Timelines: Stories Inspired by H.G. Wells' the Time Machine (13 page)

I told her about my own failed marriages, and my corresponding unremarkable career.

I shrugged. “Perhaps,” I said, “I sensed it would always come to this.” I nodded toward the stairs leading down into the basement. “Waiting for the tomb to open. My life’s true purpose, inbred from our family.”

Connie nodded. “The family curse,” she said.

Finally, there was nothing left to say. I helped carry her lone suitcase to one of the bedrooms upstairs. As she sat on the edge of the bed looking thin and worn, I asked if she truly believed that there was a man in the tomb. A time traveler.

After a moment, she looked up at me.

“
Do I believe in him?” She looked up at me with a wan smile. “Why, of course. I am in love with him.”

IV

The Time Traveler

The next two days dragged. There was not much more for Connie and I to talk about. We suffered together toward the inevitable climax of our lives – the opening of the tomb.

Not daring to leave the house, we shared the stylus. While one read for an allotted hour, the other watched television. It was futile for either of us to concentrate on anything else.

Then, at last, the waiting was over. I woke up in the secret room at seven a.m., May first. Connie was standing at the tomb, swaying, barely awake. Her hand caressed its gray crevices. I came over and stood next to her.

“
What time will it open?” she asked.

“
Eleven,” I told her. The time traveler’s last stylus entry had been eleven a.m., May 1, 1931, recorded moments before he had stepped back into the tomb.

I went upstairs and made us scrambled eggs and ham for breakfast. We ate in silence, without appetite. After cleaning up, we lumbered back downstairs. It was only a little after nine by then, but both of us were beyond doing anything else except stare at the tomb and wait.

At long last, my watch read 10:59. Then, it happened. A thin line slowly etched its way around the top of the stone tomb forming a lid. Connie and I watched breathlessly as the lid slowly and soundlessly lifted, as if powered by magic.

When the lid had stopped rising, we stepped forward for a better look. Inside the tomb, a thick, purplish-blue gel held a long, dark figure—the time traveler! I could hardly breathe now and, when I looked over at Connie, she was similarly transfixed.

The gel started to emit a dim glow, but the time traveler remained still as a statue.

“
Should we do something?” Connie whispered.

I shrugged. On his deathbed, Father had provided no instruction regarding what to do once the tomb opened.

But in the next instant, the gel started to churn. I soon realized that this was caused by the time traveler’s own movement within the tomb–he was pushing himself up and out of the gel as he had done hundreds of times before. So many thoughts rushed through my mind at that moment that I started hyperventilating. Connie must have been experiencing the same thing because I felt a rush of breath out of her trembling body as we stood side by side awaiting the time traveler’s exit from the gel.

When he finally pushed through, we each yelped for joy.

The time traveler had reawakened! It was all true! The ancient family secret had been realized!

When he turned to us, his eyes narrow and mean, the gel dripping off him with the viscosity of motor oil, like a fetus removed from the safety and warmth of the womb, I grew afraid. My concern quickly subsided when his eyes softened as he slowly began to realize what was happening, where he was. Although in seventy-three years the time traveler had not aged a moment, the span of time of between going to sleep and his awakening had not seemed instantaneous to him. He felt the long years of his sleep, and so his mind was dull and slow in those first few moments upon awakening.

After a minute or so, Connie stepped forward and wrapped a blanket around his shoulders. By then, he was shivering.

“
Are—are you alright?” she whispered. “I am Constance—the, the girl with whom you spoke while in your sleep.”

The time traveler scowled. His eyes were deep and narrow, and even in his present disheveled state, he was clearly an extraordinary man, handsome and strong and vastly intelligent.

“
And this is Damian,” Connie said, “Kosta’s son.” The time traveler slowly turned to me. I nodded in return.

“
What – what can we do to help you?”

Still sitting in the purplish gel, the time traveler stretched his mouth, yawned, then rolled his head around his neck.

“
You can help me out of this guck,” he said. His voice had an odd, unfamiliar accent. I knew there was none other like it on earth.

“
C’mon, Damie,” Connie gestured for me to come forward and help her.

As I approached, I reached for the light cord, but the time traveler stopped me.

“
No light,” he whispered. “Not yet.”

With some difficulty, we helped him over the top of the vault. Connie threw a blanket over his shoulders and we held onto him as he stood unsteadily on the cold, rough floor. Underneath, he was wearing only white briefs. Oddly, the gel had not left him wet upon his exit from the tomb. After a few moments, he nodded, seeming to have steadied himself, and we began a slow hike upstairs.

In the kitchen, he winced in the harsh gray light of morning. It was eleven thirty or so, but the clouds were leaden and gray, and there was the promise of cold rain sometime that afternoon.

“
Please, can you fix me something to eat?” he asked weakly as we sat him at the kitchen table. “Something light. Toast perhaps. And some tea.”

Connie found a small pot in one of the cabinets and started water boiling on the old gas range. She found a loaf of white bread and put two slices in the toaster next to the sink while I sat at the kitchen table next to the time traveler. He was coming around, getting life in his eyes. After a moment, he regarded me with gentle interest.

“
You resemble your father,” he said, his voice foreign and exotic.

“
He died six months ago,” I said.

Romal sighed.

“
His life—it was good for him?”

I nodded. “Yes, I think.”

Connie brought him a cup of steaming tea and a slice of lightly buttered toast. She sat across from us and marveled as the time traveler sipped the tea and nibbled at the toast. Despite his weakened physical state, he was still quite a specimen, with sharp Oriental or Native American Indian cheekbones, a solid, athletic frame, and skin with that odd bronze hue father had described.

After a few more sips of tea and bites of toast, he asked for a bed. We led him upstairs to one of the unoccupied rooms. Connie unfurled the bedspread and removed the blanket from Romal’s shoulders. He mindlessly slipped under the covers wearing only the white briefs. He fell instantly into a deep sleep. I thought it strange that he would need sleep after sleeping seventy-three years. But, as he explained, awakening from the gel was an exhausting process.

“
We have to get him some clothes,” Connie said.

For three long hours, the time traveler slept. During that time, I sprawled out on the old lumpy couch in the living room and dozed while Connie hurried to the nearest department store to buy the time traveler a presentable wardrobe. When I woke up, I found her sitting on the loveseat deep in thought.

At last, the time traveler came downstairs wearing the pants and shirt Connie had left for him at the edge of the bed. He seemed alert, completely recovered. He thanked us for taking care of him. “For fulfilling the duty,” as he put it.

He patted his belly and said, with a laugh, that now, he was truly hungry. Tea and toast simply would not do. Connie asked if he could use a beefsteak and a baked potato, and some string beans smothered in butter. When he nodded and smacked his lips, Connie promised to cook us a feast and left us alone to fix the meal.

After she had gone into the kitchen, the time traveler came over and sat next to me on the old couch.

“
Tell me about this age,” he said.

I tried to describe what life was like today – outside, beyond this house. In seventy-three years, much had changed. For one thing, there had been another World War, designated World War II, even more horrific than the one before it, involving the entire planet, and ending with an atomic blast. Seventy million people or some such number had died. However, even that war’s end did not result in peace, and there had been many continuous smaller wars ever since.

I next detailed the incredible technological advances of the past seventy-three years. Jets that flew at hundreds of miles per hour; sleek cars that sped along superhighways; cities of glass towers; computing machines; spaceships to the moon and Mars and beyond the limits of the solar system; open heart surgery and advances in medicine that had made living well into the eighties a common occurrence.

All this, and much, much more that made today a far different world than the last one into which he had awakened in 1931.

From the kitchen, I could hear steaks sizzling in a
George Foreman
grill while potatoes were being “nuked” in a microwave oven.

“
Sounds like it has become almost as magical as the time of our ancestors,” he said.

I did not know how to answer that except with a shrug.

“
You are Atlantean,” he said, as if in response to my quizzical frown. “Like me. The Atlanteans—our ancestors—made the time vessel. There came a time when a disaster befell our people. Our guild of shamans, great scientists whom you would regard as wizards or magicians, saw it coming—a great rock hurtling from the dark nether regions of space, that would break through the atmosphere at great velocity and crash into the northern region of the Great Ocean with monumental force, causing an unstoppable flood to inundate and drown our land and kill many millions. We only had a few weeks to prepare. Some were sent on ships to the barbarian lands, in what is now Egypt, Arabia to the east and South America to the west. For three of us, the shamans perfected the protective, sleeping gel and fed it a message with their magic to waken us every generation, which to an Atlantean, has always been seventy-three years.

“
And they assigned each of us to a caretaker family, whose task was to assist us in awakening down the annals of time into the future so that one day, when the time was right, the greatness that was the legacy of Atlantis, might be rekindled. After the three time travelers had entered their tombs, the caretakers and the tombs were placed on great ships and set sail for three different parts of the world.

“
We settled in Egypt, in your year 10,764 B.C. During my awakenings there, I inspired knowledge in the primitives, until, one day, I found that they had become a great people over which I could exercise little influence.

“
And so it went, down the long years of history, until today, when I seem to have awakened in an age which seems primed for the revival of Atlantean thought and magic.”

The time traveler sighed, clearly still exhausted from his long trip through time.

“
I do not know what has happened to my fellow time-travelers. But because I have not heard from them, I fear that unlike me, they have not continued the journey through time, or worse, did not survive.”

Then Connie was calling us to the kitchen. The steaks were ready, perfectly grilled, and the potatoes and green beans were drenched in butter.

As we ate at the kitchen table, Romal made Connie and me tell him more about the world. We tried our best with a rambling discourse of our times: rap music, Super Bowls, ESPN, DVDs, plasma television, the Beatles, al Qaeda, Iraq.

“
It’s the best of times,” I commented, “and the worst of times.”

Finally, when we had finished eating, I led Romal to the living room and showed him father’s old color television set.

“
This,” I said, “is what we have been talking about.”

I turned on the TV and he stepped back from it as the screen came to life and filled with color and motion.He smiled and pointed to the set, saying a word in a language I did not understand, but knew at once it was the Atlantean word for television, or something like it.

He sat on the couch, leaned forward, and watched the spectacle. I turned to CNN, and the sordid mess of current news and political debate unfolded.

“
The world is still at war,” I commented.

He nodded. Not much had changed in his ten thousand year journey.

After a time, worn out from the stress of the last few days, I dozed on the loveseat while Romal and my sister continued watching TV on the couch. Soon enough, Romal was using the remote to switch channels with the practice of a modern man.

Sometime later, I woke with a start, and saw—or thought I saw—Connie leaning back in the time traveler’s arms as he continued gazing at the TV. I also saw that he was stroking her hair.

It did not take me long to realize that the time traveler and Connie were smitten with each other. The night after his awakening, in fact, he slept in her bed.

For the next weeks after that, they were inseparable and made no secret that they had become lovers. They appeared to be roughly the same age – Connie was forty-five, and Romal, though a solid physical specimen, had to be at least that old. They didn’t hide their affection for each other from me, or in public, and held hands and kissed as we walked the streets of downtown Buffalo.