Einstein's Secret

by Irving Belateche

  The back row of cars was proving to be a bust, so I sauntered down toward the front, checking each row as I passed. Some patrons had set up lawn chairs in front of their cars, leaving their cars empty. But even if they had left their keys in the ignition, they were parked too far into their rows to allow for a quick getaway. Just as I wasn’t a car thief, I wasn’t a stunt driver. I needed a clear path out.

  I was about halfway down the lot when I heard car doors slamming behind me and quickly turned back to check it out.

  A car had just parked at the end of a row that I’d passed. Two kids, around six and ten, were hurrying to the front of the car. Their mom joined them, while their dad headed to the back of the car. He opened the trunk, and a few seconds later, slammed it shut. He came around the car, carrying lawn chairs, then unfolded them and headed toward the concession stand. The kids and their mom sat down and starting watching Donald Duck.

  I was already moving back toward their car, plotting my getaway. The route from their parking spot to the exit looked fairly clean. And there were no cars directly behind their car, which gave me plenty of room to back their car out, swing it around into the lane, and race to the back. Near the concession stand, I’d have to hang a left.

  My hope was that I’d be closing in on the exit before a major uproar about the stolen car had started. Even if the family and nearby patrons were already yelling about the thief, the commotion would take a minute to make its way to the back.

  I was about ten yards away from the car when I saw him. Richie. He was walking in my direction, but I couldn’t tell if he recognized me.

  I thought I could make it to the car before he got there, so I didn’t change my course. Not with the family engaged with Donald Duck and the car sitting empty right there at the end of the row. This was too good an opportunity to pass up.

  Richie and I moved closer to each other, and my eyes fell to his shiny plastic nametag, Richie Morgan, as if I had to verify, again, that he was my dad.

  I avoided making eye contact with him. Instead, I glanced at the kids and their mom in their lawn chairs as I walked by them. The kids didn’t as much as breathe in my direction, they were so riveted to Donald Duck, but the mom smiled at me. I returned the smile, moved on to the car, and glanced down into the driver’s side window—

  The keys were dangling from the ignition.

  My heart started to pound.

  There was no excuse now, except for Richie. I glanced at him before reaching down for the car door handle—and he was staring right at me.

  “Hey, mister. What happened to the article?”

  “It’s not ready yet. I’m sorry.” That was abrupt, but I knew that if I wavered in the least, I wouldn’t go through with this.

  I opened the car door, slid inside, and shut the door as gently as possible so as not to attract the mom’s attention. I reached for the ignition, and hesitated—exactly what I didn’t want to do.

  My wildly beating heart moved into my throat. It was now or never. Time to ignore my fear and use my adrenaline rush, which was flooding my body and telling me to run, to turn the key.

  I did, and the car roared to life with so much muscle that it startled me. This powerful behemoth was a far different breed than the fuel-efficient, compact car of the future.

  The mom and kids looked back toward the car.

  I jammed the gearshift from park to reverse, looked back over my shoulder, and backed the behemoth up.

  Then I jammed the gearshift forward, and lurched headlong, tires squealing, into an arc that put me into the lane heading toward the concession stand.

  A couple of people with popcorn and sodas in hand were walking toward me, and I was ready to swerve around them, when they kindly obliged and scooted out of my way.

  As I bore down toward the concession stand, I could see the faces of the patrons in line, including the dad’s face, in shock. Everyone scattered, realizing they were in the path of a crazed car thief.

  Except for the dad. He stood his ground.

  Was he going to try and stop me?

  I was gaining speed, so the dad had about ten seconds to decide whether to make a heroic stand or get out of the way. I had the same amount of time to decide whether to start my left turn early to avoid to him, a turn that would be so sharp from here that I’d surely wipe out.

  It was a classic game of chicken—and the dad caved in.

  He jumped out of the way, and I made my left turn a few seconds later, but it was still too sharp and the car wiped out, skidding to a stop right in front of the concession stand.

  I pressed on the gas and the car jerked forward and was back up to warp speed in no time, hurtling toward the gate.

  But it wasn’t really in no time. Unfortunately, it was just enough time for Richie to come running out from the interior of the back row, waving his hands and yelling for me to stop.

  What happened next, happened in a flash. There was no time to slow down or swerve or avoid the inevitable.

  I saw the front of my behemoth of a car slam into my own dad, the kid with the bluest eyes ever, who loved films more than anything, and heard a sickening, bone-crushing, thud. He disappeared from sight almost as quickly as he’d appeared.

  The car continued to hurtle forward, and while my mind went into hyper-drive, my body went into autopilot and continued to execute my disastrous plan.

  It was too late to stop. The damage was done.

  Nausea filled my gut and my limbs were trembling.

  I’d killed my father. That was for sure. No way had he survived that blow.

  The car plowed forward toward the exit, and in its wake, I heard the screams of horrified people.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I gripped the steering wheel hard, as if it were the only thing keeping my thoughts from spinning out of control. My entire body was pulsing with queasiness and dread. My nightmare had reached the proportions of Greek tragedy.

  Time travel was messy, but how could I have killed my own father? If this were a science-fiction tale, I would’ve disappeared right about now. Without a father, I couldn’t have been born. But this wasn’t a science-fiction tale. It was fact. Time travel wasn’t like it was portrayed in the movies.

  As a wave of nausea swept through me, my car roared down the road toward Cumberland. I considered stopping to puke, but if I stopped, it would turn into a permanent stop. The magnitude of what I’d just done would paralyze me.

  I had to keep going because I had to fix this. More than ever.

  Einstein’s confession is the key.

  I clung to that. Otherwise, there would be no salvation.

  I thought about Dorothy’s Theorem. Belief had worked. It had transported me to the right time. But doubt still crept into my thoughts. Sure, I had evidence that belief dictated the workings of wormholes. But that wasn’t evidence that Einstein’s confession could bring my dad back to life.

  That seemed more like faith.

  I muted the doubt and tried to concentrate on the task at hand. Regardless of my belief, regardless of faith or not, I had no other option but to move forward.

  The road in front of me was dark and lined with thick woods. In the distance were headlights, but it was too soon for the police to be headed this way, and there were no flashing red lights up ahead.

  How fast did law enforcement respond to a crime in the fifties? Probably way slower than law enforcement in the future. Still, when it came to the heinous crime of running over a child, it wouldn’t be moving at a snail’s pace.

  The speedometer said I was doing fifty, so I pushed the car to sixty, and pulled the directions out of my pocket. The first turn would come up when I hit Cumberland proper. Take a right onto Mechanic Street, which led to 68 East, which led to 220 North. Then came a thirty-mile stretch of flat-out driving.

  Within minutes, the lights of Cumberland shone through the thinning woods. Over the next few miles, I debated whether to abandon this car or not. How long would it take before the police st
arted to hunt it down?

  Luck favored me in one way. When I hit 220 North, I’d be in Pennsylvania, which meant there’d be some jurisdictional issues between the local and state police of Maryland and those of Pennsylvania, not to mention good old communication problems.

  I hit the lights of Cumberland, and it was then that a new concern crossed my mind. Was there evidence of my monstrous act festooned on the grille of the car? I was cruising through a quiet residential neighborhood, with no traffic, so I weighed whether to pull over and check. It was a Sunday night and my guess was that everyone was either inside the picturesque homes lining the street, sitting in front of their boxy TV sets, or they were at the drive-in.

  A car turned onto the street and headed my way. As it passed, the driver, a middle-aged man with glasses, looked over, tipped his hat, and smiled. I smiled back, and was reminded that luck favored me in another way, too. The fifties were a less-suspicious time.

  I decided not to pull over and check the car. That would be the more suspicious move. Instead, I kept my eyes peeled for Mechanic Street. The half a dozen other drivers that I passed all looked at me and nodded. I nodded back to all of them.

  I turned left onto Mechanic Street, drove through another residential neighborhood, and stuck with my decision. There’d be no pulling over to check the grille, or to switch cars.

  Within three minutes, I’d merged onto Route 68, and a few miles later, I was gliding down the open road of Route 220, crossing the border into Pennsylvania. There were a couple of cars behind me and none in front of me. It was obvious that in this decade, people didn’t rush around at all hours.

  As for me, I was barreling through the night at sixty-five miles an hour, the posted speed limit. I could’ve gone faster, but I didn’t want to hand myself over to the police.

  It wasn’t long before the steady, full hum of the engine and the stillness of the night led me back to the image of Richie’s face. How it had suddenly appeared right there in front of me, terrified, followed by a hard, sickening thud, before it disappeared in a rapid jerk beneath the long hood of the car.

  His parents probably knew by now. They were devastated. I’d killed their boy. They would live the rest of their lives with a hole in their hearts, forever grieving. I wished I’d been erased from existence, like would’ve happened in the science-fiction version of time travel.

  I glanced down at the gas gauge and forced myself to make some practical calculations. The tank was three-quarters full. Estimating the size of the gas tank, the poor gas mileage of the fifties, and the number of miles I had to go, I’d have to fill the gas tank once to cover the round trip to Princeton.

  If I topped it off now, I’d have to get gas another time, too, on the way back from Princeton, in the wee hours of the morning, should I be so lucky as to have accomplished my mission.

  Gas would wait. I’d roll the dice and run down this tank, aiming to stop only once for gas.

  I sped up, exited Route 220, and followed my directions for getting onto Route 76, the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Once there, I began the two-hundred-and-twenty-mile sprint that would take me to within thirty minutes of Princeton.

  There were very few cars on the turnpike, so I upped my speed again. The sooner I arrived by Einstein’s bedside, the better chance I had of getting to that confession before Einstein handed it over to Clavin.

  As the miles started to pass, the turnpike lulled me into a comatose state, which was a good thing. I didn’t want to see my dad’s blue eyes and I didn’t want to hear that sickening thud. There were long stretches of total darkness. Gloomy, undeveloped hinterlands, interrupted only by lit interchanges and a few pairs of headlights.

  As I closed in on Princeton, I saw a sign for an upcoming service plaza and snapped out of my daze. This was an opportunity to gas up now, instead of waiting for the return trip. If the gas station was still open.

  A few miles later, I pulled into that plaza. It boasted a Howard Johnson’s restaurant and an Esso gas station, both open. The parking lot had three cars in it.

  I drove toward the gas pumps, but when the gas pump attendant stepped out of the cashier’s booth, I instantly changed course and swung the car around into the restaurant parking lot. I’d forgotten that this was an era when gas attendants pumped your gas, cleaned your windshields, and checked your tires.

  The bottom line was that I needed to check my front grille for signs of my crime before allowing anyone near my car. I pulled into a space far from the three cars in the lot and out of view of the large bay window that fronted the restaurant.

  Before stepping out, that feeling of dread came over me again. Would I find blood and flesh on the front grille? Well, it didn’t matter, did it? I had to get the job done regardless. I turned to the back seat in search of something to wipe the front of the car with. There was something there all right, but using it seemed callous and creepy.

  On the back seat was a small, pink, button-up sweater. It must’ve belonged to the young girl I’d last seen riveted to Donald Duck. Her life would now always be tied to the death of that child at the drive-in. Her family car was the weapon that’d killed him.

  I checked the glove compartment, hoping there’d be a handkerchief or a stack of paper napkins tucked inside. There wasn’t.

  I grabbed the pink sweater and stepped out into the chilly night. As I moved around to the front of the car, I scanned the side of it to make it look like I was one of those obsessive car owners constantly checking for dings. This was my feeble attempt to cover up my true purpose in case the gas attendant or a restaurant patron was watching.

  Not really wanting to face the grille, but also knowing I couldn’t delay the inevitable, I looked down at the front of the car. My eyes ticked over the grille from right to left and stopped on some small, bloodied scraps of clothes, lodged between the metal slats.

  I lunged at them with the pink sweater, and as I did, I noticed there was something stuck to the inside edge of the oversized bumper.

  A chunk of tattered flesh.

  Turning away from the horrid sight, I knelt down and freed the scraps of bloodied clothes from the grille, using the sweater. Some stuck to the sweater and some fell to the ground.

  When the slats were free of evidence of the crime, I forced myself to look back at the globule of flesh, then scraped it off the bumper, keeping it all wrapped in the sweater.

  Then I reached down and collected the pieces of clothes that had fallen to the ground. Just as I was finishing up, I noticed something stuck farther back into the slats of the grille.

  I reached in with my free hand and wedged it out. It was my father’s plastic nametag.

  Richie Morgan.

  My mind went numb for a second, no thoughts. Just a flood of darkness, like the thick gloom I’d been driving through all night.

  I stuck the nametag in my pocket.

  Then, from my kneeling position, I checked the grille, the bumper, and the ground, making sure all the grisly evidence was gone.

  It was.

  The only evidence that remained was the grille itself. It was ever-so-slightly curved inward at the point of impact. But the bumper was unscathed. Cars of the fifties were tanks.

  I stood up and scanned the parking lot for a trashcan, then thought better of it. It’d be smarter to put the sweater in the car, drive back into the hinterlands of the turnpike, pull over, and bury it in the woods. I walked around the other side of the car, scanning every inch as if I were still on the lookout for dings, made my way around the trunk, stopping to buff a spot with my shirt sleeve, then ducked back into the car and stashed the sweater under the passenger seat.

  Rather than drive off as if I had something to hide, I went straight for the Esso station. At this point, I thought it’d be less suspicious to get the gas and be done with it. The attendant probably wasn’t thinking that this guy is a child murderer. At worst, he was thinking that this guy is an odd duck.

  As soon as I pulled up to the pump, the attendant wa
s at my window, offering to fill ’er up and check the oil. I said yes to the gas and no thanks to the oil check. He went to work, gassing up the car and cleaning my windshield and windows.

  I paid him with Eddie’s cash and told him to keep the change. He gave me an enthusiastic good night, sir, and I pulled out and onto the highway. My goal was to get rid of the pink sweater as soon as I entered another long stretch of country darkness.

  As soon as that stretch came up, I couldn’t pull over fast enough. My emergency flashers stayed off. I didn’t want to attract the aid of a Good Samaritan, or worse, a policeman. But I did flick on the interior light.

  I inspected the floor for evidence, retrieved the sweater from under the seat, checked the floor again, then clicked the interior light off and got out of the car.

  The forest was bathed in a haunting glow, courtesy of the pale gibbous moon. I trudged through the underbrush, and about twenty yards in, knelt down and brushed the leaves away from the dirt. With my hands, I dug out a two-foot-square shallow grave.

  I laid the sweater in the tiny grave and covered it with dirt.

  The temptation to say a few words was strong. A prayer or a couple of lines of tribute to Richie Morgan, the kid who loved movies. But I didn’t give in to the temptation. That would’ve meant giving in to this current history. Accepting its facts.

  I couldn’t do that. I had to ignore the power of this moment. Only then could I resurrect the flesh that I’d just buried. Only then could I breathe life back into the set of facts that made up the only history that mattered.

  I quickly spread the leaves back over the grave, then stood up, ready to take off, when I suddenly remembered that there was one more piece of evidence I needed to bury.

  My dad’s nametag. It now felt heavy in my pocket. I pulled it out and knelt back down. But I couldn’t do it. Something was telling me not to bury it. Even though I wasn’t superstitious, I had this feeling that the nametag had been embedded in the grille for a reason.

  I stuck it back into my pocket and hurried to the car, hoping my hunch was right. If it turned out to be wrong, and the police tracked me down, the nametag would link me directly to the crime.