Transcendent

by K. M. Szpara

  You leaned forward, bracing your hands on the edge of the sink, looking for all the world as if you couldn’t hold yourself up, as if gravity was working just a little bit harder on you than it was for everyone else. I wondered for a second if you were going to tell him about Dara. I’d grown up keeping her a secret with you, though the omission had begun to weigh heavier on me. I loved Dad, and I loved Dara; being unable to reconcile the two of them seemed trickier each passing week.

  Instead you said nothing. You relaxed your shoulders, and you smiled for him, and kissed his cheek. You said the two of us would be fine, not to worry about his girls.

  And the very next day, you pulled me out of bed and showed me our family’s time machine, in the old tornado shelter with the lock I’d never been able to pick.

  I know more about the machine now, after talking with Uncle Dante, reading the records that he kept. The mysterious man, Moses Stone, that built it in 1905, when Grandma Emmeline’s parents leased out a parcel of land. He called it the anachronopede, which probably sounded marvelous in 1905, but even Uncle Dante was rolling his eyes at the name twenty years later. I know that Stone took Emmeline on trips to the future when she was seventeen, and then abandoned her after a few years, and nobody’s been able to find him since then. I know that the machine is keyed to something in Emmeline’s matrilineal DNA, some recessive gene.

  I wonder if that man, Stone, built the anachronopede as an experiment. An experiment needs parameters, right? So build a machine that only certain people in one family can use. We can’t go back before 1905, when the machine was completed, and we can’t go past August 3, 2321. What happens that day? The only way to find out is to go as far forward as possible, and then wait. Maroon yourself in time. Exile yourself as far forward as you can, where none of us can reach you.

  I’m sure you were lonely, waiting for me to grow up so you could travel again. You were exiled when you married Dad in 1947, in that feverish period just after the war. It must have been so romantic at first: I’ve seen the letters he wrote during the years he courted you. And you’d grown up seeing his name written next to yours, and the date that you’d marry him. When did you start feeling trapped, I wonder? You were caught in a weird net of fate and love and the future and the past. You loved Dad, but your love kept you hostage. You loved me, but you knew that someday, I’d transform myself into someone you didn’t recognize.

  At first, when you took me underground, to see the anachronopede, I thought you and Dad had built a fallout shelter. But there were no beds or boxes of canned food. And built into the rocky wall were rows of doors that looked like the one on our icebox. Round light bulbs lay just above the doors, nearly all of them red, though one or two were slowly blinking between orange and yellow.

  Nearly all the doors were shut, except for two, near the end, which hung ajar.

  “Those two capsules are for us, you and me,” you said. “Nobody else can use them.”

  I stared at them. “What are they for?”

  I’d heard you and Dara speak in code for nearly all of my life, jumps and capsules and fastenings. I’d imagined all sorts of things. Aliens and spaceships and doorways to another dimension, all the sort of things I’d seen Truman Bradley introduce on Science Fiction Theater.

  “Traveling,” you said.

  “In time or in space?”

  You seemed surprised. I’m not sure why. Dad collected pulp magazines, and you’d given me books by H.G. Wells and Jules Verne for Christmas in years past. The Justice League had gone into the future. I’d seen The Fly last year during a half-price matinee. You know how it was back then: such things weren’t considered impossible, so much as inevitable. The future was a country we all wanted so badly to visit.

  “In time,” you said.

  I immediately started peppering you with questions: how far into the future had you gone? When were you born? Had you seen dinosaurs? Had you met King Arthur? What about jet packs? Was Dara from the future?

  You held a hand to your mouth, watching as I danced around the small cavern, firing off questions like bullets being sprayed from a tommy gun.

  “Maybe you are too young,” you said, staring at the two empty capsules in the wall.

  “I’m not!” I insisted. “Can’t we go somewhere? Just a—just a quick jump?”

  I added in the last part because I wanted you to know I’d been listening, when you and Dara had talked in code at the kitchen table. I’d been waiting for you include me in the conversation.

  “Tomorrow,” you decided. “We’ll leave tomorrow.”

  The first thing I learned about time travel was that you couldn’t eat anything before you did it. And you could only take a few sips of water: no juice or milk. The second thing I learned was that it was the most painful thing in the world, at least for me.

  “Your grandmother Emmeline called it the fastening,” you told me. “She said it felt like being a button squeezed through a too-narrow slit in a piece of fabric. It affects everyone differently.”

  “How’s it affect you?”

  You twisted your wedding ring around on your finger. “I haven’t done it since before you were born.”

  You made me go to the bathroom twice before we walked back on that path, taking the fork that led to the shelter where the capsules were. The grass was still wet with dew, and there was a chill in the air. Up above, thin, wispy clouds were scratched onto the sky, but out west, I could see dark clouds gathering. There’d be storms later.

  But what did I care about later? I was going into a time machine.

  I asked you, “Where are we going?”

  You replied, “To visit Dara. Just a quick trip.”

  There was something cold in your voice. I recognized the tone: the same you used when trying to talk me into wearing the new dress you’d bought me for church, or telling me to stop tearing through the house and play quietly for once.

  In the shelter, you helped me undress, though it made me feel hotly embarrassed and strange to be naked in front of you again. I’d grown wary of my own body in the last few months, the way it was changing: I’d been dismayed by the way my nipples had grown tender, at the fatty flesh that had budded beneath them. It seemed like a betrayal.

  I hunched my shoulders and covered my privates, though you barely glanced at my naked skin. You helped me lie down in the capsule, showed me how to pull the round mask over the bottom half of my face, attach the clip that went over my index finger. Finally, you lifted one of my arms up and wrapped a black cuff around the crook of my elbow. I noticed, watching you, that you had bitten all of your nails down to the quick, that the edges were jagged and tender-looking.

  “You program your destination date in here, you see?” You tapped a square of black glass that lay on the ceiling of the capsule, and it lit up at the touch. Your fingers flew across the screen, typing directly onto it, rearranging colored orbs that seemed to attach themselves to your finger as soon as you touched them.

  “You’ll learn how to do this on your own eventually,” you said. The screen, accepting whatever you’d done to it, blinked out and went black again.

  I breathed through my mask, which covered my nose and face. A whisper of air blew against my skin, a rubbery, stale, lemony scent.

  “Don’t be scared,” you said. “I’ll be there when you wake up. I’m sending myself back a little earlier, so I’ll be there to help you out of the capsule.”

  You kissed me on the forehead and shut the door. I was left alone in the dark as the walls around me started to hum.

  Calling it “the fastening” does it a disservice. It’s much more painful than that. Granny Emmeline is far tougher than I’ll ever be, if she thought it was just like forcing a button into place.

  For me, it felt like being crushed in a vice that was lined with broken glass and nails. I understood, afterwards, why you had forbidden me from eating or drinking for twenty-four hours. I would have vomited in the mask, shat myself inside the capsule. I came back to
myself in the dark, wild with terror and the phantom remains of that awful pain.

  The door opened. The light needled into my eyes, and I screamed, trying to cover them. The various cuffs and wires attached to my arms tugged my hands back down, which made me panic even more.

  Hands reached in and pushed me down, and eventually, I registered your voice in my ear, though not what you were saying. I stopped flailing long enough for all the straps and cuffs to be undone, and then I was lifted out of the capsule. You held me in your arms, rocking and soothing me, rubbing my back as I cried hysterically onto your shoulder.

  I was insensible for a few minutes. When my sobs died away to hiccups, I realized that we weren’t alone in the shelter. Dara was with us as well, and she had thrown a blanket over my shoulders.

  “Jesus, Miriam,” she said, over and over. “What the hell were you thinking?”

  I found out later that I was the youngest person in my family to ever make a jump. Traditionally, they made their first jumps on their seventeenth birthday. I was nearly five years shy of that.

  You smoothed back a lock of my hair, and I saw that all your fingernails had lost their ragged edge. Instead, they were rounded and smooth, topped with little crescents of white.

  Uncle Dante told me that it wasn’t unusual for two members of the family to be lovers, especially if there were generational gaps between them. It helped to avoid romantic entanglements with people who were bound to linear lives, at least until they were ready to settle down for a number of years, raising children. Pregnancy didn’t mix well with time travel. It was odder to do what you had done: settle down with someone who was, as Dara liked to put it, stuck in the slow lane of linear time.

  Dara told me about the two of you, eventually; that you’d been lovers before you met Dad, before you settled down with him in 1947. And that when she started visiting us in 1955, she wasn’t sleeping alone in the guest bedroom.

  I’m not sure if I was madder at her or you at the time, though I’ve since forgiven her. Why wouldn’t I? You’ve left both of us, and it’s a big thing, to have that in common.

  1981 is colored silver, beige, bright orange, deep brown. It feels like the afghan blanket Dara kept on my bed while I recovered from my first jump, some kind of cheap fake wool. It tastes like chicken soup and weak tea with honey and lime Jell-O.

  And for a few days, at least, 1981 felt like a low-grade headache that never went away, muscle spasms that I couldn’t always control, dry mouth, difficulty swallowing. It smelt like a lingering olfactory hallucination of frying onions. It sounded like a ringing in the ears.

  “So you’re the unnamed baby, huh?” Dara said, that first morning when I woke up. She was reading a book, and set it down next to her on the couch.

  I was disoriented: you and Dara had placed me in the southeast bedroom, the same one I slept in all through childhood. (The same one I’m recovering in right now.) I’m not sure if you thought it would comfort me, to wake up to familiar surroundings. It was profoundly strange, to be in my own bedroom, but have it be so different: the striped wallpaper replaced with avocado-green paint; a love seat with floral upholstering where my dresser had been; all my posters of Buck Rogers and Superman replaced with framed paintings of unfamiliar artwork.

  “Dara?” I said. She seemed different, colder. Her hair was shorter than the last time I’d seen her, and she wore a pair of thick-framed glasses.

  She cocked her head. “That’d be me. Nice to meet you.”

  I blinked at her, still disoriented and foggy. “We met before,” I said.

  She raised her eyebrows, like she couldn’t believe I was so dumb. “Not by my timeline.”

  Right. Time travel.

  You rushed in then. You must have heard us talking. You crouched down next to me and stroked the hair back from my face.

  “How are you feeling?” you asked.

  I looked down at your fingernails, and saw again that they were smooth, no jagged edges, and a hint of white at the edges. Dara told me later that you’d arrived two days before me, just so you two could have some time to be together. After all, you’d only left her for 1947 a few days before. The two of you had a lot to talk about.

  “All right, I guess,” I told you.

  It felt like the worst family vacation for those first few days. Dara was distant with me and downright cold to you. I wanted to ask what had happened, but I thought that I’d get the cold shoulder if I did. I caught snippets of the arguments you had with Dara; always whispered in doorways, or downstairs in the kitchen, the words too faint for me to make out.

  It got a little better once I was back on my feet, and able to walk around and explore. I was astonished by everything; the walnut trees on our property that I had known as saplings now towered over me. Dara’s television was twice the size of ours, in color, and had over a dozen stations. Dara’s car seemed tiny, and shaped like a snake’s head, instead of the generous curves and lines of the cars I knew.

  I think it charmed Dara out of her anger a bit, to see me so appreciative of all these futuristic wonders—which were all relics of the past for her—and the conversations between the three of us got a little bit easier. Dara told me a little bit more about where she’d come from—the late twenty-first century—and why she was in this time—studying with some poet that I’d never heard of. She showed me the woman’s poetry, and though I couldn’t make much of it out at the time, one line from one poem has always stuck with me. “I did not recognize the shape of my own name.”

  I pondered that, lying awake in my bedroom—the once and future bedroom that I’m writing this from now, that I slept in then, that I awoke in when I was a young child, frightened by a storm. The rest of that poem made little sense to me, a series of images that were threaded together by a string of line breaks.

  But I know about names, and hearing the one that’s been given to you, and not recognizing it. I was trying to stammer this out to Dara one night, after she’d read that poem to me. And she asked, plain as could be, “What would you rather be called instead?”

  I thought about how I used to introduce myself after the heroes of the TV shows my father and I watched: Doc and George and Charlie. It had been a silly game, sure, but there’d been something more serious underneath it. I’d recognized something in the shape of those names, something I wanted for myself.

  “I dunno. A boy’s name,” I said. “Like George in the Famous Five.”

  “Well, why do you want to be called by a boy’s name?” Dara asked gently.

  In the corner, where you’d been playing solitaire, you paused while laying down a card. Dara noticed too, and we both looked over at you. I cringed, wondering what you were about to say; you hated that I didn’t like my name, took it as a personal insult somehow.

  But you said nothing, just resumed playing, slapping the cards down a little more heavily than before.

  I forgive you for drugging me to take me back to 1963. I know I screamed at you after we arrived and the drugs wore off, but I was also a little relieved. It was a sneaking sort of relief, and didn’t do much to counterbalance the feelings of betrayal and rage, but I know I would have panicked the second you shoved me into one of those capsules.

  You’d taken me to the future, after all. I’d seen the relative wonders of 1981: VHS tapes, the Flash Gordon movie, the Columbia Space Shuttle. I would have forgiven you so much for that tiny glimpse.

  I don’t forgive you for leaving me, though. I don’t forgive you for the morning after, when I woke up in my old familiar bedroom and padded downstairs for a bowl of cereal, and found, instead, a note that bore two words in your handwriting: I’m sorry.

  The note rested atop the gilt-edged book that Grandma Emmeline had started as a diary, and that Uncle Dante had turned into both a record and a set of instructions for future generations: the names, birth dates, and the locations for all the traveling members of our family; who lived in the house and when; and sometimes, how and when a person died. The book
stays with the house; you must have kept it hidden in the attic.

  I flipped through it until I found your name: Miriam Guthrie (née Stone): born November 21, 1977, Harrisburg, IL. Next to it, you penciled in the following.

  Jumped forward to June 22, 2321 CE, and will die in exile beyond reach of the anachronopede.

  Two small words could never encompass everything you have to apologize for.

  I wonder if you ever looked up Dad’s obituary. I wonder if you were even able to, if the record for one small man’s death even lasts that long.

  When you left, you took my father’s future with you. Did you realize that? He was stuck in the slow lane of linear time, and to Dad, the future he’d dreamed of must have receded into the distance, something he’d never be able to reach.

  He lost his job in the fall of 1966, as the White County oil wells ran dry, and hanged himself in the garage six months later. Dara cut him down and called the ambulance; her visits became more regular after you left us, and she must have known the day he would die.

  (I can’t bring myself to ask her: couldn’t she have arrived twenty minutes earlier and stopped him entirely? I don’t want to know her answer.)

  In that obituary, I’m first in the list of those who survived him, and it’s the last time I used the name you gave me. During the funeral, I nodded, received the hugs and handshakes from Dad’s cousins and friends, bowed my head when the priest instructed, prayed hard for his soul. When it was done, I walked alone to the pond where the two of us had sat together, watching birds and talking about the plots of silly television shows. I tried to remember everything that I could about him, trying to preserve his ghost against the vagaries of time: the smell of Kamel cigarettes and diesel on his clothes; the red-blond stubble that dotted his jaw; the way his eyes brightened when they landed on you.