Sic Semper, Sic Semper, Sic Semper
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He realized that the last thing he had ever said to his father was probably something stupid and undramatic. That’s the way things typically work out.
He opened the door and stepped out of the chamber. He remembered this place. Being here (or rather, in the part of here that wasn’t here, the part of the hospital where doctors tell families gentle euphemisms about their dead fathers) all those years ago. The words he felt no pain and he went peacefully and I’ll give you some space slithered through his head. It smelled disconcertingly unlike a room full of dead bodies. There was a sharp, cold anti-smell, a smell notable for its lack of notability. It seemed like a lie. The time traveler thought about how messy his father had been, how clumsily honest, and for a moment the time traveler’s headspace was invaded by the sentimental notion that this place was in some way an affront to his father’s memory. He thought about rifling through the cabinets, opening each in its turn until he came to the one with his father, whittling down quantum realities until he’d crafted a value-one probability. Instead, he wandered around, tracing the surfaces of metal tables with his fingertips, listening to the sound of his shoes on the tiles. Then he leaned against a wall, slumped to the floor, pulled his legs to his chest, and started crying.
An infinite loop of his father’s pathos, his failings, his humiliations and stagnations ran through the time traveler’s head. Every bad business idea and sucker bet. Every stepmother, each just another instance of the same basic person, another broken child doting on the time traveler’s father for as long as his behavior would allow. Every moment of visionary purpose, his father beaming in absolute conviction that he had, at long last, discovered the one thing he could do that would remove him from misery and put his name in the sky.
Nobody came. No pre- or post-time traveler plucked his father up and sent him to 1865. No HSTT crept in and absconded with an old failure’s corpse. At some point, it occurred to the time traveler that, maybe, he—that is, the he that he was and not some other he from some other point in the reticulum—was going to send his father to himself tonight, and he promised himself that he wouldn’t. If he was the primary actor here, he’d go off script. He stayed all night and only returned to the moment after he’d left Lincoln’s skull because he was afraid that someone would come down and find him in the morgue, and he wasn’t sure what he’d say if they did. Nobody ever touched his dead father.
Once, when the time traveler was a young man, his father brought him to a river. His father held an urn in which were the remains of the time traveler’s grandfather. “Guy was a fucking asshole,” said the time traveler’s father. He was crying. “So many things went wrong,” he said. “You know? So many things went wrong.” He wiped his nose on his sleeve, and the time traveler stared in bitter contempt at the wet streak of snot darkening the flannel. The time traveler had liked his grandfather. His grandfather had been precise and careful and clean and quiet. It seemed sometimes that whatever emotional mechanism had allowed him to emote so sparingly had skipped a generation, leaping over his spastic emotional son and embedding itself instead in the time traveler. The time traveler hated to hear his father speak ill of the great man. It was so transparent. So pathetic.
“You know,” said the time traveler’s father, “he wanted to be buried in some big fucking mausoleum. He wanted a goddamn monument built over his corpse. Idiot. You don’t get to decide what happens to you. Not when you’re alive, and definitely not when you’re dead. You get what you get.” He opened the urn, didn’t so much dump the ashes as fling them out over the river. He swung the urn again and again, and then pounded on the bottom like it was a bottle of ketchup, growling, sobbing, shouting, “You get what you get! Do you hear me, Dad? You get what you fucking get!”
The time traveler, overwhelmed by how undignified and naked the whole scene had become, tried to take the urn from his father. They struggled. And his father flung the urn out into the river. It hit the water, splashed, and sank. “What’s wrong with you?” whispered the time traveler. “How did you become this?”
And then the time traveler saw his father like he’d never seen him. Saw some of the awful calm and precision of his grandfather sink into him like the urn into the river. The old man, breathing deeply, walked back toward the road and got into his shit-box car and turned the engine on. The time traveler stood there and wondered what he ought to do next. He felt suddenly afraid of his father. He’d never feared him before, but now, now that he’d taken on some of the countenance of the great man with the office full of teeth, the time traveler’s father was a fearsome mystery. There were depths undiscovered. And they were filled with such awful anger.
When the time traveler opened the passenger’s door and sat down next to his father, the old failure said, “You don’t get to tell your father what success is. A man defines success for himself. Nobody else does that. You don’t let strangers do it, you don’t let your wife do it, and I sure as hell am not going to let my own son do it. Are we clear?”
However obvious the irony, it had felt true. It still did.
It felt true now that the time traveler was back inside of Lincoln’s skull, waiting for the end of the play. He was exhausted, and the world felt hot and airless. He tried to reconcile himself with the notion that he might never discover why or from whom his father’s body had been sent to him. The notion sat like a too-large bite blocking his esophagus. He wanted to scream, but noise suddenly frightened him like darkness frightens children. He was stuck. And soon, he would die.
So it was that the time traveler got into the time-reticulation chamber and reconstructed it once more, this time inside his own skull, which, itself, was inside of Abraham Lincoln’s skull. He hollowed himself out, pulled to himself a second iteration of the same construction materials with which he’d built his first intracranial apartment, and started over. He drank coffee in the morning. He watched movies and ate pizza. And when his new apartment started to evince the same telltale tilt, he got into the chamber again and built another apartment inside his own head, which was already in his own head, which was in Abraham Lincoln’s head. And then he did it again. And again. An endless Escher hallway of himself inside himself inside himself inside himself. He did this not because he didn’t want to die. He did want to die, every day and with a longing that bordered on lust. But dying without knowing? Better not to die. Better not to die at all.
Each time, he would have to travel back into the previous layer of himself to fetch his DVDs and his books and his coffee maker. Each time, he would see himself, his previous self, hollowed out, dead but frozen, staring at him with eyes the optic nerves of which no longer had a visual cortex with which to communicate. Each time, it would occur to him that he had managed to kill himself after all, in a way, and part of him would find the idea hilarious, and part of him would find it ghoulish. Each time, he was astounded by how much he resembled his father. The first few times, he thought about saying, “You get what you get.” But he never did. There never seemed to be much point. And after a while, the urge to say anything at all to himself just sort of drifted apart under the weight of routine.
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Copyright © 2016 by Douglas F. Warrick
Art copyright © 2016 by Carl Wiens
Contents
Title Page
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