Time Flying

by Dan Garmen

  My episode with Amanda had distracted me from what had happened before she showed up in the gym. The memory of my sudden return to 2007 hung over the rest of the day, darkening my thoughts. I'd promised my dad I'd drop by one of the job sites, and inventory some material. Though he never told me I couldn't climb and work with roofers, or help hang drywall, he didn’t like me doing anything that put me in a position to repeat last year’s accident, so I didn't. He didn't try and turn me into a clerk, but always seemed to find something that sort of blended job that wouldn't look like a waste of time, but yet wouldn't put me in danger of getting hurt again. I enjoyed the work this time around, being more mature and experienced and considered getting to know this business better, quickly changed my mind, remembering hard economic times coming and nothing I could do would change history enough to avoid it.

  I counted the materials on the list, about a 50/50 mix of shortages and overages, something which irritated my father to no end. He was constantly frustrated with this kind of thing, often complaining “people can't seem to master the fine art of counting.” This time around, his tirades made me smile, visibly at first, until he caught me and asked “what's so goddamn funny?” After that, I managed to hide my enjoyment of my much younger than I remember him father getting pissed. Fortunately, on this day he wasn't on site, instead working in the office.

  After a couple hours checking and double-checking the numbers, I put the inventory forms into the folder and sat down to eat the ham sandwich I had packed into my gym bag. Since my work on this day didn’t include manual labor, I had stayed in the sweats I'd worn at the gym. The temperature was a little too warm for them, but the short basketball trunks worn at the time didn’t work for me off the court. They'd never bothered me before, but after years of fashionably long and somewhat baggy shorts, these I found myself again having to wear, with their legs ending a few inches below the crotch made me look like one of the Village People. The first time I pulled a pair from my dresser and put them on, I looked in the mirror and imagined myself in a leather biker's cap, an Indian Chief on one side of me, the construction worker on the other. Jeesh, at least I understand now why we wore those long tube socks. Three months later, and I still hadn't gotten used to wearing the shorts again.

  Lunch time on the job had come and gone, so I sat on the lowered tailgate of the El Camino listening to the sounds of the construction site and ate my ham sandwich alone, since my mood didn’t suit or desire company. I tried for as long as I could to deny the incident in the gym was my traveling back to 2007. Had to be. There was no doubt I'd had a car accident, but thinking about it in the detached way I'd been able to do here in 1976, proved different from finding myself in the wreckage of my car, unable to move, a number of people trying to come to my rescue. The man with the round glasses calling for the “Jaws of Life” meant they were having to cut me out of my ruined Chrysler Pacifica.

  Great.

  I still didn’t believe this experience was my life “flashing before my eyes,” because it was taking a hell of a long time, and I had changed so much in the course of the three short months I had been here. Try as I might, the “I must be dead” idea would not fit into the puzzle, so more and more the massive hallucination brought on by the accident theory seemed a better solution. I missed my wife and daughter, but the thought of going back to a situation full of any number of kinds of pain didn't appeal to me at all. There is a certain comfort to being in your past. I knew in the fall, Jimmy Carter would be elected President of the United States, the Russians wouldn't be launching ICBMs at us, and it would be a long, long time before another Arab oil embargo created lines at the gas pump. On the other hand, I was aware Elvis had about a year to live, and I wondered how I could get to a concert before next August. I had to admit to myself I hadn't a clue who would win the World Series in October, or the next Superbowl.

  From time to time, I would think about the things I remembered happening between 1976 and 2007, the good and the bad. I wondered trying to change them would be of any use. In 1980 for instance, should I get on a bus or airplane to New York and head off Mark David Chapman, kick his ass before he stalked and killed John Lennon? A good friend of mine in 2007, who is a Beatle fanatic, would vote for trying to talk him into leaving John alone and shooting Yoko instead, since he believes she broke the band up! What about John Hinckley? Should I go to Washington, DC and stop him from shooting President Reagan? Given my actions over the past few months, I didn't have any clear devotion to preserving the time line of my life. I'd upended the whole damn thing. As long as I'm here, why should I stop with the things that directly affect me? Why not reshape history in any number of ways? I have the potential to mess with some key turning points I know are coming up.

  But, I realized despite all of my grand ideas about changing the world I remember, I wouldn't. What I truly wanted was to get back to my family and resume the 2007 life I'd grown accustomed to. Sure, reliving some dark days and making them a bit lighter was fun, and I'd be lying if I said flirting with Amanda Tully wasn't titillating, amazed as I was I didn’t feel any guilt about it. I sometimes experienced a twinge of fear about overturning the chain of events so much my wife might not be available to me in 1990, the year we would meet.

  And always on the periphery of my thoughts about my situation was the wondering what my experiences in Belton the day before my car crash in 2007 meant. According to Annie Bennett, I will bodily travel back to 1933 sometime in 2008. On the one hand, believing she was right was comforting, because it meant I would in fact, return from this time. On this day however, sitting on the lowered tailgate of Girrard Construction's El Camino, my dark attitude whispered to me I would travel to 1933 from the 2008 that proceeded from this timeline. What if I never made returned to 2007, but instead aged from here, until in 2008 I either stumbled upon or had forced upon me the secret to bodily doing what I had done in this case, with only my consciousness making the trip?

  It should be pretty obvious why I was bummed out.

  When I considered all of this, my trip this morning back to 2007 didn't seem so threatening, but instead gave me some hope I would return to my life in the future. But first, I had some loose ends to tie up in 1976. Nodding to myself, the decision made and committed to, I pushed myself off the El Camino's tailgate, collected and walked my lunch trash over to the small fire my Dad's crew had built to burn trash, again amazed at how much things had changed over the years. “Hang on a minute,” I called to the crew's painter, Delray, whose afternoon entertainment of tossing an almost empty bucket of paint thinner into the fire to enjoy the explosion was imminent. I threw my trash in and smiled at him to go for it, and jogged toward the car. I needed to go see someone and have a conversation I'd been putting off.

  25 minutes later I pulled the car into the driveway at home. I found Thelma and Katie in the backyard, my sister sitting on the ground surrounded by her Barbies and their clothes, Thelma sitting on the picnic table sewing something. I'd pulled a couple Cokes from the fridge in the kitchen and held one out to Thelma as I sat down on the bench across the picnic table from her. She nodded for me to set the can down on the table. I did so and popped the ring top on mine, peeling thin slice of aluminum off of the can and laying it on the table.

  “So, what do you know about all this, Thelma?”

  She regarded me over the top of the glasses she wore for reading and close work. “I know you're different from you were before you became 45 years old.”

  “47.”

  “47, right.” Thelma admitted, looking back down to her sewing.

  “Different? How?” I asked, taking a drink of Coke.

  Thelma shrugged. “My Nan passed on 22 years ago. She raised me, after my Mama died having me, and my daddy…” She sighed, not looking up from the sewing, and added, “He ran off.”

  I nodded, interested. I had never heard this story before.

  “Nan dyin' hit me hard. I had my boys, but they were old enough they didn't need me so muc
h anymore, so I didn't handle it well.” Thelma put the sewing down, took off her glasses, opened her can of Coke and tipped her head back for a drink. She glanced over at Katie for a second before continuing.

  “She'd been gone for a month or so, and it was harder and harder to get out of bed in the morning. Today, they'd say I was…’depressed.’ Back then though, I just had the blues. One day, it got to be too much. I had gone into Nan's room to start going through her things, and started to feel real strange. I went to sit down on her bed, but didn't make it down. They told me later I collapsed and hit my head on the night stand.”

  Thelma took another drink of Coke, her eyes looking off into the distance. “Next thing I knew, I was sitting on a bench in the park in Memphis, Tennessee in 1936.” Her eyes turned and she stared at me, daring me to express any disbelief.

  I didn't.

  “Everything about it was real. After a day or two, I just kinda accepted the whole thing and started living day to day. Nan back living again, me younger, I didn't really question any of it, figuring it was God’s will, I guess. Sometimes, I thought maybe I was dead, or I was 20 and had dreamed everything else, but I missed my boys something terrible, and would not believe they were just my imagination.”

  I nodded, understanding her perspective without saying anything, because I wanted to the hear the whole story.

  “At first,” Thelma continued, after another sip of Coke, “I pretty much did what I remembered doing the first time. Going to work at the River Hotel, helping Nan with the washing she took in, whatnot. After a while though, I remembered I was 18 years older than the world thought, and I seemed to be living in my past. I didn’t have to make the same mistakes this time, and so I began to change my life and try some things I hadn't done before. I also did NOT do some other things I HAD done the first time.”

  At this, Thelma glanced over at me and smiled. “I made a few folks pretty upset.” Her smile grew wider. “Once I got going, I loved it. I read books I'd never read before, I quit the hotel and traveled around some, got a job writing for a newspaper! Learned to take photographs.” She kept smiling at the memory.

  “Did you tell anybody what had happened?” I asked.

  “No siree, I did not. Who would have believed me? I’d have been locked me up in a padded room, or worse,” she said.

  “How did it all work out?” I grew hungry for the answer, I could sense was close.

  Thelma paused, thinking, and I saw the smile slowly fade. “You must understand something, Richie. I love my boys. I missed them something terrible, but had made some mistakes the first time I had no intention of repeating, given another chance.” She pursed her lips, turning her face away. I thought I could see the beginnings of a tear forming in the corner of her left eye.

  I realized immediately what she meant. Given the chance to repeat an important part of her life, she made the choice not to be a mother. I found myself nodding, understanding what she had gone through. Thelma had raised two boys, Christopher and Darnell, completely by herself. The boys father clearly being someone who, when given a second chance, Thelma took a “pass” on. Therefore, her alternate past included no Christopher, the Crispus Attucks High School basketball star I'd met once and idolized from then on, and no Darnell, the laughing, always-joking pastry chef who lived in Chicago and had the biggest, most magnificent afro I'd ever seen.

  “How was that?” I asked, ashamed at the stark simplicity of my question.

  “Broke my heart.” She said, looking directly at me. Somehow the tear had disappeared, or maybe had never been on her face in the first place.

  Thelma paused a second and took a last drink of Coke.

  “And healed it.”

  I nodded again, comprehending exactly what she meant, and understanding why on my first day back here, she had asked me what I was back here to do.

  “You got a do-over, and you lived differently,' I said. 'How could you tell I was going through the same kind of thing?”

  Thelma laughed and answered immediately. “You were a man that day, Richie. A dumb-ass boy the day before, but you walked in the house the day you cut school, a man. Everything about you was different.”

  Thelma smiled at me, and continued.

  “I figured out pretty quick what I needed to do different when I got the chance. What are YOU going to change? What HAVE you changed, Richie?”

  Like I hadn’t been thinking about that, I thought.

  “A few things,” I answered hesitantly. “I’m working harder in the gym this summer. Hell, I didn't even GO to the gym all summer my first time in 1976. My leg hurt too much.”

  “Mmm Hmmm,” Thelma responded, in her slightly sarcastic way. “The way I figure, you whined through the next several years, let your messed up leg keep you unhappy, didn't do what you darn well knew you should do, and ended up with a load of regret.”

  Thelma’s words started to sting a little bit, like I had a big red target on my chest and dart after dart, each tipped with truth hit me.

  “You probably settled for a wife, a job and a life and regretted all of it.” The darts kept coming, but the last one was a full sized arrow, but did not represent the truth at all. At least I didn’t think so.

  “I have a wonderful wife, Thelma, and a daughter, Samantha, both I love more than life itself!” My loud, angry voice had upset Katie, who had stopped playing, a Barbie hanging from her right hand, and looked puzzled.

  “You have a wife, Richie?” she asked, not understanding.

  Ah crap.

  “It's okay, sweetie,” Thelma called to my sister. Shaking her head, she said, “Your brother's practicing the lines for one of his plays. That was good, Rich!” she said, pretending to critique my performance. Katie went back to her dolls and Thelma, looking over at my sister, her voice softer now, said, “I didn’t say your character doesn’t love his family, but earlier in the play he settled, didn’t he?” She paused, and continued to gaze at me.

  Silence.

  “In the play, he wanted something different,” she went on, “or at least thought he did, and he settled. Didn’t he? Because he didn’t think he was worthy of what he really wanted.”

  I looked away, gazing at the hoop on the half basketball court my Dad had built for me three years ago.

  “Yes,” I finally answered. “You're right. I…He was incredibly lucky and married well, but settled for something different from what he thought he wanted. And I’m enormously guilty about that. Congratulations, Thelma, you unmasked me as a complete ass.”

  Thelma laughed in derision, snorting. “Oh, please!” She exclaimed. “I thought you'd grown up!” On seeing my puzzled expression, continued. “I tell you, you children of plenty are something else! You have everything, and that seems to be quite distracting, because you fret over the least little things. You're so worried about settling for something less than you deserve, you don't deserve what you settle for!”

  She smiled now, shaking her head in with an intensity making it clear she really, really wanted me to listen. “Richie, this is real, but not real. You can have whatever life you want here, with a loving wife and little girl waiting for you when you wake up from all this.”

  The look on my face must have indicated to her I didn’t understand, so she continued. “Do what you think you should have done all along while you're here, because you won't be here forever. Take your life off into whatever direction you think you should, but be ready to set this one free because you're not going to have this forever. I felt myself nodding slightly, and was starting to understand.”

  “Look, a smart man told me one time that everything that could ever happen, does happen, and sometimes, we get a chance to jump the tracks to another route. Ride that as long as you can, make sure it's pointing in the direction you want, because one day you'll jump back to your own track, and this train will continue on.” Thelma sat back and folded her arms as if to say I’m done.

  I took a breath after a few seconds and answered her. “So, yo
u’re saying we can sometimes travel to alternate realities and influence how events play out, that an entire universe exists for every possible outcome of every possible event, and we can just…surf them?”

  “Okay, I suppose,” Thelma responded, shrugging. “I’m not sure how much control, if any, we have, but okay.”

  “So when my consciousness leaves this reality,” I continued, “a copy is made and goes along, not even realizing I'm not along for the ride any more?”

  Thelma shrugged. “How the hell should I know? I just woke up, back in my own body, in my own time, in this body when my trip in time was over and went on with my life. I'd done the things I always wanted to do and didn't ache for the things I'd only wished I'd done.”

  I considered this, and it somehow seemed right. I hadn't died, and I wasn't in some drunken fever dream from a drug overdose. “How long were you away? How long before you returned to your old life?”

  Thelma gave me a grim smile that didn’t touch her eyes, which held something I realized was sympathy.

  “Almost 30 years.”

  FIVE

  Time Passages

  Thelma's story had hit me hard. 30 years. Holy shit, what if I'm back here for 30 years? Or more? I'd always figured I'd be out of here and back to 2007 in a matter of days, weeks at most. What had happened in the gym earlier had reinforced my belief in that and showed 2007 was a breath away.

  But 30 years is a long, damn time. The thought of spending the next three decades living the 70s, 80s and 90s all over again didn’t hold much charm, especially since it could end at any second. But how is that different from how we live our lives anyway? We expect it to go on and on, but if we think about it, we are aware of our mortality.