reminders (part 4)

We traveled through time and space, our rocket crashed at the feet of a beautiful green woman, her friends put our ride-home back together again and—like that—our little interstellar day trip is at its end. 

“The boosters we attached to your rocket should provide enough thrust to put you beyond the planet’s pull.”  So says the green beauty whose name is a song.  “But I’m afraid we can’t point you in the right direction.  We only know it is somewhere out there.”  She points to the sky.     

She gives me a parting kiss, and no sooner am I back in the rocket than John starts complaining that he didn’t get a kiss.  Toby leaps over the stick shift and plants a fat one on his lips.

“Not the same,” he complains.

My head is still light, my lips are tingling…and there is the sound of thunder.  The rocket lifts, and the pink sky turns to black space.   

“If you can hear this,” another of Dr. Hudson’s prerecorded messages is triggered. 

“Not this again,” John says.

“As I was saying…if you can hear this, you have triggered the rocket’s homing system.”

“Homing system,” I cry with joy.  “We’re going home.”

“In ten seconds, the time field that opened to get you to point B, will reopen to bring you back to point A.”  Then, as a recorded afterthought, the doctor says, “Everything between those two points will be undone.”

The hoop at the nose of the rocket starts to glow.     

“What do you think he means by undone?” I ask John.

He shrugs.  “Doesn’t matter.  We’re going home.”

“…three,” the doctor’s voice counts.  “Two.  One.”

I grip the seat.  Toby’s nails grip my legs.

Each of us is braced. 

Waiting for it.

Still waiting for it. 

“There you are,” Dr. Archibald Hudson says.  The driver’s door opens and the white-haired rocket owner himself is waving to get us out of his rocket.  “I’m a very busy man,” he says to the cat.  “Forgive me if I ask you to show yourself out.”

There are no questions.  No welcome reception.  No glass of champaign to celebrate our epic mission-accomplished.

The three of us are too stunned to do anything but accept our marching orders and leave the laboratory.  There is no talk on the elevator ride up.  When we step outside the sunlight hits our eyes hard.

“What just happened?” John asks, daring to question the veracity of the past day, give or take one twelve-hour time differential. 

“Look,” I say and point across the street to the kid in the taboggan who was mowing that same yard before we left planet Earth.

“Can’t be,” John says. 

I check my phone, the first of us to sync with the times. 

“It’s the same day,” I confirm.  “Where did the time in-between go?”

Toby holds up his paws and forms a furry letter A.

“Like the message said would happen,” John recalls.  “We’re back at point A, and the whole rocket trip has been undone.  Even Dr. Hudson didn’t seem to know anything had happened.”

“I guess he wouldn’t.”  I try to think this through.  “He didn’t travel in time with us.  He never left point A.”

We walk the short distance back to our own neighborhood.  John says he needs time to process what just happened.  He walks away and stops.  “No one’s going to believe this,” he calls back like a man reading the last page of the book first and deciding this is not the one for him.

John’s right.  I don’t know why, but we need someone who was not with us to believe our story.  And there is one person who might just fit the bill.

The cat and I chart a short course, walk three houses down, and arrive at a door we know well.  We knock, and the original old guy opens up for us.

“Is there a problem with the filling?” Telly asks about the free dental service he provided one day minus one day ago.  “You know, you really do get what you pay for.”  He shows us into his living room and holds out a foil bag.  “Figs?”

Toby helps himself.

“We went to see Dr. Hudson,” I tell him.

“Did he confirm my time at NASA?”  Telly’s smile begins to grow.  “Hellova good baker, isn’t he?”  Telly’s expressive eyebrows start stretching before the main event.

“He did, and he is.  He also built a rocket in his basement.  It’s quite a green-energy machine.  It uses time for fuel and a Hoola-hoop for the launch.  Anyhow…”

There is no easy transition into uncharted conversation.

“John and Toby and I took his rocket out for a short trip into outer space, crashed on another planet, and met this beautiful woman who speaks English.”

“What are the chances?” Telly says, just playing along.

“She said she learned the language from a collection of writings from one earthling wife to her earthling husband, sort of a portrait of the beloved by the lover.  She said the lover’s sentiments were shared with all the warring people on her planet; they reminded everyone who and what they are to each other and saved them from self-destruction.  Oh, and the woman was green.”

“Green, was she?”  Telly’s waxing smile is almost too big for his face.  He leans back to laugh as his eyebrows practically leap off his head.

“And you want to know the most unbelievable part about this far-fetched story?”  I pause to let his thoughts run wild.  “We have proof.  Toby?”

The old guy puts his brows on pause as Toby reaches into his fur and removes a fur-covered cap.  He blows off the layers of orange and yellow to reveal the letters N A S A over the bill.

“This belong to you?” I ask.

Telly’s face falls slack, his disbelieving eyebrows suspended above him.  He reaches for the cap he hasn’t seen in some sixty years and looks inside at the loving reminders penned by his late wife.  At once, his eyes tear up.  He opens his mouth to speak but “Where…” is the only word he can get out.

“Where did we find it?” I help him.  “The green woman with the kiss.”

“Green woman,” he repeats after me.    

“Dr. Hudson’s rocket has a number of pre-recorded messages to let passengers know it probably wasn’t a good idea to climb onboard.  One of them indicated that by traveling back to our trip’s starting point, everything about the trip would be undone.  It was apparently erased from the mad scientist’s memory.  I’m assuming you don’t remember standing in line for a Rocket Burger before the launch.”

Telly raises his head, and his typically-expressive eyebrows slowly return to points A-1 and A-2 on his face.   

“Are you telling me my old cap traveled to another world?”

“I’m telling you the reminders Alexi wrote in that cap saved a planet from destroying itself.”

Rodin’s signature man sitting on a rock never looked so thoughtful as Telly as he considers the far-reaching influence of his wife’s inscriptions.

“He did it,” he says with no hint of doubt in his voice.

“You believe me?” 

“Archibald is a pretty smart guy.  Way back when, he had a bright future with NASA.”

“What happened?”

“Like you, he met a woman.”  Telly’s voice is uncharacteristically soft.  “My wife.”

“Alexi?” Toby and I meow.

“I knew Archie liked her.  I never worried about it.  But she did confess to me that on one occasion she was tempted by another man.  An older man.”

“You don’t mean Dr. Hudson.”  I laugh to stress the incredulity of the thought.  “If anything, he is a few years younger than you.”

“Unless an older Archibald went back in time to revisit her.”  He puts on his accustomed fedora and stands up.  “We have to go.”

“Go where?” I ask as I follow him out.  In the drive next to his house is the classic car he seldom drives anymore.  He pulls off the heavy plastic cover and throws me the keys. 

“The question is not where…but when.  If we’re going to stop Archibald from doing something, to what point in time do we go to do that?  Do you arrive at the moment of the thing you want to prevent?  Do you choose a time afterwards and then try to rebuild?  Or perhaps some time before so that we can put in safeguards, to warn or inoculate Alexi from a future caller?”

“Is Dr. Hudson something you can inoculate a person against?”

“I don’t know.  I’m just brainstorming my options.  Which may or may not even be options.  I’ve never done this before.”

“Well, how do you propose we do this?  Dr. Hudson is not just going to let you take his rocket out for a spin.  And your Chevy is no DeLorean.”

“First, let’s get to the place.  That’s our X, Y and Z coordinates.  Then we’ll work on the next coordinate.  Alexi.”

That’s when it hits me.  “Alexi.  She’s Point A.”

“Right.”

“You still don’t know when he went back.  It could be any time, any day over a sixty or seventy-year period.”

“I think any time before he met her will work,” Telly says.  “Get in.”

We drive five hours south, until we get to a small town just shy of the sprawling reach of Atlanta.  The town has all the signs of former growth, collapse, and revival.  Telly directs me to a charming neighborhood with a park built around train tracks no longer in use.  It’s late in the day when we pull into a small parking lot near the tracks and stop the car.

I look around at the restored wood-frame homes and the park’s pricey swings and slides.  “This is nice.”

“It is now,” Telly says, contrasting the here-and-now with the same here at another time.  “You see that house on the corner?”  He points across the street at a house with a front porch on both the first and second floors.  “That’s where we lived when I went back to Emory on the G.I. bill.”

“It’s gorgeous.”

“Yeah.  Now.”  He starts to lean nostalgic, when he shakes his head to snap back to our shared time and place.  “The sun will be setting soon.  We will be less conspicuous then.”

“We will be less conspicuous…doing what?”

“Just wait.”

Toby holds out his paw to Telly for another helping of figs. 

“Easy there, pal,” I warn him.  “We don’t know how well figs in intestinal transit will travel in time.”

When twilight covers the park, the things around us lose color and edge.  “It’s time,” Telly says and steps out of the car.  He opens the trunk and removes long jumper cables and two metal spikes.  A few feet in front of the car, he sticks both spikes into the ground slightly more than one car-width apart.  He points the spikes away from each other and a thin wire connecting them springs outward to form an arc.

“Pop the hood,” he tells me.  I watch as he hooks the jumper cables up to either metal spike and then one opposing end to the car battery’s negative terminal.  “This will create what my dear nemesis Archibald Hudson refers to as an energy field.  That’s a bit of a misnomer.  In function, it’s more of a flat worm hole.”

“Wait a minute.  You carry around a portable worm hole in your trunk along with the spare tire and the jack?”

“In sixty years, it’s never been put to the test.  Its functionality has been in theory only.”

“Don’t you sort of need the energy of an exploding star to create a wormhole?”

“Only in theory,” he answers with confidence.  He attaches the second cable to the positive terminal and hurries back to the car and pulls the passenger door shut.   “Once you turn the ignition, hit the gas hard.  This isn’t going to last long.”

“What isn’t going to last long?”

“Our window of opportunity.”  The one theme he hasn’t strayed from all day. 

 I turn the key and a familiar blue light fills the space within the wire hoop in front of the car.

“NOW,” Telly cries.  “GO.”

I hit the gas, spraying dirt and gravel as I drive us through the blue light. 

“STOP,” Telly cries.

I brake hard and the hood slams shut, the chrome grill just inches from a tractor trailer minus the tractor.  We couldn’t have traveled more than twenty feet, but it is clear from our surroundings, we are far from where we were.

The park is gone, the twilight too.  It is daytime, early afternoon, judging by the light.  The train tracks are still here, only now there is a line of container cars rusting on the tracks.  The trailer that is inches from the front of the car is covered by large swaths of rust, as are about four other abandoned trailers, their tires flat and bald.  We step out of the car.

“Whoa,” I say.  “We really did it.  Look at this place.”  We are facing the other side of the street where the same stretch of lovely two-story houses is far less lovely now.  Their paint is chipped and peeling, their wood porches sag in big frowns.  The house on the corner which Telly says he used to call home looks ready for demolition.  “What happened?”

“The better question would be what hasn’t happened yet.  It was a lovely neighborhood about forty years before we lived here, and it was just starting to make a comeback when we moved out.  See that pink bedsheet in the window there?”  He says this like a loving parent divining something of the Da Vinci in his preschooler’s crayon smash-up.  “The place came without curtains.”

But the old guy’s fondness for the old days fades like the twilight between days there and here.

“What do we do now?” I ask him.

“I don’t know.  How do you keep something that never happened from still-never happening?”

In the roughly five years I have known him, Telly’s confidence and his ability to gauge the outcome of any process has been rock solid.  Hearing now the existential doubt in my wise friend’s voice is more than disconcerting.  Like learning that Santa might not live at the North Pole, or that Bumbles, after all, might not bounce. 

“I understand now,” he says, “since the day Archibald met Alexi, she has been both his starting point and destination.”

“Telly, do I need to remind you which of the two of you your wife was married to all those years?”

He holds his head and nods.  “But I wonder, just as everything about your space odyssey was undone for everyone else by your traveling back in time, if my marriage—even who I have become over the years—could be undone.”

Toby climbs up Telly’s leg to slap him across the face.

“Stop that,” I demand.  “Be reasonable.  Alexi married you.  She chose you.  Your old pink bedsheet still flies in the window.  If you need a reminder, you have a fedora—and a NASA cap—filled with the reminders she wrote.”

At this Telly removes his hat and stares at the love notes written by his late wife.  As he reads, there is click on the other side of the street, and the front door of the corner house opens.  A young woman, early twenties, steps to the edge of the porch and puts up her hand to block the sun.

“Can I help you?” she calls across the street.

Telly pales.  “It’s her.”

When my friend says nothing, I call out, “We’re trying to figure out where we are.”  Then, to Telly, “Say something.”

The old guy holds his fedora over his heart, and I’m worried a weathered hat may not be enough to keep him from going into cardiac arrest.  At my cue, Toby climbs Telly’s leg again and slaps him across the face.

“That’s not quite what I meant,” I correct my furry mini-me.

Toby gives me an exasperated glare and stands on Telly’s shoulder so that he can purr comfort and confidence directly at his ear. 

“What do I say?” Telly asks me.

“What did you say to her the first time you met?  That must have worked then.”

“It was Christmas under the mistletoe, and we weren’t exactly talking.”

“What about after that,” I urge him to think faster as his beloved crosses the road between us.  Toby leans into the old man’s noggin to expedite his recollections.

“I told her I have no money and no job and that until I kissed her, I had no direction in life.”

Toby looks at me and shakes his head sadly.  It’s a beautiful line that only a very young man could get away with.

The young Alexi wades through the tall grass like the fearless prow of a ship.  Hair of dark chestnut falls past her shoulders.  Her eyes are green suns that defy one to look away.  The old guy who has never shown fear, trembles now behind the trembling hat in his hands.  The twenty-something he has loved for almost seventy years stops in front of him, bringing two distance here’s into one cataclysmic now.

“Hey there,” I say when Telly refuses to take the lead.  “We kind of ran out of gas.”

Alexi furrows her brow.  “I thought you said you were lost.”

“Yeah, that too.”  I look to Telly for help.

“How did your car end up so far off the road if you were running out of gas?” she asks.

Solid point.

“I thought I we were coasting into a parking lot?”

Alexi is looking hard at something behind us.  “Nice car.  It looks new, but old.  What is it?”

“Oh, it’s a 19…”  It dawns on me that I don’t know the year of the classic Chevy nor the year we have returned to.  “Let’s see.  Nineteen hundred annnd—"  I draw out my answer to give Telly a chance to intervene and date the car after the date we have arrived at.

“Why are you really here?” Alexi demands. 

“Okay, this is going to sound a little weird, but my friend here used to live in this neighborhood.  We were passing through and he wanted to stop and have a look at the old place.”

“Which house?” she asks my friend.  “Which one did you live in?”

Telly points to the corner lot with no trees.

“What’s wrong with him?” she asks me.  “Why doesn’t he speak?” 

“I think the cat on his shoulder got his tongue.  Show her Toby.”

Toby sticks out his tongue.  But the clever young woman is not convinced.

“Your cat doesn’t look so well either,” she says. 

Only now do I recognize the mild distress in my furry wingman. 

“Do I need to call the police?” she asks with absolutely no sign of fear or concern.  “Are you casing out the neighborhood to determine which houses you want to hit?”  Alexi frowns, more frustrated than concerned.

“Okay.”  It is time to come clean.  “We came here to prevent something from happening.  The thing is, we don’t know when it might….arrive.”

“Arrive.  Do you mean like a package?”

It is unclear to me how much information from the future I can share with the past without jeopardizing everything in between. 

Alexi looks to my friend for answers, and the fedora rises further up the old nose.

“Telly,” I demand.  “I kind of need your help here.”

“What did you call him?” the young Alexi asks. 

Toby digs his claws into the fedora and pulls it as far as Telly’s brows.

Alexi looks at me and says, “What are you not telling me?  This thing,” she says with air-quotes.  “Does it put me at risk?”

The three of us shake our heads.

“Who then?” she demands.

Alexi raises her hand and pulls Telly’s fedora down, revealing a beloved obscured with age.

“Your eyes,” she says, stepping back.

The cat leaps to the ground and holds his belly.

“I know you.  Don’t I?” Alexi asks the future.

Telly looks ready to give up the ghost.  Toby starts making a familiar toilet-plunging sound.  I’m thinking this would be a good time to ditch all plans and get both of them back to the car. 

“It is a young man’s decision to follow his love of a woman, like one star in a crowded sky.”  Telly finds his voice, but it’s half-choked and ready to croak.  “And it is an old man’s satisfaction to discover it was the best decision of his life.”

Alexi’s eyes widen.  She knows. 

Given no further explanation, she puts her hand on Telly’s chest and asks, “Was I unfaithful?”

“No,” he says.

“Did I change?”

He shakes his head.

“Then I am dead,” she concludes the inevitable. 

Telly presses his eyes shut.  He puts one wrinkled hand over the hand of his perfectly young bride.  “You are always in my heart.”

This is possibly the most beautiful moment I have ever witnessed.  For the cat, however, this human drama may be too much.  He excuses himself and steps away through the high weeds.

“But you have doubt,” Alexi says.  It is clear to her now that Telly has had reason to question her fidelity.

Telly opens his hands and widens his eyes as a man who has just opened the pirate’s chest of unspeakable treasure.

“How can I not?” 

His silent gaze proliferates with reasons ad absurdum.

“I see your silliness is something you will not outgrow.  So...”  Alexi exhales thoughtfully.  “I guess I will just tell you every day.  No, I will do better.  I will also put little notes in your books and whisper in your ears while you sleep.  I’ll spell out my love with indelible marker on the waistband of all your underwear.”  She smiles for him to understand.  “That way you will remember and never doubt.  In me or us.”

In the middle of this beautiful moment, someone makes a wretching sound on the other side of the street.  The three of us look and discover Toby in the yard of the corner lot licking his paw after a decidedly ill-timed expulsion of figs.

Time traveler tossing his figs.

“I swear.”  I am beside myself with embarrassment.  “I told him we didn’t know how undigested figs would travel in time.”

“You better go,” Alexi says to her future husband.

“But….”  Telly looks hurt and dismayed.  “We just got here.”

“And you are going to be pulling into the driveway any minute.  Catching me talking to an older him might be difficult to explain.”

No doubt.  It’s rather difficult to hear.

Alexi stands on her toes and gives her old husband a kiss just long and passionate enough to make me consider crossing the street and tossing my own figs.

The old guy is positively dazed after the first kiss he has had from his wife in many years.  He falters and staggers backward. 

“I’ll take it from here,” I say.  Toby and I walk our friend back to the car and buckle him into the passenger seat.  “I’ll do everything.  You just tell me how to get us back to the present.  Our present.” 

The long jumper cables are still connected to the grounding stakes.  They are just long enough to reach as far as the hood and the battery therein.  Telly is staring at the late wife who charted the rest of his life back in the way-back day.  When I slip inside behind the wheel, I see another car approaching from the far end of the street with a young driver who looks like he could be Telly’s son. 

Quickly, I turn the key in the ignition, and blue light fills the thin metal arc behind us.  I pull the gear shift into reverse, hit the gas hard, and brake just in time to avoid a line of cars parked behind us

It’s still day light, not exactly the time we left.  But the park is the same as we found it the day before.

“We made it,” Toby and I cry with relief. 

But Telly is quiet.  Dazed.

“Did that really happen?” he asks, already starting to doubt. 

“After everything she just told you?” I tell him.  I’m about to refer him to the reminders he carries in his fedora, when Toby directs my attention to something across the street.  “Would you look at that?” I say and point to the same corner lot that was treeless one day and one married life ago. 

“My God,” Telly says.  “Toby?”

The cat is blushing at the holy confusion. 

I have to laugh, but I am willing to credit the little guy with seeding a reminder to last a lifetime.

In the front yard of young-Telly and young-Alexi’s rental house, there is now a massive fig tree with iconic his and her green leaves. 

“I think it is safe to say,” I venture, “that what just happened did, in fact, happen.”

His head still reeling, Telly asks, “And what’s that?”

“Your indelible meaningful life.”