Allergic To Time

by Crystal Gables

  “Do you know, out of all the students I taught — all 300 or so — you were the only one who actually came up to me and said anything?” Martin turned to look me in the eye.

  I remembered back to the first week of class in my second year as an undergrad, the semester after Kate had died, when things had been so tense and awful in class. I had gone to see Martin one day after class, in his office, to tell him I was sorry for his loss. It had seemed like the right — the decent — thing to do.

  “Really? I was the only one? I don’t believe that. I mean, surely…”

  “Nope.” He looked back down at his hands. “Just you.”

  “Well, I think no one really knew what to say,” I said, thinking back to the situation. “I’m sure the other guys wanted to say something, they just didn’t know how to go about it.”

  Martin raised his eyes but kept fiddling with his hands. “No, I think you were the only one who actually cared enough to say something.”

  I fell silent for a moment. I had no idea that I was the only one out of all Martin’s students to say something to him at the time. I thought most of my classmates would have offered their condolences. And what did it say about me then, about my feelings towards him, that I had been the only one to do such a thing?

  “Anyway,” Martin went on, shaking his head briefly, as if to shake off the memory of what were discussing. “You know, after that I kind of lost passion for my job.”

  I had to raise my eyebrows at that. “Really?” I asked. “Because it seemed to me like that was the time you actually got serious about it. You were a really amazing lecturer after that.”

  He turned to me and returned my surprised look. “And what was I before that?”

  “Well, you were a fun teacher, I suppose. But not a particularly good one.”

  He sighed. “It’s funny how things must have looked. Because it was before — in my so-called ‘fun’ era, as you call it — that I was taking it seriously. My heart was never in it again afterwards.”

  “Well, what was it in?” I asked.

  “Time travel.”

  I sat up straight on the bed, feeling as though I had made an important discovery. “Because you wanted to go back in time to save Kate’s life!” I exclaimed. “Well. How very H.G. Wells of you.”

  Martin pulled a face. “No.” He shook his head at me. “Not because I wanted to ‘save her life’. I never would have thought that would have been possible.”

  “Oh.” He had kind of dashed my theory. “Why then?”

  He took a long hard look at the floor, like he was trying to set things straight in his mind. “I stumbled across a case. An alleged time travel case.” He let out a long sigh. Somehow along the way we had ended up right next to each other again, and now not only were our legs touching, but our arms kept brushing against each others as well. “I’m not sure if ‘stumbled across’ is the right word. I kind of purposely may have searched for the information. But I never in a million years would have expected to find what I found...”

  “What did you find?” I asked, almost in a whisper. I had the feeling this was more than just another case. After all, this was the one that had started everything, had set him off in his secret line of work as a time travel detective.

  “I started reading up on this case: of a family, the parents, and a young girl, three years old. Still a baby, really. That’s why it was so sad: she was in the hospital, unable to breath, her lungs couldn’t hold out, they were too little and undeveloped to cope with such a massive change in atmosphere. See, this family had travelled, approximately, 60 years through time.” He shook his head. “It was this that first started to convince me that maybe they were telling the truth, maybe time travel is possible. I mean, you certainly wouldn’t fake your baby daughter being that ill. And it seemed sick to lie about it, to use your kid for publicity like that, if it was just a hoax.”

  He stood very still for a moment. If I didn’t know better I would have thought he was shaking slightly. He took a deep breath and continued. “So, I researched the entire case. I became a bit obsessed with it really, I am sorry to say.”

  “Why are you sorry to say?” I asked slowly.

  He didn’t answer me directly, he just kept going with the story. “It was my first official — if you can call it that — case. I became convinced, despite all my better judgement, despite my years of learning and teaching in the science department, that these people were telling the truth. I tried to track the parents down. I found the father, but...” he trailed off.

  “But what about the little girl?” I asked, impatiently. “Is she okay? Is she still in the hospital?”

  Martin shook his head. “No.” He then shook it even more vigorously. “No, no. This was not a recent case. It happened decades ago. 22 years ago, actually.”

  I froze, my heart in my throat. “Martin,” I said, slowly, forcefully. “What was her name?”

  “Anna Black.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight.

  I felt as though I might vomit.

  I recoiled away from him, not quite trusting myself to stand up from the bed, but not wanting our bodies to be in contact any longer. The first thing that came to my mind, my first overwhelming question, was how the hell he found the information in the first place, though why that was the most salient point in my head I wasn’t sure. “So you’re, like, obsessed, with me?” I asked in horror.

  “What?” He looked at me with confusion.

  “Why was I the first case you came across?” I had magically found the strength to stand, and I managed to back several feet away from the bed, as I was now entirely untrusting of the man who was sitting on it.

  He sighed, and looked down. “That was the part I meant I was sorry for.” He looked uncomfortable and reluctant to continue on. He scratched the back of his head. “It was a really weird time for me Anna. I mean, my fiancé had just passed away...”

  “So you decided to stalk your students?” I was aghast.

  “I wasn’t...” he began, and then thought about it. “Well, I suppose I sort of was. Are you telling me you’ve never stalked any of your students?”

  I thought back to many a bored evening marking assignments where I would look up whichever student’s essay I was currently marking to see if they were on Facebook and Twitter. I may or may not have spent over an hour going through Naomi Stone’s Facebook photos. I wasn’t proud of it, but it was just something I had done while procrastinating. Plus, I wanted to know my students a little better, so I could figure out who was actually worth my time and who was rubbish. But, I mean, that was different to what Martin had done. Wasn’t it?

  I shrugged, not wanting to admit that I had also engaged in a bit of student-stalking in my time.

  “I didn’t mean to,” Martin continued, hurrying to explain himself. “You’d just been in my office offering your condolences, and up until that point I didn’t really know who you were.”

  “Thanks,” I said, raising my eyebrows. I was slightly embarrassed that I’d gone out of my way on that day in question to go and offer Martin Anderson my condolences, and he hadn’t even known who I was.

  “Well, there were hundreds of people in your first year course, Anna. I recognised you, but I didn’t know your name until you introduced yourself.”

  “So you just typed it into Google as soon as I left and had a good look.”

  “Something like that.” He paused. “Do you remember the conversation we had that day? All of it I mean?”

  I thought back to how I had knocked uneasily on his office door that day, unsure of exactly what to say but feeling as though I ought to say something. I had just been planning on entering his office under the guise of needing assistance on an assignment and then dropping a casual, “I’m so sorry about your dead fiancé” into the end of the conversation. But once he had invited me to come in and I was just standing there in the middle of his office floor with him staring at me from his desk where he was marking papers, I had just blurt
ed out, “I’m really really sorry. Honestly. It is the worst thing.” I thought it was simple, and succinct, and true. But at the same time it was a slightly uncomfortable moment, as to be honest I barely knew the man and he clearly hadn’t known me at all.

  On that day he had just stared at me for an uncomfortable minute, and I’d been scared I might actually cry. The emotion of it all had gotten the better of me.

  Eventually he’d just nodded and said, “Thank you.”

  I had then stood there for a moment, shifting my weight from foot to foot, wondering what else I could say. Should I just turn and leave? I could no longer even remember what the made-up ‘problem with my assignment’, that I had been going to pretend I was having, even was. So, all of a sudden, just to break the silence I had blurted out: “I think there should be a unit in the physics department that is solely dedicated to time travel.”

  Martin had just looked up from the paper he’d been marking and given me the strangest look.

  “Erm,” he’d begun, taking his reading glasses off and placing them on his desk. “I don’t think there would be enough demand for that. The university would never agree to the funding.”

  “Oh.” I had taken a seat on his couch without being invited. “That’s a shame: it’s my main area of interest.” At that stage I was still a very naive undergrad student, with only a year of uni under my belt. I was brash enough to think that I could just walk into my lecturer’s office and offer course advice. “And I think a lot of other students would really love it.”

  Martin had studied me for a moment with a serious expression. “And why are you so interested in time travel?”

  I had probably shrugged and offered some kind of reason, but I couldn’t recall what I had said after that point. I just remember I had rambled on and on about how I thought the science department could be rearranged to accommodate this whole new major area of study I had thought up. I’d assumed Martin was humouring me at the time, probably, or that he felt rude about kicking me out of his office considering I’d come in to offer him my sympathies.

  ***

  Back in the hotel, I brought myself back to the present moment. “Yeah,” I admitted. “I remember that I suggested that the university should run a new subject dedicated entirely to time travel...” I was a bit embarrassed over the memory.

  “I was in such a strange place at the time,” Martin continued, “that your suggestion actually started to seem to me like it was a good idea. Even though, up till that point, all throughout my academic career I’d held the position that time travel was impossible. You know my own PhD was supposed to prove that time travel was impossible.” He let out a long heavy sigh.

  “Yes I do know that!” I exclaimed. “I figured that’s why you always shut my ideas down.” But now, all of a sudden, that didn’t seem to me to be such a certain fact.

  Nothing seemed certain anymore. I took a deep breathe and forced myself to think about the other information that Martin had told me, the information that made me really uncomfortable. That girl, that three year old girl, hooked up to a life support machine...unable to breathe. All alone in a hospital bed. Hot tears began falling from my eyes, skipping down over my nose and dropping on the floor with unbelievable ease. Because I knew now that I remembered it, and I knew it was true.

  “How could he?...” I managed to say, in between my tears. I shook my head and almost broke down into full blown sobs. Martin stood up off the bed and came over, hugging me. I returned the embrace for a few seconds, but then I pushed him away. It wasn’t just my father who had lied to me.

  “So this is how you knew him...” I muttered, looking at the floor.

  “I was just trying to find out...I was trying...”

  “I know, I know,” I said quietly. I completed the sentence for him so he could stop sounding like a broken record: “to protect me.” I shook my head, still staring at the floor. “But why? Honestly, why did you care so much?”

  “I didn’t at first,” Martin replied, backing away from me as well, returning to the window where the sun was starting to dip lower in the sky, creating a dazzling view down below over the harbour. Rays of sun were blaring in through the window and I wanted to pull the blind down. I found them to be obnoxiously annoying in that moment. I was homesick for the dark winter skies I had experienced only the week before.

  He leant up against the window and stared out. “There was something about the way you talked about it. Time travel that is. After you left my office I started to search through old science journals, partly because I was miserable and had nothing better to occupy myself with, and partly because you’d put the idea so strongly in my head. You’d spoken about the subject so passionately.”

  He stopped. “And I don’t believe in coincidences.”

  I didn’t either.

  “When I came across your name, Anna Black, in that article about the family with the baby, my heart almost stopped. I couldn’t believe it: the coincidence I mean. I actually shut the screen down. I was frightened, almost.” His tone had gotten lower and graver. “I almost thought I was actually going crazy. I had barely slept in months by that stage...” he trailed off and looked down. I felt guilty that I was forcing him to dwell on the topic of his dead fiancé for so long.

  “I didn’t go back to it for days, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I couldn’t even look at you in the lecture theatre.” He turned and glanced at me. “You probably didn’t even notice.”

  I hadn’t, no. Like he said it was such a crowded lecture theatre. The only thing I had noticed about him at the time was that he had grown more and more serious, and that his lectures and classes had grown drier and drier, and class numbers had dropped off.

  “Anyway, I did at some point start becoming a little... I guess you could say obsessed with it,” he said slowly, looking back out the window. “Only because it was so strange.”

  “At first I couldn’t even be sure it was you, of course. It could have been another Anna Black. The dates all added up though. And do you remember one time you stopped to ask me a question after class and I asked you where had grown up?”

  “Not really,” I replied, searching my brain for the memory. “Vaguely, maybe.”

  “You said Nelson Bay. That’s when I knew for sure. So I started investigating: not just you, but other cases as well. I didn’t really believe any of it at first: I thought I had just stumbled on this weird phenomenon of time travel hoaxes, which I thought was interesting enough in itself. I thought I might even write a paper on it at one stage.”

  “You did,” I pointed out.

  “Under my real name, I mean,” he said, raising his brow.

  “But then what happened?”

  “I went to Nelson Bay.”

  “To see my dad?” I was freaked out that this whole thing happening behind my back, the two of them - Martin and my father — colluding somehow. Hiding this information from me all of these years, while I remained blissfully unaware, sitting in class like a good little student, dutifully applying myself to my studies and my stupid little obsession with time travel.

  Martin nodded. “When I got there he said he had been expecting me. Which I didn’t understand.”

  “Well, he’s an underworld criminal, isn’t ” I replied. “He knows everything.”

  “Yeah, well, if I had realised that at the time, I never would have gotten involved in any of it.”

  “So you were at my house?” I asked, still in shock. “Five years ago?”

  “Roughly, yeah. I didn’t see much of it though.” He raised an eyebrow again, thinking back to it. “It was about as short a trip as our most recent one.”

  “Did he send you through time?” I asked, my voice hushed. I quickly thought back to five years ago, searching my memory for any time that Martin had been mysteriously absent from classes. But nope: in all the years I had had him for a teacher, he had never missed a lecture, or a tutorial, or even a single meeting.

  Martin confirmed thi
s. “No, he didn’t send me through time, on that occasion. He gave me a list though. A list of names of people who had claimed they’d travelled through time. He said, since I had done such a good job of tracking him down, that I shouldn’t have any trouble working on these other cases.”

  I started walking slowly towards him, confused. “Why on Earth did he want you to do that?”

  “I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase, ‘there’s more than one way to skin a cat’. Well, there’s more than one way to time travel. Well, actually, there’s one basic principle behind it, but numerous methods. Your father wanted to be in control of them all. I was supposed to — on his orders — track all of these people down and determine whether or not they were telling the truth, first of all. And then I was supposed to investigate the way they had travelled through time, the method or equipment they had used, and then pass that information back to him.”

  “He thinks time travel is the ultimate money making machine…” I muttered. “He’d be able to make a fortune off it if he controlled it.”

  Martin turned away from the window and leant his back against the frame to look at me. Blinding light was coming in behind him so he just looked like a silhouette. I couldn’t make out his face. “Besides the original machine he’d used to travel though time — with you — originally, he couldn’t get any of his own experiments to work.” He stopped and took a breath before continuing on slowly. “Everyone he tried to send through time...died.”

  He stood up and walked toward the sink to run himself a glass of water, which he gulped down. “I thought that was, you know, the problem. I thought he wanted to solve the issues he was coming up against, so that he could succeed in sending people through time without them dying.”

  “As if he cared about people dying,” I murmured.

  “Exactly,” Martin said, bitterly. “So I thought I was doing a good thing, maybe, tracking down these time travellers who had survived, so I could learn something from them. It was fun, too, doing this secret work. It took my mind off things at least.” He took a swig of water. “But then I realised that he was using time travel as the means to an end: as a murder weapon. It was the best, easiest, cleanest way to dispose of someone. It conveniently disposes of the evidence like no other form of murder.”