The Time Travel Chronicles (20 page)

It happened right after lunch on the fourth day of his hospital stay. I had almost reached the end, the part in the book where the traveler had come back to eighteenth-century London only to disappear again a few hours later. This time for good. First I saw one of his fingers move. After a while I realized that he was pointing at me. His skin was clammy and cold when I took his hands. There was no strength left in them. The hands that had built things, had held tools for all his life, the hands that had carried me through all of mine. His mouth opened. I took an ice cube from the tray and moistened his lips with it. He might have said something, I wasn’t sure. His mouth moved as if he wanted to form a word.

"Do you want to tell me something? Dad?"

I leaned over, my ear close to his mouth. There was nothing. No sound. No word. I felt silly all of a sudden. But something in him wouldn't let go of me. There was a word on his lips. I tried to read it. It was like an ahhhh or maybe a duhhh. He seemed to repeat it over and over. Once I thought he said druhhh.

That day, I left the hospital defeated. I knew there was something he had wanted to tell me but I couldn't make out the word. When he died a few days later, without ever lifting his finger again, I couldn't comprehend that he was gone. I went back to school. My sister and her husband moved into our house. They had to sell their house right after my brother-in-law lost his job.

One evening during dinner, they started talking about my father's things. They wanted to sell the tools and the equipment. I think it was my sister's husband most of all who wanted to sell it. My sister just nodded. My stepmother was still too grief-stricken to oppose. I told them if they were going to sell his things, I would stop eating. They didn't believe me. I made it without food for three days. On the fourth day, I collapsed during gym at school and went to the hospital. I was released a few days later. They didn't sell my father's things. They even let me go into the workshop.

The shop was in an old barn a bit further down from the house. The first few times I went there after his death, I sat at his welding station in the dark, listening to the silence, trying to feel if he was still here, if part of him was still around. The smell of his pipe tobacco and the damp coal in the forge lingered. I wasn't able to stay for long. One day, I decided that it would be a good idea to straighten up the place. I had always been responsible for cleaning after we worked together. I swept the floor planks, making sure the metal sheathing around the welding station was clear of anything combustible. I straightened out the tools and cleaned the forging hammers with oil, then swept the two workbenches. I cleaned the shelf that had all the leftover parts like copper fittings, pieces of iron, steel rods, plates, and other items. I emptied the ash container in the forge, polished the anvils, and greased the spindles of the vices.

I had my own leather apron. It hung next to my father’s under a small shelf that had our gloves and welding masks on it. When I looked at it, I started to cry and couldn't continue that day. I didn't go back for a few days. One morning, I woke up thinking about him saying druhhh. I began to scribble the word on pieces of paper during class at school. ‘Draw’ was the closest I could come to making sense of it. Did my father, with his last word, tell me to start drawing?

That afternoon, I went back to the shop. I turned the light on, kindled a fire in the wood stove, and sat in the corner opposite the chimney. From there, I could see the whole shop. I had a large drawing pad and a pencil and began to sketch the room. First, I tried to get the right perspective and proportions. Then I added the chimney and the large workbenches. After that came the welding station, the forging area, the large shelf with the materials, the small old dresser that had been converted to hold small boxes of nuts, bolts, washers, rags, and smaller parts. From there I went to the tool carts, the other chairs, and the larger tools like the stand-up drill and belt grinder.

After a few hours, I was done. I hung the picture in my room where I could see it from my bed. I lay awake for most of that night. The moon rose around 11 pm and I took the drawing with me into my restless sleep. In my dream, the picture was made from charcoal from the forging oven. But it was washed out and almost unrecognizable. When I woke up again, my clock showed 1:45 am. Druhhh. Druhhh. Draw. I said the words out lout. Druwh. Drough. Drought. Dry. Draw. I looked at the drawing again. Drum. Drawl. Draw. Drawer. Drawer. Drawer.

DRAWER!

I sat up. Drawer. The moonlight on the wall was enough to illuminate the drawing. The old dresser. I’d never looked inside the drawers, hadn't gotten to organizing them yet. I got out of bed, put on my thermal pants, a long-sleeved shirt, and a wool sweater. It had gotten cold during the last few days. The first flurries of snow had fallen yesterday. I went downstairs as quietly as I could and put on my boots. I left the house through the back door and walked along the silvery path toward the dark silhouette of the barn. My heart was pounding when I arrived. I didn't want to turn the lights on so I grabbed a flashlight from the hook next to the door. I kindled a fire in the stove and stood in front of the dresser for a while. Part of me couldn't wait to open the drawers and see what was in there. The other part wasn't so sure. What if there was nothing? What if I was chasing a ghost? What if my dad had simply told me that he wanted water?

There was no point in stalling. I needed to know. I opened the first drawer. On the right side, an assortment of bolts of different lengths and widths was organized into sections, separated by narrow pieces of thin, dark wood. On the other side of the drawer were nuts and washers. Over time, the sizes had gotten mixed up and now it was just a mess of bits mingling together.

I should have taken better care of this, I thought. Instead, I’d let it get to this level of disorganization. The next drawer wasn't as deep. It held a few pieces of sandpaper for the belt grinder. Nothing else. I closed it. Then I opened it again and looked closer. It wasn't deep enough for the size of the drawer. I took out the sheets of sandpaper and placed them on top of the dresser. A false bottom. I could see it right away. There was a small gap between it and the back board of the drawer. I pulled it up. It dislodged easily.

The beam of my flashlight illuminated what looked like a spiral notebook. It was blackened from grease and metal dust and its corners were bent upward. Large parts of the spiral were missing. I carefully lifted it up. Below it lay what looked like a piece of metal sheathing. Maybe a square foot and a quarter of an inch in thickness. I took it in my hands, expecting its weight to be much more than it actually was. It felt like lead but without the weight. I tapped at it with my fingernail. The sound was similar to that of glass when touched with a metal object. Pling! I carefully laid it on the ground.

I went to the stove and added a few logs to the embers. The chill hadn't left the room yet. I pulled a chair close, sat down, and opened the notebook. The first page, written in perfect pencil lettering, started with Table of Contents. Below that, and perfectly aligned according to its sections, it said:

1 — Parts

1.1 Centrifugal Rotor

1.1.1 Core

1.1.2 Outer Ring

1.1.3 Connectors

1.2 Power Supply

1.2.1 Battery Compartment

1.2.2 Capacitor Board

1.3 Controls

1.3.1 Left Foot Pedal

1.3.2 Right Foot Pedal

1.3.3 Display

1.4 External Parts

1.4.1 Chassis

1.4.2 Faraday Cage

1.5 Traveler's Chair

1.5.1 Head Rest and Neck Stabilizer

1.5.2 Seat and Back

2 — Construction and Assembly

3 — Setting Dates

4 — Travel

5 — Clothing and Accessories

6 — Safety

7 — The Traveler

What followed were twenty pages of neatly written text intertwined with drawings, sketches, and mathematical formulas. Then several pages with lists of materials needed. This list was separated into items we had in the shop and others that needed to be bought. The list had everything in it, from metal wire fencing to pieces of copper, from steel piping to Neodymium rare earth magnets that could be ordered through the mail.

The Construction and Assembly section described how to put it all together, piece by piece. I recognized my father's writing — how he phrased certain sentences and how he began some of the lines with "Careful there!" He had used this phrase many times throughout his teachings.

"Careful there, don't apply too much pressure on the welding rod. Let it be pulled into the steel rather than push it into the bead."

I could hear him as if he stood beside me, reading to me in his deep voice. I had to stop several times. During those moments, I felt both the pain over his loss and the love he had left behind.

I still had no idea what the finished product would be. Until I got to the end of the section. The drawing took up a whole page. It was detailed and seemed to be to scale. It took me all but two seconds to see what it was. One person could comfortably sit inside. The chassis was made from galvanized pipes. The cabin holding the traveler was surrounded by metal fencing. A faradic cage. There was an engine of sorts and two pedals, one for each foot, to control the machine.

Did he expect me to build this? He must have wanted to give it to me much later, maybe five or ten years from now. Surely he hadn't expected to die so soon. I stared at the notebook for a while, then closed it carefully and placed it back into the drawer. I was cold all of a sudden. The fire must have gone out. "I'm sorry, Dad, but what you want me to do is impossible," I said into the silence. I listened for a moment, in case there was an answer. But the shop was quiet. When I left, the grey sky loomed overhead.

* * *

After that night, I didn't set foot into the shop for a week. Instead, I glanced at it from the window of my room during the night — a dark shape against the slightly lighter background of the meadow behind it. An emptiness had spread through our house during that time. My stepmother was a ghost, busily moving from room to room, organizing my father's belongings. My sister was consoling her but I could see that it was her who needed consoling more than anyone. She and my dad had had a difficult relationship. It didn't help that when she was a teenager, I began to want to help him in his shop and therefore spent much more time with him than she ever did. Now I could see in her the regret of never wanting to listen to him when he spoke about the furniture he'd built or the iron gates and door hinges he had made.

I rarely went downstairs anymore except when I had to eat or do chores around the house. I spent most of the time up in my room, doing homework or looking at the shop from my window. When I lay in bed at night, my thoughts always went back to the notebook. Why did my father tell me about the drawer if he knew I would never be able to build the machine? The question kept me up at night and even my days were filled with trying to answer it. He had written the manual for me but it was clear he had intended to build it with me, not have me try it all by myself. In the hospital, he probably thought I should have it to remember him. But I didn't want to remember him. Remembering him was too painful. I wanted to see him again. I wanted to feel his gentle touch on my shoulder when I worked on a project in the shop, hear his words of encouragement when I burned a hole into the steel or the welding rod got stuck in the bead.

I caught myself thinking about the items on the list and where to get them. A 12 Volt/700CCA car battery, the magnets, a six-by-six foot piece of metal fencing, a few copper connectors, about thirty feet of one-inch galvanized piping, a seat cushion (if needed), the display of an analog alarm clock and a few other things I could get at our hardware store. If I were to try to build it. Which I wouldn't. But as much as I tried not to think about it, I couldn't stop. I had forty two dollars and seven cents in my savings box. That would barely be enough to get the magnets. If I wanted to do this, I needed to get a job. But I didn't want to get a job because I couldn't possibly build the machine. I paced back and forth in my room, but this made me even more agitated than I already was. Eventually, I sat down on my bed and, just as I did sometimes, opened The Time Machine without any particular page in mind.

"I told some of you last Thursday of the principles of the Time Machine, and showed you the actual thing incomplete in the workshop. There it is now, a little travel worn, truly; and one of the ivory bars is cracked, and a brass rail bent; but the rest of it is sound enough. I expected to finish it on Friday, when the putting together was nearly done, I found that one of the nickel bars was exactly one inch too short, and this had to be re-made; so that the thing was not complete until this morning."

I closed the book again. Should I try it? I'm not sure what happened at that moment but something inside me gave way. I couldn't hold out any longer. I guess the pain over not being with him was greater than the fear of building a machine that would, in the end, be just that — a machine with no purpose but to have made a fool out of me. I got dressed and went downstairs.

"Where you going?" I heard my stepmother call from the living room.

"I'll be right back. Just going out to the shop."