Out of Time - Five Tales of Time Travel

by Paul Siluch

  Once she had decided on the date, Cindy gathered all that she would need to survive in the period as methodically as for any other scientific study that didn’t have the same psychological baggage. She researched real estate records, road layout and viability, scoured vintage clothing stores, collected money to live on for a span of time - money that wouldn’t post-date the period - and squirrelled it all away without telling Michael. She knew he wouldn’t approve, but she didn’t need his permission because he would never have to know. To him, she would simply be gone for a matter of minutes within the calculated margin of error. Unless he asked, she wouldn’t explain.

  Michael insisted on being there during this second trip. He didn’t know her plan, but knew her well enough to feel uneasy. “You won’t change anything?” he asked.

  “I wouldn’t,” she said, “even if I could.”

  She embraced him just a bit too long and gave him a kiss with the passion of their first month together. He frowned.

  “I’ll see you in a few minutes,” she said when she finally let go of him.

  “Promise?” His eyes searched hers.

  “Yes,” she said. “You’ll see me in a few minutes.” There was no lie there. She squeezed his hand before slipping into the shed.

  The few minutes that Michael experienced sandwiched a half year of the past. Cindy rented an apartment back in 1974 within walking distance of the cafeteria where Mom worked. Every day she ate lunch there, gazing at her mother as often as she could without raising suspicions, feeding the nostalgia beast until its hunger seemed nearly satiated, until being back in 1974 felt as natural as living in the 90s.

  When she came within a month of her first visit to the past at the playground, she returned to her time. It didn’t seem like a good idea to meet up with two versions of herself since she didn’t know how retroactive memory worked in time travel. Maybe one day, there’ll be temporal psychologists who could figure that out, she thought, but it wasn’t within her capability to decipher the mystery.

  As she exited the shed, less than ten minutes from when she jumped according to the clock, Michael looked up from weeding and smiled at her with a familiarity she could not feel herself; after all, what was only about six minutes for him was six months for her in another era. As he put his arm around her waist, she returned the gesture self-consciously, hoping that he’d attribute her stiffness to the effects of time travel induced nausea.

  Michael noted that Cindy didn’t cry this time but wasn’t sure whether to consider it a good sign or a bad sign. She had darker circles under her eyes than he remembered, but that was understandable given how physically draining the process of temporal jumping must be. There was much he wanted to say to, and ask of, his wife, but he held it in, waiting for her to open up on her own.

  Cindy didn’t divulge much about the visit. Her vagueness bothered Michael, but because she looked so radiant when recounting what little she did share with him, he didn’t press further. In a few days, the wall of awkwardness crumbled and she was her old loving self, cooking his favorite meals and engaging in his work and the normality of her own life. He let his misgivings go, satisfied that he was helping with her long-overdue healing process.

  It only took three months for Cindy to be ready for the next trip, though she had to wait until the end of the school term. She worked with cheerful fervor, both in her teaching and her planning for the trip, the latter mostly in secrecy.

  She picked October of 1971. That was shortly before her family moved to the city. She knew that in just a month or so after her own arrival, Mom would be taking English and homemaking classes that were offered to new immigrants. Cindy enmeshed herself by finding employment as an instructor’s aide at the community center that offered the classes. Her bilingualism, and the decent economy of the era, made securing the position a simple matter.

  The weeks before Mom’s appearance were excruciating. Cindy stared into the mirror of her apartment every day to practice things she could say to Mom without giving anything away. She thought of ways to interact with Mom without exposing herself too much to the family. She didn’t want her younger self to see her older self for a long enough period that she’d remember her own presence. Not that she wouldn’t understand the significance of the memory as an adult, but just in case.

  But sometimes slip-ups happen. Mom was so grateful for Cindy’s assistance in class that she introduced her family to Cindy when they came to pick Mom up one evening. Afterwards, in her tiny, Spartan, temporary apartment, Cindy rummaged her memory, searching for any recollection of that meeting. To her relief, she found none. Her seven-year-old self must not have thought her older self interesting enough to remember. It made her laugh to realize that she was such a boring adult.

  Cindy worked the remainder of that year until Mom was done with her classes, then took a job at a factory packing sausages that was a few blocks from the cafeteria where Mom found work.

  When she stopped in the cafeteria to eat, Mom asked her why she had quit the community center position to take the lower paying job at the factory, Cindy replied that this new job suited her better, citing vague reasons about working hours and change of scenery.

  Again, within months of her second visit in 1974, she slipped back to her own time.

  The smile faded from Michael’s face when he saw her. This time he had no doubts that Cindy’s appearance wasn’t merely due to the effects of using the TEA. Even her hairstyle had changed. When he confronted her about it, she told him the truth: she had just spent three years in the past. It was never her intention to lie outright to him, only to hide details to keep from upsetting him. She couldn’t understand the hurt look on Michael’s face.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were going to do that?” he asked.

  “I didn’t want you to worry. If you thought I was only spending as much time in the past as I am gone from the present, you wouldn’t waste those minutes fretting about me.”

  “But three years? It’s as though we were officially separated.”

  Cindy wrapped her arms around him. “It’s not. When I’m not in our timeline, our marriage is in suspended animation. I live only for my Mom in the past. I have eyes and thoughts for no man but you.”

  Michael sighed, burying his face into Cindy’s hair, returning her embrace. He didn’t tell her the more subtle changes he noticed in her looks. He had studied her countenance daily, caressing every curve and plane in his mind. Even after a number of years of being together, she seemed as beautiful to him as when they first met, and he never tired of looking at her. Because of his intimate familiarity with that face, he knew that the wrinkles and creases on it were new, and that the gray hairs on her head numbered a dozen or so more than just ten minutes ago. That realization gnawed at him, yet he continued to keep his frustrations to himself.

  Once Cindy confessed to having stayed for three years, and Michael didn’t badger her about it, she felt comfortable enough to tell him all about the trip, every boring detail. He relived it with her, albeit much like an intruder at a family reunion.

  After this third visit, Cindy, wrinkles and gray hairs notwithstanding, was her old self in outward appearance – a loving wife, a devoted instructor. Only Michael noticed that she dropped her other hobbies, no longer gardening or cooking elaborate meals, and often looked as though she was gazing at something just beyond everyone else’s sight. He wanted to talk to her about the changes in her, but he instinctively knew that the strong exterior was a façade, underneath of which was a state more fragile than soap film and he could not bring himself to burst her bubble.

  It was a long time before Cindy time-traveled again. Preparing for her next journey was far more complex than the previous trips. Amassing huge amounts of data was a slow and tedious process as she sent many letters overseas to gather the necessary historical information. Getting a hold of older currency was even more difficult. By the end of her preparations, she felt like she was old friends with some of the numismatists s
he dealt with. But the preoccupation with the arrangements of provisions made the six years fly by. She also tinkered with the TEA, creating a compact and portable version that could be worn under clothing and wouldn’t draw unwanted notice.

  Michael, relieved to have his wife occupied and by his side with no mention of time-travel, pushed inner doubts aside and convinced himself that the emptiness inside of Cindy had been fully filled. He busied himself with working his way through tenure and promotion to full professor, refusing to entertain the suspicions he still harbored deep down.

  He came home one day to find travel agency guides and brochures scattered about the dinner table.

  “I thought we could go on holiday,” Cindy said by way of explanation.

  Michael thought of their upcoming anniversary. “Somewhere like Hawaii?” he asked.

  “I was thinking of Hong Kong.”

  “Oh.”

  “You could meet my extended family.”

  “That sounds romantic,” said Michael.

  “You never know what could be romantic,” she said, slipping her hands under his shirt.

  Michael forgot about the conversation until a few weeks later when he nearly tripped over suitcases when he got home from work. There was a his-and-hers smattering of clothing in each of two pieces of luggage. Cindy came through the back door with a metal band reminiscent of a bracelet, but wider and thicker. Michael immediately knew what it was. She laid it on top of her clothes before giving him a kiss.

  Michael cupped her face in his hands. “Sweetheart, tell me you’re not time-jumping while we’re on our trip.”

  “I have everything worked out. You won’t even notice I’m gone.”

  “Why?”

  “You know why.”

  “But you’ve already spent time with your mother in three separate periods of the past.”

  “It’s not enough, Michael.”

  “Are you aware that you age normally during your visits? You and I are living the time travel equivalent of the Twin Paradox.”

  Cindy hung her head. “I’ll try not to stay too long in the past.”

  It was a lie this time. They both knew it. They both pretended they didn’t.

  “If you truly loved me, you wouldn’t go,” said Michael in almost a whisper. He reached out as if to touch her face, but let his arm fall half way.

  “If you truly loved me, you’d let me go.”

  They were at a stalemate that Michael knew would not last. He couldn’t fill the void in her heart that her mother took with her and he couldn’t deny her the insatiable need to fill it.

  If he were an authoritarian husband, he’d have forbidden her to carry out her plan. If he were an ordinary husband, he’d have sought divorce from a woman that any other man would deem mad. But he was neither. He was a devoted husband who could no more break free from the gravity of his love on his own volition than Earth could from its orbit.

  They spent the first couple of days in Hong Kong sight-seeing like a typical couple. They went to the Island and toured Victoria Park, the Botanical Gardens, and the University. The next day, they stayed in Kowloon, meandering the street, hitting open markets, and taking an elderly uncle, a cousin of her mother’s, for lunch.

  The bustling city was sensory overload for Michael, but he did enjoy meeting Lee Kwok Cheung, or Mr. Lee, as he knew he should call him through Chinese formality. Mr. Lee was about Cindy’s father’s age, and, though he was a teacher at the high school level, displayed impressive knowledge of math and physics that one would associate with a graduate level education. Michael remarked that scientific brilliance must run in their family, whereupon Mr. Lee got a most peculiar expression on his face, a confused mix of pride, joy, sadness, and, even a hint of terror.

  “I hope I haven’t offended him,” said Michael when Cindy’s uncle excused himself to go to the bathroom. But when Mr. Lee returned, he was all smiles and friendliness again, arguing for a good fifteen minutes with them over paying the bill. If there was one thing Michael now knew well about people from Hong Kong, it was their restaurant tab ritual; they were insulted if the other party didn’t fight to pay for the bill, but they were also insulted if they didn’t win the argument and get to pay for the bill themselves. It seemed like a no-win situation to Michael, but it appeared that everyone was happy if the tab game (for that’s how he thought of it) was played properly. The ritual was one of the things he found the most amusing and endearing about marrying into the culture.

  On their first day, Michael avoided asking Cindy about her intended jump. Only during the second day there did he broach the topic.

  “When are you slipping to?” he asked, fingering some dried up sea creatures in a wicker basket at one of the many street markets.

  “1957.”

  “Why?” He glanced sideways at her. “You weren’t even born then.”

  “I had never asked my Mom to tell me about her life as a young woman…her hopes, her dreams, her friends. Not once did I say to her, ‘tell me what school you went to growing up?’ I was so self-absorbed.”

  “You were just a child, Cindy.” He reached for her hand in an attempt to offer some degree of consolation.

  She turned her face away but let him hold her hand. “I never learned those things that I would have asked her about as an adult.”

  She looked at him then, her eyes brimming. “I need to know, Michael. I know everything about you – when you learned how to ride a bike, who your grade school friends are, I even know when you were potty-trained!” She gave him a crooked smile. “I know nothing about my Mom’s life before I came along. Nothing.”

  People were starting to look at them, so they moved along the street, still holding hands.

  “But now I want to know all of it, every detail of Mom’s life,” said Cindy.

  They didn’t talk about it again.

  Cindy slipped back in time that night. She had chosen a hotel in the Chuk Yuen district of Kowloon which was convenient both to Kai Tak Airport and, according to records, an under-developed space that refugees squatted in back in the 50s, therefore an area she could easily slip in and out of. She thought it’d be the safest launch point to where she wanted to be.

  Michael watched her unpack the Apparatus and fiddle with the dials and settings, neither offering to help, nor trying to talk her out of it. The pain inside him was so huge, he felt as though his ache had swallowed Cindy’s grief. He nursed several Tsing Tao beers and distracted himself by trying to decipher the programming on television. Cindy had always maintained that Cantonese was a harsh, ugly dialect, but he never thought of it that way until then.

  “Why don’t you try a different tactic?” Michael asked suddenly.

  “What?” Cindy said distractedly.

  “Why don’t you travel to the future instead and find a cure for your mother’s cancer so she’d still be alive right now and you wouldn’t have to do…what you’re about to do?” Michael realized that his brain wasn’t at its sharpest right now, being slowed by lingering jetlag and alcohol.

  She stopped what she was doing then, and looked at him. “Determinism. When you’re thinking clearly again, you’ll know.” That sounded like she was talking down to him and she softened her words with a kiss.

  Michael sighed and turned back to the gibberish on television.

  Cindy checked the TEA band thoroughly, re-calibrating the instrument with precision. By the time she was done, Michael was mostly asleep. He barely registered her kissing him on the forehead when he tucked in for the night.

  The targeted year was 1957. Mom was fresh out of teacher’s college and would be getting a post at a private, all-girls’ school in Kowloon. With no teacher’s credentials for the period, and an inability to write Chinese well, Cindy took a job as the school janitor. It was hard, manual labor that she had never had to do before, but she savored her interactions with Mom, who was kind to her and the other lowly staff. She arrived early and stayed late at the school so as to have ample occasions
to engage Mom in small talk, working up to trading philosophies about life and the world.

  When Mom gave birth to Cindy, and later her sister Maria, Cindy leaped at the chances to pay visits to Mom, showering her with gifts. In older, hierarchical cultures, particularly back in those days, people of different socioeconomic classes didn’t mingle except in rare circumstances. She wasn’t about to pass up the opportunities.

  Cindy had seen black and white photos of the place that Mom and Dad lived in during that time of their lives, but being in the apartment in glorious Technicolor, the scent of ginger-vinegar-eggs soup cooking on the stovetop, and the sound of vendors shouting their businesses on the streets below was a treat that only whetted her appetite. Instead of feeling satiated, she craved even more.

  Dad had a confident gait and a ready grin back then. Cindy had forgotten the way he was, having spent so many years with him in mourning. Mom even let Cindy hold the infant version of herself, which was so surreal, she giggled. Luckily, Mom thought it was merely her delight in the cherub-faced baby.

  Cindy stayed fourteen years until just before Mom quit the school and the family moved to Canada.

  Michael stirred when she arrived back in their time. He opened one eye as she ran her calloused fingers across his forehead, brushing aside his sandy blond hair that was just starting to show a few white strands. Drifting back to sleep, he went on to dream of meeting Cindy’s mother in Hong Kong. The mother-in-law he’d never known was holding his wife’s hand, and his wife was only four years old. He grunted in his sleep and rolled over.

  Cindy continued to run her fingertips through his mussed up hair for a while longer. Seeing Michael lying there, doubts crept into her mind about attempting this second, and dangerous, trip of the night. As she had often thought in the years of their marriage, she was incredibly lucky to have found a spouse like him. She knew few people would have put up with, let alone assist, her singular preoccupation. One of her close friends in high school bluntly told her, “Get over it, Cindy; you’re not the first person to have lost a parent. Quit moping and get on with life.” While her other girlfriends had not been so direct, their sentiments were the same. Eventually, old friends became ex-friends.