by MK Alexander
“We will have to plan a visit then.”
“We could check for fingerprints,” I said.
“On her sculpture?”
“We might get lucky.”
“After almost forty years? It’s highly doubtful. And why should we want to in the first place?”
“To prove your story. It would be hard evidence. Prints that match?”
“I have nothing to prove, Patrick. Perhaps you do though.”
“Well, there’s this too.” I took a single folded sheet from my pocket and put it on the chief’s desk.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“Birth certificate for Lorraine Luis.”
“Well done… but how does it help us?”
“We could match the toe print,” I suggested, “to… um, the victim.”
“To what end?”
“That would be absolute proof that she is Lorraine Luis, and that she disappeared thirty-six years ago.”
The inspector eyed me. “Again, to what end? It is a certainty that they are the same person.”
“Well, Durbin…”
Fynn laughed a little. “I am sure that would be quite disturbing to the good detective. Yet how would it help solve this crime… or prevent it?”
“But it proves everything you’ve been saying.”
“I see…” He passed a glance at me. “You are in need of proof then.”
He was right but I had no reply. Another expert two-step. Another way to keep his delusion intact. My mind shifted into gear… how was I going to get a toe print off a corpse? I sort of knew Willard at the funeral home… not as well as Pagor… maybe a distraction… an ink pad… some paper… some excuse to take photographs... I’d have to think this through. They had probably already moved the body to Fairhaven, to the county morgue, or worse.
chapter 16
libra lapsus
Eleanor tossed a copy of the Fairhaven Times onto my desk. She gave me that look. Well, maybe a bit more. She seemed angry.
“What?” I asked.
“Page sixteen,” she said
I flipped through and found a feature article on Inspector Fynn. I looked right to the byline: Jack Leaning.
“How did they beat us to this story, Patrick? Your story. I thought you had a rapport with the man.”
“Well, I do… sorry, my bad…” I looked over the article. “Hmm...”
“What?” Eleanor asked sharply.
“The phrase Leaning uses here… and in quotes: ‘bachelor detective...’ I was under the impression that Fynn was married.”
Eleanor insisted that I do a big feature on Detective Chief Inspector Tractus Fynn, at least a three page spread. I don’t know why I had any hesitation, but I did. I don’t know why I procrastinated. This was the perfect story for me, and for the Chronicle. It was a strange reluctance. Maybe I was avoiding him.
I met Fynn on a Friday at the elementary school and made a conscious decision not to talk about murder or any other crimes, or anything else for that matter. He had just finished giving a talk to the kids about Interpol and seemed to be in a great mood as usual. The school had emptied out already, oddly it seemed almost abandoned. Most of the lights in the rooms and the corridors were switched off. Hardly a teacher roamed the halls. Okay, maybe I was more than ten minutes late this time. I found the inspector in a darkened classroom, 4B. Only half a bank of florescent lights were still on. He was sitting on the teacher’s desk in front of a large old fashioned blackboard, well, it was more of a greenish color.
“Patrick, good to see you.”
“Sorry I’m late.”
“That means very little to me.” He laughed broadly.
“How did it go?”
“Hmm?”
“With the fifth graders.”
“Very well. A promising group of youngsters to be sure. No particular interest in modern policing methods though… There were a great many questions about tulips and wooden shoes, and who stuck their finger in the dyke.”
“Who did?”
“Hans Brinker of course, yet he is not Dutch at all.”
“Um…” I chuckled, then paused uncomfortably. Somehow this was business, not personal. “I need to do a story on you for the paper. An interview with a photo… you know, kind of introduce you to the community.”
“Of course,” Fynn said and smiled, then asked, “Is a photograph really necessary?”
“Absolutely.”
“Very well.”
“This is good.” I took out my camera and framed a shot of Fynn against the chalkboard. He was sitting, giving an official looking smile; his hands on either side grasped the edge of the desk. Behind him I could make out two words written against the green board: “Libra Lapsus.” I snapped off a bunch of shots, the flash fired. I lowered my camera and looked at the writing again. Libra Lapsus was chalked out in neat letters and underneath that there seemed to be a complex equation written out, like something you’d see in a physics lab. It made absolutely no sense to me. It had all kinds of capital letters that were squared, or subtracted from, or divided by… I noticed more than a few Greek letters also.
“Well, you have my press sheet, my biography,” Fynn said with a certain reluctance. “There is a Wiki page… and of course we’ve had many a conversation already. I don’t know what else your readers should want to know about me.”
“Some personal details, maybe.”
“Personal details? I’d rather not talk about—”
“Not personal personal. More like, what’s your favorite…?”
“My favorite what?”
“You know, your favorite… um, sports team, favorite food, favorite wine maybe… do you read books? Watch movies… that kind of thing.”
“Ah, trivia.”
“Well, I guess.”
“I prefer a strong wine, red, a burgundy, though merlot will do in a pinch. My favorite cheese is probably muenster, or feta perhaps. And I never drink cheap scotch.”
“You sound like the most interesting man in the world.”
“Pardon?”
“What kind of beer do you like?”
“I rarely partake. A lager, I suppose.” He looked at me. “Do you need to write this down?”
“No, I’m good.”
“Well then…if there’s nothing else?” The inspector lowered himself to the floor carefully, and walked towards the front of the classroom.
I took the bait. “What’s that on the board?”
“Ah… Libra Lapsus. Free Fall. You were curious about how I traveled.” Fynn turned and smiled at me. “If you have the time, I thought I might enlighten you.”
“Are you prepared to demonstrate today?”
The inspector’s dark eyes flashed. He smiled again. “No, not today…”
My disappointment was obvious.
“Patrick, traveling in time takes a bit of caution, some planning even. It’s not something that can be done just willy-nilly.”
“Okay.”
“There are consequences… a chain of causality…” he began to make excuses.
“If you were to travel now, and I’m just saying hypothetically... What would it look like? To me, I mean.”
“It depends where I go.”
“What?”
“If I traveled to the future… right now… to you it would seem as if I just vanished. Pop,” he said and snapped his fingers. “I would be gone. I would disappear.”
“Cool.”
“Indeed… If I were to travel to the past. You might notice nothing unusual. Nothing at all.”
“Why’s that?”
“By traveling to the past, this exact present is inexorably altered. It would be as if I had never arrived here. Most people would have no conscious memory of me. Recall what I said? The past changes the present.” Fynn gave me a huge grin. “Of course you seem to be exempt from this.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your peculiar memory.”
“Right…”
> “But for most others, it would certainly seem as if I never existed.”
“I sort of understand that part. But why would you disappear if you traveled to the future?”
“Well, we have a history together. We have a past, memories, a relationship of sorts. And we are sharing this present moment. If I were to leave… all your memories, our history, would remain intact. But, we would not be sharing the present any longer. So to you, it would seem like I vanished into thin air.”
“What does it seem like to you?”
“Pardon?”
“When you travel. What’s it like on your end?”
“Again, it depends on which mode of travel I employ. Each experience is distinctly different. One is an almost pleasant feeling, the other is quite the opposite.”
“But what’s it like? Flashing lights, swirling colors, a tunnel, a vortex or something?”
“No, nothing so dramatic. One second I’m here, the next I’m there.” Fynn paused. “Funny you should ask this; I usually close my eyes when I jump.”
I was disappointed again.
“Yet in either case, in order to travel, I need to be in free fall.”
“Yeah… what is that exactly?”
“I must be physically off the Earth… even if for the briefest of moments or the smallest of distances.”
“Really?” I tried to think what he meant. “Like a jump or something?”
“Exactly this. My feet must not be touching the planet.”
“I don’t know… sounds pretty weird to me.”
“I agree whole-heartedly. But remember my story? The first time I traveled was in the moment I let go of the rope and fell into the river with a splash.”
I couldn’t help but think back on the crazy story Fynn had told me on the beach. Hoplites and Centurions? Really? I had a hard time imagining him as a young man, let alone a small boy hanging from a rope and swinging around his idyllic river glen.
“Why you?” I asked.
“Ha… such a question. I don’t know. There is something wrong with my atoms, I suppose. They are entangled in some strange way.”
“Entangled?”
“You’ve not heard of quantum entanglement?”
“I’ve heard of it, but my physics is a little lacking.”
“Well, perhaps this sort of thing happens to people all the time. Perhaps it’s commonplace.”
“I don’t think so.”
“And why not? Consider: A woman jumps off a steep curb to avoid a puddle, and in that tiny moment, she is in free fall… And then, a few minutes later she makes the most momentous decision of her life and she is forever changed by it. Did she travel in time, or perhaps slip into another reality? It is certainly possible.”
“No, it’s impossible.”
“I think not. It is all a question of awareness and memory. I slipped back and forth for many years before I even had an inkling as to what was happening to me. I thought my experience was the same as everyone else’s. It took decades before I learned this was not the case… that people live only in a linear fashion.”
“What about that thing, the searing pain you mentioned? If I jumped around in time, wouldn’t I notice that?”
“Most certainly. I am meaning the first mode of travel, soft jumps, the kind of travel where only your consciousness shifts from place to place. This is quite different, and I’ve come to believe, quite commonplace.”
“Somehow I doubt that.”
“I believe everyone has this ability to travel through time, but few of us have any consciousness of it. Most of us are stuck in our time simply because we do not have the awareness that we can be unglued.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Why is that?”
“Well, you know, when you wake up in the morning, you remember what happened yesterday… more or less.”
“Yes, persistence of memory. This is a powerful thing.” Fynn paused to face me. “Yet, I think you are missing the point entirely.”
“How so?”
“Say you accidentally slipped back in time… What would you recall? The place where you came from, or the place where you find yourself? To have a memory of the future would be quite unusual, don’t you think?”
“I guess.”
“Though not impossible.” Fynn gave me another big smile, a devilish smile. “As you say, you might well remember what you did yesterday… you wake up and expect about the same to happen today. But, if you have no awareness of traveling, then what you do today should coincide with what you did yesterday. Your own mind would make it so.”
“So your memory is reset?”
“Not at all. You just don’t recall traveling to the past. Your memory simply picks up where it left off. You might wake up tomorrow morning and find yourself shoveling lion dung in the bowels of the Coliseum; or dragging the corpses of dead gladiators from the arena… Ah, just another day at work... If you cannot remember jumping from somewhere else, a future time, then this would seem perfectly normal to you.”
“It’s impossible.”
“Perhaps… but this is easy for you to say because you do possess such an awareness. You do remember things— things you’d rather forget, as you’ve said.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Fynn laughed.
“So it’s all about awareness?”
“Yes, memory and awareness… something you seem to have an aptitude for.”
“Me?”
“Of course. You are the exception. But all this is a different kettle of fish. Today our lesson is about free fall.”
“Alright then, explain this libra lapsus thing.”
“I will warn you in advance, it can get fantastically complicated.”
“How so?” I was dubious.
“How are you at astronomy?”
“Astronomy?” I paused to consider. “Not so bad.”
“I’m afraid I will lose you here, it’s all frightfully involved…” Fynn paused. “Do you have a head for figures?”
“You mean math?”
“Yes.”
“Not really.”
“I could give you velocities in miles per hour, if you’d like, but I’m not sure that would aid your understanding.”
“Probably not.”
“Well then, I will keep this as simple as possible.” Fynn walked to the blackboard and erased his formulas. “I would begin by saying that everything in this universe is in motion. It sounds straightforward enough, yet when you begin to think about it, things start moving very quickly.”
“Wait, are we talking past or future here?”
“Ah, indeed, the two modes of travel... Well, they both rely on libra lapsus.”
“Like past or future?”
“Yes, but this is something of an oversimplification. Only the present matters. It might be easier to say I am a place traveler. I simply go from place to place.”
“Don’t we all?”
“This is most fundamental. As soon as I leave a place, I am not there.”
“That’s just common sense.”
“For you perhaps, for me, not so much. If you leave this place, this classroom, you will likely persist elsewhere, maybe in the principal’s office, or in the corridor…” Fynn gave me a smile. “I may cease to exist in the present altogether. This is a bit different, eh?”
“I’ll say, but I don’t get any of this.”
“It is simplicity itself.” Fynn drew on the board. He made three giant circles almost touching each other. The first he labeled past, the next, present, and the final one, future. He drew a long arching arrow. “When I travel to the past, everything must change.” He erased the circle containing the future. “Everything is reset.” He redrew the circle and wrote future again. “Though this particular future is probably just a temporary place, a phantom place...”
“How is this simple?”
“In one case, when I go to the past, only my awareness travels, a soft jump. When I go to the future, my
entire self travels, a hard jump.”
“So, more like mind travel and body travel?”
“Again, that is rather facile. If I go to a new place, both my mind and body come with me.” He smiled briefly. “If I go to an old place, my mind re-enters a body it is largely familiar with.”
“Is this like astral projection?”
“Not at all.”
“Okay, sorry for the questions. Please go on...”
Fynn paced a few steps in front of the board. “The first thing you must understand is that to travel through time, one must also travel through space.”
“I’m not following already.”
“Ah, but this is fairly simple. Everything is in motion, yes? If I go from summer to winter, I must be in a different place, if only because the Earth orbits the sun. At any point in time, the Earth is in a very specific location. It travels through space and so must I... Motion… this is all that time can measure.”
“Still not getting this…”
Inspector Fynn erased the entire board again and drew a large chalky dot, and then a line with an arrow to another dot. “To travel from here to there, from point A to point B, I must travel in space. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“And so it is when I travel in time. Surely, no one can go from one place to another without using up some time? It goes to follow, time is simply a measure of motion.”
“Okay… but what does this mean?”
“I must travel through space and time together, not just time.”
“Can you give me an example?”
Fynn kept his patience but paused for a moment. “Say I want to leap ahead by a half a year, yes?”
I nodded.
“I must travel through time of course, but I must also travel in space. I must physically go to where the Earth will be in six months: the other side of the sun as it were. And that is quite far in terms of miles. It’s the same if I slip to the past. I must return to where the Earth was... as it moved through space.”
“That sort of makes sense.”
“Motion, direction and momentum are critical to how libra lapsus operates.”
“Can you explain that in simple terms?”
“No, it’s altogether inexplicable.” Fynn flashed a smile and raised an eyebrow. He took a deep breath. “You are traveling on a train or in an automobile… at say, one hundred kilometers an hour.” Fynn glanced at me. “Everything in your car is traveling at the same speed… your passengers, your baggage, a cup of coffee, yourself. All is well… but then suddenly, your coffee cup enters the state of free fall. Suddenly, it is plucked from time. It is no longer moving at the same speed. The result? It goes crashing into the back window to spill everywhere.”