The Sea Beast Takes a Lover

by Michael Andreasen

  The time travelers who had left earlier reenter the conference room, which is now a tragedy of priceless historical debris. They’re wiping milky fluid off their hands and cheeks with large gray towels. Their jumpsuits are singed and burned away in places. Their hair is smoking. Their eyebrows are missing.

  “The time travel device was leaking,” they report. “We fixed it.”

  The returning time travelers check on everyone, beginning not with the students but with their colleagues, the desk jockey time travelers, who are huddled together, wailing louder and harder than any child.

  Everyone decides the field trip is over. A school bus is summoned. The driver carries a license with dates of birth and expiration. He loads up the students, whose heads are still abuzz, some with visions of living dinosaurs, some with war, some with their first narcotic taste of other human bodies. They will not unbuzz for days. As the bus pulls away, they do not look back, or even think to wave good-bye.

  The time travelers take the rest of the day off. They retire to the Time Travel Institute’s residential wing to nap and watch television, but cannot truly relax. They are thinking about the wrecked and mangled artifacts on the conference room floor, many of which had been taken directly from the field. It turns out that the ethical dictums of their work have not, in fact, kept perfect pace with the moral dilemmas inherent to their technology. Each has pocketed a souvenir in his or her travels. Or two. They know that they shouldn’t have taken, shouldn’t have touched, but the time travelers, for all their virtue and rigor, are still human. They filled a conference room with objects they presumed no one in history would miss. But the students—and this makes them so angry—the students are right: There’s no way to know for sure. It’s possible, they admit to themselves now, that they’ve been tugging at threads that shouldn’t be tugged. A broken time travel device is one thing, but a broken history . . .

  Slipping into their pajamas, they try to shake off the sneaking suspicion that their procedures and protocols and manuals haven’t protected anything, that their whole enterprise is fatally flawed, that, in the end, they’re only making things worse. As they brush their teeth, they worry about causality, and the observer effect, and the very real possibility of accidentally erasing someone from history. Someone like themselves.

  All time travelers share the same secret fear: that one day their collective lack of self-control, their inability to resist looking, touching, taking, will purge them from the ranks of having ever existed, robbing them of a life, a death, and a birth all at once. Honestly, when they really think about it, it’s a miracle it hasn’t happened already.

  These are the thoughts that keep time travelers up at night.

  “Will you make sure that I’m not erased?” they ask again as they tuck one another into bed. “Will you make sure that I’m born? That I live when I’m supposed to? That I die when the time is right?”

  “We will,” the time travelers hush, turning out the light. “We will.”

  Acknowledgments

  Everything is impossible. And then it isn’t. When this happens, there are usually people to thank.

  Sword-and-shield thanks to my unstoppable agent PJ Mark (stop him, just you try it), whose laser-beam readings and raw hustle are just two talents in a quiver of many. Thanks also to Ian Bonaparte and Marya Spence for their sharp eyes and sharper suggestions.

  Whip-smart thanks to the great Maya Ziv, editor extraordinaire, who just makes everything better (sentences, scenes, brief swings through New York), and whose radiant enthusiasm carried me through much of this book. Thanks also to Ben Sevier, Christine Ball, Maddy Newquist, Wendy Pearl, and everyone else at Dutton for their kindness and support.

  Spotlight thanks to Willing Davidson, Michael Ray, Claire Boyle, and Emma Komlos-Hrobsky for helping some of these stories thrive outside their natural habitat.

  Sage thanks to my incredible teachers: When Geoffrey Wolff admires one of your sentences, you feel like a goddamn superhero. When Brad Watson listens to what stories are saying, you feel like you’ve been deaf to them your whole life. Maile Meloy will show you that even the ridiculous should be taken seriously. When Ron Carlson talks shop, you remember why you love writing, and writers. When C. J. Hribal encourages you, there’s a good chance it’ll change your life. David and Phylis Ravel will teach you that loving deeply is the artist’s greatest calling. And when Michelle Latiolais invites you over for lunch, once again lending her brilliant insight to your work and her calm counsel to your fears, you’ll invariably leave with a lighter heart, a resuscitated courage, and what’s left of the chocolate cake.

  Vanguard thanks to that gang of literary thugs I am most eager to please: Ramona Ausubel, Marisa Matarazzo, and Matt Sumell, who demanded many of these stories into being. Be ever whole and ever true, our little coterie.

  Roundtable thanks to Lauren Coleman, Izzy Prcic, Max Winter, Michelle Chihara, Dave Morris, Erin Almond, Kevin Lee, Zach Braun, Frank D’Amato, and all the other great UCI writers for seeing me through those earliest of early days.

  Rescue-team thanks to Cristina Rodriguez and Leila Mansouri for emergency readings both keen and clutch. Thanks for hearing me out, talking me down, and pointing out what was right under my nose. And to Amanda Foushee, for regularly knocking sense into my sometimes senseless head.

  Home-team thanks to the UCI School of Humanities and the International Center for Writing and Translation for the grants; and to Ann Heine for her support and the support she continues to give young writers.

  And finally, alpha-and-omega thanks to my family: Tom, Tiffany, Beth, Andy, Karen, Andrew, and Megan, and to the greatest of all parents, John and Mary Eileen. Thank you for giving me the freedom I desperately needed, the patience I didn’t deserve, and the stalwart, selfless love that astonishes me still. I love you deeper than sea, wider than sky.

  About the Author

  Michael Andreasen is a graduate of the University of California, Irvine’s MFA program. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Zoetrope: All-Story, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. He lives in Southern California. The Sea Beast Takes a Lover is his first book.

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