A BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO TIME TRAVEL
NaNoWriMo the November Book Challenge
This is the November book challenge. It’s a challenge to yourself. There is no winner; there is no prize to speak of. The challenge is to write a novel of 50,000 words, edit it the next month, and start sending it out by the new year. I’ve never participated in it before, and thought I’d give it a stab. The problem is, that I was putting my other book JACK OF DIAMONDS up for editing, there just wasn’t enough time to do it all at once. Since I was putting up excerpts of JACK on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I figured I’d give my PAID subscribers a first look at what I came up with. The problem with starting something like this, is that you usually prepare yourself. You plot out your story, have characters in mind, have a theme you think you ‘re going to want to bring out. A lot of shit going on behind the scenes that people just don’t consider—or you can just open a new document and start writing…which is what I did. No plot line to follow; no characters to introduce, you just write and see where the writing takes you…
So, shall we see where the writing takes me?
A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO TIME TRAVEL
1
Let me just start off by saying that everything I’m about to tell you is true. I know, whenever someone starts off a story by telling me that, I always think to myself: this is obviously going to be a whopper. And it usually is. What I mean by saying it is this, there are some things you just can’t question—and you shouldn’t if you want to keep your sanity—because in the end it doesn’t matter what your mind tells you; there are simply some things in this world that can’t be explained, by anyone.
That’s as plain and simple as I can put it. If it’s any consolation, I didn’t believe any of it when it first happened to me, either. I have a hard time believing it now, to this day, and I’m the one it happened to—or it is happening to—or maybe it’s going to happen to? I don’t know anymore. Let me just start off by saying it’s not as if I stood on the sidelines watching the events as they unfolded around me. I was just as much a part of it, as much as it was a part of me. Does that make any sense? If you can’t follow where I’m going with this, then maybe you’d better just pack it in and give up right now, because it’s only going to get more confusing as we go along. That’s because we’re talking about time here, and while it’s something everybody feels they have a lot of, that’s not really true.
I’m going to try and explain this the best way I can. I don’t know if I’ll be able to, and it’s not just because I don’t understand the math involved—I was never very good at math when I was in school—but because this goes way beyond that. I don’t think I have to tell you that I didn’t pursue a career as a physicist—even though I don’t think that would’ve helped when it comes to trying to figure this stuff out. I’m a blue-collar man, like my father, and his father before him—or so I thought. This is where it starts to get confusing, so bear with me.
I work for the Sanitation Department, here in Ames. I guess that’s just a fancy way of saying that I work at the dump. The work itself isn’t as bad as it used to be; I don’t work on the garbage trucks anymore, tossing cans. I didn’t mind the grunt work when I did it; I was younger then, and my back could take it, in fact, I liked it because I was young; I didn’t have to think. I had my Walkman, a cheap set of headphones, and smoked dope whenever I thought I could get away with it. I generally lived in my own little world, hanging off the back of a garbage truck. And then I worked through my first winter. I found that I could keep warmer by running behind the truck; when I got older, I realized I could stay warmer by sitting inside the truck.
Seniority has its privileges, as they say. Because now, I drive a big machine and work at the dump site. I have a/c for the summer; a heater for winter, as well as tunes in the form of a CD player. I don’t have anyone looking over my shoulder to make sure I’m not screwing around. I don’t even work up a sweat anymore, and they know that. My job gives me a lot of freedom. There’s always been one rule of thumb working at the dump: If you find it, it’s yours. You have to want it, of course. Sometimes, you might find an old wallet, or a purse, and it will have money in it. It’s never very much, but sometimes, sometimes it’s enough to buy beer for the boys after work.
My days start early. I’m usually up by five in the morning. That’s when I do my exercises—a quick twenty minute work-out—followed up with a smoothie for breakfast. I’m 37 now, single—although not by choice. My ex left me for the accountant we were seeing when we were trying to sort out some of the tax problems my father was kind enough to leave me. He suffers from dementia, and as a result, his tax problems are now mine. She never came right out and told me she wanted a change, or that she thought she could do better—whatever that’s supposed to mean—but the end result is that’s exactly what she wanted. Of course, I didn’t find out about any of this until after she’d been fucking our accountant for more than three months. I thought she was seeing him for business reasons, the business being my father’s tax problems. But no, she was seeing him at a Super 8 motel just off the hi-way. Now, I’m getting all sorts of legal papers in the mail; the tax department is threatening to send me to jail, and I’m probably going to be evicted because I can’t afford to pay the rent now that she’s gone. So things couldn’t get any worse, I was thinking.
About the only thing I have to look forward to are the weekends I spend with my father. Of course, since he was diagnosed with dementia things aren’t as good as they used to be; but he does have his lucid moments. I still take him out for lunch to the pub once a month. In fact, I insist he go with me. My two brothers couldn’t even be bothered to visit. They pretend their lives are too busy to see him. Besides, it’s an hour drive for them and only twenty minutes for me. They tell me it’s better if I see him and let them know how he’s doing.
And how is he doing?
He’s got dementia, I say.
Sometimes he remembers things—I mean, he still has his lucid moments, like I said—and then there are times when he doesn’t even know he’s wearing three shirts and a sweater while he tries to put another sweater on top of it all.
He says things to me that make no sense. He always asks me if I’ve seen his father yet, and then five minutes later he’ll ask again. I used to tell him Grandpa’s been dead for the last fifteen years now, but I don’t think he realizes it, so I just nod, smile, and tell him Grandpa’s doing great; maybe we’ll go visit him someday.
“We can’t,” he said one day, and starts looking around the pub as if he’s making certain no one’s listening to us.
“You mean because he dead?” I said.
I thought he was having one of his lucid moments.
“Dead? No, he’s not dead,” he said with a laugh.
So much for that, I tell myself.
“You can only come back to where you started from,” he said, looking up at the big-screen TV.
“What’re you talking about? Just what is that supposed to mean? ‘You can only come back to where you started from’?”
“You can choose to come back if you want, or you can stay. That part’s up to you. Your grandfather chose to stay.”
My grandfather had been bedridden for more than ten years.
“He gave me the bracelet before he left.”
“The bracelet?”
He nodded.
The nurses at the home all tell me to humour him. They tell me to agree with everything he says because he’s not going to remember it in five minutes anyway, and then he’s going to ask me about it all over again. It’s not easy. It never is. In fact, it gets harder all the time.
I remember how lively he used to be; how his eyes would light up and how he always laughed; his laughter used to fill the room. He used to tell us stories when we were younger, and I always told him maybe he should write them down. They were fantasy stories about another life he’d led on what sounded like a different planet, but he said it was here—just in a different reality. The stories sounded so real. He played the hero of course, had a wife who was a princess—much to our mother’s chagrin—and she had powers because she was a magician. Together, the two of them led a rebellion against the Overlords, or something like that. It was a long time ago.
They were stories I could never get enough of though, until we got older and my brothers didn’t want to listen anymore. I want that man back I thought, looking at him as he watched the big-screen TV.
“Did I give it to you yet?” he said, still looking at the TV.
“What?” I asked, confused.
“The bracelet? I’m supposed to give it to you. It’s something that’s handed down from father to son.”
He seemed upset the more he thought about it and I tried to distract him by showing him the pocket watch I’d found two years ago.
“That’s not it,” he said. “I know what it looks like, and that’s not it.”
“What does it look like?”
“What?”
“The bracelet? What does it look like?”
“It’s bigger than that,” he said, pointing at my watch.
“And where do you think it might be? Where did you put it?”
“If I could remember that, do you think I’d be so worried?”
“Why are you worried? What’s there to worry about?” Hell, you’re not even going to remember this conversation in five minutes, I thought.
“I should’ve never come back. I should’ve stayed with Del.”
“Come back? What do you mean? Where did you go? And who’s Del?” I laughed.
“Ameroose,” he said slowly.
“Ameroose? Where do I know that name from?” I asked.
“It’s where your grandfather went.”
“What? Oh, yeah, right. Come on. I think I’d better get you back to the home.”
“It’s in the attic,” he said, suddenly remembering.
“What is?” I asked, standing up and pulling two twenties out of my front pocket.
“The bracelet. It’s in the old steamer trunk up in the attic.”
“You don’t have a house anymore, remember? There is no attic.”
We sold the house after Mom died and put everything we couldn’t sell, into storage. I remember the trunk, though. It was big, and blue, with big brass hinges and a huge padlock. I remembered thinking how we should look inside of it, but Dad was still with us then and said we couldn’t open it until after he was dead. He made us swear. Jimmy and Bobby didn’t seem to care one way or the other; they seemed happy enough putting the trunk in the back of the storage locker and burying it.
“You have to open the trunk for me,” he said, standing up and finishing his last swallow of beer.
“It’s still locked. I don’t have the key.”
“Bobby does.”
“And you remember this?”
“Find me that bracelet.”
