In Times Like These (51 page)

I stop
myself and shove open the door, taking in the rickety building and the desolate landscape.
No wonder I end up alone in a desert
.

The older me
is waiting around the front of the shack with a pair of canteens. He hands me one to carry.

“So what do I call you?” I ask
. “Do we both just refer to each other as Ben?”

The man looks at
me and shrugs. “People started calling me Benji later on in my life.”

“
Benji?” I say. “I always despised being called that. Sounded like the dog.”

“It grew on me after a while,” he says.

“What was her name?”

He grunts, and continues walking.

“Okay. Better you than me, I guess.”
She must have been a looker.

He leads the way into the trackless desert. I dodge around tufts of scraggly brush and other low sparse vegetation that’s too stubborn to just wither and die. After about the fifth dune, we descend onto a flat expanse of hard dirt that’s free of vegetation. From the structure of the hills around the perimeter, I realize that it was likely a lake at some point. Half a dozen fifty-five gallon drums sit rusting, spaced seemingly at random around the perhaps
hundred yard circle. Benji sets his canteen down, then turns to face me. “Why didn’t you kill Stenger?”

I’m taken aback by his question. “Um. Well, there were lots of reasons.” My mind flashes back to the lab. “I wasn’t armed, for one. He had this woman with him who had a gun.”

“You could have stopped him, but you didn’t.”

“
No. I couldn’t. I mean we tried . . . Blake and I had him cornered, but that’s when the woman with the gun showed up. She shot Blake. And they had Francesca. They somehow got the drop on us and grabbed her.”

“And you didn’t save her.”

“Look, I tried! I went up to search the third floor, and I found Malcolm, but it was a trap. They had the whole room rigged to burn as soon as someone went in there. There was no way out.”

“So you just left.”
Benji’s expression shows no sign of mercy.

“No! I mean I left, but I left to get help. If you just brought me out here to remind me how awful of a job I did, and that I failed miserably, you could have saved your breath. I know I screwed up. I know I failed. My
friends were counting on me and—” I feel tears coming on. I stop talking and stare at the ground. My body is shaking again.

Benji
takes a step toward me. “Why didn’t you stop Stenger?”

“I couldn’t
 . . .”

He steps closer and puts his index finger to the center of my forehead. He pushes my head up till I’m looking him in the eyes.

“You didn’t stop Stenger because you didn’t believe you could.”

I sniff.
“How could I?”

He looks me over. “You say you were unarmed. What’s that thing on your wrist, decoration?”

I look at my chronometer. “Well I use it, but it’s not a weapon.”

“Isn’t it?”
Benji stares into my eyes again. “Your problem is you need to readjust your concept of ‘possible.’”

I consider my chronometer.
Does it have some sort of function I don’t know about?

“So what do I do?”

“You learn to use that thing like it’s meant to be used.” He walks past the drum and picks up a rock the size of a baseball. Setting it on the drum, he then reaches into his pocket. He pulls out a chronometer and fastens it to his right wrist. The sun glints off the stainless steel as he dials the settings. He’s holding something else small with the fingers of his left hand, but I can’t make out what it is. He picks up the rock with his chronometer hand and strides forward a few steps toward the open expanse of lakebed.

“I want you to see something.” He holds his arm back to h
url the rock, does a quick crow-hop and then throws, but just as he’s releasing the rock, he vanishes. I watch the rock sail through the air. It arcs upward and then plunges downward about forty yards from me. It gathers speed. It never hits the ground. Six feet before impact, Benji reappears with his hand around it, and drops onto his feet with a light thump.

I realize my mouth is hanging open, and c
lose it. Benji walks back to me, giving the stone a casual toss in the air and catching it again. When he gets to me, he’s smiling at my shock. “That was a little sample for you.”

“That was incredible,” I stammer
, as he hands me the rock. “How—”

“That is what you need to learn. Well, not the rock throwing trick. That one takes years to master. But you’re going to learn the ‘how.’”
I turn the rock over in my hands. It’s nothing special. “So what did you notice about that little maneuver?” Benji is watching my face for my response.

“Um, for starters, your an
chor was flying through the air . . . and you never actually touched your chronometer.”

“Good. I was hoping you’d pick up on that.” He extends his left hand and shows me a tiny white tube with a button on the end.

“What is that?”

“It’s a remote switch. It actuates your chronometer’s pin function wirelessly.”

“Wow. That’s awesome.” I take the remote from his palm and examine it.

“But let’s get back to your other observation,”
Benji says. “The rock was flying through the air. Why is that relevant?”

“For one, you weren’t grounded to anything,” I say. “Don’t you need to be electrically grounded for the chronometer to work?”

“No. And I’ll tell you why. The chronometer needs to be temporally grounded. The electrical ground is a method of conveying the gravitites and activating them with current, but the chronometer only needs a ground in time, to get you back where you need to be in space.”

“So my anchor doesn’t need to be electrically grounded.”

“Nope. The chronometer just needs to be able to connect to something that’s not full of gravitites.”

“So
as long as my anchor is gravitite free, I could be flying through the air and it would still be able to make the jump.”

“Exactly.”

“What happens if I activate the chronometer when there isn’t something grounded in time to connect to?”

“You don’t want to do that.”

“What happens?”

Benji
scratches the whiskers on his chin a moment before speaking. “That’s actually a matter of some debate. Some people say you stop existing.”

“Whoa. Really?”

“If you think about it, if you have something that can be displaced from the stream of time, and then you displace it without any means of getting it back . . . there’s no real reason why you should hope to see it again. You’ve stopped existing in time.”

“Where do you go?”

“I don’t know. People talk about it. Some people say you’re just gone. Some people claim there is space that exists without time. They call it the Neverwhere. There are some people who say that’s what the afterlife is. It sounds like a bunch of swill to me, but I guess it’s possible. I’m old enough to know better than to think I have all the answers.”

“You ever know anybody who’s done it? Gone to the
Neverwhere?”

“None that ever came back. I don’t recommend trying it. You’d do better to learn how to stick around here on the planet first.”

“So what do I do? How do I learn to use this thing better?”

“Let’s
see what you’ve got,” Benji replies. “Show me a jump.”

“Where?”

“Use one of the barrels. Use that one.” He points.

I walk to the indicated barrel and
look at my chronometer. “How far do you want me to go?”

“A few seconds is plenty,” he says.

“Okay.”

I find the seconds ring on my chronometer and dial it to three seconds. I look to the side of it and check my directional slider to make sure it is on forward. Satisfied with that, I place my chronometer hand firmly on the lip of the barrel and take a breath. I reach my other hand over to the pin.
Here we go
. I blink.

“How was that?” I say.

“Fine, except I about nodded off while I waited. I think my beard hair got a little longer too.”

“Oh.”

“I want you to try it at a run.”

“What?”

“Running. You know, that thing that you do that’s faster than walking.”

“Okay. I mean
 . . . I’ve never done that before.”

Benji
points away from the barrel. “Start over there.” I walk to the specified spot. “Do five seconds this time, but I want you to set your chronometer while you’re running.”

“Okay.” I look at my chronometer and mentally find the knob for seconds.
Yeah okay. I can do this.

“Go!”
Benji yells.

I start running, but immediately have to slow to a quick trot as I try to dial the
seconds ring over two marks. I manage it, but realize I’m barely jogging when I finish. Speeding back up, I concentrate on the barrel. I have to do a couple of stutter steps upon reaching it. I slap my chronometer hand down onto the barrel, and with my right hand over my chronometer, push the pin. I stagger a little as I reappear, and then slow to a stop a couple of yards from the barrel. I turn to look at Benji. He’s appraising me with his arms crossed.

“Like that?” I ask.

“Yeah. Though I’m pretty sure Cheeto could have done it faster.”

“Who’s
Cheeto?”

“
Cheeto’s the tortoise.”

“You named your tortoise after a cheese snack?” I ask, slightly out of breath.

“What would you name your tortoise?”

“
I don’t really—”

“Yeah. Thought so. Get back over there.” He points again.

This time he has me regress to a two-second jump and I manage to do it a little quicker. When I’m finished, Benji doesn’t comment, but only gestures to the starting point. He holds up four fingers.
Four seconds. Got it.
I run. I get progressively faster over my next half dozen attempts. Just before my seventh attempt, he calls out to me.

“Do five minutes this time.”

“Okay.” I take a deep breath and start into a run. My legs are moving smoothly and I’m able to find the five-minute mark and set it without breaking stride. I slap the top of the barrel and squeeze the pin in one fluid motion. Smiling, I trot to a stop and turn to face Benji. I’m staring off into the desert. I spin around and see the barrel has moved about seventy yards, and Benji is still back near the start point, leaning against another barrel and sipping his canteen.

“You think you’re pretty funny, don’t you?” I yell. I walk back
, dripping sweat onto the dry, caked ground. When I reach Benji, he hands me my canteen.

“That’s better. Now I want you to try jumping it.”

“The whole barrel?”

“Yeah. I want you to leapfrog over it and blink while you’re jumping,” he says.

“Okay. I’ll try.”

“Don’t try it. Do it. I’m sixty-four and I could still jump that
, easy.”

“Okay Yoda. I’ll do it.”

Benji smirks at me.

I run various drills till mid
-morning. By the time Benji lets up on me, my clothes are soaked with sweat and my canteen is empty. Benji looks at the sun creeping its way up higher in the sky and then nods his head toward the path. “Okay. Let’s head back. We’ll get some food in us and then keep going.”

Cheeto
has worked his way around the room and is peering out from under the bed when we walk back into the shack. Benji gestures me to the chair by the table and I slump into it gratefully. He sets a cup and the pickle jar of water in front of me. I pour myself a glass as he rummages through cupboards.

“Looks like I’m out of eggs.” He grabs a box of cereal out of the cupboard and after consulting the side of it briefly, sets it down on the table, but keeps a grip on it. “I’ll be right back.” I barely have time to see his hand go to his chronometer when he dis
appears. Seconds later he walks back in the front door, holding a paper bag under his arm. He sets it on the counter.

“What
 . . . where did you go?” I say.

“Grocery store. What does it look like?” He unloads items onto the counter.

I grab the cereal box and look at it. A photo of a grocery store aisle is taped to the side. Cereal boxes line the shelves but one is sticking out at an odd angle. I recognize the labeling that’s the same as the one in my hand.

“You’re really something else, you know that?” I say.
Benji piles handfuls of some sort of grass out of a bag onto a plate. He adds a handful of spinach, then walks over and sets the plate in front of the tortoise. When he comes back to the kitchen, he reaches into the bag and pulls out a carton of eggs. “Where’s the grocery store around here?”

“Tacoma.”

“Washington?”

“Finding a grocery store that will let you keep a gravitizer on the premises is harder than it sounds.”

“Oh. Yeah. I guess that would be an awkward conversation.” I watch him rummaging around the bag. “Hey, you mind if I ask you something?”

“Maybe.”

“How did you end up here? What’s with the desert existence?”

He pulls a bowl out of the cabinet and begins cracking eggs into it. “I like the desert. It’s peaceful.”

“Yeah. It is, but is this your whole life? What happened that made you want to come live out here?”

He reaches back into the bag and pulls out a few more items. I see bacon and shredded cheese and a jar of salsa.
“I needed to be here to train you when you showed up,” he says. “I needed somewhere away from the rest of the world where you wouldn’t be distracted. But I’ve been out here a while anyway.”

“What kinds of distractions?”

Benji pauses and looks at me. “You have a tendency to booger some things up once in a while if you haven’t noticed. Out here . . .” He gestures to the view out the window. “There isn’t much to mess up.”

“Wow, thanks for t
he vote of confidence. That makes me feel really great.”

He looks me in the eyes. “That’s not what I meant. Look, I knew what kind of state you were going to be in coming out of that fiasco in the lab. I knew if there was anytime you were likely to do something rash or emotional, then that would probably be it. I just wanted to avoid that possibility.”

“So you knew what I would go through, but you didn’t know firsthand what I’d do? So does that mean the lab never happened to you?”

“No. It didn’t. Our timestreams split before that point.”

“When?”

B
enji sighs. “In 1986. But it was 2009 that really made the difference. The other 2009. Not the one you were in. Not after the changes.”

“What happened?”

Benji goes back to cracking eggs. “I made some poor choices.”

“Oh.” I consider him as he pulls strips of bacon out of the package and lays them on a pan. “So then how did you know about the lab? How did you know I would need help?”

He turns on the camp stove and adds the eggs into a pan. “You told me.”

“I did?”

“The future you,” he says. “You told me what I needed to do to get you back there.”

“Really? How did you know it was me?”

“You had the same frequency signature.” He turns and points a spatula at me. “But don’t go getting it into your head that just because I met a future version of you, that you’re somehow invincible and can’t die, or any bullshit like that. If you go do something stupid, you won’t end up being that version of you at all. You’ll end up the version of you who got himself killed doing some stupid shit.”

I nod. “Okay. I won’t.”

I turn my glass around in my hands and watch the last sip of water swirl around bottom. I look back to Benji pushing the eggs around the pan with the spatula.
He’s a version of me, but he seems so different. He seems sad somehow.

“How many versions of us have you met? Are there a lot of us?”

Benji frowns. “Not as many as there should be.” He sprinkles some of the cheese over the eggs.

“Oh.” I set my glass back down. “You mind if I ask you something else?”

“Shoot.”

“Okay, well this has been bothering me since I got here. I’m not completely sure I want to know the answer, but I feel like maybe I should.” I feel my chest tighten up. I take a deep breath. “What happened to Malcolm? And Francesca and Blake? This is 1990. Does that mean they died back in
’86?”

Benji
sets a plate of eggs and bacon in front of me. “No.”

I breathe a sigh of relief.

“A
ctually, it sort of depends . . .” he adds.

“What do you mean?”

He grabs his own plate and drags a stool to the table. “Have you ever heard of Schrodinger’s cat?”

“Who’s Schrodinger?”

“He’s a scientist. He’s dead. But he had a theory that might help you understand your situation.” He leans forward and puts his elbows on the table and begins to gesture with his hands. “The idea is that you take a cat and you put it in a box. You also put in some sort of device such as a vial containing poison that is set to break at an undetermined time. It doesn’t really matter the nature of the device in question, only that it has the potential possibility of killing the cat. Let’s say it’s fifty-fifty.”

“That’s terrible,” I say.

“Of course it is. But that’s not the point. The point is, that due to the imprecise timing or probability of this device going off, until you open the box, you don’t know if the cat is alive or dead. Inside the box, it exists in a state that can be considered both alive and dead.”

I think about this scenario. “So you’re saying that my friends right now could be dead?”

“Or they could be alive. You won’t know till you open the box.”

“What’s the box?”

“In this case, you have to figure out if you are, or aren’t, going to go back to 1986 to save them. And if you do, whether you’re actually going to succeed.”

I ponder my eggs.
“So since it’s 1990, there could be a grave out there somewhere with Francesca’s name on it right now.” I point beyond the walls of the shack. “If I don’t save her, she died in 1986.”

“That’s one possibility.”

“But it might be one fact. Potentially I could walk out of here and find out the truth one way or the other. I might find that grave.”

“You might. But maybe just that knowledge that you failed would be enough to dissuade you from going back to try to save them in the first place, causing the very thing to happen that you were hoping to avoid.”

“That’s really convoluted.”

“Another reason why I brought you out to a desert with no phone and no
internet and no other contact. You don’t need that kind of distraction right now. It would be too easy to go searching for answers when you need to be finding the answer firsthand.”

“So you don’t know?” I say. “You don’t know if I succeed in saving them when I go back? You met me. Future me. He didn’t tell you?”

“No. He told me what I needed to know. And he told me if I wanted to make up for some of the other things I’d done over the years, this might be a good place to start. Helping you.”

“But apparently I live,” I say.

“One version of you does at least,” Benji replies. “That’s not to say that you stay him though. Like I said. You can make different choices. Your destiny would change then, along with aspects of your timestream signature. How this plays out is up to you now.”

I pick at my food for a little and then set my fork down.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Benji says. “You go through with this, you’ll know one way or the other. You don’t, and it will eat at you. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that wondering ‘what if’ can be the worst of it. You go back there and you might die. That’s true. And I won’t say that’s an easy choice to make, but I’ll tell you this, dying ain’t the worst thing that can happen to a man.”