“This is the Mojave desert. Northwest of the Kelso Sand Dunes.”
“Oh.” I sip cautiously at my tea. “I brought your tortoise back.” He grunts. I consider him as he settles into the chair by the table. He looks in pretty good shape for his age. Sixty? Sixty-five maybe? “It was pretty far,” I add.
“You fishing for a thank you?” The man’s eyes are hard.
“Well it wouldn’t hurt. You could have lost your tortoise.”
“I knew you’d bring him.”
“How could you know that?”
The man pauses his mug on the way to his mouth and stares at me. “You once tried to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a rabbit that you hit with your car. You were definitely going to bring the tortoise.”
“I’ve never told anybody about that,” I say. I look at the man’s face closely. “If you know that, then that means WE once tried to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a rabbit.”
The man sips his tea and sets his mug back down on the table. “No comment.”
I lean forward. “So that’s it? You’re me?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No.” The man stands and pours the rest of his tea into the sink. He sets the mug down and walks to the door. He swings it open and gestures for me to leave.
“That’s it?” I set my mug down on the floor and stand up. “Have some tea and now get out?”
“Just walk outside, will you?” The man jerks his head toward the porch. I stride past him and off the porch to the front of the shack. The sunrise is just dawning over the distant hills. I walk a few yards and then spin to face him. He sidles out of the shack and closes the door behind him. He descends a step, and leans against a roof support as he considers me.
I put my hands to my hips. “So what now?”
He looks me up and down. “I forgot what an impatient little shit I was.”
I scowl back. “So you are me.”
“No.”
“No? That’s it? No? You care to elaborate on that a bit, man?”
“You know, you should be more polite to the people whose beds you steal.”
I look down at the ground for a moment, considering my response before I look back up at him. “You know? Okay. Yes. Thank you for the use of the bed. But you should understand why I’m a little tense. I’m not exactly having a great life right now. I just had what is unequivocally the worst day of my life and my only hope of salvaging it was a photo you left in a tortoise. I walked forever in a God-forsaken desert to try to find some help, and you were nowhere to be found. So I’m sorry if I dirtied up your bed sheets or whatever, but I didn’t exactly have a lot of options.”
The man straightens up and steps the rest of the way off the porch. “I know.”
“You know? That’s right, but you’re not me, so I can just figure out how you know from the complete lack of sense you’re making, right?”
“We’re the same person,” the man says. “I am Benjamin Travers.”
“Okay, so you are now,” I say.
“But I’m still not you.”
I cock my head and stare at him. He’s not making any sense.
“The life you’ve had and the life I’ve had were the same up to a certain point,” he says.
“So what happened?”
“Some of the decisions I made were . . . different.”
“When?” I ask.
The man walks toward me. “You’re here because you have a problem to solve. Let’s concentrate on you.” I look into his serious brown eyes. My eyes. This is so surreal.
“Okay.” I drop my hands to my sides. “So you can help me?”
“Yeah. Come on. We’re going for a walk.”
“Um, okay.” I hesitate. “You mind if I use your bathroom first? You’d think I’d have sweat out all my fluids yesterday, but my bladder begs to differ.”
“Outhouse is around back.”
I find the wooden outhouse to be tidy and clean with a half-moon vent hole in the door like old west cartoons. There’s no faucet to wash up with, but there’s a plastic gallon jug of water, a basin with a towel, and a mirror. I look at the young man in the mirror. My face is smeared with dirt in vertical lines from sweat. Another smear of dirt angles across my cheek from where I must have wiped my nose at some point. You’re looking pretty rough, Benjamin.
I pour some of the water into my hands and splash my face. It takes three attempts till I approach any form of cleanliness. Even then, my face leaves brown stains on the hand towel. I look myself over again. Better than nothing. Those eyes stare back at me. Not the eyes of a killer after all. The eyes of a failure. I see Francesca with a gun to her head, the spray of blood spattering the chair as Blake gets shot, Malcolm coughing smoke as he’s surrounded by flames. Is there anything you didn’t screw up? I think about Dr. Quickly and his encouraging smile as we’d master new lessons. He wouldn’t be very happy with me now. I burnt his lab down with my blundering attempt at a rescue mission. And Mym . . . how would she feel if she knew I was the one who cost her father everything?
I stop myself and shove open the door, taking in the rickety building and the desolate landscape. No wonder I end up alone in a desert.
The older me is waiting around the front of the shack with a pair of canteens. He hands me one to carry.
“So what do I call you?” I ask. “Do we both just refer to each other as Ben?”
The man looks at me and shrugs. “People started calling me Benji later on in my life.”
“Benji?” I say. “I always despised being called that. Sounded like the dog.”
“It grew on me after a while,” he says.
“What was her name?”
He grunts, and continues walking.
“Okay. Better you than me, I guess.” She must have been a looker.
He leads the way into the trackless desert. I dodge around tufts of scraggly brush and other low sparse vegetation that’s too stubborn to just wither and die. After about the fifth dune, we descend onto a flat expanse of hard dirt that’s free of vegetation. From the structure of the hills around the perimeter, I realize that it was likely a lake at some point. Half a dozen fifty-five gallon drums sit rusting, spaced seemingly at random around the perhaps hundred yard circle. Benji sets his canteen down, then turns to face me. “Why didn’t you kill Stenger?”
I’m taken aback by his question. “Um. Well, there were lots of reasons.” My mind flashes back to the lab. “I wasn’t armed, for one. He had this woman with him who had a gun.”
“You could have stopped him, but you didn’t.”
“No. I couldn’t. I mean we tried . . . Blake and I had him cornered, but that’s when the woman with the gun showed up. She shot Blake. And they had Francesca. They somehow got the drop on us and grabbed her.”
“And you didn’t save her.”
“Look, I tried! I went up to search the third floor, and I found Malcolm, but it was a trap. They had the whole room rigged to burn as soon as someone went in there. There was no way out.”
“So you just left.” Benji’s expression shows no sign of mercy.
“No! I mean I left, but I left to get help. If you just brought me out here to remind me how awful of a job I did, and that I failed miserably, you could have saved your breath. I know I screwed up. I know I failed. My friends were counting on me and—” I feel tears coming on. I stop talking and stare at the ground. My body is shaking again.
Benji takes a step toward me. “Why didn’t you stop Stenger?”
“I couldn’t . . .”
He steps closer and puts his index finger to the center of my forehead. He pushes my head up till I’m looking him in the eyes.
“You didn’t stop Stenger because you didn’t believe you could.”
I sniff. “How could I?”
He looks me over. “You say you were unarmed. What’s that thing on your wrist, decoration?”
I look at my chronometer. “Well I use it, but it’s not a weapon
.”
“Isn’t it?” Benji stares into my eyes again. “Your problem is you need to readjust your concept of ‘possible.’”
I consider my chronometer. Does it have some sort of function I don’t know about?
“So what do I do?”
“You learn to use that thing like it’s meant to be used.” He walks past the drum and picks up a rock the size of a baseball. Setting it on the drum, he then reaches into his pocket. He pulls out a chronometer and fastens it to his right wrist. The sun glints off the stainless steel as he dials the settings. He’s holding something else small with the fingers of his left hand, but I can’t make out what it is. He picks up the rock with his chronometer hand and strides forward a few steps toward the open expanse of lakebed.
“I want you to see something.” He holds his arm back to hurl the rock, does a quick crow-hop and then throws, but just as he’s releasing the rock, he vanishes. I watch the rock sail through the air. It arcs upward and then plunges downward about forty yards from me. It gathers speed. It never hits the ground. Six feet before impact, Benji reappears with his hand around it, and drops onto his feet with a light thump.
I realize my mouth is hanging open, and close it. Benji walks back to me, giving the stone a casual toss in the air and catching it again. When he gets to me, he’s smiling at my shock. “That was a little sample for you.”
“That was incredible,” I stammer, as he hands me the rock. “How—”
“That is what you need to learn. Well, not the rock throwing trick. That one takes years to master. But you’re going to learn the ‘how.’” I turn the rock over in my hands. It’s nothing special. “So what did you notice about that little maneuver?” Benji is watching my face for my response.
“Um, for starters, your anchor was flying through the air . . . and you never actually touched your chronometer.”
“Good. I was hoping you’d pick up on that.” He extends his left hand and shows me a tiny white tube with a button on the end.
“What is that?”
“It’s a remote switch. It actuates your chronometer’s pin function wirelessly.”
“Wow. That’s awesome.” I take the remote from his palm and examine it.
“But let’s get back to your other observation,” Benji says. “The rock was flying through the air. Why is that relevant?”
“For one, you weren’t grounded to anything,” I say. “Don’t you need to be electrically grounded for the chronometer to work?”
“No. And I’ll tell you why. The chronometer needs to be temporally grounded. The electrical ground is a method of conveying the gravitites and activating them with current, but the chronometer only needs a ground in time, to get you back where you need to be in space.”
“So my anchor doesn’t need to be electrically grounded.”
“Nope. The chronometer just needs to be able to connect to something that’s not full of gravitites.”
“So as long as my anchor is gravitite free, I could be flying through the air and it would still be able to make the jump.”
“Exactly.”
“What happens if I activate the chronometer when there isn’t something grounded in time to connect to?”
“You don’t want to do that.”
“What happens?”
Benji scratches the whiskers on his chin a moment before speaking. “That’s actually a matter of some debate. Some people say you stop existing.”
“Whoa. Really?”
“If you think about it, if you have something that can be displaced from the stream of time, and then you displace it without any means of getting it back . . . there’s no real reason why you should hope to see it again. You’ve stopped existing in time.”
“Where do you go?”
“I don’t know. People talk about it. Some people say you’re just gone. Some people claim there is space that exists without time. They call it the Neverwhere. There are some people who say that’s what the afterlife is. It sounds like a bunch of swill to me, but I guess it’s possible. I’m old enough to know better than to think I have all the answers.”
“You ever know anybody who’s done it? Gone to the Neverwhere?”
“None that ever came back. I don’t recommend trying it. You’d do better to learn how to stick around here on the planet first.”
“So what do I do? How do I learn to use this thing better?”
“Let’s see what you’ve got,” Benji replies. “Show me a jump.”
“Where?”
“Use one of the barrels. Use that one.” He points.
I walk to the indicated barrel and look at my chronometer. “How far do you want me to go?”
“A few seconds is plenty,” he says.
“Okay.”
I find the seconds ring on my chronometer and dial it to three seconds. I look to the side of it and check my directional slider to make sure it is on forward. Satisfied with that, I place my chronometer hand firmly on the lip of the barrel and take a breath. I reach my other hand over to the pin. Here we go. I blink.
“How was that?” I say.
“Fine, except I about nodded off while I waited. I think my beard got a little longer, too.”
“Oh.”
“I want you to try it at a run.”
“What?”
“Running. You know, that thing that you do that’s faster than walking.”
“Okay. I mean . . . I’ve never done that before.”
Benji points away from the barrel. “Start over there.” I walk to the specified spot. “Do five seconds this time, but I want you to set your chronometer while you’re running.”
“Okay.” I look at my chronometer and mentally find the knob for seconds. Yeah okay. I can do this.
“Go!” Benji yells.
I start running, but immediately have to slow to a quick trot as I try to dial the seconds ring over two marks. I manage it, but realize I’m barely jogging when I finish. Speeding back up, I concentrate on the barrel. I have to do a couple of stutter steps upon reaching it. I slap my chronometer hand down onto the barrel, and with my right hand over my chronometer, push the pin. I stagger a little as I reappear, and then slow to a stop a couple of yards from the barrel. I turn to look at Benji. He’s appraising me with his arms crossed.
“Like that?” I ask.
“Yeah. Though I’m pretty sure Cheeto could have done it faster.”
“Who’s Cheeto?”
“Cheeto’s the tortoise.”
“You named your tortoise after a cheese snack?” I ask, slightly out of breath.
“What would you name your tortoise?”
“I don’t really—”
“Yeah. Thought so. Get back over there.” He points again.
This time he has me regress to a two-second jump and I manage to do it a little quicker. When I’m finished, Benji doesn’t comment, but only gestures to the starting point. He holds up four fingers. Four seconds. Got it. I run. I get progressively faster over my next half dozen attempts. Just before my seventh attempt, he calls out to me.
“Do five minutes this time.”
“Okay.” I take a deep breath and start into a run. My legs are moving smoothly and I’m able to find the five-minute mark and set it without breaking stride. I slap the top of the barrel and squeeze the pin in one fluid motion. Smiling, I trot to a stop and turn to face Benji. I’m staring off into the desert. I spin around and see the barrel has moved about seventy yards, and Benji is still back near the start point, leaning against another barrel and sipping his canteen.
“You think you’re pretty funny, don’t you?” I yell. I walk back, dripping sweat onto the dry, caked ground. When I reach Benji, he hands me my canteen.
“That’s better. Now I want you to try jumping it.”
“The whole barrel?”
“Yeah. I want you to leapfrog over it and blink while you’re jumping,” he says.
“Okay. I’ll try.”
“Don’t try it. Do it. I’
m sixty-four and I could still jump that, easy.”
“Okay Yoda. I’ll do it.”
Benji smirks at me.
I run various drills till mid-morning. By the time Benji lets up on me, my clothes are soaked with sweat and my canteen is empty. Benji looks at the sun creeping its way higher into the sky and then nods toward the path. “Okay. Let’s head back. We’ll get some food in us and then keep going.”
Cheeto has worked his way around the room and is peering out from under the bed when we walk back into the shack. Benji gestures me to the chair by the table and I slump into it gratefully. He sets a cup and the pickle jar of water in front of me. I pour myself a glass as he rummages through cupboards.
“Looks like I’m out of eggs.” He grabs a box of cereal out of the cupboard and after consulting the side of it briefly, sets it down on the table, but keeps a grip on it. “I’ll be right back.” I barely have time to see his hand go to his chronometer when he disappears. Seconds later he walks back in the front door, holding a paper bag under his arm. He sets it on the counter.
“What . . . where did you go?” I say.
“Grocery store. What does it look like?” He unloads items onto the counter.
I grab the cereal box and look at it. A photo of a grocery store aisle is taped to the side. Cereal boxes line the shelves but one is sticking out at an odd angle. I recognize the labeling that’s the same as the one in my hand.
“You’re really something else, you know that?” I say. Benji piles handfuls of some sort of grass out of a bag onto a plate. He adds a handful of spinach, then walks over and sets the plate in front of the tortoise. When he comes back to the kitchen, he reaches into the bag and pulls out a carton of eggs. “Where’s the grocery store around here?”
“Tacoma.”
“Washington?”
“Finding a grocery store that will let you keep a gravitizer on the premises is harder than it sounds.”
“Oh. Yeah. I guess that would be an awkward conversation.” I watch him rummaging around the bag. “Hey, you mind if I ask you something?”
“Maybe.”
“How did you end up here? What’s with the desert existence?”
He pulls a bowl out of the cabinet and begins cracking eggs into it. “I like the desert. It’s peaceful.”
In Times Like These: eBook Boxed Set: Books 1-3 Page 38