by Alex Boyd
“Get somewhere safe!” Oliver yelled as he made his way over to lie beneath a bench as I pressed myself against a tree. We watched everything slowly settle as the fast-moving, ghostly images careened around us from our relatively safe positions. I laughed at the idea of one person after another, for decades, resting their collective asses over my father as time caught up and saw that Oliver was returning my stupid grin from his own place of safety. Nobody but a blissfully free child would suffer the indignity of crawling under a park bench during a funeral, and they were all tugged to funerals rather than given the opportunity to collide with an invisible spirit under the bench.
“This is insanity!” I yelled to my father, as though into the wind, but he was laughing, too. It would seem there are few trees safer than a cemetery tree. Not many joggers or mourners took the time to examine my spot. There were flashing movements of darkness and colour. I saw a businessman with a cigar looking around as though to check if anyone noticed him. I saw a young woman holding a book with long, dark hair that fell over her blue dress. She looked up at the immense tree, put a hand out to feel the bark and then brought her hand back. She closed her eyes a second and then she was gone. The world around us fell back to normal. Had she just been here? Maybe in the last year? I felt like I was a little in love as I glanced around before going to help my father up.
37: Penelope
“You can’t do this,” I told Blake when he appeared at my home. The sense that I was intrigued by Blake had long since been dismissed by his self-centred nature. He was among those men who’ll bring a woman to a certain level and then leap after his own pleasure like an animal unable to resist the food in front of it. And now there were these sudden, intrusive appearances. I came to feel he shouldn’t be in my life at all, but he persisted.
He was even in a dream of mine, both Oliver and Blake on a game show behind podiums demonstrating their knowledge about subjects as obscure as British television drama and the number of symphonies Beethoven completed. Oliver guessed ten symphonies but was told by an oily host, “Beethoven died working on the tenth, so he completed nine.” There was more, though my memory of it is confused and faded, as often happens with dreams. Blake missed a question about when the First World War had started and Oliver was set to win when a question about archery came up. Blake knew the answer: “Archery declined with the invention of firearms, but enjoyed a revival in the eighteenth century when it became fashionable again.”
But the game wasn’t resolved. Instead, the host slowly fell away from the conversation and they turned to each other. Blake was always arrogant, and while it was tempting to dislike him for this alone, he did have intelligence and a slim handsomeness that helped to balance the haughtiness to a degree. He stood in his dark blazer: “If you neglect your woman, you open up an opportunity for any old Blake. We’re talking here about a man who left for twenty years to tumble through the world. Twenty years, for crying out loud.”
But he seemed false, angry and poised at the same time. He showed that the personality he demonstrated to the world was as neatly arranged as his jackets and shirts were. This is finally the instinct that kept me from him, subtle enough that it was clarified to me in a dream: he wasn’t genuine enough. Oliver should know he was lucky. It wasn’t that I refused to move on and never would have considered someone else; above all, falseness troubled me and above all Oliver was a plainly charming man, comfortable in his own skin and with nothing to prove.
And then he was back, framed in our doorway as the breeze behind him ransacked the tree in our yard. Tomas came in first but wisely moved aside. “Mother,” he said. “Father has returned, tired from twenty years of struggle to reach us again. He has held us in his heart all this time.”
Oliver stepped in. For a few seconds my eyes couldn’t take him in. Of course, that’s our somewhat romantic way of saying it, when really my mind couldn’t handle the sight of him: his same short hair, his round and handsome face. For a moment I thought he looked much older. I thought he had wrinkles, his head utterly robbed of its dark hair, his eyes dimmed. I couldn’t believe it was Oliver. In my confusion, I stepped back. He took another soft step forward and I saw it was a trick of shadows and light. Oliver was older, but recognizably the same and not an old man as I had thought. A small river of bitterness in me threatened to swell and overflow but was quickly washed aside when the warmth in his eyes opened a floodgate of the same in me.
“I’m hungry,” he said. We stood and talked in the doorway for long minutes before we even thought to move away to sit, so precious was our time. It was gradually less jarring to see him, less of a miracle every moment, beginning with opening a can of soup for him. It’s true that we’ll never forget the reunion and the feeling that came with it. We can think of it like an island above the placid surface of our daily experience: the moment we were utterly astonished with the existence of the other.
38: Blake
I had followed my Penelope. I drove the pleasant, tree-lined corridor of her street over and over again. I slowed to see him return to stand on the front steps of the house. I was transfixed, watching him step so undeservedly inside. Her hands hesitated in the air but then found places on his broad back. His son was there, too, and the three of them didn’t take the slightest notice of me before I peeled away.
So I began my secret war. I’m not a stalker. Those people don’t have the slightest understanding of what’s best for their loved ones. I have an awareness of injustice stronger than most. Sometimes I picture a map of the world shaded to different degrees like a heat map, except it shows where there were greater or lower levels of injustice. And while some injustice like, say, a holocaust are easy to pick out, many others are much quieter and form the subtle base from which the rest of it springs. Only a small few of us, elected by our sensitivity and education, can attempt to change the world.
If I had to be honest, I’d have to say I’d always considered women to be one kind of prize or another. Few have astounded me. Relationships were always like classes to me; you learn something from them and move on, but you don’t stay in the same class for decades because what would be the point? I would walk the streets trolling for women just to let them go a few months later. Penelope changed all that. When she wasn’t around I felt anxious. I walked the streets feeling I’d forgotten something important, like I’d left the tap running in my apartment. I’d disconnected the doorbell long ago after one woman rang it repeatedly to get me to come down. For years I’ve just said it was broken and told people to call me when they arrive, but now I worried Penelope would visit and I wouldn’t know.
I waited in the parking lot at her workplace and pretended to emerge from my car just in time to run into her, but I sensed she was aware I’d made some kind of special effort. She was polite but distant. More importantly, she declined to see me soon. Days passed. I sent a friendly note expecting an immediate reply and refreshed and refreshed my screen, but it simply blinked back at me, resetting in the same plain and agonizing manner. It seemed appropriate to send another message about the injustice, the inappropriateness of taking back a man destined only to hurt her again, an undeserving man. I explained that for the first time I felt I could be a deserving man. And then a brief reply, at last arriving in my inbox like a colourful little bird. It declared she didn’t feel I was the right thing for her, along with a few more words wishing me well.
Wishing me well, a wishing well. It was as though the one wish I had was a hard coin in my pocket and I couldn’t spend it. Calling her only went to voicemail, and she changed her job, so there was little point trying to find her there. I drove by her house for a year and it frequently yielded very little until I finally caught sight of him, the husband who would now enjoy the nightly comfort of her bed once again. My thoughts became more dramatic, concentrated and angry. I’m not accustomed to losing, particularly when the cost is high. My thinking turned to Oliver. I saw him at least as frequently
as I saw her; it was as though the world kept offering him to me somehow, and I slowly came to recognize he was an obstacle that could be removed.
I invested in a second used car to allow for different appearances and circled the block or walked around Oliver’s house. Unable to look directly at it, I came to know its sounds and rhythms. For example, Oliver usually left at around eleven in the morning through the back door. He was no doubt meeting people, informing friends he was back and starting work on the network of contacts he’d previously dropped. From the back door he walked behind an old garage and down a dirt path through a handful of trees that took him to another street and finally the subway.
On a quiet night at four in the morning I walked to the house, casually glanced at the back door and carried on to the garage. I put my hand delicately on the peeling white paint as I stood behind it. Here I would make my stand, and change the world for the better. By eleven in the morning I was tired and brittle with nervous energy, but excited. I became even more excited at hearing the familiar creak of the door. I waited. When Oliver appeared, it was only to start out again down the path, but I caught up with him, clumsily putting one hand over his mouth and with the other, driving a knife into his back. He let out a muffled cry and to my surprise, kicked out with a foot, making contact with a tree and sending us both backwards.
We fell and fell. It was the most extraordinary feeling to expect to hit the ground and instead find oneself in freefall. The trees rushed away and a translucent, overlapping haze of colour and movement closed in on either side of my vision like curtains. It was suffocating for a moment, and I held my breath as though underwater.
39: Athena
“You were always a lucky one, Oliver,” I once told him. Not all the time. Not every moment of every day. I can name at least one thing that went wrong: I’d sent a much earlier message back to Penelope about how Oliver was available to them in the cemetery where Tomas eventually found him. Penelope would’ve lost Oliver and learned almost immediately he was waiting for her. But the message was gone, a minnow in a tremendous waterfall of events.
I checked the data, surprised at the number of years that had ticked by, and sent another message to Tomas: “I can help you find the father you don’t know but deserve to know.” Tomas brought him home. As a result, Oliver met the man he hadn’t raised; and yet, even after that, events conspired to give Oliver another chance. He was not the brightest or the strongest of men, but he was blessed with second chances, surrounding him like a bed of leaves. Another chance to defeat an opponent, another chance to get home.
Blake stabbed Oliver and they fell together like drunks. I’d never have anticipated this, but they fell through time and Oliver had the advantage of recognizing it first. Blake withdrew the knife and the energy Oliver owned moved to heal the wound, working to return that small part of him to the way it was. Time became soft around the wound, the knife, the hand, and finally the two of them, so that they were both lost.
They fell together, grappling and suffocating through the heat of events for long minutes. There were no words spoken. Oliver saw what was happening and pulled them in a particular direction, but Blake was no fool. He must have read about time travel to at least some extent because he caught site of a few signs of his own personal geography and pulled them in that direction, thinking vaguely of his own personal timeline.
In the confusion, Blake struck Oliver again with his knife and would have stabbed him in the heart, but I arranged for him to miss, slipping a pillow of air and time between his arm and Oliver, even taking the extra step of loosening his fingers and pulling the knife from them. As Oliver reeled, he was able to see clear of the skyscrapers and cigar smoke, pulling them free like two languid swimmers. Through a long distance of falling boulders and hurrying trains, he pulled them in the direction of his son’s birth.
Blake, however, had caught sight of Penelope. It was only her distant childhood burning like a star, but as he reached for it he saw her childhood home like an old movie, brief flashes of distorted colour blending together. Someone kicked fall leaves, then soundless children moved toward a birthday cake. Blake was a quick learner. He reached further in the direction of that hidden, remarkable time with the idea of becoming her childhood friend. Finally furious, Oliver stuck back, hitting Blake across the face. As the two of them grappled and spun together, Oliver held tight and twisted his weight, throwing Blake further back than he’d intended until Blake was lost before the brief trail of their lives even began. Free to swim and struggle the way he wanted, Oliver searched for the moment he wanted most, the time after his son was born, when he’d left his family.
And that was the end of his travels. I said a quiet farewell to my friend, in the hope of seeing him in the world at a less worrying time. I felt I’d see him again some cold, bright day. Oliver began again where he left, which made him a very lucky man, indeed. I like to think a particular kind of happiness isn’t more than a man deserves if he’s also given the opportunity to be a better man. I stuck around for a bit and saw Oliver learn the mixture of love and pressure that came with new fatherhood; to learn of the rewards and begin to gather up an idea of whom his son would become.
“He stops crying!” Oliver said, learning that when he sang to his son—only a small bundle in his arms—Tomas stopped fussing and looked up at him, his eyes wider. He knew those small eyes would grow up to drink in paintings and oceans. He knew that he now woke to a certain pressure, difficulty breathing. “It’s like someone put a stack of plates on my chest,” he told Penelope. But it slowly got better, as he saw they were managing. His own childhood lay as wetlands, somewhere deep in the bottom of his mind, faintly allowing comparisons to the experience he gave his son.
40: Oliver
Now I understand. I’ve looked down into the calm and uncomprehending eyes of my son at twenty months old and I’ve been struck with the idea that you lose everything you love. Even if nothing were ever to remove him from me, he’ll grow and this child will be gone. The way they change teaches you that, and it teaches you to appreciate the moment. On some level parents are willing to have a second child at least partly to start over and begin again at the first step. But there isn’t any way to cheat time. You can only begin a new process. Time is relentless. Time notices us and stares. In a similar way, water noticed the Titanic and kept staring until it covered every corner of the great ship. In this world, shy people are stamped out because we have no patience for their awkwardness, but underneath our impatience is the fact that they live their lives owning secret knowledge we’d rather ignore, like that it’s unlucky to be noticed.
All I’d known when Tomas was coming was that I felt the gates of my old life closing. Fatherhood felt like a trap. I hadn’t thought about how I would live on in my son. I thought only about the sacrifice, the most superficial kind of lost freedom, without thinking of my new freedom to grow. When he was twenty months old I went into his room to look down in his crib, and as my eyes adjusted I found him among all his stuffed toys, arms folded to form a small arc, an arrowhead of potential. All around I sensed the parts of the world that were indifferent to him: a river of cars outside, pushing a space someone can be killed in, the electricity curled in the walls wanting to stop his heart, the angry people who’d thrash him. More than anything, I wanted to protect him.
On my permanent return to the time I’d left, I became something of a celebrity. Nobody had ever stepped back and reappeared moments later looking the same and capable of telling their story. I wrote down names: Maddy and Aldman, Fernando and Victoria. I made note of them all and told their stories, though I had little evidence of anything. They became like an old film I remembered watching, and while I remembered it warmly, the details began to escape me.
I was a distracted celebrity, sitting on an interview couch and pausing in the middle of a reply to see the parts of the camera unassembled, the bolts pulled into the air and melted back into the earth, the cam
eraman as a plump, bullied child surrounded by a halo of summer. The side effects lasted only a few months, but it was enough, thankfully, to sabotage media interest in following me around for various comments and statements. Even later, I’d stare off into the distance when they asked me something and I’d think of Penelope. It was an amusing way to thwart their efforts.
“Check this out,” Penelope said, and we laughed at changing a diaper and finding a pea in his belly button. I was proud that my son lived in love, shrugging off kisses like rain. I was reminded of the moment I knew I loved Penelope. We sat in a café and I read about the 1971 atomic bomb test on Amchitka Island, uninhabited but for an entire sea otter colony. So many people don’t think of anything but themselves, but later Penelope said, “I keep seeing hundreds of sea otter heads, all turning at once.”
I knew nothing except that I wanted to protect her and Tomas, and that compassion was an essential ingredient in the world. It isn’t much of a starting place, but everything starts somewhere. I’m not a great artist with a painting that will hang in a gallery for a century or two. I’m not a politician skilled and fortunate enough to have a career that ends in a prominent statue. My story is the story of a common man. I will extend a hand into the future and be remembered for some small distance through a child who’ll think of me in so many different moments. Often enough they’ll reflect on each other and together make the image of a man. A teacher might accomplish something similar with a reflection in the minds of her students. To live is to burn away in one place or another, and when a sun dies, its light strikes elsewhere for a time. This is to be remembered, until the last light falls.