by MK Alexander
“Jumping from the past probably. Such would be quite disturbing to anyone.”
“Why is that?”
“Try to imagine for yourself. Perhaps one moment you are in your kitchen making morning coffee. Someone grabs you and a moment later it is late at night and you are somewhere else entirely… And there is the searing pain.”
“Searing pain?”
“Yes. It feels as if every part of your body has burst into flame and then has been frozen solid. A most unpleasant experience. This sort of travel wrecks havoc on the nervous system.”
“How do you survive this searing pain?”
“It lasts for the briefest of moments… if you expect this, you can cope with it. If you are unawares, well, I suppose your body goes into a kind of shock.”
“Why were they killed then?”
“Surely you’ve noticed that they are all the same. The same age, the same appearance…blond, pretty, fit…”
“Yes.”
“This man is hunting them, but he lacks knowledge about my past. He is fishing, if you’ll forgive the word… Getting closer to whom I hold dear… and eventually succeeding, I will add.”
“Does he know he’s succeeded?”
“It’s difficult to say with certainty.”
“Did you know these women?”
“Who?”
“Clara and Debra, the first two victims.”
“Not in the slightest.” Fynn turned to face me with a serious expression. “These were attempts to close in on the correct victim, I believe. This man, my adversary, tries to do me harm by killing the people I care for most: my wife and my daughter Anika— though his knowledge of my past is somewhat limited. He is forced to make suppositions. These women fit the profile for Lorraine: the correct age, the correct location, and their physical similarities…”
“So… Clara and Debra, they were just sort of hapless victims, caught in a crossfire?”
“Apparently.”
“You must have really pissed this guy off.”
Fynn flashed some anger. “This guy as you call him is a monster. He hasn’t a shred of humanity left in him. His brutality is something little experienced in your modern world.”
“And he’s after you.”
“It would seem so.”
“Okay, so how do I help?”
“I’m not entirely convinced you’re ready to help.”
Wait, did he just shut me down?
I tried to look at all this through the lens of mental health. No doubt Fynn was suffering from something, though it didn’t seem to be a straight-up psychosis or schizophrenia. He didn’t seem especially paranoid, or hear voices in his head. No hallucinations as far as I could tell… I took a long evening to do a bit of checking. Psychiatric stuff. I sifted through hundreds of acronyms, PPD, NPD, BD, SPD… most of them seemed to end in Disorder. In the infamous DSM-IV, I found DD or delusional disorder. It seemed to be the best fit for his symptoms:
Non-bizarre delusions (i.e., involving situations that occur in real life, such as being followed, poisoned, infected, loved at a distance, deceived by spouse or lover, or having a disease) of at least 1 month’s duration.
Well, maybe not non-bizarre. Time travel? Alternate realities? It hadn’t been a month yet either… maybe he’d come around in the next week or so. I read some more:
Apart from the impact of the delusion(s) or its ramifications, functioning is not markedly impaired and behavior is not obviously odd or bizarre.
This seemed true enough and was somehow comforting. I wasn’t quite ready to break the news to Durbin yet. Soon though, as soon as I was able to dismiss the very idea that I had experienced a different timeline. Two other murders? No one else, especially Durbin, ever gave an inkling that something like this had occurred. No, I had fallen into Fynn’s madness, temporarily. He had convinced me things had happened which hadn’t. But how? And why was he so damn convincing? Still, somebody cleaned out our morgue… including all the files for July 1977. Maybe his delusion isn’t so harmless after all? Not if Fynn is busy sabotaging files for Lorraine Luis… Whoa, who’s getting paranoid now? I caught myself.
***
On the other side of it all, Fynn was proving to be a very popular figure in town. He had a natural charm, an ease with people. He had a robust, hearty laugh and it came easily. People liked him. They liked to talk to him. He liked to listen. He was larger than life and something of a local celebrity now. I found it all pretty annoying. Maybe I was just plain old jealous. Even Durbin was completely enamored by Inspector Fynn: “This guy is awesome. Smartest guy I ever met, and a very laid back boss…” he told me over lunch at the Land Ho Bar and Grill last Tuesday. And then there was the Policeman’s Ball. Durbin thought it was a great idea. I had my doubts.
“Yes, a Policeman’s Ball!” Fynn said with great enthusiasm.
“A what?”
“It is a tradition in my country to hold an annual dance. There is nothing quite like it.”
“Do you mean the Secret Policeman’s Ball?” I asked.
“No, no, there is nothing secret about it. Everyone is invited.”
“Did Durbin say okay to this?”
“He has. In fact he seems quite enthused. He has offered his help in arranging it all. You will give me a mention then, in your newspaper?”
“Of course… when’s it scheduled for?”
“June, the last week, sadly, just before I depart.”
I couldn’t help but mention there was something tasteless about the idea. Fynn seemed slightly offended until I used the words murder, wife and dancing in the same sentence.
“Yes, you do make a valid point, Patrick. I’m sure everything will be fixed or solved well before then.”
Maybe this should be all about boundaries. I’d help Inspector Fynn with this murder, if I could. It seemed very real to me, whatever the cause, but no time travel nonsense, okay? Not that I actually said this out loud to Fynn. Call it cowardice, call it compassion. Still, I kept getting sucked in. Apparently, he still had lots to explain. Our friendship continued. We often went on long walks, Fridays or not. I was beginning to fear that my very spring would be ruined. I will admit that part of me was increasingly less interested in what he had to say, happy enough to go along with my regular, mundane existence. Our conversations always seemed a bit unsettling. And after a while, I actually tried to avoid him. I felt a growing unease. Something was not quite right and I couldn’t put my finger on it.
I also learned that Fynn’s delusion was incredibly elaborate— harmless I still hoped, and it did not seem to interfere with any of his official duties. I still felt compelled to spill my guts to Durbin, but always thought better of the idea when I was just about to. I wrestled with this on a daily basis now: Should I tell Durbin? Or more properly, when should I tell him? Did Fynn’s eccentricity affect his job performance? Was it really harmless? I had concluded that the inspector sought no gain from his crazy ramblings. He didn’t seem to have a particular agenda other than solving the Sunset Park murder. And he never seemed to engage in ad hoc embellishing. He never once gave me an off-the-cuff response to questions I would pose. He always had a patient, coherent reply, and he never seemed flustered.
One Saturday, we hiked around Kettle Pond, four and a half miles of bog, brambles and soggy shoreline.
“What about the Grandfather Paradox? You know, if you go back in time and kill your own grandfather you’d never be born…”
“And why would I do such a thing?”
“I’m just saying, like by accident…” I stopped along the edge of the pond. “Wait, you’re a time traveler and you don’t know about the Grandfather Paradox?”
“Apparently not. Please explain.”
“Okay, it goes like this: you’re in the present and you build a time machine that lets you travel to the past. You go back and kill your grandfather. As a consequence, your dad is never born and neither are you. So the paradox is: how could you build the time machine in the
first place if you were never born?”
“Ah yes, this is like reverse causality. It presupposes that there is only one past, one present and one future. As I’ve undoubtedly mentioned, the past changes the future. There is no paradox. If I kill my grandfather, I would not exist and I would have no awareness. It’s as simple as that.” He paused to consider. “Besides, I don’t think I can travel to a place before I was born.”
“Have you ever tried?”
“No, not really,” he admitted. “Perhaps I should jump back to the Cretaceous and ride atop a brontosaurus?”
“You probably mean an apatosaurus... and the Jurassic Period.”
Fynn looked at me oddly. “I defer to your superior knowledge.”
On a more practical matter, I asked him how that Pontiac was in a garage for the last forty years.
“Oh, well, I bought the building sometime ago...”
That wasn’t a lie at least. No, this delusion was coherent and well thought out. I could find no gaps in it. Still, I didn’t believe a word he said. I’ll admit, sometimes I’d play along, just to see how far he’d go… to see if he’d slip-up or make some unsustainable, ridiculous claim. He never did though. At least it seemed that way to me. I remember once I asked him why he was so old.
“So old?”
“Sorry, I didn’t really mean it like that.”
“Of course not. I don’t take it personally.” Fynn gave off a broad smile. “It’s simply because I’ve been here for a long time.”
“Here?”
“In this present, in this life. I’ve been here since the early sixties.”
“And why is that?”
“Ah, my third rule of travel: Stay as long as you can.”
“Wait, I’m not sure you ever told me the second rule.”
“No, I don’t believe I have.” Fynn smiled again. “They are in no particular order. Another day I will tell you.”
“So why now, this present?”
“Why not? It’s a very interesting time… men to the moon, an explosion of technology… and we are on the verge of… well, enough said for now...”
“Wait a second, you can’t just leave me hanging like that.”
“The future is always changing. It may only be a phantom place… not a future you will experience.”
“Okay then, tell me more about your third rule of travel, stay as long as you can…”
“This is purely for selfish reasons, for my own well-being, my mental hygiene. I have learned that some continuity in one’s life is rather important.”
“How so?”
“If I flitter from here to there, it all gets rather muddled. It’s not a proper life at all.”
I half-hoped that I’d catch Fynn some day. Find some inconsistency in his story, in his reasoning or logic… something to pin my old reality on. I never could though. His delusion was perfect, flawless, and thoroughly cogent. It just wasn’t true. It couldn’t be. And it wasn’t so much that I was out to get him. I didn’t really want to catch him in a lie or a mistake, or confront him. No, he was too sweet of a guy for that. It was all about me. I wanted to convince myself that everything was normal, that my own life was on course and predictable. But how could his delusion be so damn impeccable? In the end, I guess, it was so perfect, I didn’t want to be the one who sent it all crashing down. The stuff he said, crazy stuff like:
“I spent some time as a monk in the ninth century, copying manuscripts. It was in Ireland.”
“How was that?”
“Rather tedious. And there were the Vikings of course… always attacking, pillaging, quite bothersome.”
“Did you ever, you know, die?”
“No, that is rule five: Avoid dying at all costs. I will say though, I have come very close. Once I had to ask my enemy for a last wish. I was quite sure it was the end of me.”
“What happened?”
“I was involved in a minor skirmish during the Saxon Wars.”
“When was that?”
“Under Charlemagne… I was mortally wounded, at the very edge of death. I had to convince my foe to push me down a ravine instead of stabbing me through the heart with his sword— as a dying request. This enemy laughed, but he complied, and I slipped away from my own death. Libra lapsus saved me. Surely, not a place I wish to revisit. This saved my life of course...”
“Of course… wait, does that mean you died in that life?”
“Not at all. I simply left.”
“So, you’re immortal.”
“I am extremely long-lived, but not immortal. Think of it this way: I am a very old man dying of some terrible plague. My end is imminent, but at the last moment I back-jump to a previous self, say to a self who is only twenty-odd years old. Here I live again, and I can travel again, forward or back. In this sense I am immortal, however I can be injured or killed.”
“You can be killed?”
“Any number of ways, a gun, a knife, an accident. Just like anyone else. In this sense I am mortal.”
“What happens if you do die?” I asked.
“Pardon?”
“When you die, actually die, what happens to all your other selves.”
“I do not know. What happens when you die?” Fynn looked at me.
“What?”
“If you were to be hit by the proverbial bus tomorrow. What would happen to your past self, your present self, or your future self?”
“I don’t know.”
“We are the same then.”
“Wait a second here… Say you died right now. Isn’t there still a past self out there who hasn’t jumped forward yet? And when that time comes, would you exist… or exist again?”
“An interesting thought, but no. I live only in the present. I believe it is my awareness that is unstuck in time. If I die, my awareness goes kaput, and this would ripple through time completely. I would cease to exist everywhere.”
“Yeah. Me too, I guess.” I tried to think about this. “Still, you must have died at least once. All the different you’s can’t still be alive, not for two thousand plus years.”
“This is a misunderstanding. From your frame of reference they are the past, indeed, the very distant past, but for me, they are virtually concurrent presents. I can return to them as I wish.”
“As you wish?”
“More or less, given the extent of my traveling prowess and the constraints of libra lapsus.”
“Constraints?”
“There are limits to these abilities. I cannot jump too far without breaking both my legs, eh?”
I wasn’t really sure what he meant. “So... what, how far you jump actually matters?”
“Very much so, duration and direction. These are the keys to free fall.”
“And that’s what makes you slip between different timelines?”
“Yes. As I’ve no doubt mentioned, I have lived many hundreds of lives.”
“Do you remember them all?”
“No. Such would be impossible, though I have memories from many of them.”
***
To top it all off I started having doubts about my own life. Things seemed slightly different, slightly off kilter. There was nothing definite, nothing I could point to exactly, but I knew that my reality was fraying at the edges.
Was I dating Alyson again? Apparently. Why was she calling me almost every day now, leaving cute messages on my phone? It had something to do with adopting Roxy the terrier. I also found sticky notes from her on my sliders, the door to my apartment. It was almost like having an invisible stalker. During the day, especially in the office, I questioned everything. Is that the Frank Gannon I always knew? Was he different somehow? Why is he wearing a Diamondbacks cap today? Frank, have you ever even been to Arizona?
I was on my way into the office and came up to him in the parking lot. Frank was rummaging around in his beat-up Subaru wagon, looking for something. There was a rusty old bike rack on the roof but it was empty. I peeked into the backseat… kind of shoc
king really, it was a rolling hovel. I started to wonder how his kids even fit back there.
“Hey Frank, what’s up… how are the kids?”
“The kids?”
“Your kids.”
“My kids?”
“Don’t you have two kids in middle school?”
“Oh, those kids… they’re fine.”
“That’s good…”
“Hey listen, Patrick, how many pages do I have this week?”
“The usual four… Why? Do you need more?”
“No, four is good… it was a slow week in the sports world.”
Joey Jegal came up to me in the parking lot as well. “What I wouldn’t give for a beached whale right about now…” he said, grinning.
“What are you talking about, Joey?”
“Just for an easy story… lots of photos, lots of quotes, all warm and fuzzy… you know, fill up five, six pages in less than an hour.”
“I’m not sure warm and fuzzy and beached whale go together, but I know what you mean.”
Filling up the Chronicle with news was not always easy. There were weeks when hardly anything happened in Sand City, and that seemed especially true in the month of March. There’s also a no man’s land when it comes to weeklies. We go to press on Thursday nights and hit the streets on Friday morning. Anything that happens between then and the next Wednesday is already old news. That made competing with a daily like the Fairhaven Times pretty difficult. To counter that, all we had was the website update. It almost made us like a daily. What Eleanor Woods wholly failed to appreciate was how the Chronicle site was like guerrilla warfare against the Times. Oh sure, their story might come out the next morning, but we could update on the hour if necessary. If something big happened in Sand City, most people would turn to the Chronicle Online Edition rather than wait till the next morning for the Times.
Eleanor called Joey and I in for an update, a rundown on next week’s issue. She sat back in her chair and lit a cigarette.
“Are we looking for a front page, or back page stuff?” I asked.
“I’ll be happy for anything at this point.”
“Okay, let’s see…” I took out my skinny notebook and started through the pages. “New chef for the Governor’s Inn... Pierre Escobar, schooled at the famed Institute Pâté de Terre… Former chef, Hans Souci, has moved onto bigger and better things, notably, he’s taken the position of manager at the Clam Shack. Oh yeah, and there’s Clam Shack Adds New Staff.”