by Dan Garmen
It was then that a certainty came over me about what must be going on here. I don’t know how they’d done it, but there was something going on that didn’t involved my Grandfather writing a letter in 1933, including information in it he couldn’t possibly have known. Some sort of scam was being perpetrated, at my expense . These thoughts flashed through my mind in a matter of a couple seconds, and I directed my gaze at Annie.
She must have seen my suspicions clearly, because she returned the gaze calmly. "You don’t believe this, do you?" I shook my head, not able to say anything. "Look at the envelope," she said. I glanced down at it on the table to see her pointing as she added, "The back." I picked the old envelope up and immediately saw the same faded penciled lettering, only in a different hand. It was a date, matching the one in the letter. November 17,1933, but this one was in a hand I recognized. A chill spread from my stomach up to my head, and I felt my skin prickling and the hairs on the back of my neck stirred. Directly underneath the date was a hand-drawn smiley face and a signature.
Mine.
TWO
In 1976
That evening, I drove south towards Interstate 70 to get back to Cincinnati. I was pretty much ready to fly back to San Diego and home the following Thursday, but felt a need to get back on the road and do some thinking. On the way through Terre Haute, I stopped at the cemetery where my grandparents are buried, found their graves, not far from my great-grandparents’ graves and stood for several minutes, thinking about the strange things the day had shown me.
I took the letter, but insisted Annie keep the one ounce gold coin my Grandfather had put in the envelope. The coin, I had to admit, was a touch of genius on the part of my Grandfather, who according to Liz, had told her and Annie about the letter not long before my family left Belton in 1952. My grandparents invited the two women over for dinner on one of their last nights in town and told them an important letter and a gold coin was hidden in a beam in the basement of the house. When the ladies asked why confide in them, my Grandfather just said, “So you’ll remember. Don’t forget the gold coin."
In fact, they hadn’t remembered, until a few months after buying the house in 2003, when the subject of my family came up during dinner in Annie’s new house. They remembered the mysterious envelope with the gold coin, so Liz’s son extracted it from the beam and together, they read the letter. Then on this day, June 4, 2007, the circle begun in November of 1933 closed. I insisted the coin was meant for them as payment for keeping the letter safe. Annie persuaded me to have a piece of the apple pie, baked that morning, but I politely refused the offer to stay the night, wanting to be by myself to think this strange, crazy thing through.
While I drove in darkness with Belton, Terre Haute and the cemetery behind me, I looked down again at the envelope on the passenger seat, and in the dim light I could imagine what lay on the seat was nothing more than a plain envelope with no faint, pencilled names or dates, but I knew better. I supposed some sort of microscopic testing done would confirm the "June 4, 2007," and "November 17, 1933," were written at the same time, but by looking at them, I had no doubt about the truth, and somehow, my signature had been put on the envelope almost 72 years ago.
This whole situation was puzzling, but also a rather exciting mystery, too. Would I, sometime in my future, travel back to 1933? Time Travel stories had always been my favorite sci-fi to read, starting in about the fifth grade when I read a book about a two kids who travel back to the seventeenth century. I don’t remember the title of the book, or its author, but I remember being completely captivated by it. A more recent book, a love story, told from the perspectives of a time traveler and his wife had been both a joy and a heartbreak to read. Driving through the darkness, I realized maybe my interest in the concept of time travel had played a big part of this mystery, at the same time fearing it might be some sort of psychosis brought on by that very interest. I reassured myself it was only an interest, not an obsession at all, but I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t started to doubt my sanity.
The miles slid by as I again passed Indianapolis, and I finally got my thinking sufficiently organized to call Gary, probably the most analytical person I know. Not surprising to anyone, Gary has a tolerance for New Age concepts of approximately zero. After catching up, I told him the day’s entire story, start to finish, needing three different phone calls to do so because he was driving on some cross-country trek to the East Coast, never flying when driving a Jeep would get the job done. Cell coverage can be spotty outside the big cities, and since his Jeeps are Gary’s main source of amusement outside of work, many of our conversations go this way.
My friend listened, obviously looking for the scam, and after the basic outline of the phenomenon had been related, he asked a number of questions that showed he too was skeptical of Annie and Liz and what they stood to gain by all this, but he admitted, any possible angle eluded him. The women hadn’t asked for my phone number, address, social security number or anything, so how they would profit from this? Neither of us had an answer. But then, my friend shocked me.
"You really need to read ‘The Yoga of Time Travel’ by Fred Wolf," Gary told me.
I was unfamiliar with the book, but the author’s name was familiar. "Fred Wolf?" I said.
"He was the physicist in What the Bleep Do We Know!?” Gary answered.
"Oh yea, the guy with the beard,” I said, astonished. "You HATED that movie," I reminded him. I had sent Gary a DVD of the controversial documentary, which he watched, trashing it in an email to me, calling the movie a bunch of metaphysical hogwash trying to legitimize itself with a little bit of science.
"Fred Wolf is a brilliant man," he said, his cell signal breaking up, getting ready for another dump. "But to be in a movie with a woman pretending to channel a 5,000 year old warrior is a bad career move." Gary can compartmentalize quite well when he needs to.
"Read the book," he continued. “Something might resonate. You really think your signature is on the envelope from 1933? Any possible way they might have forged it?”
"I can’t think of any way for them to have gotten my signature," I said, “and it looks just like my signature today. A month ago, I came across something I signed 15 years ago, and it was different. This one wouldn’t be out of place at the bottom of a check I wrote yesterday.”
"Wow." Never before, when faced with a problem had I seen Gary at a loss for words.
A few seconds later I sensed the connection had again terminated, and unable to get anything but an immediate voicemail pickup, I gave up, realizing he had traveled out of range, which in a way, so had I.
The rest of the drive to Cincinnati was uneventful, and uncharacteristically quiet. I didn’t even want the radio interrupting my thoughts. The background hum of the road and the white noise of the wind flowing over the top of my car, heard through the open sunroof was enough. I tried to remember how I got my name. Could my grandfather in 1933 or before, decided his first grandson would be named "Richard?" No, I decided. I was named after my mother’s grandfather, a man I’m sure my grandfather never met. Were there any other Richards in our family? I couldn’t think of a single one. Sherlock Holmes, one of my literary heroes, said, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth,” so I put my mind to work eliminating the impossible.
I hadn’t talked to my wife since I had been on my way to Starbucks that morning for my coffee, so I gave her a quick call from the road, catching her and our teen-aged daughter on their way home after the weekly catch-up dinner at Soup Plantation. I told her about my sudden road trip, but only mentioned the letter and its mystery as "kind of a cool thing the lady who owns my grandparents’ old house gave me" and promised to fill her in later. Being occupied driving, that satisfied her so we caught up on the day’s happenings in San Diego and hung up with "I love you" spoken into each cell phone, neither of use aware that from my perspective, it would be the last time we would talk for a long time.
I pulled into Cincinnati and my rented corporate apartment’s parking lot just after 10pm. Exhausted, I wasted no time in turning in for the night, exhausted from all the driving, having had enough of the mystery banging around in my head. Sleep came within seconds.
Morning seemed to come instantly, as if I hadn’t slept at all. The dull, early morning light had started glowing through the blinds in the apartment’s bedroom and despite the day I’d had before my head hit the pillow, I felt really well rested. Given the events of the previous day, that was pretty surprising. But, I slid out of bed, pulled on some running shorts, a t-shirt and Nikes and went for a run. Still early summer in the Midwest, the mornings had a bit of crispness left in them, perfect for running. Saturday’s odd adventure was still puzzling, but sleep had apparently done its job sorting the situation out, and things didn’t seem so overwhelming on Sunday morning. I did a little under three miles in good time and still had the energy to take the stairs up to the second floor of the apartment building two at a time. A hot shower followed, and I dressed, retraced my path down the steps to the car and headed toward Starbucks, grabbing my laptop bag and Cincinnati Reds baseball cap on the way out.
When I arrived at my favorite Starbucks, I ordered and received my Venti Vanilla Latte, sat down and opened the Powerbook. BoingBoing popped open with Cory Doctrow going on about chocolate (which I’d given up after realizing headaches would often trail consumption of the stuff), Dave Winer at Scripting News blogging about Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field (one of my favorite topics) and a host of other web writers writing about things interesting to them, and me. The drama of the previous day slid into the background as I got back to more familiar territory.
Thirty minutes later, my daily blogs and latte exhausted, I cracked open the bottle of water I’d bought with the coffee and entered the URL "amazon.com," then "fred wolf yoga of time travel," and was rewarded with the first result: “Yoga of Time Travel: How the Mind Can Defeat Time”. I clicked on the cover of the book and saw Gary had wasted no time in reading this one, since the first edition date was just a few months ago. Two reviewers, both lavish in their praise, wrote admiringly and I only hesitated a few seconds before clicking the "add to shopping cart" button. I went through the couple of steps necessary to order the book and in a few minutes the book was on it’s way and would probably beat me home to San Diego.
I closed my laptop and looked around at the now busy coffee shop. It was almost 10am, and I realized I needed to get a few last details cleaned up before I packed up the car, turned it over to the auto-transport company and got on an airplane for San Diego on Wednesday. Dumping the laptop case in the back seat, I climbed in the car, turned the key in the ignition, and pulled out of the parking space.
The shopping center my most frequented Starbucks is in sits on a busy state highway, at a traffic-light controlled intersection with another highway. The second highway Ts into the shopping center, so leaving the center is a simple matter of driving out on a green light straight onto the highway, which I always did to go back to my apartment. When the light turned green, the car ahead of me pulled forward and I followed. Neither of us observed the black Hummer approaching from the left, its driver preoccupied with her cell phone. The Volvo in front of me got off scot free, but I wasn’t so lucky. The Hummer hit me broadside at about 40 miles per hour, the police would later determine, striking my Chrysler Pacifica on the left side, even with the back passenger door. I don’t remember anything but an explosive avalanche of noise, and the extremely brief sensation I was on the wildest-ass merry-go-round in the world, everything spinning, trying to find something to hold on to.
After that, I have a vague recollection of music playing. I can’t recall the tune, or if there were even any words. Just the faintest hint of music.
I woke slowly, groggily, like clawing my way out of a vat of tar. The environment, dark and humid, smelled heavily of vegetation, so I figured I was outdoors. I curled my fingers, the grass and a peaty soil giving way beneath my hands. I pushed myself away from the ground, sat up and looked around. Tropical plants, a very real jungle surrounded me and absolutely no sound intruded, save any noise I made. I realized that I this was one of the most comfortable places I’d ever been. I wore a pair of light, almost white shorts with Keen sandals and had my favorite olive-green RL t-shirt on.
A sudden realization and memory of the crash surfaced and the blood rushed to my head. Oh shit. I’m dead, and apparently in Hawaii, I said to myself with no small measure of irony. I guess if anyplace on earth was designed to represent heaven, Hawaii would be at the top of the list. I stood and walked around and found the clearing I inhabited discovering it to be circular, bounded by the thick, impenetrable jungle to the outside, with some sort of pit in the middle. Between the pit and the jungle stretched 40 to 50 feet of a clearing, made up of a smooth and lush carpet of grass. Daylight filtered through the jungle canopy, but not enough of a view of the sky revealed the time of day.
At some point in the next few minutes, I somehow came to the realization that this was all a hallucination. Everything seemed real enough, sure, but there was something …artificial about the setting. If that wasn’t enough, adding to the sense of unreal, I remember what I did next like yesterday, even though I can’t explain the thought process.
I climbed to my feet, walked straight across the grass-carpeted clearing separating jungle from the hole, and stood for a second at the edge of what I can only describe as an abyss. I spread my arms out to the sides and let myself fall forward into a dive into something I couldn’t even begin to see. Again, I’m not sure what compelled me to do this, or what set of skills I called upon, because I’m a passable swimmer, but no kind of diver at all. I’m pretty sure the dive was Olympic medal quality though, and continued for what seemed like minutes, until I hit, my hands slicing through the water, making way for my head, then shoulders followed by the rest of my body. The water seemed to be the same temperature as the air, so the sudden impact and resistance let me know the descent had almost come to an end, my body slowing down almost to the point of stopping, though everything remained dark.
The water disappeared, and as sleep overwhelmed me, so did everything else.
Music again, this time, a tune and words, something about a cane, a hat, and a rubber band.
I knew the song. The Spinners was my first guess, or maybe The Four Tops. I definitely recognized the era as mid 70s, at any rate. Again, the grogginess, as if I’d taken a two-cap dose of NyQuil, and awakened in the middle of a dream. The sound, loud enough to be slightly irritating, came from just above my head. I was in bed, covered up and comfortable, but the music seemed insistent, trying to wake me up.
I no longer needed alarm clocks to wake up, so figured the maid must have accidentally set it. I reached out to hit the snooze bar, but my left hand hit empty air. I couldn’t make out the glowing lights of the clock face in the dark, and as my eyes fully opened and adjusted, I realized nothing seemed to be in its place. I jerked awake and sat up, my left arm whacking the wall next to me with a loud thump. Damn! I glanced around. A desk sat at the foot of the bed, a dresser and mirror next it. Nothing was reflected, only darkness outside the area of the floor illuminated by light leaking through the crack underneath the door. I sat on a small twin bed, music coming from not a modern digital alarm clock, but an old beige Emerson analog model. My hand went instantly to the knob on the right, or the stem part, since the larger bit had long ago slipped off and disappeared. After turning the volume down I froze. Holy shit. This was the bedroom I inhabited during my high school years.
Memory of "Hawaii" and the spectacular dive for the moment forgotten, I laughed, realizing I was in the middle of a lucid dream. I’d had a couple in the past and found them a lot of fun. If you can stay in the dream state, you can make anything happen, all the while knowing you’re dreaming. It’s fun to be standing on a street corner one-second, flying or shooting hoops with Michael Jordan the next, all driven by tho
ught. But before changing the scene, I thought I’d explore my old room for a minute. I walked the 3 steps over to the chest of drawers and flipped the light switch. Wow. Just like I remembered it. My desk, with three or four stacks of books on it, dresser with TV, lamp and portable 8-track stereo player sitting on top. That HAS to be my Chicago 10 tape, I thought, and reached out to examine it. I laughed, reading the text on the back of the cartridge.
I opened the closet to the right of the dresser, my reflection now in the mirror. For an instant, I didn’t recognize my seventeen year old self, the kid who considered himself ugly and fat. I had broken my leg in two places the winter before, and the period of inactivity had packed an additional twenty pounds on me, but compared to the normal course of adulthood and what aging does to most people, I hardly noticed the extra weight. Someone once told me they never pass up an opportunity be photographed, because she knew she’d never again look as good as she did at that moment. Youth and vigor radiated from the image in the mirror, and seeing myself without all the adolescent insecurities raging was warm and comforting. I began to be aware of my leg, as I remembered my past. The old pain and weakness eased its way back in, after being gone for so long. Think it away, I said to myself. This is a lucid dream. Nothing’s here I don’t want to be here.
Except the pain didn’t go away, and grew a little, now that I had become aware of its existence, creeping in, from just above the knee almost to my hip. A dull ache which at its worse, made me whimper at the unrelenting agony, and got me addicted to pain medication in college, causing me to flunk out of Purdue University, making my late teens and 20s a time I wasn’t too keen to revisit.