by Alan Seeger
Kissing her never grew old, and he savored the taste of her mouth and the smile in her eyes as she climbed out of the Jeep. “Bye, honey,” she said.
“I love you,” he called to her. His heart was light as he weaved the SUV through the heavy Monday morning traffic.
Arriving at his office at seven minutes until eight o’clock, he climbed out of the Jeep and made his way toward the tinted glass front door of the building, which bore the legend:
ChroNova, Inc.
in simple silver block letters.
CHAPTER 2
Rick walked into his office, greeting his co-workers absentmindedly. His thoughts were still several miles away, lingering on the smile Stefanie had given him as she said goodbye and the shape of her body, clad in khaki pants and a short denim jacket, as she turned and walked away up the sidewalk.
He went to his office first to check for messages, then to the lab where the company’s research was done. The task he had left on Friday awaited him at his workstation, still taunting him.
Rick greatly enjoyed his work as the vice president of R&D at ChroNova. It was incredibly rewarding. The company was on the bleeding edge of the newly developing field of chronophysics — exploring ways to manipulate the flow of time that had previously been thought impossible.
It was the stuff of science fiction, in a way — none of them had thought it was possible, four years before, when they had begun their research in earnest, to do the things that they were doing. The fields of energy that some of the company’s newest equipment generated seemed to be able to actually slow time down by a few thousandths of a percent. They called it the time dampening effect or simply time flexing. It was their task to increase that.
It wasn’t much, at this point; Randall Orwell, the scientist who was Rick’s boss, at least according to the company hierarchy, said it would be a difference comparable to the Earth orbiting the Sun in five hundred twenty five thousand, six hundred and one minutes, gleefully mocking the song from Rent as he discussed it.
Randall was someone Rick looked up to, but there was one thing he was adamant about that Rick disagreed with, which was that the small increments that they were seeing when they attempted to flex time were near the limits of possibility.
Rick wasn’t so certain. To him, the laws of physics were barriers that existed only because they didn’t know how to get around them — yet.
He strongly suspected that, given enough power, the systems that ChroNova was developing would eventually be able to do things that would utterly blow people’s minds.
Rick spent the day working with a computer simulation of the time dampener, but the more hours he put into the project, the more convinced he became that they were going about their research all wrong. Certain assumptions had been made in the design of the data simulation regarding the nature of the time dampener, but more than once, Rick had a feeling that these assumptions were simply incorrect. And you know what you get when you assume, he thought; you make an ASS out of U and ME.
The time dampener clearly worked — tests had shown it did, albeit on a miniscule scale; but what if they were wrong about how it worked? There was something nagging Rick, something chewing at his insides like a mouse gnawing at the insulation on a piece of electrical wiring, something that said This is not quite right, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. It kept slipping out of his grasp like an elusive firefly, teasing him with its golden glow.
During his morning break, he walked across the street to a coffee bar, a near-clone of the one where he and Stef had gone for what he now thought of as their first date. He stood at the counter, waiting to place his order, half-listening to those people in line before him as they requested hazelnut lattes and venti vanilla cappuccinos.
The back wall of the coffee bar’s work area was mirrored, and Rick found himself staring at reflections, first at his own, and then at those of the other people waiting in line, one by one, wondering what was passing through their minds as they waited to place their orders.
There was a woman in her mid-60s with bleached blonde hair who was wearing what seemed like a showcase full of Native American jewelry. Next to her, shifting his weight from one foot to the other impatiently, was a young man with a pockmarked face, short, wavy brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses. His faded black tee shirt bore a large image of a green marijuana leaf, overlaid with the face of the late reggae musician Peter Tosh and the message LEGALIZE IT.
A couple in their 50s stood immediately to Rick’s right, trading barbed comments under their breath that Rick knew they never intended him to hear. After a minute and a half, Rick knew far too much about their only daughter’s strained marriage and their “worthless” son-in-law, whom the woman clearly despised. He looked at her reflection just as she made eye contact with his. Rick averted his gaze self-consciously, focusing on his own face in the mirror once again, waiting for the barista to take his order.
His attention was gradually drawn to the blonde woman, resplendent in malachite, coral and hammered silver, whose skin had the I-go-tanning-three-times-a-week look of a rawhide glove. The hair, the tan, the jewelry, even her skirt — decidedly too short to be socially acceptable — were all her personal way of slowing down time. She was probably considerably closer to 70 than to 60, but in her own mind she was clearly still the belle of the ball.
It’s all in your point of view, Rick thought to himself. That turned his thoughts back to his work at ChroNova, looking at how to manipulate time, how to stretch it or compress it… He thought for a moment about folding it back on itself like a piece of paper, but was distracted by the barista saying that it was his turn to order. He absently parroted his standard request, “Venti Americano, please,” but his thoughts were still juggling the puzzle that stubbornly refused to give up its secret. There had to be a solution, and it seemed to be hanging in his peripheral vision, barely out of sight. But what was it?
More than a little frustrated, Rick took the steaming cup, stirred three envelopes of sweetener into it, and headed back to the office.
The answer didn’t come that day. As was her habit when she had only a morning class, Stefanie had taken the city bus home; Rick made a pretense of tidying his workstation, logged off his computer, and was out the door twelve minutes before any of his colleagues.
“Where’s he headed in such a hurry?” muttered Elizabeth Ryan, the office manager, as she readied to leave herself.
“Hell, if I was living with Stefanie Padgett, I’d leave early on a daily basis,” laughed Randall. “He was here-but-not-really-here the whole frickin’ day.”
Elizabeth grinned, shook her head and said, “Newlyweds,” under her breath.
“They’re just living together,” replied Randall with a smile.
“They’re an old married couple, Randall, in every possible way but the paperwork,” grinned Elizabeth. They nodded at each other as if sharing some great secret.
CHAPTER 3
The evening traffic was heavy, and Rick was tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, impatient to get home. The familiar strains of an old song came on the radio, and he turned it up with a grin. “Girl, you really got me now,” he sang along, “You got me so I can’t sleep at night…”
He grinned at himself in the rear view mirror. Okay, so he’d never be a rock star — a retired football player, maybe, with muscle starting to fade ever so slightly to flab, but he knew no one but a blind man would ever mistake him for David Lee Roth, Mick Jagger or David Bowie.
Can it be that I’m really 45? He thought to himself. He didn’t feel it. Forty-five had been old, once, way back when. Old? It was fucking ancient, he thought. He remembered the year he had turned sixteen; the year of his first car, a like-new bright yellow 1983 Ford Mustang which was a birthday present. He smiled and shook his head as he recalled how he had wrecked it just a week after his grandmother had bought it for him. That was also the year he had his first girl. I guess that balances things out, he thought with a smile.
He remembered her well — a fifteen-year-old blonde named Amber who had taken his virginity on a blanket under a grove of trees at a church camp. She’d taken his, but he suspected the reverse was not the case. That was the best thing I ever got from going to church, he laughed to himself.
He remembered Amber and the other women he’d been with in the years since, but their faces faded like a dying flashlight in the light of the summer sun whenever he thought of Stef. He suddenly became even more impatient to get home and cursed, laughing, at the traffic light, which obliged him by turning green.
Rick pulled the Jeep into his parking space, shut off the ignition, and hopped out. He trotted up the front walk, energized by the thought of her, and walked into the apartment, greeted by the delectable scent of one of Stefanie’s wonderful dinners. On top of her other obvious charms, the woman was a marvelous cook.
“Hi, sweetheart,” she called. He smiled at the sound of her voice and walked toward the kitchen. A large steamer pot sat atop one of the burners, emitting a steady stream of vapor from underneath the edge of its lid. The oven light was on, and through the window he could see a large casserole dish containing large slabs of meat.
“Mmm. Spare ribs?”
She smiled and nodded. “And I’m steaming that veggie mix you like.”
“Veggie mix? Still trying to turn me into a rabbit, aren’t you?” he grinned, doing his best Bugs Bunny Bronx accent.
“You liked it last time we had it. Carrots, broccoli, cauliflower…” she raised an eyebrow at him and grinned back.
He smiled. “Yeah. I’ll eat anything you fix me, you know that.” He grabbed her playfully by the waistband of her worn jeans and pulled her close, his arms encircling her. He kissed her, tentatively at first, then more deeply, as he felt her body reacting to his.
“And I know what I want for dessert,” he whispered into her ear. She smiled and broke away to return to preparing the meal.
Dinner was relaxed; the food, as always, delicious and filling. The real dessert, his whispered suggestion notwithstanding, was the chance to open up and share the events of the day with each other. Rick never felt reticent about discussing his workday with Stefanie.
Despite the technical nature of his work, she always listened attentively, offering suggestions and asking questions from a layperson’s perspective, but always with deep insights that Rick knew were just a glimmer of the largely untapped genius of her keen mind.
She shared about what had occurred in her various classes during the course of the day; he was always interested in that as well. Rick had often said that if he hadn’t ended up in research, he would have enjoyed being a teacher. He thought that he still might teach one day, perhaps after he retired from ChroNova.
After dinner, Rick cleared the table, scraped the dishes into the disposal and loaded them into the dishwasher. They decided to watch TV in bed, finding an old movie and settling down for a quiet evening. Rick turned toward Stef and put his arm around her waist as she gradually dropped off to sleep, then lay there quietly, listening to her slow, steady breathing.
Once again his mind wandered back to the conundrum that had occupied most of his waking thoughts for more than four years. Even the ticking clock seemed to mock him, telling him that even as he devoted himself to unlocking Time’s secrets, it was stealing his remaining life away, one day at a time. You and Stefanie could be seeing this whole, wide world, Time seemed to whisper. You’re wasting the precious days of your life trying to understand me, and someday you’ll run out of me. He thought of the old Pink Floyd song:
And then one day you find / Ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run / You missed the starting gun…
Rick sat up and looked over at Stefanie’s sleeping form. Was it really true? Was he spinning his wheels, looking for an answer that was either an utter impossibility, or so elusive that it might as well not exist?
His life with Stef was the happiest he’d ever been, but the one regret he had was that he hadn’t found her until he was halfway into his fourth decade. He often wondered why they couldn’t have met when he was younger, so that they could have had many more years together than remained for them. He was 45; even if he should live to be 75 or 80, as was typical for the men in his family — hell, even if he lived to be 100, he felt that wouldn’t be nearly enough time. Sometimes he felt as though, in the back of his mind, there was a hidden agenda motivating him to figure out new ways to manipulate time. He thought to himself that if he could stretch time, every added minute, every second, would be one more that he’d have with her.
Rick lay awake in the darkness, and an image suddenly came to his mind. He visualized a person’s life being like a book; it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. In between are many chapters; birth and the carefree days of childhood that follow; adolescence and the gradual gaining of maturity; adulthood and the onset of its responsibilities, and finally — and most unfortunately — death. The end of it all.
If life really were a book, he thought, I’d just go back and reread the good parts over and over, folding the corners of my favorite pages down, and I’d never bother to getting around to reading the final chapter.
Suddenly something sparked in his brain, leaping back to the day he had stood in line at the coffee shop. What if the key to manipulating time was not so much in stretching or compressing it, but folding it? Bookmarking it? Rereading one’s favorite passages, so to speak?
Books were divided into chapters. So were DVDs; you could go to the index and find the part of the movie you were looking for and go directly there. What if there was a way to find a sort of chapter menu for time — and, by extension, for our very lives?
Rick got up and went to his study, found his notepad, and began scrawling equations.
CHAPTER 4
Rick’s first marriage was to a woman named Holly McMillen. He had met her in 1992 while attending classes when he was working on his undergraduate degree in physics at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. She had long blonde hair, and eyes the color of a stormy sky.
Holly was pursuing an education degree, planning on teaching at the high school level; she was a local girl, having grown up in Hartford, some 25 miles away. Rick had courted her in the old-fashioned manner, meeting her parents and asking for her hand. They wed the June after Rick graduated with his bachelor’s degree, in a lavish outdoor event held in her parents’ enormous back yard, complete with a catered luncheon, a jazz orchestra, an outdoor dance floor, and 300 guests.
It didn’t take long for problems to arise, however. Her parents were continually nosing into Holly and Rick’s business, never seeming to know how to mind their own. When were they going to start a family? How were their finances? When was Rick going to make something of himself?
The saying goes that ‘Good fences make good neighbors,’ but what makes for good in-laws?
Rick worked for a tech company called CyberResearch in Branford for a few years, and then the couple moved to the greater Chicago area so that Rick could return to school to pursue a graduate degree.
When he completed his master’s at Northwestern, it was made clear to him that Holly’s father expected that Rick would proceed to move into either a teaching position at a major university or a job as an executive for another large tech firm. Instead, he became a research assistant at Stony Brook University on Long Island.
Despite the fine reputation of that excellent school, Holly’s parents were aghast at the idea that Rick had become a research assistant. Those sorts of positions, reasoned Mr. McMillen, were better suited for graduate students, not the man that was expected to provide his daughter with the creature comforts she deserved. Mr. McMillen was the CEO of a chemical company that bore his name; along with spoiling her with a walk-in closet full of clothes and shoes, every fashion accessory one could imagine, and a trip to Cancun or Acapulco every winter, he’d bought Holly a shiny black Porsche convertible for her 16th birthday. She’d graduated from
a very exclusive private academy — a very expensive school, her father was fond of reminding Rick. She wore Prada, and Gucci, and Dolce & Gabbana. Could a research assistant provide those things for his daughter? He thought not.
Mr. McMillen offered to pull some strings in order to get Rick a position at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory outside of Washington, DC, figuring out practical applications for governmental use of scientific principles.
Rick knew that really meant “Helping figure out more efficient ways for the United States Military to kill people.” Rick had no interest in doing that.
Despite all of Rick’s efforts to explain just how important his work was at Stony Brook, Holly’s parents continued to be utterly unimpressed.
About a year after that, Holly went home to Hartford to visit dear old mom and dad, and never came back. She notified Rick — via e-mail, of all things — that she “just didn’t want to be married” to him anymore. He was devastated, but couldn’t honestly say that it was a complete surprise. They had gradually grown apart over the seven years of their marriage, and he’d seen it coming for some time.
Early in 2002, Rick moved back to California, where he had grown up, and applied for admission to the doctoral program at Caltech in Pasadena. He was accepted for the following semester, and by the time he was 34 he had his Ph.D in Theoretical Physics. That was just over ten years ago. The first nine of those years had been spent with his nose in books, his head filled with swirling clouds of equations, his focus on finding ways to change the world for the better.
After earning his doctorate, Rick returned to the east coast, joining the staff of a corporate research team headquartered in Philadelphia. He worked there, making small strides in the name of science, for nearly five years. Then one day he got a phone call from Randall Orwell in St. Louis, who had been one of his professors at UConn a decade before, and his adventure with time began.