by Jack Hunt
“So let me get this right. Your neighbor is from the future, here to save the next president from someone else who is going to attempt to kill her and if you don’t stop yourself from shooting your neighbor, Dempsey is going to die and some crazy shit is going to happen in the world?”
“That’s about the sum of it. Yeah.”
“Okay, you are batshit crazy if you are expecting me to believe this.”
I showed him the watch on my arm. He went to press it and I pulled back.
“Careful. This isn’t a toy, Eric.”
He took a sip of coffee. “Okay, let’s say for argument’s sake that I believe you. Why not just go and tell Harry?”
“He told me very clearly to avoid him and myself.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. You tell me, you’re the expert on this kind of stuff.”
“I don’t know about this. I listen to a radio station that talks about this. It’s completely different.”
“But you understand the dangers?”
“No.” He ran a hand over his face. “I mean, from what that scientist said on the radio. Any changes in the timeline would create—”
“A new branch.” I finished his sentence.
He stared back at me.
“You told me before.”
“I did?”
I nodded.
“What am I thinking?” Eric asked.
“I traveled through time, Eric, I’m not a mind reader.”
“I really want to believe you but you have to place yourself in my position. This is blowing my mind.”
“I can’t be in two places at once, can I?” I asked him.
Then I remembered something. “Actually, speaking of mindreading, well it’s not that but you are going to meet two foreign Japanese students. Twins.”
“Am I?”
“Yeah. Sometime today.”
“Damn if that’s true, this is better than fortune cookies. Hell, we can make some money.”
“Eric.” I pointed two fingers at my eyes and then back at his. “Pay attention.”
“These Japanese girls. Tell me, are they freaky? Do I take both home and indulge in a little bit of a ménage à trois?”
“Yeah, no.”
“Crap!”
“Listen, we need to make sure that I don’t end up going to that parking structure on Sunday. Talk me out of it. Like invite me somewhere. Actually, invite me to the get-together you are going to on Sunday.”
“I’m going to a get-together?”
“Your family are getting together this Sunday.”
He obviously had not agreed to it or even been told about it.
“You are joking. I agree to it?”
I nodded.
“Damn! She must wear me down,” he said referring to his mother. It seemed strange knowing the future even if it was only a couple of days. All the mystery about what would happen was gone. Perhaps that’s why we could only remember our past and not the future.
“Why don’t I just tell the other you that you are here from the future and not to go and shoot your neighbor?” he asked.
When he put it that way it sounded ridiculous.
“Please. Do you think I’m going to believe you?”
“You have a point there,” he replied.
It was very rare that I believed anything that came out of Eric’s mouth. He had a habit of exaggerating and telling all manner of stories.
“No. We need to be careful here.”
“Leave it to me. I’ll come up with something. For now, you need to stay off the grid.”
Eric reached into his bag and pulled out the card for his dorm room. “Here. You can stay at my place.”
“And your roommate?”
“Ash is barely there. He’s banging this goth girl off campus so for the past week he’s been crashing there.”
“Alright. Two days. I can do this.”
“Leave it to me. I’ll make sure he doesn’t chase after your neighbor. I mean, I’ll make sure you don’t.” He shook his head. “This is really confusing.”
“Tell me about it.”
Chapter 15
The temptation to go over to my house and see myself was overwhelming and yet I was aware that the consequences of such actions could be devastating. Instead I had to trust that Eric would find a way to ensure what had occurred wouldn’t.
When I arrived at his dorm room I slid the card down the lock. It bleeped green. From the moment I entered I had to divert my eyes from naked ass. And it wasn’t your typical one. It was overly large and well… I didn’t want to stare at it longer than I already had.
“Shoot, I’m sorry, dude.”
“Alex?” Ash asked.
I still had my hand on the door handle. I stood there with my eyes closed. I could hear them rustling about.
“Yeah.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Eric said I could stay here for a couple of days while I got a few problems sorted out.”
“Oh, in that case. Come on in. You can open your eyes.”
“Are you sure about that?”
He let out a chuckle.
Now with a white sheet covering their nakedness, Ash appeared to be in a state of nirvana. I wasn’t sure if that was from the sex or drugs. The room was full of a thick white smoke. That’s when I noticed the bong on the side table. Slipped under the covers with only her face peering out was the girl I gathered Eric had mentioned. Both of them had their faces painted with black lipstick and eyeliner.
“Go on, I’ll phone you later,” Ash said.
The girl slipped out fully naked and got back into her clothes. Ash slapped her on the ass as she bent over. I did my best to look the other way as to not make her feel embarrassed but it didn’t seem to matter. She looked as if she was comfortable in her skin.
“So, what’s the problem?” Ash said as he sat up in the bed. I hoped he was going to get dressed and give me some warning before he unveiled himself as it wasn’t a pretty sight the first time around.
“Ah you know. Family stuff.”
He gestured with his head to my wrist. “Sick watch.”
“Oh. This. Yeah, gift from a long-distance relative.”
I looked around the room, which was full of posters from the ’80s. Eric had always been a fan of films from that era. The room was your typical dorm. There were two single beds either side, one main desk and a couple of side tables. Instead of blinds or curtains they had a large flag. This one had a skull and crossbones on it.
Ash leaned over in his bed and reached for his giant colorful bong.
“Want to partake?”
“No thanks.”
Last thing I needed was to get stoned. I had to stay clear-headed. I began to think about what would happen once I had prevented myself from showing up. Would I just blink out of existence? Would there be two of me still here? These were some of the many questions spinning around in my head. I kept going through a roller coaster of emotions. One moment I would be super excited at the fact that I had traveled through time and the next terrified that I had screwed up something and would forever be stuck here as my own doppelganger.
“Hey, you want some chips?”
He tossed over a half-eaten bag of Doritos and I grimaced as he licked his fingers.
“I’ll pass. Do you know where Eric keeps those interviews he listens to?”
As I had some time to kill, I thought I might as well brush up on what was known about time travel.
He frowned. “Interviews?”
“He said something about a radio station.”
“Oh, that crap, yeah, let me get up.”
I stepped forward fast. “Actually you stay where you are. Just point them out.”
I really didn’t want to relive what my mind was desperately trying to erase.
“Suit yourself. It’s in his notebook over there. Bring up iTunes, he has a whole playlist. That guy is as crazy as a coot.”
“Right. Tha
nks.”
I took a seat at the desk and opened his laptop. It didn’t take me long to find them. I stuck a pair of headphones on and leaned back to listen. I selected the one on time travel dated 1991 hoping that it might provide me with some answers or at least problems that could occur if time travel was possible.
Over the next two hours I sat there listening to an interview with scientist Dr. Martin Whetherby. It was fascinating to hear from someone as far back as the nineties talking about the possibilities of temporal relocation. He spoke about Tesla’s work in tapping into the earth’s energy, along with electromagnetic fields and how time and space could be breached or warped in order to create a doorway. Essentially how a wormhole could be made.
“Okay, Dr. Whetherby, so theoretically you are saying time travel is possible?”
“That’s right.”
“For what purpose?”
“Essentially the goal would be to use it for medical reasons. To slow down disease until a cure could be found. Patients with terminal disease would have the option of entering a field where time itself would be slowed. Outside of the field the years would pass allowing us to find a cure. However, the person inside the field would only experience two minutes passing.”
“So we’re not talking about sending people into the past or future?”
“Yes and no. I mean, not in the typical way you might imagine.”
“Wouldn’t that also mean they wouldn’t age?”
“Exactly. There are numerous ways that we are looking at how this can be used but mostly it’s for medical purposes and not for travel.”
“And what about if you managed to send someone back into the past, what happens if they make a change?”
“Well, you would have the butterfly effect. Like a pebble being dropped into a lake. The consequence of that action would ripple out and affect other things.”
“So that wouldn’t be a good idea.”
“At this stage when we don’t know enough about it, no. We have no idea how it would affect the world we live in.”
“But doesn’t this play into the whole multi-universe theory that everything and anything that could happen already has?”
“Yes, it does.”
“Okay, well, this is interesting stuff. We are going to open up the phone lines now and start taking some questions from guests. Ted from Texas, are you with us?”
I removed the headphones from my ears and spent a moment running a search on Dr. Martin Whetherby. And old news article came up from the year 1999 that said he had died in a car crash. It praised his work as a scientist and gave references to projects he’d been involved in with DARPA – the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
By the time Eric returned to his dorm later that afternoon, I was on my third radio interview. Each of them was over two hours long. By the time he showed up, my head was spinning with talk of magnetic fields, changes in the quantum environment and Tesla-based quantum access technology.
Except now, instead of laughing at it all, I was living it.
Minutes earlier, Ash had left us in a cloud of his ganja smoke. I hadn’t even had any but I was already beginning to feel the mild effects of a secondhand high.
“So… you are going to stay here while I head over to your house,” Eric said.
I jumped up eager to get out. “No, I’m coming with you.”
“You can’t do that. If anyone sees you, you’re screwed.”
“Dude, I’m going out of my mind here.”
Eric blew out his cheeks. “I told you, let me handle this.”
“Buddy, tonight you get drunk, end up in a fight and crash at my house.”
“Even more reason for you to stay here otherwise you’ll be sleeping in the car.”
“Look, I don’t know what ripple effect I have caused by returning to the past. No offense but I can’t have this riding on just you. I’m going with you.”
So that was it. An hour later we were on our way over to my house. I stayed in the back of the vehicle under a blanket. Eric was planning to park across the street. On our way over Eric kept looking at me as if I was going to disappear.
“Have you thought about what the biological effects might be on you having gone through time?”
“What do you mean?”
“You traveled through time and space. Wouldn’t that have affected you at the atomic level?”
“Yeah, it gave me a bigger penis.”
“Did it?”
I scoffed and rolled my eyes. “By the sounds of what Dr. Martin Whetherby was saying, I’ve stepped through a wormhole. This isn’t like beam me up, Scotty. I’m not broken up into a million pieces and brought back together. Anyway, what do you have planned?”
“I’m going to invite him – the other you – out with me and the twins. Which by the way, you were dead right about meeting those two. Damn, those girls are babes. Check it out.”
He tossed me his phone.
“I’ve already seen them, remember?”
“Oh right.”
“And if that doesn’t work, I’m going to just come out with it and tell him I bumped into his future self and he, well, you told me to tell you not to show up on Sunday.”
I don’t know what it was about his plan but I got this gut feeling that it wasn’t going to work. I had so many questions for Harry Castle. If anyone would know about it, it would be him. Why couldn’t I just tell him? That way if Eric failed to get through to me, at least Harry would know. I knew he wanted me to avoid him but why?
It was close to seven-thirty in the evening when we arrived in my driveway. Eric honked his horn like he always did. Before he jumped out I reminded him that I, the one in the house, hadn’t seen the photos of the twins so he had to remember to show them.
“Act uninterested when I tell you that I’ve seen something over at my neighbor’s.”
“You got it. What are you going to do?”
“Take a direct approach,” I replied.
I didn’t want to tell him any more. I had already jeopardized everything by seeking him out but without him I wasn’t sure I could do this. The sun was just dipping behind the trees when Eric approached the house. I had been peeking out the window in the back seat trying to catch a glimpse. When I saw myself answer the door, my eyes widened. A shot of fear rushed through me. This was the real deal. I knew I had traveled back in time but seeing myself verified that for sure. When he disappeared inside and the door shut, I let myself out the back and ventured over to Castle’s place. I was closing in on my neighbor’s house when Mrs. Walsh spotted me. I had borrowed a jacket and beanie hat from Eric in the hopes that no one would recognize me but it had worked about as well as a fake mustache from a dollar store.
“Oh Alex, could you be a dear and help me get this table out of my garage? I have a man coming tomorrow who is meant to be taking it away and I want to make sure I don’t have to pay him to take it out.”
I stopped in place and pretended that I hadn’t heard her. I took a few more steps and she called out my name again, though this time it was a little louder. I couldn’t have my earlier self in the house hear my name, his name I mean. Oh god, this was getting confusing. I turned and rushed over to her while at the same time trying not to get spotted by anyone else.
“Why are you wearing that? You must be boiling hot.”
“Oh, I caught a cold.”
“Well, don’t you go giving it to me. I have to watch myself, you know, in my old age.”
I nodded and helped to drag some big-ass computer table from inside her garage out to the curb. All the while my eyes were scanning my house, my neighbor’s and the neighborhood.
“Okay, glad to help.”
I turned and made it a few steps away when she called out. “Oh we’re not done. I have a lamp and then that will be it.”
Are you kidding me?
I screwed my eyes up tight and ground my teeth. On a good day Mrs. Walsh drove me nuts but right now I was about to blow my top. I turn
ed, flashed a smile and did as she asked. As soon as it was done I rushed across the street before she could change her mind.
I stood there for a few seconds contemplating knocking on the door. I would have never had the guts to do it before but now I was running out of options and pressed for time. I slammed the knocker down hard and heard shuffling inside. A few more seconds and then the door opened.
“Hello, Harry, I’m from the future.”
Chapter 16
Harry looked back at me dumbfounded from across the living room. Neither of us were sitting. His stare held a degree of skepticism. I couldn’t tell what the problem was. He was from the future. If anyone should understand it would be him.
“Is this some game?”
I pulled back my shirt on my arm to show the watch on my wrist.
“Does this look like a game?”
He instinctively looked at his own wrist to see if I had stolen his.
“Okay, so let me get this straight. You shoot me this Sunday and then I tell you to go back, fix the problem and not to contact me and yet here you are?”
“What can I say? I don’t follow orders very well.”
He shook his head. “Maybe that’s the reason you were fired from your job.”
I scowled. “You already knew about that?”
“As much as you have been watching me, Alex, I’ve been watching you.”
“Okay, that doesn’t sound creepy.”
He began ushering me out. “You need to leave.”
“But I need answers.”
He kept ushering me towards the door.
“Exactly, it’s not good for you or anyone to know about the future.”
I raised my hand. “Stop. I already know about the future. At least until Sunday. Look…” I pressed my finger against his chest. “Why don’t you just go to a different location on Sunday? That way I won’t find you in time and boom, we have averted what will happen. You save the next president. Job done.”
He tossed his hands up in the air. “Don’t you think that if I could do that I would? There is a reason why I am in that exact spot, at that exact time.”
“Then go back into the past and move into another neighborhood. That way I won’t even know about you.”