Synchronic: 13 Tales of Time Travel

by Michael Bunker

  The first time she saw him she nearly leapt from her chair. He sauntered past, ten years younger than when she had last seen him. But he showed no sign of recognition—why would he?—while she knew the outline of every bone in his face.

  She continued to study at Portland State instead of the posh library at OHS, she joined the running group he belonged to, and she made her friends go to physics department pub nights.

  And yet he persistently ignored her. Or simply didn’t notice her. Occasionally he would offer a vague smile, as if he had seen her around somewhere but didn’t know where. And she couldn’t work up the courage to speak to him.

  They had originally met when he’d signed up for a triathlon training group that she was running. But she was a med student now, not a personal trainer, and as fit as she was, she no longer had the time or the credentials to organize a training group. She trained for herself, but it didn’t come close to the gut-wrenching determination she had put into it before, when she had to feel physical pain to erase the emotional pain. She occasionally considered quitting med school to go back and be a personal trainer, but that seemed like too much of a sacrifice for a relationship that could go nowhere.

  She followed Paul sometimes, lurking in bushes and behind bookshelves as he ambled around the campus. She snapped a picture of him while he walked past the library one sunny afternoon, his vulnerable but sensual face wrapped in thought.

  She almost laughed at herself. She had become the cat and he the mouse. Who was this cipher that she was pursuing? He was from a different timeline.

  She fell into step with him one morning during running club. In her previous life she could easily keep pace with him. She was still easily the fastest woman in the club, but medical school had cut into her training time, and she had to push to match his speed. She tried to remember how easily she and Paul had fallen into jibes and sprint challenges.

  “Hey,” she said, hoping her face wasn’t a brilliant red.

  “Hey,” he responded.

  “I’m Sarah,” she said.

  “Paul,” he returned.

  “What department are you in?” she said.

  “Physics,” he said. “You?”

  “Med school.”

  “OHS? You’re a little far afield.”

  “I live around here,” she lied. Then she waited, because Paul had always carried the conversation before. Or had he? Had she structured their conversation by outlining drills and distances, and he’d eased his way in with quips and questions? She drew a blank. She smiled at him. He smiled back, and for a second she hoped that she saw some flicker of interest in his eyes.

  “I was wondering if you wanted to have coffee sometime, and talk about, you know, training,” she said. She wasn’t sure if her voice was thin and high from the exertion or the nerves.

  Paul lowered his eyebrows, looking bemused. “I guess…” Then, “Just so you know, I have a girlfriend.”

  She gasped back a small sob of humiliation, and forced her lips into a bright smile. “Oh yeah, no. I just wanted to find out how often you run, get some tips, you know…” She trailed off. “But don’t worry about it.”

  They had reached a hill and he started to pull out in front of her. He glanced back with an eyebrow uplifted, the polite running partner code for “Can I go ahead?” She doubled her effort to keep up. But it was no use.

  At the end of the run, everyone stretched. A bunch of skinny, sort-of neurotic people contorting their bodies into various shapes. Running culture almost made Sarah laugh now. They were all too serious. She still loved running, but she wasn’t quite as compulsive about it this second time around.

  Paul approached as she eased into a deeper quad stretch.

  “You going in any races this season?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe the Portland Tri.”

  “That’s good. You’re super fast. Just remember to run your own race,” he said with what appeared to be almost an apologetic smile, and then jogged off.

  Run your own race. Live your own life. Maybe that would have to be a life without Paul.

  She didn’t quit running group, but she no longer tried to keep up with Paul and she stopped stalking him at the university. She trained harder, and one day she passed him with a small wave on the hill where she had tried to ask him out.

  He didn’t say anything to her after their run that day. He just passed her with a tight little smile.

  * * *

  Sarah’s mother called one night as Sarah prepared for final exams.

  “Charlotte’s in trouble,” she said. “She’s been using drugs. Jake and I don’t know what to do. Can you come and talk to her?”

  Sarah drove out in her little Hyundai. Charlotte was seventeen. Sarah hadn’t been home much in the last two years. Too much studying and running. She cursed her negligence as the miles passed between Portland and Maryview.

  When Sarah arrived home, Jake was slurring his words and staggering around the kitchen. The cigarettes had hardened and yellowed his skin, and his eyes smoldered like two pieces of coal inside a stiff exoskeleton. Her mother seemed to have lost thirty pounds. Sarah tried not to cringe at the dinginess of the green shag rug, rough wood cabinets, and dusty macramé planters in the dim light of evening. Charlotte was out.

  “We tried to keep her in,” her mother wailed. “But she won’t listen.”

  Sarah found Charlotte giving a blow job to a dark, heavy man with tattoos in an alley behind “the Pump and Grind,” the local nickname for the Break in Time, the grimiest bar in town. When Sarah called out for them to stop, the man shot back into the bar, not keen to partake in a family drama. Charlotte rose to her feet—almost skeletal in her impossibly tight jeans and stilettos—offered Sarah a menacing toothy grin, and made as if to follow the man. Sarah grabbed her and started to haul her back to the car. Charlotte fought like a wild woman, punching and kicking her sister with a strength at odds with her mass. But Sarah persisted, and had endurance on her side. In the car, Charlotte glared at Sarah from beneath a heavy layer of eyeliner, her pupils too large for the light level. She was agitated and refused to do up her seat belt as Sarah pulled away from the curb.

  “Fuck you,” Charlotte said.

  “Fuck you back,” Sarah responded and started driving home. “What are you doing, Char?”

  “None of your business.” Charlotte contorted her words in the careful enunciation of the impaired. Her left hand bounced and jittered.

  “You need to clean up.” Sarah hated the words coming out of her mouth. She could find none of the comforting suggestions that she had learned doctors are to say in clinical practice. She pulled back and tried to refocus. “I’m sorry. Forget I said that. Tell me what’s going on.”

  Charlotte lapsed into silence in the seat next to her. The streetlights lit her mascara-streaked face and baleful expression.

  “What did you take tonight?”

  “None of your business.”

  “I love you, Char. Please, talk to me.”

  “Fuck you, Miss Perfect. Miss Doctor. Oh no, I can’t drink, I’m training,” Charlotte extended the word training into a mocking slur. “You can’t keep me here. You aren’t the police. I could jump out at the next red light.” Charlotte fumbled with the door handle.

  A bile of panic rose in Sarah’s throat. She slowed, but there was no place to pull over and too many cars behind her. Charlotte had her hand on the handle and opened the door a crack. The rush of air and the dark, ruthless, moving pavement beneath the car sent a shot of adrenaline through Sarah’s system. The red taillights in front of her blurred and she tried to ease the car into the right-hand lane. “Stop it, Charlotte, just stop it. I gave up everything so you could live. Don’t you dare throw your life away like this.”

  The door closed a bit. “What are you talking about?”

  Sarah found an opening and, trembling, pulled the car into the outer lane, looking for a place to pull over. She had to keep talking, but she almost didn’t know what she
was saying. “There was an accident, when you were three. I came back in time to save you. I gave up the man I loved to do it, the man who invented the time travel device. Please just live. That’s all I want from you.”

  Charlotte began to laugh hysterically. “And you think I’m high.”

  Sarah spotted a place up ahead to pull into and put on her signal light. “Look, forget it. I know it sounds ridiculous. It is ridiculous. I probably imagined the whole thing. Let’s just get you home and sobered up, and then we’ll talk.”

  “Oh, well, thanks a lot for coming back in time to save me and leaving me with the biggest bastard of a man who ever lived. Do me a favor. Maybe next time put fucking Jake in the time machine and send him back to the Jurassic period.”

  Charlotte gave one last crazed burst of laughter, pushed the door open wide and flung herself out onto the black pavement.

  * * *

  After the ambulance took Charlotte away, Sarah drove home with trembling fingers. She had to collect her mom and Jake because Jake was too drunk to drive and her mom had night blindness. Jake downed two more beers while Sarah and her mom tried to corral him into Sarah’s car.

  “She’s in a coma.” Sarah repeated what she’d told her mother on the phone. “Abrasions, broken arm, concussion. We need to get back to the hospital. Now.”

  “Well, you fucked that up royally,” Jake said. “The fancy doctor. I guess you’re not that good at it after all.”

  “Leave her alone, Jake,” Sarah’s mother said.

  “Leave her alone, Jake,” he mimicked.

  “Stop it,” Sarah ordered. “We need to get to the hospital.”

  “Always so righteous,” Jake murmured. “Sarah’s always the adult. Aren’t you glad we always have an adult with us, Nance?”

  “That’s enough. Just get in the car,” Sarah said, pressing her hand against the small of his back to guide him in the direction of the back seat. At the touch, Jake’s hand snapped out and grabbed her arm. Sarah wrenched her arm out of his grip reflexively.

  “Oh, aren’t you the tough one?” Jake said, puffing his shoulders up into his fighting stance.

  “Jake, just get in the car, please. Leave her alone,” Nancy said.

  “That’s right, Nancy. Just take your daughter’s side as usual. Sarah and I were just having a little conversation, weren’t we Sarah?” Jake lunged forward and grabbed Sarah by the elbow. Nancy reached out and tried to pull him back.

  Jake whirled and swung out wildly with a loosely fisted hand, catching Sarah’s mother hard on the chin. Nancy Williams fell backward, hit her head on the edge of the car door, and toppled to the ground.

  “Mom!” Sarah yelled. Her mother lay motionless. Blood streamed from her head.

  Jake lurched and bent, his arm pulled back at the ready, as if he meant to finish off her mother, and Sarah snapped. She wrenched his arm backward, swung her leg out to take his feet out from under him, and plowed her fist into his face.

  Jake, caught by surprise, fell hard to the ground. He rolled over onto his stomach before Sarah could come at him again, and when he returned to his back, he held a handgun in one hand.

  “Stupid little bitch. This is your fault,” he said. He fired, but he was too drunk to focus and the shot sailed over her head. Sarah kicked the gun hard out of his hand before he could fire it again.

  Jake rolled over and grabbed her ankle, snapping her feet out from underneath her. She fell on top of him, and they rolled over and over on top of each other down the gentle slope of their driveway. Each was grasping for the gun, and then there was a tooth-rattling bang, and the blood from Jake’s body was drenching her as his grip on her arms loosened.

  Sarah pushed Jake’s body off of her and crawled, sobbing, over to her mother. She felt for a pulse, but got nothing.

  * * *

  She knelt in the grass snorting hysterical tears and emitting guttural, almost feral wails as she pounded her mother’s chest in some sort of pathetic facsimile of chest compressions, her hands slippery with blood. The ambulance was taking forever. Jake lay motionless a few feet away. Charlotte was probably dead in the hospital. This wasn’t a redo. This was worse than the first go around.

  “Sarah! Sarah!”

  She almost didn’t hear the voice until a hand closed gently on her shoulder.

  She whirled.

  Paul stood there in the dim light, his blue eyes luminous and tortured.

  “I’m so sorry I’m late. I got lost. I meant to be here half an hour ago.”

  “What are you talking about?” She continued to pump furiously at her mother’s heart.

  Paul held up a time device. “I came back to prevent this. But I didn’t know the exact time, and I had to travel from Portland, and I misjudged. I’ll just go back a little bit, and I won’t get lost this time.”

  Sarah didn’t let up on her chest compressions. “No way. How do I know you’re not going to make it even worse?”

  “How can it be worse?”

  Sarah shook her head furiously through her tears. “How did you even know this was happening? You don’t even know me.”

  Paul glanced at the blood covering Sarah’s arms. He spoke in a hurried voice. “I think we should talk about this later. A few months ago a woman came to see my 2013 self. She told me what happened. Gave me a picture taken of me in front of the library when I was in undergrad. Her name was Charlotte.”

  “Charlotte?” The thrall of sirens cut through hum of the night air.

  “We need to do this now, Sarah. Charlotte said both your mother and Jake died tonight, and that you were jailed for Jake’s murder. I need to undo this now. I don’t want you to experience any more of this timeline.”

  “You mean redo?” she said faintly. The sirens were closer now. She could see a police car behind the ambulance.

  Paul tore a hand through his hair. “Yes. I’m going back.” His finger reached for the button on the device.

  “Wait! I’m going with you. I need to know this happened, so I can make sure it doesn’t happen.” She leapt from the ground, snatched at his other hand, and held fast even as she felt it jerk in hers.

  * * *

  She was back in her car driving from the hospital, about a mile before the turnoff to her mother’s house, trembling so hard that the car wobbled and careened on the deserted road.

  She edged the car into her mother’s driveway and cut the engine. She could just turn around and go right back to the hospital, but if she did, maybe Jake would still deliver the punch that would kill her mother. She pulled the key out of the ignition and slowly eased open the door. A cool breeze from the river traced through her hair.

  Paul slipped out of the darkness and joined her, the moonlight casting shadows beneath his cheekbones. He had made it on time this time. Her body almost shuddered in relief, but then she tensed up again. What if they didn’t get it right this time either? Their lives could become an endless series of redos. What if Paul got shot this time? Or if she did? They could erase it and try again. But what if with each successive redo, the outcome became worse? A perpetual, progressively grimmer Groundhog Day.

  “Did you just jump with me?” he said.

  She nodded.

  “So you know what we’re going to redo?”

  She nodded again and choked back a sob.

  Paul’s hand found hers, and squeezed. “We’ll fix this,” he said.

  * * *

  “Charlotte’s visit was the push I needed to finally invent the device,” Paul said, as they sat facing each other on separate beds in a darkened hotel room in the shadow of the humming hospital, their knees almost but not quite touching.

  With Paul’s help, Sarah had managed to convince Jake to go to bed and dry up, and then, once he was passed out, they took her mother to the hospital. Charlotte had regained consciousness and was stable. They were taking shifts by her bedside. Sarah just hoped she could convince her mother and Charlotte to move back to Portland with her. To never return to that house
with Jake. She wanted to call the police and tell them that Jake had killed her mother and pulled a gun on her. But of course she couldn’t, because he hadn’t. That was the crappy part of redoing the past.

  The time device sat on the bedside table. So addictive, this possibility of redo. So dangerous. How could she undo Jake completely—make sure he never entered their lives—without undoing Charlotte? Was there some other way to erase him?

  “But how did Charlotte know to come to you?” Sarah asked.

  Paul’s silhouette shifted. “There was an article about me in the Portland Press saying I was theoretically working on the idea of time travel. Charlotte said she found my picture in your stuff, and that you had told her some crazy story about going back in time. She was desperate to help you… She admitted she was grasping at straws.” He stopped and cast a shadowy glance at her, waiting.

  Charlotte. Charlotte had saved her.

  “So now you want the story of how I went back in time,” Sarah said. Her chest tightened and her breath came in shallow puffs, not the deep restoring breaths she had trained herself to take when under stress. “I stole the device from you. Not in this timeline. In a previous one. Then by jumping back twenty years in time, I changed the timeline somehow, and you no longer invented the device, or you did it a few years later, or you didn’t tell me about it, so I no longer had the device. I’m sorry. I did it to save Charlotte. She drowned when she was three, in the river. It was my fault. You and I were friends.” Sarah paused. They had been more than friends. “Good friends. When you told me about the device, I saw my chance to save her, and I betrayed you and I am so sorry.” Sarah pressed her face into her hands.

  A sliver of light from between the heavy hotel curtains fell on Paul’s hands as he reached out and placed them on her thighs. His weight felt heavy and solid, and she wanted to slip off her bed, fall to her knees, and wrap her arms around his waist.