It’s a pleasure to present Part Deux of Shea’s harrowing tale of time travel…
As we have touched briefly upon its potential, let us pause for a moment to reflect upon Time. There are those who say Time is like casting a stone into a pond and watching the ripples circle outward. Sometimes this is the case. But mostly, Time is like a handful of pebbles strewn across a lake, with each pebble creating its own tiny ripple. The ripples scatter, directionless. Sometimes they flow into one another; sometimes they ebb into nothingness.
One pebble is a woman.
There is nothing special about her as far as appearances go. She looks as any plain faced, 20 something, might look in 1970’s Pondicherry—familiar.
Each day at 3 o’clock she would pass a small, family owned-café in the northwest section of town. Each day there would sit a man reading a book in the corner. The man was Indian, but with a foreign quality about him, and not particularly just that he was from another country, but like he was from an entirely different kind of place. At the same time he felt so familiar. It was almost as if he were pleading to tell her a story: a story that by some peculiar design featured only her.
Still, their days were spent in silence. Try as she would to engage his attention, he never once looked up from his book.
The man is another pebble. The man is Manoj Vindalu.
Though he departed from Dunville with a plan, Manoj arrived in 1970 Pondicherry without the faintest idea of how to execute it. He hadn’t a clue where to find M Knight’s future mother. Worse yet, he had no idea when the time of conception was, and could not be sure that, even if he found her, the genetic miracle of life was not already stewing within her uterus.
Manoj decided that his first plan of action would be to use the time machine as a sort of research device to uncover the moment when the two lovers first met. It should have taken months (or years depending on how you look at it) and yet he stumbled almost instantly upon a street corner where they shared their first kiss. Upon further investigation, he was fortunate enough to overhear them discussing the details of the day they first met. He went back in time again and followed her to the meeting. He found it at a small, family owned café in the northwest section of town.
Finding two specific souls in the bottomless abyss of time? Learning further the exact date of their meeting? Why Manoj never thought to reflect upon this wave of good luck is uncertain. Though it is often the tragedy of the unwise to mistake fate for fortune, as he would soon come to understand.
After ascertaining the details of their meeting, he traveled innumerably to the past of M Knight’s future mother. He made periodic appearances throughout her life, positioning himself in places where their eyes would meet, sometimes only for an instant. His eyes would become a motif that defined her life. His eyes would be the dream she unconsciously sought in her waking hours. He would become her perpetual déjà vu. Once he was certain that his eyes would never be forgotten, he traveled to the small, family owned-café in the northwest section of town. There he waited three weeks, each day feeling her gaze hot upon his neck.
Then came the day of the fated meeting. Everything played out as normal: M Knight’s future mother was on track to meet her one-time future husband. But, at the precise moment when the eyes of her one-time future husband looked forward, hers instinctively looked right—to Manoj in the café. And there, for the first time in three weeks, she met his eyes. They were the eyes of her dreams. They were eyes that reflected her past. They were eyes that had seen time. And with no greater passing than any of the other innumerable, shifting bodies, her one-time future husband continued on his way, unaware as she that their shared future had been struck from existence with the swiftness of a single quill stroke.
Manoj offered her a seat, though he could scarcely understand why. He had already averted fate. His task was finished. He had assured that M. Knight could not possibly be conceived. He had thwarted their meeting, and in a city of millions, no one gets a second chance at something like that. Perhaps it was the intoxicating power of his success, or the sweet aroma of coconut milk that swam from her pores, but he found himself wishing to pursue his advances further. He had bested his rival. Now he would taste the spoils.
Manoj never had much skill with women. But he wouldn’t need any for this. The consequences of his meddling with her past had ensured that she would never want for another as long as she lived. On a tattered, single mattress, within the walls of a small inn, they engaged in carnal congress with a passion that can only be exhibited by lovers who have seen time, and returned to write its designs upon one another in their sweat.
Later, Manoj rose in the moonlight and stared at the woman whose womb now lay dormant. He paused for a moment of reflection. He was 8,000 miles and 40 years from the only life that he knew. What was he in the future but a cranky, middle-aged video store clerk, with a now-complete vendetta against a prominent Hollywood director? In the now he was a time traveler. He was a man with knowledge of the future. Knowledge he could use to make him a very rich man. And so he fled without so much as a fare-thee well, pawned the device, and booked passage to America.
Manoj could not see the grand lake of Time. If he could he would have seen that the many ripples caused by the pebbles he had strewn were slowly merging into one. And though many interesting things happened to Manoj in America, nothing of true merit occurred until nine years later. He was on a stroll through Fairmount Park when he bumped into his Indian mistress of nine years past. It was awkward. But it was nothing compared to what he felt when she introduced a small child, scarcely older than eight: the product of their quieted lust.
How does a penguin know her child? How does a bird known the passage south only just being born? Is it in the blood? Is it in the genes? Or is it in the eyes? Manoj met the frightened gaze and he saw familiar eyes—eyes that had seen time. And when the revelation came, it did not come like surf upon a beach, but like waves upon sharp rocks.
There, in a park in Philadelphia, were the eyes of the man who would go on to create the greatest atrocities known to modern cinema. The very man Manoj had set out to destroy so long ago had been born from the fruits of his own lust. Was it always destined to be like this? We do not know. All we know is that Time is pebbles strewn across a lake. And no matter how many ripples circle outward in untold directions, they all settle in the end.
Manoj fled. He felt the hands of madness begin to claw at him, and he knew it was only a matter of time before they would pull him asunder. Unless…
Unless Milo! If Milo knew the truth perhaps he could avert such an undeserved fate. But how would he contact a man 30 years in the future? Something came to him, an idea he had seen in Back to the Future Part II. He would send a letter to Milo. He would recount every vivid detail of his journey. Milo would learn from his mistakes and then, only then, could he save Manoj.
He ran to the nearest pharmacy and bought paper, envelops, a pen, and Sitcky’s Quick Bonding Glue: guaranteed to last 30 years. He scribbled furiously, penning letters barely more legible than Sanskrit. He closed the letter and applied a glob of glue to the back. He ran to the nearest mailbox, opened it, and glued it beneath the lid. With any luck the envelope would survive the 30 advertised years before falling in the appropriate time period. It was a long shot. All he could do was wait.
Against all odds, the plan worked. The letter fell a little more than a week or so after the day Manoj had first begun his journey through time. It fell among similar parcels, differentiated only by the tawny coloring it had accumulated over the years. It was retrieved by the mailman and delivered to the home of the intended recipient. And yet, not all went according to plan.
Manoj had peeked so far into his own past that he had forgotten entirely about the future—more specifically, Milo’s future. He and Manoj may have shared drastically different geography, but they still inhabited the same timeline.
So on that fateful day as the credits began to roll and Manoj activated the device, Milo had turned right to offer him some popcorn. As he extended a handful, he saw Manoj disappear into nothingness. Milo screamed inconsolably. He made such a ruckus that he was arrested. He continued to scream all the way to the police department. He screamed past his holding cell and into the office of a psychiatric evaluator. He screamed at every turn in the brief, albeit windy, road that led him to be confined within The Montgomery County Psychiatric Hospital. Perhaps he screamed out of horror from seeing his friend vanish. Perhaps because he could not stomach the fact that time travel was nothing more elaborate than the liberal application of glue to circuitry.
The incident aroused the attention of many. Bad popcorn some said. Too much pornography said others. It also attracted the attention of a 40 something movie director with a strong affinity for such mysteries. The man spent his evenings trolling various newspapers in search of critics who reviewed his movies favorably. He never found any. But what he did find while browsing through a supermarket tabloid he had purchased in the hopes of finding a favorable review, was a story about an individual who claimed his best friend disappeared into thin air during a recent screening of The Happening. He decided it was a story worth investigating.
So he went to the man’s home and talked to his mother. She told him her son had been committed and was not allowed visitors for the first 50 days. When the man inquired further about the incident she left the room. She returned with a tawny colored envelope. The envelope had arrived a week after the incident. It was addressed from the man who Milo claimed disappeared. Stranger yet was that no one had seen that man since. She had kept the letter out of fear. She gave it to the man at her doorstep for the same reason.
He bid farewell and hailed a taxi. In the backseat he opened the letter and read its contents. He became entranced in a story that both explored and transcended Time. It was a Greek tragedy; it was an exploration in science fiction. Its protagonist was raw. He even saw the potential for a subplot of redemption in the rewrite. As the cab pulled into his driveway, he produced a twenty for the driver and a cell phone for himself. Dialing a number he dialed once a year, he heard a voice click on the other end; and he spoke.
“Hello Mike, its me, M Knight. I’ve just had the best idea for my next film.”
So comes to rest another tragic tale about a man who thought himself the better of Time. But Time is not a foe to be conquered, or a trial to be endured. Time is pebbles strewn across a lake. And whether Time really is a thing, an abstraction, or a cosmic seamstress weaving tapestries of fate by celestial candlelight, one thing is certain: it sure can spin a good yarn.
He stood outside the alley, alone in the wind, in his horribly bland and self-loathing outfit: a royal blue collared shirt tucked into a black denim pair of jeans over white sneakers. And back in the alley, in the furthest corner of the furthest lane, stood the 10th pin.
