It Begins. . . .

“Wait,” she said, panting, ‘I’m almost there, just a little more!”

I tried to hold on, tightening my abdominal muscles in a mostly futile attempt not to cum but it was enough and I felt the walls of her pussy clamp down on my cock as she cried out “Ahhhhhhhh, yes, oh yes!” I lost all control and, breathing in great ragged gasps, shot my load of cum deep inside her. All of a sudden, I felt very tender towards her and leaning down, I kissed her softly.

We lay together a little while, a gloriously sweaty and sticky mess, as I shrank inside of her until her pussy just gripped the head of my cock. Eventually, I pulled out and we lay nestled like spoons, my cock warm and snug between the cheeks of her ass, my resting upon her shoulder. We talked of this and that and drifted off to sleep together.”

“That’s a hell of a story about a hell of a woman it sounds like, boy.” Walter says diplomatically.

“I’m not finished and this story gets a lot stranger. I do believe that tonight will be a night for much that is strange.” I replied. “As I may have mentioned before, physically none of that ever happened. I have never done so much as shake hands with the woman. This I now know to be sure. I have been to her grave though, at first to convince myself that she was truly dead, but as I lost my hold on reality, to laugh and cry and talk to her. In all truth, all I have ever had was memories of her, of a lifetime spent with her. Of the births of our children, of vacations to the sea shore, of anniversaries and afternoons spent restoring the house we bought together. Such strong memories stretching years all more good than bad.”

“Trying to reconcile these memories with that of my everyday existence proved futile and in the end I lost it. I became insane and my family arranged for me to enter a mental hospital in Ohio. Diagnosis: acute psychosis and major depression. God only knows what the doctors thought of me, grieving at the loss of a loved one I had never known. I did get better there although it was a long and hard road. For while there, I did come to realize what I was and what my purpose could be, if only I could manage to control myself enough to do it.”

“Yeah?” asks Walter, “Find out that you were meant to be a nutball that climbs into peoples’ cars and kidnaps them at gunpoint, did you?”

“Well, I was a nutball for a while but I am not anymore, I assure you. I know exactly what I am doing, however it might seem to you. I regret that I have caused you distress, but it was necessary and for that I make no apologies.”

“What I found out was that, well, I have become unstuck in time and space. It started as dreams I had while at the hospital. In these dreams, I would fly out far and above where I slept and wander across the countryside, looking in people as they slept or went about their business at night. Unable to control it at first, I would travel randomly, a spirit at the mercy of what winds I knew not. Gradually, over the months, I grew able to control this ability and my nightly journeys grew ever wider. I discovered that the distance I was able to travel was inversely related to the amount of time I could travel into the past. That the farther in distance I went, the more closely to the present I would have to stay. I could not travel forward in time though. I tried but it was as though a great black void opened up around me that I could not pass through.”

“I journeyed to the night of Tina’s fatal accident, and although I couldn’t control precisely when or where I would arrive, I got close enough to see her little Honda Civic swerve on a patch of icy highway, heard the tires squeal, the crump of the steel buckling and the crunching sound of the broken glass. Heard her scream, the snapping sounds as the underbrush gave way. But I could do nothing. I heard her call for help and remained there, disembodied, as those cries grew fainter, as the cold set in. I was there and I watched her die.”

“Jesus Christ, “ says Walter, shaking his head.

“After witnessing this, I took a turn for the worse, becoming so despondent that the doctors upped my medication considerably. It was months before I began to venture out at night once again. But I never returned to that night. To this night. Until now.”

“But I thought that you said you couldn’t take your body with you. That’s what you said.”

“Yep, but Walter, I discovered in rather a terrible way, that I could. It was a night I had ranged clear up to Portland, Maine; farther than I had attempted in quite awhile. I was drifting along the alleys and back porches of a run-down neighborhood, when I heard a man’s and a woman’s voices in heated argument. Curious, I drifted through the wall of the house from which it emanated and became witness to some sort of domestic squabble. She was a wiry little blond thing of mid thirties with a scarred face and he a tall thin muscular man of about the same age. They were arguing about money and the baby and her fucking some other guy. The place reeked of alcohol and the table at the center of the room contained a large overflowing ashtray and the remains of several beers. I watched. The argument escalated, they began throwing things and she surged forward slapping him soundly across the face. Enraged, he grabbed her arms and threw her across the room. She lay sprawled like a limp ragdoll, dazed and a small sound escaped her lips.”

I pause and unscrew the cap of the bottle, taking another drink of the whiskey.

“The man strode across the room and straddling her waist, he reached down and ripped her shirt from her body. She lay there, bare to the waist, a tattoo of a butterfly on one of her small breasts. ‘Noooo, she whimpered, ‘Please don’t hurt me.’”

“’Shut up, shut up, shut up, you bitch, you little fucking whore!’ the man screamed and systematically proceeded to beat the living shit out of her. Punching her in the face, splitting her lips and rebreaking her nose, he punched her in the chest and methodically he worked his way up and down the length of her body. I watched, my eyes wide with horror. No, no, oh god no! I felt sick to my stomach. The man lit a cigarette and cruelly began pressing it into her skin between her breasts between her thighs, the cherry singeing the tips of her nipples, as he continued adding to the scores of similar marks already present on her body. She screamed a horrible animal scream of pain and he slammed her head into the floor again and again. Flipping her over on her stomach, he roughly pulled her pants down around her knees and unbuckled his jeans. He pulled out his cock and lay on top of her. I stood there frozen, paralyzed by shock and terror. A gurgling scream escaped her lips. Indiscriminately he continued to thrust inside of her.”

“No, I thought, no, this is not right. This must be stopped. Rage, pure and red, surged through me and screaming I ran forth to kick and hit and hurt this man, to make him stop. But what could a ghost do? The first punch passing through his body as ineffectual as a mosquito. The second landing with the same result. Suddenly though, I heard a roaring in my ears and my vision clouded and I felt a great pressure on all sides. When I kicked him, though, it made contact, dislodging him from her and knocking him to the floor. Furiously, I attacked him, screaming, crying “Stop, stop, goddammit, stop!” I punched him in the face and felt his nose dissolve in a spray of blood and teeth. ‘What…who the fuck are you?’ he gasped as we fought. I was a demon in faded plaid institutional pajamas. Driving downward with my knee, I made contact with his chest and felt his ribs crack. The sudden shock of what just happened suddenly hit me and I vomited all over him. He twisted, trying feebly to get away. His breathing labored, he coughed a gurgling bloody cough. The woman only made these small mewling noises but other than remained as she was, pants around her ankles, her ass smeared with blood. I had to get out of there. I felt sick and disoriented. Gagging, I staggered to my feet and ran to the door. Outside, the night air cooling the hot sweat that covered my skin. I was out in front of the house.”

“I had to get out of there away from that awful place. I ran, pausing only to throw up on a neighboring lawn. I was covered with blood and vomit, a fucking mess. I was confused, frightened and alone. What had happened? IT had just happened. I had crossed over physically. My rage, no, vengeance had allowed me. I ran barefoot along the cracked city streets, finally stopping along the bank of a small creak strewn with rusted out junk and old tires. I waded out into the creek and sat down, the cold water soaking through my pajamas instantly. I washed my face and hair and rinsing the vomit from my chest. Wet and dripping, I wandered aimlessly along the streets of Portland, trying to figure out what to do next. I was tired, I was cold and hungry, my mind still reeling from the awful rape I had witnessed and the fact that I actually there at all. I had been in the institution in Ohio for going on two years by then.”

Walter turns to me, his mouth hanging open a little, and he seems about to say something but instead just mutters “Shit” softly and reaches for the bottle. We reach the interstate and he makes a left turn onto the entrance ramp. We pick up speed and head south (to where my beloved will be, I know).

“Eventually the police picked me up as they do with filthy dirty straggling vagrants out for a walk in their pajamas. I told them my name and that I was supposed to be in the Braxton-Biggs mental facility in Cincinnati and who my doctor was. They asked me how I got to Portland and I told them I didn’t know. ‘I don’t know’ became my pat answer for almost all of their questions and eventually they stopped asking. A couple of hours of phone calls and soon the hospital had someone on the way to pick me up. The police fed me and I showered and felt better. They were real nice, and even dressed me in a pair of sneakers, jeans and a T-shirt with a picture of Michael Jordan on it. They never asked me about the man and woman into whose house I had fallen and I do not even now know what became of them. I honestly hope he’s dead, though.”

“The institution sent two men to pick me up and we drove the long miles back to Ohio. They drove in shifts, anxious to deliver their charge without incident and to collect the paid time off they had been promised. I sat silently, gazing out as the hills rolled by, thinking a lot. Then all of a sudden, I understood what I would do. It was as if I had completed a large and complicated jigsaw puzzle and had snapped the last piece in place. There I was standing back looking at the completed picture. One of the men leaned back around in his seat and asked if I was ‘Ok, back there buddy?’ I realized I was laughing and crying out loud. Oh yes sir, I was all right and it was all I could do to not jump up and down and scream for joy. I had figured it out and I made plans the whole rest of the way back.”

“But what was it that you had figured out, boy?” queries Walter, “Did you finally find out that all that stuff was just in your head?”

“No, no…all those memories that I had were real, but they belong to another me, one of many me’s in fact. At any given point in time, the future is only a possible choice of an infinite set of sets of possible number of futures (you get that?). As to which one becomes the past is dependant upon the choices people make as well as a number of other factors including everything from the weather to what the Dow-Jones finished the day before. Somehow, somewhere, when I saw that newscast, some kind of wires got crossed, I don’t really know. I got to experience an entirely different future within a set of futures that were not my own. Yet I remained contained within my own set of possible futures. The overlap was what snapped my mind. I have thought a lot about what could cause something that bizarre to happen. Of all the possibilities, and you may think it’s cheezey, I choose to believe that it was love.”

“Love?” says Walter “ You think that love crossed your wires, drove you insane and gave you the ability to time-travel. Boy, you are the craziest motherfucker, I have ever met.” He shakes his head. “Love.”

“Yep. I have begun to see that love is a real, elemental part of the universe and if love is strong enough it can change things at the most fundamental levels, traversing time, space, and even death. Have you ever watched the movie ‘The Crow’?”

“Yeah, I watched it on cable once, but that’s just a movie. Things just don’t happen like that in real life.”

“Well, I can’t fault you for not believing me. It does sound absolutely ridiculous but it’s the truth. When I got back, the doctors subjected me to an almost endless round of questions. How did I manage to get Portland, Maine that night? What was I doing there? They wanted to know everything. I had prepared some bullshit story and stuck to it so hard that they finally gave up and let it go. By then they were more excited at the progress I was showing. I wanted out of the hospital and so I went through the hoops they place before with a determination I didn’t know I had. Every day, endless hours of therapy, they wanted to be sure, you know, and I exercised, running the hills around the institution’s campus. Every night, I flew high and far, practicing. Getting better. My family was overjoyed and at last the great day came when I walked out through the doors of the Institution into the hot summer sun, never to return. I returned to the city from whence I came and got my old job back, as a night shift paramedic and did my job so well and with such enthusiasm, that all reservations were overcome, call after call.”

“Damn, you’re a paramedic? That figures. That’s one of those high-stress jobs isn’t it? Well, I hate to be the one to break it to you, boy, but you done flipped out again.”

I laugh, “No, right now I’m as sane as I’ll ever be, Walter. Just get me a little further down this highway.”

“All right.” He shrugs his shoulders. “This has got to be the strangest night of my entire life.”

“Well, last night…last night for me will be almost three years from now for you, anyway I was finally ready proceed with the final steps of my plan. I ‘borrowed’ all the supplies I’m going to need from the ambulance, I have a cell-phone and I stole this gun from my father being unable to obtain one myself. You know that they don’t sell guns to ex-mental patients?”

“Is that right? Well, what do you know,” Walter replies sarcastically. “I still don’t get it, won’t they notice that things are gone? Won’t you get in trouble when you get back?”

“I’m not going back. There will be no back for me to go back to. That future will cease to be and a new one will take its place. I’m already dead, Walter, inside. I died the minute I saw her face on television because without my beloved Tina, this future is no future for me. I came back tonight to save her life and in doing so, I become a victim of paradox. I will cease to be. In doing this, I will change the my current possible set of futures for myself with a possible set where I get to spend my life with Tina.”

“But if you die, how will you ever manage to meet her, get married, raise young’uns and all that?”

“Walter, this three years in the past for me. There is another me right here right now too.”

We pass the Brockton Heights exit as Walter digests this. I turn and point up at the overpass as we go by. “Right up there, Walter, six blocks down that street, the other me, rather myself three years ago, is sitting in an ambulance eating a Twinkie and trying to stay warm. I remember that tonight was a slow night. We only went on a couple of calls. Six blocks, Walter, SIX BLOCKS! Oh, hang on….we are almost there. Stay in the left lane and you will avoid the ice that’s coming up…see that, there it is and look over to the right, there’s the woods that she will crash into…now drive on a little ways and let me out. I thank you for taking me here and I’m sorry I involved you in this, but I had no choice. I fucked up and wound up downtown instead of out here where I should have been. I’m still not so good at controlling where and when I jump through time and space physically.”

Walter pulls over to the shoulder. The engine idling, we sit silently for a minute and slowly I get out. “Wait” he says. “Why didn’t you go back and prevent her from ever getting in her car and crashing in the first place? Why does she have to wreck her car?”

I sigh, “She must or else we will never meet. I’m going to call 911 as soon as the accident happens and the other me, the former me will be dispatched to the scene. That is how we meet. I remember it. She asks the former me to look after her cat and I do and I go to hospital to visit her every day and it snowballs from there. I wish that there was some other way, but there isn’t.”

I look at my watch. 4:23 AM. “I must go now, she will be along any minute. Thank you again and remember what I said about love.”

He looks at me a minute and says, softly “God help you, boy, and good luck.”

I close the door and start walking back along the shoulder. The Walter puts the Buick in gear and slowly the car edges forward…and stops. I hear the door open and slam shut.

“HEY!” he hollers, “Hey! Wait!” His feet make crunching sounds as he hurries to catch up with me. “Wait. You may need some help.”

I nod and smile and manage a whispered “Thank you.” The air is so cold, it stings my eyes and my fingers feel leaden. We walk a short ways back down the highway and go down a small but steep ravine. At the bottom is a fallen tree which we lean against, my backpack heavy against my back. Waiting. The night is silent except for the occasional whooshing as a car goes by. We wait, shivering, and the trees sigh as the wind whistles through them. It is time and the tears begin to run down my face. Destiny hurts.

About a hundred yards further back down the road the low whooshing builds signaling the approach of another car but then suddenly the sound changes, tires squeal and scrabble and lose purchase on the pavement and in seconds, some eighty yards down the road from us, a pair of headlights appear bouncing wildly down the ravine. The underbrush gives way with sharp cracks like gunshots and there is this awful tearing sound as the metal buckles and rends. Glass breaks and we hear a scream shrill and terrified against the night. Already I am running towards the car (towards my beloved) and Walter is close behind me, breathing heavily. “Oh, God” he keeps repeating, “Oh, Jesus”.

I can hear her fast sharp breaths in the stillness that follows as we approach the car. She is still in the driver’s seat, still in her seat belt. The car ticks, a dead thing, the engine already beginning to cool in the cold. It is so cold.

(a view from on high)

The stars glitter brightly like diamonds upon the velvet black of the sky and the moon shines down upon the scene of an accident where a young white man and an old black man struggle to open the driver side door. With a popping sound the door is wrenched slowly outward buckling the front quarter panel as they reach toward the victim, a pretty young woman with dark hair. Blood is running down her face, but her eyes are open. Her face has an eerie glittery sheen from the fragments of windshield sticking to her skin. The young man, professional now, does what he has done for so many so many times before. He bends down gently in front of her, and asks her if she is all right. She starts crying, he listens to her breathing, checks her pulse and has the old man hold her head steady. Fingers pushing, prodding, noting injuries, she has possible fractured ribs on the left side, her left femur is fractured, there are lacerations to her knees and hands and arms and to her face. Tenderness to the abdomen. But her lungs are clear and her pulse is strong. Quickly he pulls the sodium acetate warmer packs, the big ones, from the backpack. Clicking the metal tabs, he activates them and they heat quickly as he places them on her chest, her legs, her lap. Leaving her still strapped securely in her seatbelt he covers her with a blanket, also pulled from the backpack.