“I’ve died more than once before?”
“Well, not you, but other versions of you in other universes. I’ve watched you die on March 21 more times than I can count. And even with everything I tried, I couldn’t do anything to keep you alive.”
“Why did I survive this time?”
I shrugged out of habit, despite knowing exactly why she survived. I came out with the truth. “You survived because I finally died. I had hundreds of chances to save you. You died every time because of me.” The last bit was closer to the truth than I wanted it to be. I shook it off and said, “But this time I didn’t want you to die. I had a chance to give up my life for you, not knowing what the outcome would be.”
“You have this power, but you didn’t know you were going to live?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “For all I knew, I was going to die like you. I didn’t expect to be different.”
She laughed lightly, and I could tell she was back to believing me and trying to understand, instead of rejecting this as a dream. “You’re able to do all these crazy things. You can see versions of me that I can’t even see. Why didn’t you expect to survive death?” She threw her hands up in bewilderment like none of this made sense.
Who would blame her? I thought.
* * *
I loved Gretchen deeper than I’d loved any other woman up to that point. Whatever power my future self said that I had won by dying for her, I didn’t care about. Instead of exploring the multiverse, I lived out my life with her.
When we left the coffee shop I changed my appearance a little and lived a long life as Joseph DeMarcus. By the time I hit forty and started to gray, my appearance resembled that of an old Todd Rungson, but no one remembered the boy who had gotten run over by a drunk driver on a Monday in March decades ago. Joseph DeMarcus lived an unremarkable life. It was the same kind of life the default Todd might have lived. As unexceptional as the life was, this life with Gretchen had the memories I value the most.
Our favorite thing to do was to stay up late at night telling stories. It was mostly me telling her stories about how the world would be and how the world used to be. I explained all the unexciting things of history, like how people slept sitting up for a period of time because only dead people lay down. We watched western movies and I would explain that the west was never that exciting, and felt a lot smaller. I told her which stocks would shoot up in the next few years, and we retired younger than most. We did work we loved after that. She got into gardening and organized the local farmer’s market. It was her pride and joy.
I wrote fiction, under a different pen name altogether. They were stories of the future and the past. It was mostly Gretchen’s idea, and I would have never set pen to paper without her encouragement. Those stories are lost somewhere in the multiverse, since I only ever wrote them in that timeline.
There were some fairly accurate predictions of where the world was headed. If they had sold well, I would have been considered a modern Nostradamus. But they never did, and I never wanted them to. Gretchen was who I wrote for, and she spent more time reading them than I spent writing them. It was her only way to experience the other places and times I’d been to. I could tell she wanted to go, but she knew she couldn’t, and seemed content with the life she had.
For our long life together, I didn’t switch universes a single time. I savored every moment with Gretchen. It was a blip of happiness in my sea of thousands of lives. We had checked ourselves into an elderly care facility at the ripe age of ninety-five. I had never lived in the same body for so long, and the age was getting to me. I felt my mind work slower, and the things I used to do so simply were a challenge.
It was even harder to watch Gretchen age. I knew I would soon be changing into a younger body, or a new timeline, but this Gretchen would once again die. This time it would be final, and there was nothing I could do. She always maintained a positive attitude, though.
In her final days, she was simply grateful to be around me. We looked back at everything we had accomplished and all the stories we had created together. She blamed most of the success on me, but I told her everything meaningful that had gotten done was her fault.
She died in her sleep one night next to me. It was a peaceful death. She deserved it, after the hell my future self and I had put her through. I attended her funeral and made sure they displayed a picture she would be happy with.
The day after we buried her I walked out of the nursing home in a new and younger body. I wasn’t about to wait around for that one to die, although I could tell after losing Gretchen it wouldn’t last much longer. I lived another short twenty years in that world, milling around and working on jobs that interested me, but in the end, I saw the future of this world was headed to the same place as the others. And it wasn’t worth saving without Gretchen around.
One night, I tried to transfer back into the body of a young default Todd. It worked, and I was back to the evening of March 20, 2016. It was a universe I had never been in before, and my mouth tasted like stale meatloaf. The familiar flavor brought back too many bad memories, so I brushed my teeth. The flavor of toothpaste was refreshing and familiar. I lived through March 21 and ten more years with that Gretchen. But it was never the same.
I was never forced to broach the subject of my power with her, so I put it off as long as possible. The fascination and magic were never there with this new version of Gretchen. There was something lacking. We weren’t able to bond over our mutual loss and rediscover each other alive.
I suspected that this shared experience kept us together for eighty years in the last universe, but this new Gretchen had never experienced it. She always seemed to be expecting more from me. I finally did explain my power, and the entire relationship slowly spiraled out of control. She went from wondering why she had stayed with her high school boyfriend, to why her high school boyfriend was certifiably delusional. We ended our ten-year relationship two years after broaching the subject. I left that timeline completely a year later.
I tried multiple times again, bringing up the subject at different times. But without the loss of my death or her natural interest, it always came across as me bragging. We never lasted long in those universes.
As a last-ditch effort, I tried getting myself killed so that we could bond over her loss, but it wasn’t genuine and it seemed like she could tell. I spent countless lives trying to get back to what I had with the first Gretchen who had survived, but in the end I concluded it was impossible.
It was during those attempts that I realized why my older self had killed every Gretchen that I had come in contact with. The man who sat across from me at the coffee shop, the man I would become, was right. None of the mortals were special. Even the special ones weren’t special. But I could make Gretchen special.
If I made her so valuable and so rare, then my younger self would get to die and live again to see Gretchen and live a long and happy life with her. I wanted him to be able to experience the same joy I did with the Gretchen that survived, but knew it would be worth nothing to him if he didn’t first have to watch her die a few thousand times.
My older self was proof that death would never come for me. All I had to give to my younger self was Gretchen’s deaths, but hopefully she would give him some hope in the process. The time had finally come to pass this torch of hope and death to myself. Don’t worry Todd, the loss will make the love precious.
About the Author
Nicholas Licalsi began writing during a sabbatical from his career as a software engineer. After a short six week stay in a Chinese Buddhist monastery he decided that being a monk was not for him. In an effort to find something that made him want to get up in the morning he picked up writing. Two years later he writes every day for a minimum of an hour and finds it easier to get out of bed in the morning because of it.
He lives in Rockwall, TX where he can be found writing, brewing tea, or starting a new hobby. Find out more at StepIntoTheRoad.com
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An Echo Through Time: A Novella Page 8