tie off from his pocket, and then searched without success for a vein. Giving up, he moved to the other side of the bed. If he couldn’t find a vein, the cure wouldn’t work. Seeing what he was doing, Doctor Prescott stepped forward to assist. Finally, he got the vein he was looking for, inserted the needle, and pushed the glowing liquid into the woman’s arm.
“What do we do now?” Doctor Liciki asked. “Should we try to bring her fever down, try to clear her lungs?”
“Nothing. Here is how this is going to work—her fever is what right now?”
“Doctor Prescott just checked. It’s 105.”
“Within the hour, her fever will come down to about 102 and stay there for about twelve hours. At that time, her temperature will return to about 100, which will be the new normal for her. I will stay with you until her temperature reaches 102, and then I’m afraid I will have to leave, as I have an important appointment I can’t miss.” The truth was, he didn’t want to be there when a phone call might be placed to the Medical Center of Norfolk, blowing his identity.
“What do we do then?”
“Nothing. Just let the medicine work.”
“How will we know it’s working?”
“Just ask the patient. I won’t leave until she regains consciousness.”
Thirty minutes later, as if on cue, Mrs. Arthur opened her eyes as if waking from a refreshing nap. She sat up in bed, looked around at the surprise on everyone’s face, and said, “What in the world is
all the fuss about?” She looked quite serious.
The room erupted in uncontrolled laughter, which left the confused Ellen Arthur looking even more perplexed.
“What is wrong with you people? It’s like you are all on a deathwatch. I told you I was just a little stuffy.” They all laughed again. Ellen was looking better by the second.
“Where are you going, Doctor Riggs?” Chester asked, standing to intercept him. He followed him out of the room and the two men were alone in the hallway.
“Mister Arthur, what I have to tell you might be considered unbelievable or farcical, but I assure you I’m as serious as cancer. I am not a doctor. I’m not even a scientist. I’m a businessman.”
He paused and let Arthur absorb his words. Arthur took out a handkerchief, wiped his watery eyes, and dabbed at his big fleshy nose.
“What is this Mr. Riggs?”
“Please, Mr. Arthur. I have a small window of time. I am no charlatan, and I know you are no fool. On July 2 next year, a Comanche Indian by the name of Billy Blackfeather will kill President James Garfield. On July 3, as vice president, you’ll take the oath of office becoming president of the United States.”
“But I—”
He could see that Arthur was flummoxed. Before he could speak, he continued. “An all-out war will be declared on Native Americans, the first thing you’ll have to rein in. To show you I have nothing to do with this, I’ll give you two natural disasters. On February 22 of next year, a devastating earthquake will hit California. Its epicenter will be the town of Parkfield. Then on August 27, the fifth hurricane of the season will hit Florida and the Carolinas and kill around seven hundred people.”
Chester Arthur’s eyes bulged. “Again Mr. Riggs, why are you telling me this?”
“Because I will come to you next year and together we can change the world. I’m sure you’ll know of me.”