Nick stepped off the bus into a whirlwind of rain and hail. He pulled his hood over his dark hair as he stood under the roof of the bus stop, the vehicle cruising down the street and out of sight. He dropped his bag for a moment and tucked his ungloved hands under his pits, fingers already beginning to freeze. He had not expected this weather or the possibility that his flight would be canceled. By now, he should be at home, feet up in his recliner, a cigar in hand. But fate had other plans, and when he arrived at the airport to find his flight canceled and no others coming in any time before 5:00 pm tomorrow, Nick was forced to find a place to wait out the storm. There had been an enormous line at every desk advertising cars for rent, with so many flights suddenly canceled due to the storm. He was in too rotten a mood to wait, and instead pulled out his phone and looked up the closest motel and the city bus schedule.
Nick stroked his hands through his hair, trying to wipe away the water dripping onto his head through the crack in the bus station roof, eyes tightly shut for a moment as he tried to clear his head. He had spent the bus ride watching the rain race across the window, depressing thoughts circling through his skull. Greif and loss were not new emotions in Nick's life. He had lost his mother when he was young, and his only memories of her were blurry and unfocused. There was a hole in his life, but it did not ache. He thought his father's death would be the same.
He remembered when he got the first call from his sister: "Dad is sick," she said over the phone, her voice soft and distant. "I really think it would be a good time for you to come home…"
"If he wants to see me he can tell me himself," Nick snapped.
"He does want to but he can't—" He hung up the phone before she could finish.
She called for two days. He let each one go to voicemail if not hitting the reject call button. He was relieved when it stopped. Every time his phone rang, he could feel rage building, his father's face at the center of it. But it was not as clear an image as it had once been, the features fuzzy, but what remained strong was the feeling that it was his father, the word and emotion blending into something ugly.
The last time Nick saw his father the man had just turned 50. He left his children alone in the house and spent the night downtown getting shitfaced. Nick remembered being alone that night, Sara still too young to understand what an alcoholic was, him a recent high school graduate with no direction to go in his life. He opened the fridge to make dinner and found a half-gallon jug of milk, one egg, and a bottle of ketchup. He remembered slamming the door shut in frustration. The cabinets contained crumbs and empty cereal boxes.
When his father stumbled into the living room at 3:44 am, Nick was waiting for him on the couch, determined to speak his mind after years of silence. The conversation escalated quickly and now looking back on it, he could not remember exactly what had been said. Insults and swear words. A dreading feeling that the last ties they had to each other were snapping. But he did remember how it ended. His father threw the first hit, but Nick hit back harder. He remembered being certain he had broken the man's nose. Sara ran into the room, sobbing. She tried to defend their father and he remembered the shame he felt when for a moment he had the strong impulse to hit her too. He shouted at her as well, calling her an idiot as he marched to his bedroom to pack. Within 10 minutes he had a backpack over his shoulder and a duffle bag in hand. As he closed the front door he could hear Sara's crying and his father's stumbling as she tried to walk him to bed.
He had called Sara a few months later to inform her he was still alive, crashing with some friends, and had found a job at a retail store. He was done with their father, but after weeks of thought, Nick concluded he still cared about his sister, regardless of how naive she was. But they did not speak often and rarely did they see each other. Then their father got sick.
The calls stopped for a month. When Sara called again, Nick felt obliged to speak with her.
"You'll be pleased to hear he's dead," she said in a flat tone the moment he answered.
Nick thought he would be pleased. He wanted to be pleased. But that hole came back, and this time it ached.
"When's the funeral?" he responded suddenly.
¤¤¤
Nick flew from Sacramento to Harrisburg three days later after Sara gave him the time and address of the funeral, shock radiating over the phone when she gave him the information. He occupied the back row of the church, the people in front of him strangers. Sara had asked him to sit up front with her while the minister delivered faithful words, but he refused, and she backed off quickly.
When he walked down the aisle and passed his father's open coffin, Nick did not know what to expect. Shock radiated down his spine. The face was that of a stranger. Pale skin, bald head, and a gray beard coated the bottom of his face. His limbs looked thin beneath the suit, his crossed hands bony and fingernails long. Nick looked away and rushed out of the church before the rest of the crowd.
There was a massive group that gathered in front of the church and Nick was puzzled at how popular his father had become. Growing up, his dad had a single circle of companions—drinking buddies—but those bastards would not have given two shits about his father's death. So who were all these people?
Sara caught up with him outside, approaching as he pulled out a cigarette under an eastern hemlock. She hugged him before he could light it.
"Thank you for coming," she said in a soft voice. She wore a slim black dress, her legs longer than he remembered, and her brown hair had been cut above her shoulders. Last he saw her—7 years ago—it ran down to her hips. Her pale face had thinned and small wrinkles were forming around the corners of her bright blue eyes. "I didn't know you smoked."
"New habit," he said as he lit the cigarette. "It's just weird to be here…"
"Why did you come?" she asked.
"I thought closure would be good."
Anger flushed Sara's features. "This is not closure. It's too late for that now. Closure would have been you coming when he was still alive before his mind had left him. Closure would have been you two talking about your differences enough that you would realize that he had changed." He shook his head. "People change, Nick. It's a pity you're too stubborn to believe that because Dad wanted you to come. He wanted it more than anything." She blinked back tears. "You were his son and he loved you."
"Don't act like that's an excuse for the way he used to treat us."
Sara looked at her brother with a mask of grief and pity. "When did you get so closed-minded?" Before Nick could respond, she shook her head, flinging the tears from her lashes. "Well, I hope you got your form of closure. I'm sorry. It's been a rough few weeks."
Sara swallowed her feelings and invited Nick to dinner with her and his brother-in-law and nephew. Nick tried to shake some of the ice from his heart and thanked her, but said he had to refuse as he had a flight to catch (which was true but in about 4 hours). But he thanked her for taking care of their father all these years—his tone was flat but Sara appreciated the effort he had made to say it.Â
While Nick watched the rain splattering across the bus windows, he was cycling Sara's words through his head. People can change. Of course, they can. He knew that, believed it fully, unless it was his father. Why? Because he drank until he passed out. He never bought groceries and was terrible at cooking. He forgot things constantly and had little regard for other people's feelings. But though those thoughts and memories loomed large in his mind, he found background thoughts began to surface.
He remembered the camping trips his father had taken him on. There were not many, but Nick had enjoyed them all. Sara stated from an early age that she did not enjoy those kinds of excursions, so it was just him and his father while Sara slept over at a friend's house. His father showed him how to set up a tent and start a fire. They would roast potatoes in the coals and cook meat over the flames. Sometimes they would talk late into the night, other times enjoy a comfortable silence. The image of his father's corpse flashed between scenes of laughter and firelight.
Regret grew over Nick like the gust of wind that ripped through his jacket as he tried to tighten it around his thin body, dropping his hand to pick up his bag, which was stashed with extra clothes and a novel for the plane. He looked down the street, trying to spot the motel.
It was past 11:00 pm, and with water flowing down the roads, the streets stood empty and wet. The buildings were few, power lines strung down the road and large parking lots lain before him. And then he spotted it, green neon flickering in the rain: THE SLEEPING LAMB MOTEL. Below the sign was a simple outline of a lamb, head curled into its chest, flashing neon tubes in Z shapes trailing above its head. Nick clutched his bag in one hand and his jacket in the other and ran across the street toward the motel.
Yellow lights glowed through tan screens, the square building holding 4 floors of rooms, the ground floor serving as a lobby. A large parking lot surrounded 2 sides of the building, the paint faded and a few cars parked far in the distance. Rain dripped off the landings that surrounded the floors, the railings flimsy and bent at odd angles. Water pooled around the entrance to the lobby, and Nick swore as he stumbled across the puddle and litter that surrounded the building.
The lobby consisted of a small couch, a table with a coffee machine, and stale bagels in a plastic bag with a desk along the back wall where a young woman sat chewing gum that she pulled and twisted around her finger while she looked at the novel in her lap. The pale fluorescent lights dimly showed the peeling of the wallpaper and large spiderwebs growing in the corners of the room along the ceiling.
Nick approached the desk. "Any rooms for the night?" he asked.
The girl hardly glanced at him, putting the book down. "I'll need an ID," she said.
Nick pulled out his wallet from his pocket, which was now drenched. He opened the billfold and grabbed his license, handing it over and groaning as he saw the bills soaked. He had a little bit left on his credit card…but he was not sure if that would be enough.
"A single bedroom will be 80 for the night. Payment?" asked the girl, blowing a small bubble with her gum.
Nick dried the card on the inside of his sleeve and handed it over while the girl passed him back his license. He held his breath as the girl swiped the card, almost hearing the computer as it loaded the information. He looked at the book folded in her lap, eyeing the cover.
"Lonesome Dove. I read that one a while ago," he said. The girl looked up at him with a stone expression. "More of a True Grit fan myself."
The girl said nothing, blew another bubble, and removed his card from the machine, handing him a key.
"Room 209. Checkout is at noon."
Nick thanked her and grabbed the key. He picked up his bag and gripped his coat as he exited the lobby and entered back into the rain. He ran to the stairs on the east side of the building, slipping twice as he staggered to the 2nd floor. He ran around the landing to the other side of the building and jammed the key into the door of room 209, hand shivering enough to make the task difficult. He had forgotten to pull up his hood and water was running down his back.Â
Once in the room, he stripped down to his boxer shorts, taking the wet clothing to the bathroom. The room was small, a simple shower, sink, and toilet all sat nearby and Nick struggled to find enough space to hang his wet clothes.
When all his clothing was laid in place to dry, he moved across the scratchy carpet to his bag. The blue fabric of the bag was a shade darker than normal and he let out another loud groan, opening the bag to find everything was as wet as the rest of his clothes. He pulled out the backup pants and shirt and tossed them to the ground. His novel was soggy and his pack of cigarettes in the side pocket was ruined.
For a moment Nick thought he was going to put his fist through the wall. He only barely contained himself, giving a moment to thrash his arms in anger before forcing his mind to gradually calm down. He sprawled his other wet clothes on the carpet, then set the novel and the bills in his wallet on the small table beside the twin-sized bed. He shivered as he grabbed a small cotton robe from the bathroom hanger, the material rough and stained in a few places, but the poor heating left the room too cold to stay in just boxer shorts.
He moved to the bed, a gold quilt covering the surface that looked just as uncomfortable as the robe, but he got under the covers anyway, turning on the lamp on the bedside table. The shade was torn, creating uneven lighting across the room. There was a boxy TV and a single art piece where a deer scampered around thick tree trunks as a wolf chased after it, paws reaching close to the animal's legs, jaws open and detail revealing the unnaturally long fangs jammed in its gums.
Nick opened the top drawer of the end table and found the remote to the TV, turning it on and flicking through a dozen channels of static before turning it off. A gust of wind howled against the door, small smacking sounds of rain being pelted at the building and he shivered at the thought of still being stuck out in the storm. He checked his phone and was infuriated when he saw it was 12:34 am and he was not at all tired. With his novel soaked, and his phone on low battery, he began to rummage around the room.
There was a small brown dresser beside the TV collecting dust, and the medicine cabinet in the bathroom had a collection of dead flies. He opened the bottom cabinet on the end table and found a Bible and a small empty bottle of vodka. He smashed the door shut and heard a loud thump from inside the cabinet.
When Nick reopened the door he saw a false top had slipped loose and could see the pointed corner of a notebook sliding down the space. He reached in and pulled the notebook down, the surface cool between his fingers. The cover was coated with a smooth leather material that was twice as thick as the pages, dust collecting on the surface, and plastic spirals holding the papers together. His fingers leafed through the notebook; cursive writing sprawled across yellowing pages. He sat under the quilt and opened the book to the first page.
This book belongs to David Alserda
A Professor of Black Arts
Documenting New Research on Time Invocation
Nick stared at the page for a moment and debated if he wanted to toss the book aside. At first, he thought it a joke, a kid with an active imagination who leaves his journal behind. But why was it hidden? He turned to the next page where the first entry began:
October 14, 1998
I have done extensive studies on the previous attempts to study the flow of time and ways to access its power and have concluded that I will not let the failure of others control my decisions. I believe there is great potential in time invocation.
There have been 8 other official pieces of documentation on the study of time invocation in the field of black arts. The first to study this practice and publish works on it was Jon Schuster. He was studying reverse methods, investigating the ability to project consciousness to a younger body. This was done through an intense meditation that focusses on activation of the temporal lobe with the addition of herbal stimulus; his method was burning white sage. He began with small steps, flashing back a day or two before stretching the distance.
"It is a difficult trance to capture. The mind does not want to live in the past. The stretch is unnatural" (Schuster 1956). [1] But when he was able to steady his mind and channel his focus Schuster was able to reach the required mode that shot his present consciousness into a past self. In his first few trips, he played observer, watching the events play out as he remembered them. Once he was able to master the shift, he did things differently—said or did things that would change where he was in the present. When he snapped back to the present, everything was the same as when he left. He knew he had traveled into his past, but the memories of the events he changed were more than fuzzy, simply the feeling that his consciousness had traveled but his present memories contained the original events. This study created the Shuster Paradox: the mental capacity required to focus your mind to a past body is not strong enough to ripple the flow of events in time. Tossing a stone into a coursing river—it still flows in the same direction.
Schuster practiced this reverse meditation for 2 years, trying to find a way to strengthen his mind—give it enough power to change past events. He made breakthroughs in the distance he was able to travel, but the further he went the harder it was to come back. There were tapes he created to document his work towards the end of his life when he felt too scattered to write his thoughts down. He breaks down at moments when he finds himself reliving a traumatic moment he can't escape from. He would sit in front of the camera, eyes ghostly glazed over, bottom lip trembling slightly. These episodes begin to last longer as the tapes continue. In the last recording of Schuster's video diaries, his mind is too far gone to recover. He had stuttered through a new experiment that replicated the first one he conducted 2 years ago. He loses his point of gravity, has no idea where his present is, and eventually, he drifts off and never comes back. The tape ran for 2 days, Schuster stuck as his mind became permanently severed from his body, a blank face that stared at the camera until the battery ran out.Â
It was 4 years before Jon Schuster's research surfaced. Most were not shocked by the result, but the work did inspire a few. One was a psychologist named Alexandra Baines. She studied at The Morbithex School of Dark Arts in Prague and became fascinated by the work of Jon Schuster while in school, publishing 3 scientific papers about his work and mental state. 'Schuster started with a clear conscience at the beginning of his journals, his writing neat and experiments, hypotheses, and theories written out clearly with solid understanding. After his first trip, the word use and frantic writing indicated a strong success. Something between the lines read that the trip was addicting. He wanted to start another trance immediately and jotted down everything he could remember from the hazy memories he tried to keep clear in the present. He wrote about the power of his mind, and his focus sharpened, which leads to a theory that a mental stretch through time may be beneficial to a certain extent. But a collaboration of many trips and constant increase in the distance traveled, the muscle stretched too far too fast' (Baines 1958). [2]
Another theory was that willpower was involved when engaging in 1st perspective past time invocation. 'It is important that there is a purpose or reason for the journey. As far as how strong a 'purpose' is debated. Schuster always had a purpose for his trips, something he was trying to look for or understand. The mind has to be anchored enough to stay intact when it is stretched, and remembering the reason for the trip can give power when trapped in a trance from the past" (Baines 1959). [3]
Alexandra Baines' research centered around the future, pursuing a similar practice to Schuster—developing a mental state in deep meditation—but altered her intentions towards the future to see if she could get a glimpse at a world not yet created. She intended to plan for her future. She was pregnant at the time and feared for the life of her unborn child, who had a high chance of inheriting a fatal genetic disorder. She could stop it, but the treatment would kill the fetus if it did not possess the disorder.
Instead of white sage, Baines burnt Arp rosemary and before she began the meditation she drank a glass of a hallucinogenic juice made of abnormal fungi that helped release the conscious state of mind. She did not tape her trances like Schuster, but during the meditation, there was a gravitated portion of her mind that allowed her hand to grip a pen and draw the images she saw flashing before her. On her first successful trip, she flashed a week into the future. Her hand drew a woman she did not recognize, the pencil sketch depicting long thick hair and a round face. When she tried to remember the rest of the vision, knowing there had been more detail at the moment, she found she could barely recall anything. A week later, she met the woman when she was shopping at the supermarket. The woman dropped a can of soda beside her and it exploded on them both (Baines 1960). [4]
Alexandra Baines died of an overdose when she tried to adjust the strength of the hallucinogenic potion. She wrote a journal describing the strange sensation of looking into the future and the paths time flowed down. Her visions and drawings had begun to fade from reality, her sketches depicting haunting faces, blood flowing down her legs, and a horrid thought that something lifeless was in her stomach. She could see the death of her child and was desperate to find a way to change what was predicted. She wrote with a quick hand when she stated she felt so close to an answer. So close to depicting a face and a scene that could change her fate. When she died of the overdose she was 7 months pregnant.
My prediction is that she found the scene she was looking for. She was in her future body the moment life slipped out of her, and her mind went with it.
Some of the research that proceeded in Alexandra Baines' experiments drifted from meditation and focus on particle separation to transport a whole body. There was one recorded paper by Colin Simon, who experimented on mice and found some success when he was able to evaporate the rodent and successfully recover the creature in 5 seconds. Simon injected the animals with a potent chemical that altered the cells of the animal to work in a fast-forward motion, the animal's body thinking that time was passing quicker than it was. He would put the mouse in a box filled with sage smoke and the rodent would begin to vibrate until it vanished. He sent the mouse back 8 hours which he tracked by attaching a small watch to the animal. He had success in transportation that sent the mouse ahead 8 hours and from there focused on lengthening the time difference as much as possible. He found that 3 weeks in either direction began to result in deformed limbs upon return. At 2 months, the animal would come back missing a limb completely (Simon 1962). [5]
Simon stopped documenting his work and has been declared missing for 34 years. My theory is he thought he found a method of travel that worked and tried to use it on himself.
I have learned a lot from the work of others, and I am grateful for the documentation of their studies in the hope it will be useful to me. This is the only documentation that I will keep of my work, and maybe someday someone else will be able to stand atop my shoulders to reach a new horizon.
[1] Schuster, J. (1956). "Temporal Anomalies and Chrono-Journeys: A Comprehensive Exploration of Time Travel Possibilities." Journal of Quantum Chronology
[2] Baines, A. (1958). "Temporal Mindscapes: Exploring the Depths of Temporal Psychology in Time Invocation Phenomena." Journal of Temporal Psychology
[3] Baines A. (1959). "Navigating the Temporal Tapestry: A Quantum Leap into Time Travel Realms." Journal of Temporal Physics
[4] Baines, A. (1960). "Mind Over Matter: Experimental Insights into Time Travel Mental Teleportation and It's Cognitive Implications." Journal of Quantum Cognition
[5] Simon, C. (1962). "Chrono-Portals and Spatiotemporal Cellular Mutation: Unraveling the Threads of Time Travel." International Journal of Temporal Dynamics.
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