The following is a fragment from a novel-in-progress.
After several journeys through the portal, I started noticing something strange happening to me.
On a Tuesday night, walking along Commonwealth Avenue downtown, I saw an elderly homeless woman sitting in the middle of the sidewalk. She was huddled between two bags of her possessions and was sipping a plastic cup of soda from AMPM.
As I walked past, I had a familiar dilemma about whether to give her money or just say “Hi,” just to at least like acknowledge her existence.
I am ashamed to say that homelessness had become so common and normalized in 2022 that I often just walked right past, feeling a slight sting of sadness, but also kind of powerless about the whole thing.
But on this particular night, as I approached the woman, she suddenly, briefly, vanished. It was as though, by choosing not to really see her, she ceased to exist.
I stopped, startled. When she disappeared, the landscape around me also changed in subtle ways. The sign for the bank she sat in front of changed from Opus Bank to Fullerton Community Bank–which had not existed for at least ten years.
I looked up, and the moon was in a different position.
And then, as quickly as she’d vanished, the homeless woman re-appeared–like a blip on a television screen. There she was sipping her soda like nothing had happened. She looked up at me and this time, not wanting her to disappear again, I looked back at her in the eyes and said “Hi.”
The more often I traveled in time, the more often this sort of thing happened. It was as if the fabric of space-time around me was growing unstable. I would be out walking or sitting at a coffee shop and suddenly, instantaneously, the world around me would change, like a green screen background, to another point in time.
Whole buildings would vanish and re-appear. Cars on the street would turn into much older models, sometimes even horses. People would disappear and others would re-appear wearing clothes form a different era.
Perhaps this was why the time machine had been hidden away and abandoned. It did something to people, or the world, or both.
…
Being the only person I knew who had experienced time travel was at first exciting and then lonely and scary.
I didn’t know how to tell anyone about it, so I just carried it for a long time, as I continued my research and grew increasingly unstable.
Some days it got really bad. Like I remember one day just laying in bed–I was so exhausted and depressed. And as I lay there, the world would shift and crack around me.
I was in a bed. I was in a field. I was in the middle of an orange grove. I was on a dirt slab with a big train rolling past.
I would close my eyes, so the shifting realities would just like wash over me and not totally overwhelm me. I needed help. Had I totally fucked up my life? Was I doomed to this hell of a broken space-time?
Dear reader,
You might be wondering, at this point, why I continued using the time machine, knowing that it was literally fracturing my reality.
It’s a fair question, one I often asked myself. The truth is that I was the sort of person who, once I became interested in something, would stubbornly seek to plumb its depths, personal consequences be damned.
When I was in college, a Christian college (I used to be a Christian), I discovered textual criticism. I would hole up in the library until closing hours reading guys like Julius Wellhausen and the German “higher critics” until my eyes hurt, and my faith cracked and crumbled around me.
The point being, I was willing to go to great personal lengths in pursuit of what I thought was important and true.
Hence, my dilemma. I needed to see this through.
