The Time Travel Chronicles (27 page)

“I know you told me this would happen. I don’t care! I’m still going to punch you!”

I came back to the front of my brain, even as my head snapped backward.

Dear Lord, she could throw a haymaker!

I landed hard on the concrete, feeling as light as a feather. There could be no more doubt. I traveled in time. I started to laugh, and once it started, I couldn’t stop.

I doubt you can comprehend the relief I felt as I lay on the concrete walk, nose throbbing.  For almost a decade, I had been sure that my senses were not to be trusted. Now I had the evidence that I needed to prove that I was telling the truth.

I looked up at Rachel as she covered her mouth. Her eyes widened. “That’s what I said, wasn’t it?”

I smiled and nodded. “Yeth,” I said as my nose started to bleed.

It was the blood that brought the PR agent out in my wife. She quickly grabbed a napkin from the buffet table. “Oh shit, Noah. This is really bad for us. We have to get out of here.”

Still smiling, I said, “Yeah, you’re probably right.”

* * *

The
morning after our encounter with the wayward starlet, I woke feeling lighter than I had in years. The sun seemed bright and cheerful. As I looked out of our Koreatown apartment tower, even the smog on the LA skyline seemed thin and penetrable. For the first time in nearly a decade, I felt like I was fully part of the human species. I didn’t have a disease, and the events I believed in were as real as anyone else’s.

Letting Rachel sleep, I stepped into the kitchen and started making breakfast.

The butter knife was just making that lovely scraping sound when I realized the implications of my time travel for the future of my marriage. Rachel found me a few minutes later, shoulders slumped, staring at the counter, still holding a half-buttered piece of toast.

I made an appointment with Eva for the following week. Years before, she and I had agreed that I could hold on to my belief that I traveled in time, and she would withhold judgment to see if the loops closed when I was twenty-nine. Now the day had come to tell her that I had been correct all along.

I had anticipated a sense of victory, the triumph of my sanity over the tyranny of a society that would not believe me, but mental clouds hung heavy as the day approached.

At first, Rachel was right there with me, encouraging me, telling me that my fears about our marriage were nonsense. I tried to listen, to believe that the great unspoken weight that lay between us had been lifted. I told myself that Rachel believed me, that she saw me as I truly was, but as I incessantly worried about our future, I watched the divide between us return.

As the week wore on, her eyes became more hollow, and she spoke less and less.

I told myself that it didn’t matter, that Eva would fix both of us. It was to be expected. I knew what kind of shock it was to find out that time travel existed and to know that you will divorce later in life. At the end of the meeting, it would all be fine.

Things went sideways pretty early on.

“I still will not believe in time travel, Noah. I can’t.” Eva shook her head gently as she pronounced her judgment on my story. “I’m sorry.”

I felt torn in two. On the one hand, my newly solid grasp on reality started to melt. Doubt crept back into the corners of my mind. After a decade of treatment for D.I.D., was I truly willing to say that I was sure? That I had seen the future? On the other hand, Eva’s disbelief offered a glimmer of hope for my marriage. If I hadn’t traveled in time, then I hadn’t seen our divorce. I closed my eyes and concentrated on stretching my fingers.

My eyes suddenly felt hot. I growled audibly, trying to hold back the oncoming tide.

Eva answered. “It’s okay to cry, Noah. I know this must really be difficult for you.”

Sitting beside me on the leather couch, Rachel reached out and put her hand on my back.

I opened my eyes and accepted a proffered box of Kleenex.

There was silence for a second or two while I blew my nose and sniffed.

Gesturing to Rachel, I leaned toward Eva, my voice rising. “But she was there. She saw, too. It happened just like I told you both years ago. It did happen. You have to give me that. I mean, what else could it be?”

Eva took a long, slow breath, softened her posture, and furrowed her brow, considering my words. “Fair enough. Rachel was there.”

Turning to my wife, she said, “So, Rachel, what do you make of it? Does your husband time travel?” I’m sure she did her best, but Eva couldn’t quite keep the skepticism from escaping into her words.

I turned to watch Rachel. She looked down for a moment. While she gathered her thoughts, she reached out her hand. Gratefully, I took it and felt it tremoring slightly.

When she started speaking, she squeezed my hand all the harder, her eyes glinting a little. “I don’t know what to think. I’m frankly quite confused. I mean, it did happen, almost just as Noah told it to us.”

I felt my voice catch in my throat. “Almost? What was different?”

She turned to me and took my hand with both of hers. “Well, for one thing, her dress was much more modest than the one you described. For another, I’ve been thinking about how you said I reacted. You said I punched you in the cheek, not the nose.”

I put down the impulse to pull my hand back. I tried to look through her pupils and find her soul, willing her to understand. I didn’t want to be alone, to live my life being told I was ill when I knew I was not. “Those are details, little things. So my seventeen-year-old mind made her more naked than she was. What do you expect? Come on now. You know it happened. You know it did.”

Rachel was nodding now. “I know, Noah. I want it all to be true. Maybe you just had a dream or a premonition, or what if it was just coincidence? Have you ever thought about that? I mean, you never told me her name before.”

“Babe, that was twelve years ago! She’d barely left the Mouseketeers! She wasn’t a name anyone would know! I’d never even heard of her!”

“But Noah, our marriage! I don’t want to… I won’t go through the next twelve years expecting that we will divorce! I can’t live like that!”

Eva intervened. “Noah, I think Rachel makes an excellent point. It will do you no good to live your life believing that you are doomed to betray your marriage. That’s not kind to Rachel.”

Seeing me open my mouth to interrupt, she continued a little more quickly. “However, I think what happened is certainly a meaningful moment in your life. Perhaps there’s something more productive we can do with this moment than debate what exactly happened or dwell on its implications for the future. What were you thinking when you turned around and saw Rachel, angry and ready to hit you?”

I swallowed hard. For a person with hallucinations, it can be so frustrating to feel that events and places that are so important to you can’t be understood by the world. The trick is to share of them what you can with the people close to you—people you trust. “I was hurt. It made me sad to see her so angry and upset. I wanted it to stop. I wished I could go back and keep it from happening, but apparently I can’t.”

Eva smiled. “Noah, that’s not what you would have said if you had been caught cheating at seventeen, is it?”

“No, I guess it’s not.”

“Noah, I don’t think a human ever finishes growing up. It’s a lifelong journey that has no end, and that can be discouraging. Sometimes it’s good to look back and remember how far we’ve come.”

I thought about what she said while I absentmindedly rubbed my forehead. “But it won’t be enough. I’ll still screw things up.”

* * *

When I was thirty-one, I looped back to the night I met Rachel for drinks. There really isn’t much to add. All I will say is that there was a very good reason that at that moment I believed my wife to be the greatest thing that ever happened to me.

At the time, I hoped I could change the future. Now I know that to be impossible.

I never mentioned my flashback to Eva. She had made her position clear, and I really didn’t want to get back into the argument. We would have to agree to disagree. Perhaps I could have told Rachel, but I was really too scared that I would upset the apple cart, so I kept things to myself.

Our thirties were dedicated to the movie industry. Through it all, Rachel and I managed to stay married, which is less rare than you might think in Hollywood. Bad news gets clicks and eyeballs. My anniversary doesn’t. Yet no matter how good things seemed, I had a nagging fear about the future. Part of me still believed that somewhere along the line, I was going to do something unpardonable, and she would leave. It felt inevitable.

By the time my mid-thirties came around, I became obsessed. I did everything I knew to make sure my wife felt cared for and loved. I had strict, almost prudish rules on the set when it came to my relationships with women. I think Rachel found them a little embarrassing, but I know she appreciated the intent.

I also became suspicious and controlling at home. I began to wonder if it hadn’t been me who caused the problem. I started to play the director with my wife, making sure we did things together. I’d call at odd times to see if she would pick up. The more uptight I became, the more distant it made Rachel.

I felt trapped. Our marriage began to feel like a husk that had been scooped out from the inside. We both ran away to our work.

Rachel, a publicist, helped out on numerous movie campaigns. On the side, she picked up a few small roles here or there. She always had acting talent but never the drive to make a career of it, so she did little stuff.

My first big-budget movie had been marginally successful. It certainly didn’t fail. Put it this way—it was good enough that I could get more money, and if you’re a director, that’s all that matters.

I spent the next few years attached to a lot of science fiction and superhero movies. I made an ungodly sum for studio shareholders and didn’t do too badly myself. Budgets for genre films like these increased rapidly during those years.

As the money grew, directors started to lose control of their films. All movies were required to show fidelity to the same worn-out tropes. My job was slowly being replaced by the focus group.

Directors were giving up. Good people—people you’ve heard of—were talking about quitting and doing other things.

Finally, I had enough. Something had to be done.

It was a fellow director who gave me the idea. I won’t name him, but he got his start on television with a certain teen vampire slayer. The guy looks at me over the top of his glass of beer one night and out of the blue says, “Sometimes I fantasize about creating a fake set of dailies and keeping the real edit secret. Then I’d switch them when it goes to print.”

“You’d never work in Hollywood again.”

He shrugged. “Unless it was good enough.”

* * *

Which is how, two years later, I put my career on the line and lied to a studio. I took on an adaptation of a book called
Gossamer
. The author played with the hero quest and growing up stuff in some really intriguing ways. Anyway, the subterfuge started at the beginning of the project. I had two scripts, one that I always showed to the suits, and one that I used with the crew and actors. I shot and edited both of them. Of course, I was far over budget. God bless my producers, George Katzenbloom and Maddie Stern. They ran so much b.s. by the higher-ups to get that done.

When we finished, we presented the studio with both films and demanded that they focus group them side-by-side. I remember sitting in Don Mecklenberg’s office and getting the dressing down of a lifetime. I think the three of us left that meeting convinced we would never work again, but once Mecklenberg brought his blood pressure back down to its usual high level, he focus grouped both cuts and mine won out, hand over fist.

The following March, I walked into the Dolby Theater. At the age of thirty-seven, with Rachel by my side, I nervously took my seat.

No sooner had I sat down than I was back in my office sitting at my desk. The house seemed quiet. The first thing I noticed were the age spots on my thin and wrinkled hands. My back ached just sitting there. In front of me on the desk, prominently displayed but very dusty, sat an envelope, marked in bold black letters: From 73 to 37.

I opened it.

Dear 37,

First of all, they’re prime numbers. Every jump happens during a prime-numbered year. I don’t know the significance, but at least you’ll know when you can expect them. If you really want to trip your mind out, then ask yourself how I know about the prime numbers if I got it out of the same letter thirty-six years ago. You’ll noodle on that one for years. I don’t think we can understand the answer.

When I was your age, I would have killed for someone to tell me how it was all going to turn out, particularly with Rachel, but now I’m going to piss you off because I’ve realized that the vulnerability is an important part of the journey. So while I’m not going to spill the beans on your future, I do want to help you choose the right path. So here’s my advice: