Unhappenings (11 page)

We walked in silence a block and a half to a café. Over a latte and a chai, I prompted her. “I haven’t seen you in a while,” I said.

“I haven’t seen you in eight years,” she replied.

Unexpected, but unsurprising. “Why now?” I asked simply.

“Because I owe you some apologies, and I don’t think…” She stopped there, and turned away. I gave her a moment, as she regained her composure by focusing on her latte. She blew on it, sipped it, and said into it, “Do you know how difficult time travel is?”

“Sort of,” I admitted. “I’ve only done it a couple dozen times, but it does take the wind of me most days.”

“That’s not what I mean,” she said. “Yes, it is taxing, physically, emotionally. I’m asking how much you know about the mechanics.”

“Nothing. You never told me. I never asked. I assumed I would find out when I was ready, to protect the space-time continuum or something.”

She laughed softly at that. “Space-Time takes care of herself just fine. That was always just about keeping you innocent. That part of your life is over, I’m sorry to say.” She looked up. “Time travel is technologically, mechanically, extremely difficult. Setting up the field is child’s play. Riding it is another thing entirely. Have you ever wondered why my visits to you were always non-sequential from your point of view? Or why my ages varied to the tune of about fifteen years? Aiming a time travel field is a desperately imprecise science. Do you want to guess what the margin of error is for a typical jump?”

I thought back on what little she had revealed to me in our travels about how closely she had made her goals. “Three days?” I considered the guess to be conservative.

She took another sip. “Seven years,” she said. “Ish,” she added with a slight smile that almost seemed genuine. “Mind you, that’s a typical jump. Ours were anything but that.”

“Is this stuff I’m supposed to know?”

“Doesn’t really matter,” she said. “I’m only telling you because I’m glad I got here when I did. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I was from the future. I mean, when I was Penelope.”

“I know what you mean. You’re apologizing for something you did, what, thirty years ago?”

“At least. I still wanted you to hear it. That time I saw you and knew I had accidentally let it slip… I tried for months to get back to that point in time, to tell you how sorry I was, but I couldn’t. I was shut out. But now… Nigel, you will see me again after this point, many, many times. Most of those times we will be allies, close friends even. And most of them will be good times. But I… I think this is the last time I see you. And I just want to say I’m sorry. I’m sorry for a lot of the things that are about to start coming your way, and I’m sorry for what happened eight years ago. I wasn’t well then, Nigel. Not well at all. It’s been very difficult to own that. And I’m better now. Much better. But then… Just… When the thing from my eight years ago finally plays out for you, whatever you are thinking at the time, whatever you are feeling at that moment, try to remember…”

She looked down. A single tear dropped into her coffee. After a beat, she took another sip from it. Quietly, she said, “Try to remember that someday after that, I came back here to tell you how sorry I am.” She stood, and as she walked past my seat she put her hand on my shoulder to stop me from getting up, or following her. “How sorry I am,” she repeated, “and how much I love you.”

She kissed me on the forehead, and drifted out the door.

enelope’s words of warning and apology haunted me, and her timing was dreadful. I was just finishing out the last few weeks of my undergrad career. With some carefully honed tools for maintaining a real social life under my belt, and feeling like I had some kind of handle on the unhappenings that had plagued my life for years, I looked forward to striking out into the world with a reasonable facsimile of normality. Not to be, apparently.

I did what I could to maintain stability in my schoolwork, and withdrew a bit from my friends. Whatever crisis loomed for me, I already knew I would outlive it to at least my one hundredth birthday, but there was no telling what could yet happen—or unhappen—to the people around me.

It was about a week before I graduated that I got my first taste of what she meant by the things that were about to start coming my way.

It was late in the evening, and I had just eaten dinner with Pete. He and I had begun to drift apart. That was entirely intentional on my part, but he had no way of knowing that. This get-together was something of an olive branch from him, and I humored it. In truth, that was a friendship I had come to value deeply. The fact that I was passively ending it was entirely for Pete’s protection, and I was sorry to see it go.

As we left the restaurant, Pete told me he needed to walk back to one of the physics labs to check on an experiment he was running for Dr. Ainsley. I had managed to avoid that professor entirely since his attempted arrest of me years earlier. Pete knew all about that, as did everyone who was a student at that time, but he assured me Ainsley would be nowhere near the building, so I went with him. When we got there, he asked me to wait outside.

“I’m not supposed to let anyone near the equipment,” he said. “It’s some sort of weird classified thing.”

“Really? He trusts you with top secret research?”

Pete laughed. “He absolutely does not. Honestly, I don’t even have a clue what this is all about. Twice a day I take some readings and answer a few observational questions, which usually amounts to recording the same exact numbers over and over again, and noting that nothing has changed. Part of me thinks this isn’t even a physics experiment, and that I’m really a subject in a psych study on pointless activity. This is how I earn my stipend, so I don’t ask a lot of questions. Whatever it is, he has told me absolutely nothing, and sworn me to secrecy about it. If he knew I was telling you even this much—especially because it’s you, by the way—he’d probably have me drawn and quartered. Stay put. I’ll be right back.”

As I waited for Pete outside the building, I began to feel a tingle in my left arm. It was the same sensation I felt during some of my travels through time with Penelope, and once or twice I felt it just prior to her arrival. I had come to think of the implant as my trick knee that can always tell when a storm is coming. I paced nervously, wondering if she was about to appear and if I would finally have to introduce her—or explain her—to Pete. But she didn’t come. The tingling carried on, and began to take on a pulse-like quality, which was new. I started to rub my arm, as a reflex.

“Are you okay?” asked Pete. I jumped, a bit startled, and realized I had been scanning the area so intently and nervously for any sign of Penelope that I had completely forgotten about him.

“My arm hurts,” I said honestly. If he was asking whether I was all right, he must already have seen me rubbing it anyway.

“Did you do something to it?” he asked, and as he spoke, in simple curiosity he took a step toward me and leaned in to look for an injury.

The tingling suddenly shifted to stabbing pain, and I yelped. Pete jumped back, clearly surprised and concerned, and the pain stopped.

The sensation wasn’t coming from Penelope; it was coming from Pete.

Whatever covert experiment Ainsley was running with Pete as his lackey was generating the same field around him that Penelope always carried with her. The futuristic technology I had been using for two years was no longer so futuristic. It was to be the eventual product of research and development going on in real time in my own school.

Time travel was starting to happen.

nd then I graduated.

I finished in the top quarter of my class, which I thought was pretty impressive under the conditions in which I had spent my four years of study. My parents took me and about a dozen members of my extended family out to a very expensive restaurant, where I ordered a whole lobster. It was a pretty good day.

My diploma was framed within the next week. Lacking a proper office in which to hang it, I chose to display it on the wall of the living room in my parents’ house. It was a genuine source of pride to read the words “Bachelor of Science in Physics.” Every morning before breakfast I would head into the library, and read the entire document, whispering the words softly to myself.