The Long Wait for Tomorrow (21 page)

“It’s not possible, first of all, for a
person
to travel back through time,” Edmund specified. “Remember the cesium photon I was talking about in class? They shot it, light speed, against a wall—and the residue showed up a billionth of a second before
they actually fired the shot. Now, whether you see it as traveling into the future or in the past, that’s just a matter of perspective, I suppose.”

“So why can’t a person do the same?”

“Far as traveling at the speed of light, the theory is that the body wouldn’t be able to handle it.”

“So that’s it?” Patrick asked.

“That would be it if you were a
person
.”

Kelly pointed at Patrick. “I think
person
is the word that best sums Patrick up. Me too, for that matter. Am I wrong?”

“Not about Patrick. But take a look at yourself, Kelly. You say you’re …,” Edmund trailed off, as though worried about even entertaining the notion. But there was a part of him that seemed to be gaining momentum, secretly enjoying the attention, the apparent respect. “You say you’re from twenty years in the future? Well, I don’t see a thirty-eight-year-old mental patient sitting here. If you’ve traveled back through time, then where, exactly,
are you?”

“Go on.”

“It’s no wonder you thought you were dreaming….” Edmund plucked a brownie from the tray, then quickly returned it. “Maybe if you’d woken up to find yourself in the past, and
still in your thirty-eight-year-old body
, then time travel would have come fairly easy. Not to mention how much easier it would’ve been to convince us that you were the future Kelly McDermott.” Edmund’s eyes narrowed. “But this is the body of the young Kelly McDermott, with the older Kelly trapped somewhere inside.”

Patrick sat up, began to scoot forward. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying, for lack of a better word, it was Kelly’s
soul that
traveled back through time.”

Kelly frowned. “You don’t strike me as the kind who believes in souls.”

Edmund straightened slightly. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Patrick glanced at Kelly, who calmly repeated: “You don’t strike me as the kind who believes in souls.”

“Oh?” Edmund glanced between the two, eyes ricocheting madly. “What do I strike you as, then?”

“Clinical,” Kelly replied. His voice never turned defensive or condescending. “Intelligent, empirical. Practical, Edmund.”

“Well, I
am
, and despite what you and Patrick may think, there’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Despite what
I
may think?” Patrick’s sympathies for Edmund took a quick vacation, and he stood up from the bed, looking down at Edmund with incredulous eyes. “So you’re some kind of deep, unapproachable mystery, but you get to figure me for some idiot piece of shit.”

Edmund cringed slightly. “You don’t know what it’s like.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Because you’ve got Kelly to make sure that never has to happen.” Edmund began to shake, eyes going dark. “That you don’t end up duct-taped to
some flagpole, while everyone else stands around laughing
!”

The realization of Patrick’s involvement with the rest of the
team came rushing back. But with the weight of guilt, something else; a dark uncertainty kneading at his heart, making a bed and settling in. Edmund had arisen from his seat, taken the few steps necessary to come face to face with Patrick, and in Patrick’s own soul, there were suddenly no second guesses.

Kelly’s right about Edmund
, his angels insisted.
You can just
feel
it.

Kelly came up from behind and collared Patrick, jerking him back, out from the path of a right hook that was never thrown. Patrick landed on the bed, welcomed by a choir of shrieking springs.

Kelly sent a finger in Patrick’s direction. “Calm down, we’re his guests.” He then turned to face Edmund, who now appeared unable to account for Kelly’s behavior. “Edmund, I’m sorry for what happened, and you’re right about every last bit of it. But please believe me when I say … that I could
really
use a brownie. Right now.”

Edmund stepped back, face blank. He glanced from Kelly, down to Patrick, then back to Kelly. His intelligent, empirical, practical mind amazed at an actual display of the new Kelly McDermott at work. He reached back, picked up a brownie, and handed it to Kelly.

Kelly accepted it with a nod, then nonchalantly returned to his seat on the floor. He took a bite out of the brownie, chewing thoughtfully. Swallowed, then nodded in Edmund’s direction. “You say, for lack of a better word, that my
soul
has traveled back in time…. Do you believe in souls?”

“I don’t …,” Edmund managed, retreating to his chair. He glanced over at Patrick, as though contemplating an apology.

It didn’t come, but Kelly wasn’t looking for one. “If not souls, what
do
you believe?”

“Contrary to what you might think …,” Edmund began before correcting himself, cautious now. “I’m not against imagination. I believe there is a scientific version of a soul, one we haven’t discovered yet. Call it essence, life force, morphic fields. Much in the same way that I believe thoughts can travel through time due to their lack of mass, it is possible that someone’s ‘soul’ could travel back in time.”

In the silence that followed, Patrick could feel the fence begin to mend.

Kelly stood up and walked over to a bookcase. He kicked his feet out with each step as though trying to shake off invisible sand. Or taking the time to assure himself that he was in possession of an actual body.

“So if Kelly’s soul is here,” Patrick began, throwing his own caution to the wind, “what’s going on with Kelly’s body in the future?”

Edmund eyed his bookshelves. “Guess we’ll find out twenty years from now.”

“Edmund …” Kelly was absently moving a finger along several books. He kept his back turned, voice low, tentative. “If it really is possible to travel back through time, then … is it also possible to change events, the very course of history?”

Edmund squinted, as though deliberating whether or not to
complicate things. “If you want to look at time as a straight line, then probably not.” Edmund deliberated some more, then rubbed his eyes. “For example, say you travel back to 1865 and warn President Lincoln that if he goes to see
Our American Cousin
, John Wilkes Booth is going to kill him. Your plan succeeds, but it raises a serious problem. Now that the assassination of Lincoln never happened, how could you have ever known of it in the first place? And if you couldn’t have known it, how could you then stop it?”

“Paradox,” Patrick volunteered. “You could even cease to exist.”

“That’s what’s known as
the grandfather paradox.
But Kelly’s got enormous gaps in his memory. He remembers who you are, where his parents keep their coffee. He remembers
things.
Those
things
he can’t remember can easily be written off as simple memory loss from the fact that all this, in his mind, happened twenty years ago. What he doesn’t remember are
events.
In fact, he’s
been
changing events since he first woke up to find himself here. But there’s no real paradox as far as Kelly goes, because he doesn’t know what he’s changed. He can’t remember what he did instead of going to the pool hall, for example. It’s almost acting like a safeguard, freezing memory in order to assure that his essence can continue to exist.”

“Then again,” Patrick stepped in, getting caught up in the conceptual swell, “maybe Kelly doesn’t remember anything because he’s accidentally changed so much that now none of those things have ever happened.”

“Then again,” Edmund shot back, not ready to cede to
Patrick just yet, “his memory loss could always be one gigantic side effect of time travel.”

“There is that, yes.”

“Not to mention that
things
versus
events
can get kind of tricky,” Edmund added.

“Tricky how?” Patrick asked.

“Suppose Kelly’s been masquerading as a superhero all the time we’ve known him….”

Patrick couldn’t help but laugh at the thought of Kelly as a superhero.

Edmund looked hurt, before realizing it wasn’t a bad bit of comedy. Unused to the notion of
laughing with
, he allowed himself a nervous titter before continuing. “Yes, crazy, but that makes it an excellent example. At night, Kelly dresses up as Batman and roams the streets as a vigilante. It is severely counterintuitive behavior, and yet it happens regularly. Nightly, even.”

“I’m loving it,” Kelly encouraged him.

“What could’ve been considered an event is a common enough occurrence to become a fact. Something he should easily remember upon traveling back in time. And yet, upon opening his closet and finding black tights and a cape, he could easily dismiss it as a Halloween costume he once wore.”

“Why?” Patrick asked.

“Because during the day, there was always a part of Kelly that rationalized it as perfectly normal. It would be necessary for engaging in such an extremely improper fashion. He’s rationalized it, you see. In his head, he’s told himself it’s OK. It becomes nothing to him. As a result, when he comes back in
time, that whole part of his life is erased along with everything else.”

“Is that actually possible?”

“Just how many of your sins keep you up at night?” Edmund charged with an admonishing look. He then turned to Kelly, not entirely prepared to let him off the hook. “You could have any number of skeletons floating about in your closet that you haven’t even begun to touch upon.”

“Yes, but
what if
?” Kelly insisted.

Patrick glanced up, surprised at the urgency in his voice.

“I mean, what if I did know something?” Kelly specified. Patrick could hear the added informality tacked onto the question, covering for his deeper concerns. “Even if I didn’t know for certain, even if by accident, are you saying I couldn’t change it?”

Edmund didn’t catch the undertones and strode across the room, face grim. “Linear is just an objective view of time, and I’ve never really been a fan.” He unceremoniously moved Kelly aside and began to search the bookcase. “Every time we’re faced with a decision—two roads diverging in a yellow wood, and all that—we assume that the choice we make severs that second, or third, path. That we then move on along the only existing time line.”

Edmund unsheathed a thick paperback and handed it to Kelly. “In the short story ‘The Garden of Forking Paths,’ Borges suggests that the only way to truly tell the story of humanity is to incorporate every possible path every person could possibly take.”

Kelly tossed the book over to Patrick.

On the cover, a man with thick lips and dark, slicked hair regarded Patrick with an unimpressed, yet critical eye. Judging from the clothes and texture of the black-and-white photograph, it looked to be a portrait from the midforties.

Or possibly yesterday!
Patrick’s angels announced gleefully.
Who the hell even knows anymore?

When Patrick looked up, he was surprised to find that Edmund had pulled a rather large, semiportable chalkboard from behind his desk.

“You have a chalkboard in your room?” Patrick asked, unable to keep from sounding incredulous.

Before Edmund could even begin to recede back into his awkward shell, Kelly held up his hand. “Don’t listen to him. Show us what you have to show us.”

Edmund nodded, drew a straight line. “To go to the store, or not to go to the store.” Edmund drew two diagonal lines diverging from the straight line, labeled one of them
a
and the other
b.
“These are your decisions. Say you go to the store, here on line
a …
” Edmund sent two more lines angling out from line
a.
“Then you have to decide whether or not to stop for a hot dog. But say you stay home, here on line
b …
” Edmund moved to line
b
, drew another set of splintering lines. “Whether to watch the game, or go for a walk …” Edmund then repeated the process several times over, with each new line getting its own helping of
what ifs.
“The bifurcations go on and on and on.”

“Like the branches of a tree,” Patrick observed.

“No.”

“OK, I’m going to shut up now.”

And somehow, Edmund smiled. “Don’t blame yourself, Patrick.”

It was a hell of a thing for Patrick to see him smile, to know such a thing was possible.

“Say we start with our original two decisions.” Edmund erased everything but the original line and its two options. He pointed to decision
a
and
b.
“To go to the store, not to go to the store. But say, later on, you have specific plans for dinner. If neither of these two paths interferes with that, then they both bend to meet back at that future point.” He drew a line from
a
tilting downward, and a line from
b
tilting upward. The final result was the original time line, topped off with a diamond shape. “And once again, the same goes for all those other lines. When viewed close up, the whole thing looks more like a chaotic honeycomb than anything. In fact …” He tapped the chalk against his lips. “This could attest to why you remember certain things from far in the future. The ripples of certain changes in the present might die out before they can affect certain future events.”

“But if I suspected something was going to happen, could I change it?” Kelly asked warily.

He didn’t sleep last night
, Patrick’s angels reminded him.
It’s still today, remember?

“Maybe …,” Edmund speculated. “While you may be looking at a line and a diamond on this chalkboard, the overview is far more complex. Complex, and far more dense. Compact.” He pointed with his chalk to the space inside the diamond. “This, right here, isn’t empty. It can’t be, there’s no such thing as
empty as far as I’m concerned. This space is filled with more of those branches and diamonds. It’s all so compact that, essentially, all these scattered points are touching each other at once. We only see one path because that’s all perception will allow. And we can’t effect change, because the body can’t physically do it.” Edmund shrugged. “But apparently—”