The Time Travel Chronicles (26 page)

The whole thing lasted about twenty seconds, but in Hollywood, that was far, far above my pay grade. I had a serious case of perma-grin when I walked away from that conversation and headed to the bar for another celebratory drink. I got something fruity, I don’t remember what. I was just picking up my glass when a young woman in blonde curls walked up to the bar and asked for a refill on her martini. This time I did choke and spilled some of my drink down my front. Dressed in strapless red, the girl from my delusions looked over at me and gave me a not so unpleasant smirk before she walked away. From high as a kite, I plummeted into paranoia and fear. After nearly four years, my hallucinations had returned.

Needless to say I had a lot to talk about in my next therapy session. After I had explained it all to Eva, she started with her usual profound but infuriating question. “What do you make of it, Noah?”

It was a demonstration of my deepest trust in Eva that I told the truth. “To be honest, I’m convinced she’s real. I mean, I watched her the rest of the night. She interacted with the bartender, and she talked with several other people at the party. They responded to her.”

To my amazement, Eva didn’t judge me at all. She just nodded and said, “So she was real. Does that mean that she was the same person in your hallucinations, or are you projecting that backward?”

I pinched my lips together as I considered this new thought. “I guess that’s possible. Perhaps I should really be considering who the blonde represents in my hallucinations and why I picked this girl at the party to put in that place.”

Eva smiled and sat forward. “I think that is much more important than concerning yourself with whether or not she is the same girl.”

“Well, in my hallucinations she was dear to me. That I’m sure of. We were together. She punched me because I was about to cheat with someone else. Then in the divorce hearing, I had clearly hurt her.”

My therapist made that small “uh-huh” that says they want you to say more.

“So, I guess I’m afraid that I’ll break things, that I can’t keep a commitment.”

“And where do you think that comes from?”

With a kind of mental click, the gears in my head slid into place. I looked up. “My dad. I’m scared that I will turn out like my dad.”

Now my therapist was nodding. “I think so, Noah. I think that’s true.” She sat back. “I have another question for you.”

“What’s that?”

“Did you consider talking to her?”

I cleared my throat and started fidgeting with the notebook in front of me. “Well, no. I mean, I hurt her. I will hurt her. I don’t want that. You know my story with women.”

For the last three years, Eva had been helping me resolve my double bind in relationship to women. Slowly, I had given up on sex as a means to make myself functional. It was hard work and not without setbacks. I’d come to believe that healthy relationships involve the risk of rejection. By separating sex and friendship, I was denying myself the possibility of intimacy with anyone. Of course, that was all theory. Since giving up my libertine ways, I hadn’t ever built up the courage to be vulnerable to a real woman.

Eva’s tone became more than a little stern. “Noah,
you will hurt her
. That’s a fact. Relationships are never perfect. We sign up for the pain when we sign up for the risk, but we do it because it’s necessary for real intimacy and love.” As quickly as her sternness appeared, it evaporated, and Eva’s eyes twinkled. “Noah, I don’t think you can say you weren’t attracted to this girl. I mean, you spilled your drink, and your mind decided she was the woman of your dreams. I think you should have talked to her.”

I opened my mouth to defend myself and then realized how terrified the idea of talking to the blonde girl made me, and I closed it again. I closed my eyes and took several deep breaths to separate myself from my fear. I pictured the girl in red. I saw her walk away from the bar with her drink and walk up to one of the grips and start talking to him like they were old friends. Then I realized I knew him. I had his number in my phone.

* * *

Three weeks later, I sat in a bar staring at the text on my phone. I read it again just to make sure I hadn’t imagined it. “I’d love to get a drink. Let’s hope you don’t spill it down your front this time.” I was thirty minutes early. By the time she arrived I was so amped it was taking all the mindfulness I could muster just to stay in my seat, but Rachel always had a way of putting me at ease—a steadying aura that radiated from her.

That evening, all I could think about was her pretty smile and how it drove me mad every time she tucked her curly hair behind her ear. By the time she excused herself to go to the restroom, we were halfway through our third drink, and my nerves had been replaced by an equally potent dopamine cocktail that had me desperately hoping that the evening would end well.

I was watching her sashay around the corner when it felt like my eyes were sinking to the back of my head. Something inside me spoke out loud. “Fucking hell! Really? Really? We’re going to do this now? Really! Really!” I looked involuntarily up the ceiling. The people sitting at the table next to our booth looked up, surprised at the loudness of my speech. Embarrassed, whatever it was inside me mumbled a sheepish apology. The four returned to their conversation, and the thing inside me sat there for a second, furrowing my brow, apparently trying to calm down. Then it slowly reached into my pocket, took out my iPhone, pretended to dial, and pressed the phone to my ear.

It started talking, real quiet-like. “Listen, Noah, I’m you. Let that sink in. I’m you at age thirty-one. I know that’s hard to believe. You think that you’re having another delusion, but maybe, just maybe, that’s not the case. There’s another possibility. Maybe I’m here to plant the seed in your mind that closes a loop that began when I was twenty-three. You won’t put much stock in all this before the girl in front of you breaks your nose at twenty-nine, when the next loop closes. Even now, I don’t know for sure. So go ahead, doubt me; it’s okay. I understand, but I am you, and you know what? That girl is the best thing that will ever happen to you. You tried really hard to wreck that for us when we were seventeen. You’re damn lucky that you didn’t stick around for a few more minutes, or you would have wrecked it all.”

Here the thing paused for a second and nodded my head, looking like he was getting a response on the phone. As far as I could tell, no one in the bar had yet noticed my psychosis. He picked up my drink and took a sip of something that I tasted with him. He pulled my lips back in a grimace. “Dear God, the drinks I used to get were vile. Try something like a cognac neat or an Islay single malt.”

Then he continued, “If I remember right, I don’t have much time, so let me get to the point. What’s really hard to understand is whether or not you can change stuff. Can you control when you jump? I don’t know. Does me talking to you mean that something will change? So far no, but I desperately hope so for both our sakes. Are you and I really the same person, or are you someone else? We have no way of knowing.” I felt my shoulders shrug. “So if you jump forward, try not to break stuff, like your marriage, but as we both know, that might just turn out to be imposs—”

It was like a phone line went dead. I was left sitting at the bar holding my silent phone to my ear. As calmly as I could, I put it in my pocket.

In defiance of what had just occurred, I picked up my glass and took a long, slow mouthful of my drink while I mustered the resources I had learned in the past few years to deal with this manifestation of my broken mind. I forced myself to focus on my senses and not the panic in my head. As I did so I realized one thing right away—my drink was sickeningly sweet. To this day, I trace my love of scotch back to the night I met my former wife. It’s a thread of reality that I cling to in times of need.

* * *

After that episode, Eva and I had our work cut out for us. Everything I had learned in the last few years was thrown into question. Is time travel possible? Was I really my eighty-three-year-old self when I was thirteen? How many of the details was I changing in order to fit the time-travel scenario?

At the time, I know Eva believed she was watching a deterioration in my condition.

There was something I couldn’t shake about the idea that I was traveling in time. It made so much sense. Maybe I really would be punched by my girlfriend when I was twenty-nine. Rachel Stuart’s existence seemed to be the hard evidence that my mind needed to cling to my beliefs.

Before I go on, I feel I have to explain myself. To a mentally ill person, his delusions and hallucinations are real. As real as the words you see on the page. As real as that feeling of laying with your lover. They’re intimate and personal. Without some kind of validation process, there is no way to tell the difference between a delusion and reality. That’s why a person who suffers hallucinations will work hard to check his reality whenever anything unusual happens. For example, he’ll ask a trusted friend if they also see the pterodactyl hovering above the building. So what happens when the patient checks reality and it seems to verify his delusions? That’s the moment of true trauma—the crux of the matter for every broken person. It’s the moment when the social contract of reality that everyone else shares shatters to pieces at his feet.

Eva did her best to soften the blow, to listen without judgment, but she would not agree with my conclusion that I was traveling in time. In the end, we had to agree to wait and see what happened six years down the road.

Instead of fighting a battle she could not win, Eva spent her time fighting to keep me from bolting out of my new relationship with Rachel. I am forever grateful, Eva, wherever you are.

After the incident in the bar, things seemed to quiet down.

Even though the films that I was best known for didn’t come until later, I look back on my twenties as the true beginning of my productive life as a film director. I was blessed. My second film was received with more acclaim than my first, and I soon quit working on other people’s movies to concentrate on my own full-time. Producers started to return my agent’s phone calls. Rumors swirled.

Success in my career wasn’t the only part of my life that seemed to be moving forward at full steam. My relationship with Rachel got serious—friendship and sex came together and gave birth to intimacy. I was madly in love.

Within a few months of beginning our relationship, I asked Rachel to sit down with Eva and me. It was the most vulnerable moment of my entire life. I was so scared she would leave. When I had laid everything out on the table—including my belief that I had met her when I was seventeen—Eva explained a little more. For a couple of minutes, Rachel sat, looking at her knees while I died inside. As the seconds ticked by I knew she was going to leave. I just hoped she would be kind. By the time Rachel took a deep breath and looked right at me, I could barely breathe. I needn’t have worried. She said with a grin, “I always did go in for a man with a mysterious past. Now I have my very own.”

Rachel and I married when I was twenty-eight.

Six months after our wedding, I finally inked a deal for a big-budget film. The next time Rachel and I attended a premiere, we were invited onto the red carpet rather than shuffled in the side door with the press and crew. We stood there blinking awkwardly in the glare of the flashes.

She leaned in.

I lowered my head.

“I feel totally underdressed.”

I smiled back and said, “You outshine them all.”

She gave my hand a conciliatory squeeze, and I glanced down to look at her royal blue dress. I felt sure I had seen it before. For someone who has experienced major lapses in consciousness like I had, such feelings aren’t unknown. It’s like having
déjà vu
on steroids. I took a deep breath and put my worries aside. I was attributing something from the present backward in order to make sense of an emotional situation.

When the film ended, we made our way to the afterparty by shuttle. On the bus, I realized that I had crossed some unseen magical barrier. I had been to a few of these big studio parties after the one where I spotted Rachel so many moons before, but I always ended up hanging out with the crew. It was considered bad form to try and bug the famous and powerful at one of those events. However, tonight I was escorted around by one of the producers on my film. He introduced me to genuine A-list celebrities, studio execs, and the like.

After about an hour inside the invisible barrier that demarcates the boundary between the interesting and everyone else, I excused myself to catch my breath and get a little food. As I approached the table, drink in hand, I suddenly had a sense of deep foreboding. I turned around and was just about to head back into the crowd in search of Rachel when it happened. My mind floated to the back of my head, and I watched in mingled horror and fascination as my seventeen-year-old self took over, and then she was standing there, the woman in green. This time I recognized her as a one-time A-lister whose rise had been cut short by a combination of ill-considered home wrecking and drugs. The dress was the same green with sequined trim and a slit down the middle that closed just under her very upright and unnatural breasts. “My agent said you’re making a movie. I want to be in it,” she said.

Internally, I flinched as I watched my younger self advance toward what he hoped to be a major league fantasy. I could do nothing to stop it, and then, in what felt like slow motion, my body turned, and I saw my lovely Rachel, livid, embarrassed, and vulnerable.