What You Can Change and What You Can't

I haven't written fiction in months, but recently I found my old copy of Larry Niven's anthology Convergent Series (1979). The last story is a time travel story, though totally unrelated to what you'll read below.
 
I started thinking of writing a time travel story. Actually, reading all of the short stories from so long ago rekindled my interest in writing fiction. I know I'm really limited in this area. Like always, I had a great start for the story but no ending. That's my weakness. I need to think of a good ending first, and then start writing.
 
By the by, the ending came to me. I opened a text editor and started typing start to finish. The story below is the result.

My name is Mark Miller, and when I discovered time travel, I decided to use it just like everyone else does in all those science fiction books and movies. I decided to change the past. No, not just the generic past, mine. I wanted to change history, just like Marty McFly did in "Back to the Future".

Here's what I want to change.

When I was five years old, I killed my brother. It doesn't matter that it was an accident, I did it. Jason's dead and it's because of me. He was only three years old.

I probably should blame my Dad, but I can't. I should probably blame him for going to the store "for just a minute" and leaving me and Jase alone. I should probably blame him for leaving a loaded 45 caliber pistol in an unlocked drawer in his night stand.

But I can't.

I'd seen where Dad put the pistol after cleaning it and loading it. He cleaned it every couple of weeks, I think. Mom wouldn't let me and Jase even have toy guns. Mom and Dad got divorced when I was four, and whenever we got to visit Dad, she was pretty strict about what toys we could play with at his house.

So when Dad put us in front of the TV with "Toy Story 3" in the DVD player so he could go to the store "for just a minute" (he'd run out of beer), me and Jase were alone.

I think it was because Woody was a cowboy and cowboys always have guns that made me think of Dad's gun. I paused the movie and took Jase into Dad's bedroom. I just wanted to show him something cool, a real gun, like what a real cowboy would have.

Jase followed me everywhere, so it wasn't hard to get him to come with me. Even though we were alone, I still told Jase to be quiet, and practically tiptoed into Dad's bedroom. It was a bright, sunny day in outside, but Dad had these heavy shades over his windows, so his bedroom was really dark.
I left the bedroom door open so some light would get in, and took Jase by the hand to the edge of Dad's bed.

I opened the top drawer of his night stand. I didn't see the gun at first and thought maybe Dad had moved it. Then I dug under his socks and shorts and found it.

But it was big and heavy, and when I pulled it out of the drawer, I slipped. I don't know what happened, but I heard the biggest "boom" I'd ever heard in my life. Jase didn't even scream. He just dropped to the floor, his white t-shirt was all red.

I don't remember much of what happened next or maybe I don't want to. Mom got sole custody of me and Dad only got supervised visits.

After a while, I didn't even want to see Dad anymore because just looking at him reminded me of what I'd done. I didn't blame him. I knew I wasn't supposed to play with Dad's gun. But my Mom blamed Dad.

I guess Dad blamed Dad too, because on the first anniversary of Jase's death, he killed himself with that same gun.

Mom had already been taking me to see Dr. Steward because of Jase being shot, so when Dad committed suicide, I just kept going to her for grief counseling.
 
It's been thirty years since I lost my brother and Dad and I don't think about them much anymore.

Or I didn't until I discovered time travel.

How does time travel work? I don't know. I only discovered the thing, I didn't invent it.

I discovered time travel at the bottom of a well on my Mom's property. A few years after Jase and Dad died, she bought this place a few miles out of town. She wanted to give me a home without all the bad memories of the old one. It had a big field out in the back where Mom said I'd have plenty of "run out room."

It wasn't a bad place to grow up and, when the hurt of Jase and Dad wasn't so bad anymore, I started to make friends at school. We loved running around in all that grass, climbing the trees, making snow forts in the winter, and basically being a bunch of kids.

There were parts of the field that grew wild and were thick with thorn bushes. Mom told us kids to stay away from there, but it was big enough that we still had tons of space to play in.

I grew up, moved out, got married, and got divorced (my ex says I can't commit because I don't want to have children). She got the house, and I got an apartment.

I still visited Mom every weekend and a lot more after she told me she had cancer.

She died last month and now I'm back in that house of hers with that big field in back.

I discovered time travel when I was clearing some overgrown grass and bushes in her field, the places Mom said I couldn't play in when I was a kid. I don't need that big house and that huge field just for myself so decided to sell the place. First, I need to fix it up, so I started by clearing the worst parts of the field. It's going to take a lot of evenings and weekends.

I don't know if Mom even knew about that old, boarded up well. Maybe even the previous owners (whoever they were) didn't know about it. Who knows how long it's been there.

But I was chopping away the bushes and when I pulled one back, tripped, and fell onto the boards covering the well. Good thing I dropped the hatchet I was using on those bushes.

It was just like the scene from that movie "Batman Begins" when little Bruce falls through the boarded up well and breaks his arm.

Luckily, I didn't break anything and the well wasn't as deep. There were no caves for bats to come in. Just a damp, musty smelling, dark hole in the ground.

How the hell was I supposed to get out?

That's when I saw the ladder. It was built into one side of the well. Just rusty metal rungs. I tested one and it seemed solid enough.

I suppose if I'd just climbed out right then, I'd never have discovered time travel, but I was tired from working all morning, and I was sore from the fall, so I sat down a minute.

I started thinking about Mom. The funeral was nice. It's what she wanted. No memorial service. Just a few words said over her at the cemetery before they put her coffin in the grave. I could feel the tears well up in my eyes when everything got so much brighter.

Instead of sitting at the bottom of a well with the only light filtering in from the top, I was sitting on grass with broad sunlight filtering through the trees. I started to panic, recognized where I was, and that didn't help.

I was in the cemetery where I buried Mom. I was siting under a tree. I could hear the leaves and branches over me moving in the breeze. I could hear a faint voice in the distance. It was mine.

I was mostly hidden behind the tree, and her grave was far enough away that I wouldn't see myself unless I looked right at me under the tree.

I saw myself in that grim black suit I bought for the funeral. I saw a few of Mom's friends. I saw the coffin, Mom's coffin.

I stood up and thought I was going to vomit. I closed my eyes and grabbed the tree to support myself. When I opened them again, I was grabbing one of the metal rungs of the ladder at the bottom of the well.

That night, I ate dinner alone in the dining room at Mom's house (I still can't call it "my" house). I'm a bachelor, so frozen pizza and a beer is good enough. I sucked down cheap beer and bad pizza and told myself it was all a dream.

Maybe I'd hit my head and actually passed out and dreamed about Mom's funeral. But why would I dream about seeing myself at a distance? Why dream about two Marks? Why not just dream about the funeral like I've been dreaming about Mom's dying, and Dad, and Jase?

Yeah, the nightmares had come back after Mom died. Actually, they started when I admitted her to hospice. I saw all the blood on Jase's t-shirt. I saw Dad's coffin (closed, he'd shot himself in the head) at his memorial service. I saw Mom the last day of her life, looking more like a cadaver than my living, breathing Mom.

It had to have been a dream.

But the sound of the wind in the trees was so real. I could feel the breeze on my skin and going through my hair. Sitting under the tree, I could feel texture of the grass under my fingers, and the rough bark when I stood up and grabbed the tree.

It's the next day now. Sunday morning.

I had the same nightmares last night, except I also saw myself looking at myself at the cemetery. So maybe that means I didn't travel in time and it was just a dream. But I also as an adult saw myself as a kid pulling the gun from Dad's night stand, slip and fumble with it, and watched it go off, shooting my little brother square in the chest.

Was what happened in the well yesterday a dream? I had to test it out. I had to be sure.

I ran out into the field, to where the well was. After climbing out of the well yesterday, I didn't do anymore work. I didn't do anything but brood. I hadn't bothered to board the thing back up or cover it or anything. I didn't have any neighbors behind that part of the field so who would see it?

It was only nine in the morning, but in August, the days get hot quick here. I stopped at the edge of the well and realized I was sweating because it was hot but I was also shivering.

I thought about boarding the damn well up or better yet, pouring concrete down its gullet, but I had to know.

Instead of falling, this time I carefully climbed down the ladder. The rungs were old because they were rusty, but they were also strong and didn't sag under my weight at all.

I was at the bottom. Yesterday, I was thinking of Mom's funeral and then I was there.

And then I was there. I was standing under the same tree but instead of hearing me talk over Mom's grave, I saw her coffin being lowered into it. I, that is, the other "me" was already gone. Maybe because I was already there earlier, I couldn't come back to the same moment in time. This was as close as I could get without meeting the "me" that had traveled through time yesterday, only now it wasn't yesterday but only half an hour later.

You know what I mean. Time travel is hard to talk about.

I waited a long time. When I was actually at Mom's funeral burying her, I didn't stay to see the coffin go in the ground. I left before the workers at the cemetery could do it. I didn't want to watch. Now, I watched everything.

I waited a long time. I waited until they finished putting the dirt back in. I waited until they went away. I waited until no one was around. Then I walked away from the tree, down the hill, and I stood over my Mom's grave again.

I haven't visited it since her funeral. I keep telling myself I'm too busy. I keep saying I have too much work to do between my job and getting her place ready to sell.

But the truth is, I can't stand death. Death took away my brother, my Dad, and now my Mom.

No, death didn't take Jase. I did it. I didn't mean to, but I did. And because of it, Dad killed himself, too. I miss them all so much.

I was standing at the bottom of the well again. I don't know how long I was away, but when I climbed out, and looked up at the sun, it was nearly noon.

I can't stop cancer so I can't save Mom, but if the time travel well works just because you think of when and where you want to go, I can save Jase. And if Jase doesn't die, that means Dad won't die either.

I know I probably should have waited and planned things out, but now that the idea was in my head, I couldn't think of anything else.

I climbed back into the well. I knew exactly where and when I wanted to go. Not to the moment before I shot Jase. It would be too hard to explain how I suddenly got into Dad's house and why a stranger was keeping two kids from finding their Dad's gun.

I shot Jase on a Saturday afternoon. Dad had picked me and Jase up at Mom's place Friday evening after he got off of work. That's when I'd go back. Where I'd go was Dad's backyard. I knew where he kept the spare key (he'd locked his keys in the house a few months before Jase died, and I saw where he kept the extra house key to get back in).

I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, I was in Dad's backyard. It was mid-afternoon. I saw my bike on the ground near the back door. It still had the training wheels on. Dad was trying to convince me I was big enough for him to take them off, but I was scared of falling. I can't remember if he ever got to see me riding a two-wheeler.

No telling if any neighbors were looking. I quickly moved the rock the key was under and used it to unlock the back door. I put the key back and put the rock back on top, then walked inside.

I stopped. I couldn't swallow. I could barely breathe. It was Dad's house, just as I remembered it, just as it was when I was five. I felt happy and terrified at the same time. The kitchen smelled like Dad's "infamous" meat loaf. I was trembling again. A thousand childhood memories, things I hadn't thought about in years, climbed out of dark parts of my brain and into the light like they all happened yesterday.

I guess it's thirty years ago, so they did happen yesterday, or close enough.

I started to walk to Dad's bedroom. I didn't want to go in. I was afraid of what would happen if I saw where I shot Jase again.

But Jase is still alive. Dad's still at work. He won't leave there for at least another hour, and then he has to go pick me and Jase up from Mom's. I can do this, I can stop Jase and Dad from dying.

I made myself open the door to Dad's bedroom. It was the exact same dim light I remember the day Jase died. That will be tomorrow afternoon. I can change that.

My legs felt heavy as I moved them, one step after the other, toward the night stand. My hand was trembling as I reached to open the drawer.

"Stop it you idiot!"

I clung my hands together to steady them.

I reached out again and pulled the drawer open. I pulled Dad's socks and shorts aside.

There it was. The gun. That damned 45 caliber revolver.

All I had to do was unload it and put the bullets somewhere else. Then, tomorrow, when little Marky picks the gun up and fumbles with it, it won't go off. Jase will still be alive. The worse that will happen is that I'll get scared for sneaking into my Dad's stuff, put the gun back, and drag Jase back into the living room so we can go back to watching the movie.

I didn't even realize I'd picked up the gun until I looked at my hands again.

As you can imagine, I hate guns. I've never owned one. But I figured out how to get the revolver open. I pulled six shells out, put them in my pants pocket, closed the chamber and put the gun back just like I found it.

I don't think Dad did anything with it between now and tomorrow afternoon so he shouldn't know the bullets are missing. But where to put them? I suppose I could just take them back with me. Dad will have a mystery about how the gun got unloaded and where the bullets went, but that's nothing next to a dead three-year old son.

Dad must have kept extra ammunition around somewhere, but I had no idea where that would be.

Screw it. Let him have a mystery. The gun's unloaded, that means I can't shoot Jase tomorrow.

For a second, I thought about stuff like fingerprints, and other clues I might be leaving behind, but up until yesterday (from my point of view), I didn't even believe in time travel, and I don't know anyone who does. No one is going to look for a time traveler and probably not even an ordinary break in just because six bullets go missing.

I'm going back to Mom's place, back to the well.

And then it was dark, I mean completely dark.

I was in the well. It had that same musty smell, the same dampness, but there was no light. I felt around and found the metal ladder. I could feel the cold and the uneven texture. What happened? Did I come back to the wrong time, before I found the well, before Mom died?

Only one way to find out, I blindly gripped the ladder and started to climb. I must have gotten maybe halfway up and my foot slipped. I lost my grip and fell back into the darkness.

I didn't feel hardly any pain when I hit the bottom. Then I didn't feel anything at all.

-----

My name is Jason Miller and when I was three years old I shot and killed my brother.

I guess I could blame my Dad since it was his gun. I never would have known about it except a few weeks before, my older brother Marky had shown me where it was. He pulled it out of Dad's night stand next to his bed to show me when Dad wasn't there.

Marky slipped with the gun and dropped it, and we both got so scared that he put it back, closed the drawer, and we ran out of Dad's bedroom.

We didn't live with Dad, we just visited him every other weekend. The next time we visited, I remembered where the gun was. I thought Marky would want to play with it again. Hell, I was just three. What did I know? He was watching TV. Dad was out front talking to a neighbor or something, I guess.

I went to get the gun. It was really heavy, but I wanted to show it to Marky. I took the gun into the living room. I didn't know what guns did except for what I saw on TV. I didn't even have a toy one to play with. Mom wouldn't let us have toy guns.

"Hey, Marky." I said grinning. I was pointing the barrel right at him.

It was thirty years ago, but I still remember the look on his face as he turned toward me, kind of surprised and scared. And then I tripped and I heard the biggest "boom" I'd ever heard in my life.

Marky's face just sort of disappeared in a bunch of red. I screamed, dropped the gun, and ran into Marky's and my bedroom.

I don't remember everything that happened after that. I guess that's a good thing.

Well, some of it I do remember. I remember my Mom blamed Dad because he had a loaded gun in the house. I remember him and Mom shouting at each other about it, how he accused her of sneaking into his house and unloading it, and how he needed a loaded gun for "home protection" or something like that.

I don't think I saw much of my Dad after that. When I was four, he used the same gun to kill himself.

I had nightmares for years after Marky and Dad died. They finally went away. Mom took me to some shrink for grief counseling. I guess it worked. After she moved us to a house with a big field outback, I started to make friends at school, and they'd come over all the time to play with me.

But Mom died of cancer last month and the nightmares have come back. I thought maybe if I saw a psychologist again, like when I did when I was little, you could help them go away again.

I wish I could find a way to change things, to change the past. I wish I could go back and make sure the gun was unloaded or something. If only I could travel back in time.

Stephen King's Novel 11/22/63: A Book Review

I think the last Stephen King novel I read was The Stand, first published in 1978. That's probably not true, now that I think about it. It was probably Firestarter which came out in 1980.

I stopped reading King after that. His books were too long, they tended to plod along, the characters were all depressing, his towns were always depressing, and all his stories seemed to end badly.

As I recall, King's novel The Dead Zone was about a man who, after getting in an auto accident and going into a coma, awakens with the ability to see a person's future just by touching them. This story too was about a man who tried to change the future, in this instance, by assassinating another man who was destined to be elected President and start a nuclear war.

So it's possible that King was mining some of his old material when he wrote 11/22/63: A Novel. Maybe so, but it's a lot more complex a novel than his previous works, at least as far as I know since I stopped reading him over 35 years ago. This, I think, is because this time King tackled one of the most famous events in American history: the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

King himself says that the idea of writing this story first came to him in 1972, the year I graduated high school, but he didn't think he had the "chops" back then to do credit to a novel of such scope, plus the research demands were formidable.

By the end of the first decade of the 21st century that was no longer true, and Jake Epping's story was told.

I would never have known about this novel except for a chance discovery on social media of an upcoming six-part television series on hulu based on King's book. Reading the premise fascinated me and, finding a copy of the novel at my local public library, I couldn't resist giving it a whirl.

I was dismayed that this tome was over 800 pages long. I don't have a lot of time for discretionary reading, and even though I read somewhat faster than the average person, it would still take a while to work my way through the whole thing.

Fortunately, it's a page turner.

Yes, especially the town of Derry, Maine was horribly depressing and even unrealistically grim. The communities King develops tend to have personalities of their own, as if they were living (and often evil) beings. Derry: bad. Jodie, Texas: good. Dallas: really bad, but not as downright creepy as Derry.

I liked Jake Epping. He was a borderline normal human being, a recently divorced high school teacher who seems emotionally closed, but only because he's not very emotionally expressive.

Jake got into this mess because he was teaching an adult ed class, one of the students was the high school janitor who was endearing, walked with a limp, and had an acquired brain injury. Harry writes an essay for Jake's class that tells about the night that changed his life, the night when his drunken father attacked his mother, siblings, and Harry with a hammer and killed everyone except Harry. Harry lived, but not without severe consequences.

Jake showed uncommon compassion for Harry and his tragedy but there was nothing he could do about it. After all, you can't change the past...

...normally.

But another resident of Jake's little community, Al Templeton, the owner of a local diner that served the world's best and most inexpensive hamburgers, had a secret. At the back of the restaurant's storeroom was a sort of "rabbit hole," a tesseract, an invisible doorway that lead to a single destination: September 9, 1958 at 11:58 a.m. You can go back to that moment in time, stay as long as you want, even years, then step back through to 2011 and you'd only have been gone exactly 2 minutes. Step back again, and it's September 9th all over again and whatever you changed on your previous trip was reset. It's as if you'd never gone through before (well, not exactly, but Jake doesn't figure that out until the end of the novel).

It's doubtful Al would have shared this secret with anyone, but another one of his secrets got in the way. You see, the "distance" between 9/9/58 and 11/22/63 is just over five years. Al had this crazy idea that he could save the life of John F. Kennedy, prevent Lee Harvey Oswald from ever carrying out the assassination.

The problem is, toward the end of the five-year journey, Al got cancer.

So he came back to 2011 and told the only man he thought he could trust, the only man young enough (mid-30), healthy enough, and unattached (Jake was recently divorced from his alcoholic wife and they had no children...well, he had a cat), and shared not only his secrets, but all his research (King's research, actually) on Oswald and associates with him, charging Jake with Al's original mission: save JFK at all costs.

Why?

Because Al believed that had JFK lived, he would have changed our nation for the better, maybe stopped our involvement in the Vietnam war, saving the lives of countless young men. Of course no one would know how history would play out until (or unless) Kennedy was saved.

A few things.

There's a yellow card man or a red card man or some other color card man who is always waiting near the "time portal" (for lack of a better term) in 1958. He's a wino, probably homeless, dirty, panhandling for money to buy more booze. But he's also connected to the portal somehow, as if he knows something, as if he can tell where Al was from during his trips, or where Jake came from.

The color of the card he wears in the brim of his hat keeps changing, indicating "something". On the day when Jake Epping finally accepts the task of stopping Oswald kill Kennedy, when he encounters the wino in 1958, the card is black and the man had cut his own throat and bled to death.

Another thing. Time doesn't like to be messed with. As long as you didn't actually try to make changes in history, time left you alone (more or less). But when you planned to make a change, time pushed back. You could still exert enough energy to overcome the resistance, but the bigger the change, the bigger the push back.

When Jake decided to save Harry's family from being murdered and prevent Harry's brain injury, the first time, he suffered through severe stomach flu, an attempt on his life by someone else who had a grudge against Harry's father, and he was nearly killed by Harry's Dad himself. Oh sure, he saved Harry, but his Mom still got a broken arm out of the deal, and Harry's brother still died (his sister lived, though).

The second attempt went much better, but Jake had taken precautions against the push back and amazingly, they worked.

But there was no going back. Rather than let the cancer kill him, Al had taken an overdose. Once his death had been reported, his diner would be sold, torn down, and some sort of mega-store would be built on its grave...

...and the tesseract would burst like a soap bubble and Kennedy's assassination would once again be reduced to a subject for history classes. Jake had only days, probably just hours, to step through the rabbit hole one more time and begin his journey through the long five years until November 22, 1963.

The majority of the novel chronicles Epping's living through the late 1950s and early 1960s as George Amberson (and King's portrayal of even the tiniest details of living in America during that time period were exquisite), would-be novelist, substitute teacher, and occasional gambler (like Marty in the second "Back to the Future" movie, Jake had been armed with the results of all the major sporting events, especially the upsets, as a means of making some ready cash), his adventures, first in Maine, then in Florida, and finally in Texas as he, acting on all of Al's research, slowly builds toward the day when he'd attempt to stop one of history's most famous assassinations.

Reading 11/22/63 was like watching one very long multi-car collision...horrible and yet fascinating. People suffered so terribly, and yet, I absolutely needed to know how or if Jake/George was going to save the President's life.

I think the original plan was for Jake/George just to lie low for five years, live modestly, make the money last, and stop Oswald, save Kennedy, and then go back to a better and brighter 2011.

But a man has to do something for five years.

Jake/George isn't a trained time traveler like you'd see in other stories. He has a few facts to go by, but unprepared, how does a man from the 21st century fit in at a time when computers filled a room, manned space exploration was in its infancy, and married couples in TV sitcoms still slept in separate beds?

But in many ways, this isn't really a story about time travel. It's like most of King's novels, about an ordinary person in a highly unusual circumstance, fighting against time itself, as if time had a life of its own, as if time was trying to kill Jake, in order to do what he thought was good, perhaps the greatest good in history.

But history fought back.

Jake/George falls in love, which makes things worse, not for him and not for his lovely Sadie, at least not at first, but for his mission. Time no longer has one target, Jake himself, to shoot at, now it has the woman he loves as well (and time makes them both suffer).

True to form, King introduces a small parade of insane, cruel, brutal individuals into the novel. The results are depressing and desperate, but like the aforementioned car wreck, I couldn't turn away. I found myself, having stopped reading to drive somewhere or perform some other task in mundane reality, terribly worried and wondering how I would ever find a way to stop Oswald. Yeah, I know. I started to identify with Jake/George. It got kind of personal.

Time batters and shreds Jake/George so that he ends up with only hours and then minutes to spare, rather than years, to find and stop Oswald. He does, but the consequences are disastrous. No, Jake/George, though maimed, lives, but so many other people die...

...and as it turns out, so does the future.

I waited a long time to get to this point in the novel and it's almost a let down. This isn't because of a fault in the novel, but because everything up until this moment, has been focused on killing Oswald and saving Kennedy, and in spite of time, it works.

But where do you go from here?

As it turns out, back to 2011, but again, referencing Marty McFly and his visit to the alternate 1985, it's the same town, but it's changed so much, and not for the better. Saving Kennedy doesn't save the world, it fractures reality. The green card man, a different one from the guy who committed suicide during Jake's last trip down the rabbit hole, explains it all to him.

Each trip doesn't exactly reset time. There are residual echoes from the previous trips. Each trip, and especially each change, tangles the different strings in time and if the tangles aren't stopped, existence itself is undone.

The only thing Jake can do is leave the alternate 2011, where no one has ever heard of Jake Epping and most of the world is a war zone, go back to 1958, do nothing, save no one, and then go back to his original 2011, go back to being a high school teacher, and let his scars and limp remind him that no one attempts to change history unchallenged.

Jake resisted. He could still save his beloved Sadie, Sadie who died trying to stop Oswald. Sadie who was almost killed and permanently scarred by an insane ex-husband (a classic King character), Sadie who was the only woman Jake really loved.

All he has to do is risk the very fabric of existence.

The novel was published in 2011, so there's plenty of information on the web that explains the ending, how King resolved the dilemma. Or you could avoid the novel altogether and watch the mini-series on hulu next month.

I'll leave that to you.

I thoroughly enjoyed the novel and almost considered reading it again. But that would feel too much like Jake's failed first trip through the tesseract, and then him going through again to replay history with a different outcome (besides, I've got a headache). Maybe a trip down the rabbit hole will let you, with great effort, change history, but King's novel will always begin and end exactly the same way.

The ending is semi-happy. At least King gave us that much.

The Alley

One of the exercises in the second chapter of Josip Novakovich's book Fiction Writer's Workshop asks the writer to describe a setting from the point of view of someone who has just experienced a death, and another description of the same setting from a person who has just experienced a birth.

As with this assignment and yesterday's project, I decided to adapt the suggestion to something that speaks to me in my own "language."

I'm writing this from memory, although I never let too many months pass between viewings of this particular cult classic. Obviously, I have to develop more of a perspective on these characters than was revealed in the scene from the film I'm about to describe, particularly the first character. I guess that's part of what fiction writing is all about.

The alley reeked of urine, cheap wine, and rotting vegetables as he curled up in the shadows of a doorway behind some garbage cans. Mostly the smell of wine was coming from his clothes, but the majority of the contents of that last bottle made its way into his mouth, to his stomach, his bloodstream, and finally, blessedly, his brain.

His "old lady," the aging widow who occasionally took him in out of pity and sex, locked her door on him tonight because he was too drunk to "perform." "Who does she think he is?" he slurred through intoxication and a mouth missing several teeth. "Why'd she kick me out, the damn bitch?" he whined to himself in undeserved indignation.

This alley near downtown L.A. had been his haven before. If he kept quiet and out of sight, the cops wouldn't hassle him, and neither would the gangbangers who'd have been known to roll a drunk, shove a knife through the ribs, or the really scary ones who were rumored to pour gasoline on a guy sleeping it off, and light him on fire.

But because of wine and apathy, he was beyond being afraid or caring. He pulled the old, torn and frayed Army blanket, the last memento of his service to his country and the catastrophe two tours of duty in Vietnam had made of his mind and his body, over his slight, bent frame, and used his arms for a pillow.

This evening in May in Southern California meant the concrete steps he made his bed were only a little cold to the touch. His thoughts and senses were unfocused and confused, and as he tucked his head under the blanket to avoid the street lights reflecting into his refuge, he felt embraced by a sense of wilderness and familiar comfort.

The blanket held the odors of mold and sweat and mingled with the alley's other fragrances, most of them unpleasant, and while they spoke of abandonment and loss, they also whispered "freedom." No one could tell him what to do or where to go. There were no rules. Comfortably numb, he continued to mutter to himself, occasionally cursing his "old lady," and for one more night, calling this minor corridor off of Pico Avenue his home.

Pain! Bright light! It was like being born maybe. Reese's flesh felt like he was on fire (and he'd been burned once before) as the astonishing illumination abruptly vanished and he dropped into darkness, landing hard on his knees and elbows.

It took his eyes several moments to adjust to the dim light around him after having been blinded by the startling brilliance of his brief but amazing journey. He shook off the pain, disconnected it, even as smoke rose up from his back. Then he looked up and around.

The buildings on both sides of him were whole, not burnt out ruins. Electric lights. Wires between buildings for telephones. The sounds of road traffic drifting in from the street at the far end of the alley. He was in an alley. He stood up and remembered he was naked. "Nothing dead can travel through time," they told him. Anything he needed to complete his mission he'd have to get once he got to the other side, the past, the time before the war.

"Hey buddy, did you just see a real bright light?" wailed a voice to his right. Reese cursed himself for his carelessness. He was a soldier, a veteran of countless battles against the machines, and still he hadn't noticed the frail figure lying in the shadows just six feet away.

Realizing the man was harmless, he looked around again. He'd made it. He was in the past. Reese felt the thrill of success, the thrill at survival, even as he made plans to find Sarah Connor. But first he needed something to wear. The old guy was drunk and wouldn't give him any trouble.

As Reese pulled up the stinking, moist pants he'd just taken from the man still lying in the doorway, a sudden bright spotlight illuminated him. Reese whirled around in time to see two police officers (he recognized them from an old history book he once found in the rubble of a school) getting out of a car and approaching him. He couldn't afford to be detained. They'd have guns. He ran the other way down the alley.

"He's rabbiting," one of the officers yelled as he chased the fugitive, ignoring the other man who loudly slurred, "He took my pants!"

As the two running figures receded in the darkness and the other officer drove away in his car, the older man pulled his blanket up around his shoulders thankful that the cops were ignoring him, and also crushed that he'd suffered yet another insult. He retreated into his despair as if he could melt back into the shadow of the doorway, and the pavement, and the night, and hoped the cops wouldn't come back for him. He just wanted to sleep. He just wanted to feel safe or if not safe, at least isolated from everything. That's what the alley meant to him. But it also meant a dead end, and end of time, at least his time, because a deep fear clawed inside of him, a knowledge that as he slept here he'd probably die here.

Reese's bare feet padded against the asphalt as he ran from the police officer. What was familiar to the owner of the pants he wore was an alien landscape Reese had only heard stories about from the very oldest survivors of the future nuclear holocaust, or seen pictures of in the few books and magazines that had been found in what was left of schools and libraries.

The grey cold light of street lamps, the rocks on the pavement that cut his feet as he ran, the slight chill in the air, the smells of garbage and car exhaust, all spoke of a life and a world that still had hope, that was still alive and free, of a people not yet dominated by the machines. This wasn't home. It would never be home, but if he could save Sarah Connor and somehow stop the Terminator, he could end the destruction of the human race before it ever started. The future's not set. It's just the beginning. All he had to do is survive.

Kyle Reese ran.

Musings on Being a Grandparent and Time Travel

You can never go home again. ~ Thomas Wolfe What children need most are the essentials that grandparents provide in abundance. They give unconditional love, kindness, patience, humor, comfort, lessons in life. And, most importantly, cookies. ~ Rudolph Giuliani If the universe of discourse permits the possibility of time travel and of changing the past, then no time machine will be invented in that universe. ~ Larry Niven Last Friday, my wife and I flew from Boise to San Diego to visit our first grandchild. Actually, my son's family lives in Oceanside, California, which is just a little north. To be even more accurate, they live in base housing on Camp Pendleton since he is a Marine. The trip proved that time travel is not possible but that time loops probably are. Let me explain. My wife and I used to live in Orange County, CA. When the nearest drive by shooting was only a mile and a quarter from our house, we decided it wasn't safe to raise kids there anymore and eventually moved to Idaho. However, while we were in California, we had our three, beautiful kids. I remember my parents, the new grandparents, coming down each time a baby was born. While my parents connected with my sons easily enough, I was a little worried how my Dad would react when we had a daughter, since he only had boys. As it turned out, my daughter had him totally wound around her little finger on the very first visit. Thus began a lifelong bonding between my children and my parents that I have watched with the utmost joy. Now it's my turn. Seeing my grandson Landon for the first time reminded me of the first meeting between my parents and my children. I remembered thinking my parents looked just a bit older on that occasion, but I didn't feel old at all when I saw Landon. I did feel somewhat amazed listening to my son David comment on his responsibilities and how he had planned every detail of the next 20 years of his son's life. He was somewhat revelling at being "head of household" and projected a sense of confidence and security in his own decision making as a parent that I'm sure I didn't have, even though I was ten years his senior when I had my first children. I also remarked to myself how that confidence would be eroded as he actually proceeded to parent over the next weeks, months, and years. Families are not the certain and stable things we pretend they are. I don't mean I think families are unstable. Family life just doesn't progress in an orderly and linear fashion. Having children introduces uncertainty to the extreme and events become unpredictable currents in the stream of time, like a leaf you send sailing into a forest creek. Nothing brings out the best and worst in people as does facing those currents by becoming a parent. I wonder how sure my son will be about how he wants to raise his own children five or ten years from now? I don't feel old. When I look at photos of myself (which I don't like to do often) I look old. My face sags and my hair is, at best, a salt and pepper mix (though I've managed to keep most of it). I have the usual aches and pains and obsess over what they all mean, but I don't look like my grandfather did, with a full head of silver hair standing on trembling legs (trembling at least near the end of his life). I feel "mature" when my son and his wife complain about how little sleep they're getting and all of the other adjustments they have to make, now that a newborn has entered their lives. The history of my own early parenthood rises to the occasion, though I see that action more in my wife, as her mothering skills come to the fore. The passage of time has caught me a little by surprise. Being a grandparent seems all at once real and unreal. Certainly holding my grandson is very real to me, but the stereotype of being a grandparent is completely unreal. I haven't given my first piggy-back or horsey ride yet, or read Landon his first storybook, or taken him to the park to play on the swing set or any of that stuff (give me a break...he's only eight days old right now). The passage of time also introduced another strange experience...going back "home". I say "home" in quotes, because Idaho is my home now. However, we weren't that far from Orange County and one of my sister-in-laws still lives there, so we went to go see her on Sunday. She has cerebral palsy, so doesn't travel much; thus she hadn't been able to go to Oceanside to see Landon. We all went up to her in Buena Park. Although she's my wife's younger sister, her hair is completely gray. She looked well and in fact, was probably the heaviest that she's ever been. In her case, putting on and keeping on weight is the same for her as my newborn grandson. Since Annie has cerebral palsy, her health has always been an issue. As she's gotten older, she has suffered more, and we've always had it in the back of our minds, that she may not live as long as the rest of us. She spent sometime in the hospital over the past few months and my wife was frantic at one point, trying to make sure she got the right care while hundreds of miles away. We hope and pray for God's care and peace in her life, but I couldn't help but notice the that she looks older than my wife. The added punctuation in the story was Landon, who is just starting to live. While in the area, we also decided to visit the "old neighborhood". Our old next door neighbor is still in the same house and we went over to visit. By contrast to my sister-in-law, Norma hadn't really changed that much. Her husband has, but not in a bad way, and at 71, he still has a full head of hair. He's survived 5 types of cancer and still looks like he runs (though he likely doesn't these days). He says that he's learned to stop worries (a quality I wish for in my own life...though I hope that I don't have to face cancer to learn it). The kids my kids grew up with are all tall and at least somewhat like adults. One even has a child of his own, but I noticed Norma was still in charge of how all the kids are raised. A lifetime as a foster and adoptive parent has moulded her into the ultimate caretaker for many generations. Being a grandmother is the most natural progression for her. We managed an invite into our old house. Everything was a darker color but there were some things that were familiar, even after 15 years. The ceramic tile we had laid right before we moved was the same. I remembered the place in the backyard pool where David had broken a tooth (baby tooth, thankfully), while jumping in the jacuzzi. The chandelier in the core of the house was different, but the railing on the stairs was the same. It was an odd trip back in time, but then, I had to remind myself that time travel is impossible. There are only memories to create the illusion. Like the house, the neighborhood was the same, but different. The streets were lined with palm trees now, that the city had put in. The local park was the same, but new playground equipment was in place. The air still smelled of partly combusted hydrocarbons, but the strip mall where our dentist had his office was gone; replaced by partly built condos that had been abandoned when the economy crashed. Now the frames of the aborted condos are exposed to the weather and disintegrating; perhaps illustrating the erosion of California, or at least my mind's version of it. The freeways were the same, but if at all possible, everything around them was even more built up than when I lived there. Cars traveling 75 miles per hour (and faster) were just inches away from us as we moved from one freeway to the next, while my son listened to the droning guidance of his GPS system. Little sparks of pleasant familiarity briefly flared into view, like fireflies on a humid summer's night, but then reality repossessed the night and the present returned. As I wondered how life would have evolved differently had we not moved away, I was reminded that I could never move back, even if I wanted to. I was no longer the same person who left 15 years ago and neither were my surroundings. While it was home once, it isn't now and won't be again. We left Orange County and David took us onto Pendleton through a different entrance to show us where he worked. We had driven past the Pacific Ocean on I 5 and I gazed at the endless seas that I never get to visit in Idaho, longing for one small visit to the beach. More than anything, I missed the ability to look out and let my eyes and my mind expand out across the vastness of the water, going past the horizon to distant shores. I no longer feel landlocked in Idaho as such, but this trip reminded me of what I sometimes miss. This trip pointed out to me that you can only revisit old neighborhoods, but you can't actually relive the past. Memories are mile markers, but the territory continues to change. In some ways, my wife and I have become my parents and my son has become the father. I can now hold my grandson in my arms and feel the new life in him and pray that God lets him grow up and be safe in an increasingly uncertain world. This must be what my father felt like when he held my children for the first time. Time travel is impossible, but visiting old neighborhoods and accepting the role of grandfather from my own father allows for a certain "looping" in time. I haven't really become my father, but having my own grandchild has created a new connection between us and between the moment when he first held my children and the first time I held my son's child. I can visit the house that was my children's first home, but it's only a shadow of what it once was. It's good to visit, but you can't live there. Connecting with the past provides valuable reminders, but the action is always happening in the present. We take what we can from our histories, but the ink has been dry for sometime and the pages are yellowing. The quotes from the past must be lifted from the old page and be written with new ink. I'm back home now in Idaho and it's another ordinary day in the City of Trees. I'm back at work, seeing familiar faces and doing familiar things. I posted the first pictures of Landon to Picasa and to my Facebook profile and emailed the attachments to quite a number of people. I'm writing the new history with fresh ink, but it's already drying as my first meeting with Landon moves from present to past. I can take from the past what I need to establish my role and use it to anticipate the future, whatever God wills it to be. I pray that I am allowed to read Landon from his favorite books, and do all of those things with my grandson that my father did with my children. Well, it won't be the same, both because you can't completely summon the past into the present and because, although I have adopted the role, I'm a grandfather in my own way. The past is just a memory after all. Landon and I will need to build our new memories together. For Landon.

Book Review: The Accidental Time Machine

Author: Joe Haldeman Paperback: 288 pages Publisher: Ace; Reprint edition (July 29, 2008) ISBN-10: 0441016162 ISBN-13: 978-0441016167 Surprise. I normally review books on actual and not fictional technology, but I came across the hardcopy version of this book at my local library and, having not read a Haldeman novel in a couple of decades, decided to revisit science fiction as one might revisit an old girlfriend. I wanted to see how much my interest in the genre and specifically Haldeman's writing, had held up over time. I'm also kind of a sucker for time travel stories. It is a page turner. I reserved the novel as something to "wind down" with before going to bed and there were a few nights when I pushed my "reasonable consciousness" envelope by reading longer than I had intended. The beginning of the book introduces a mystery discovered by protagonist Matt Fuller, an MIT graduate student in the more or less near future. Watching Matt try to figure out how a simple piece of lab equipment he'd built had somehow developed the ability to move forward in time was a definite hook for me. He's a bright, but not brilliant underachiever who's given the opportunity for "greatness", but only if he keeps his discovery a secret. This means he must go the way of so many other "mad scientists" by using himself as the primary experimental subject. Each push of the button sends Matt further into the future in a geometric progression and Matt ends up about 15 years into his own future feeling more useless than in his own time. Hailed as a glorified lab rat and with his Professor taking all the credit for discovering this method of time travel, Matt eventually escapes the dead end of this existence by "stealing" the time machine (it was MIT property after all) and continuing to launch himself further forward in time. Unfortunately, once Matt leaves a future history that's any where near familiar to him (or the reader), the novel begins to fall apart. It is still quite readable, but Haldeman's social commentary becomes glaringly apparent. In this next jump, Matt encounters a future where "Christers" (Christians) have taken over the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S. after the supposed return of Jesus. Haldeman is sadly transparent in portraying Christians (and probably all people of faith) as either conniving schemers, buffoons, or innocent pawns. I was hoping that Matt's encounter with the lovely and truly faithful Martha would have some sort of impact on his own state of faith (or lack thereof, since Matt is a self-declared Jewish atheist), but such is not the case. Haldeman uses this part of the book to make his case that any truly intelligent person will depend solely on scientific observation to explore and discover the universe, and that faith is merely surrendering to superstition. As a person of faith reading Haldeman's rendition of life "post-return" of Jesus, I had to determine that either he didn't do his Biblical homework, or he was making a point that Bible-believers will disregard what "the Word" actually says for a hand full of technologically generated miracles. The "faithful" in the Massachusetts of the 23rd Century blithely return to a world of a medieval religious rule with futuristic technology reserved for the ruling class. No Christian I know would have considered Jesus dropping in on the President of the United States as his first port of call to be even remotely valid, but somehow Haldeman portrays this as not a problem for the "elect". A rather simplistic view of people of faith which was one of the most disappointing parts of the book. I guess the author never met a believer that had a brain and perhaps the Scarecrow in the "Wizard of Oz" was the archetypal Christian, but I digress. It seems that Haldeman's pet peeves aren't reserved for Christianity though, in that Matt's next jump, some thousands of years into the future beyond the "Christers", takes him into a world where global society is based on eBay. A heroic but hapless Martha saves Matt's life while he's trying to escape her point in history, but at the cost of joining him on his journey into the future. While Matt confirms his understanding that Christ's return was a sham (it's now in the history books) put on by the government (talk about lack of separation between church and state), Martha, who manages to hold on to her faith for some time, eventually watches it crumble to dust as their journey forward through time continues. Matt and Martha do encounter a "savior" of a sort, both in their dreams and during each jump forward in time as they become unwitting victims of an artificial intelligence who needs Matt to help her (yes, it's a gendered intelligence) escape the boredom of running the "eBay society". For some mysterious reason (which is never revealed), this intelligence believes that seeking the ultimate end of the universe is the answer to a "life" of governing a bunch of wealthy but mentally vacant shopping drones. I could say that the book becomes less and less plausible from there, but when predicting the future, how can you say what will or won't happen? Matt struggles with his liberal ideals, especially towards women. On the one hand, he ends up explaining the various sexist aspects of the Bible to Martha and, on the other hand, arguing with himself about whether he should seduce the lovely and virginal Martha, or "act like a man" and protect her from the surrounding dangers, which includes himself. The book has a happy ending of sorts. Matt and Martha are rescued, both from their virtual captor and from forward time traveling, and given a choice of returning to a specific place or a specific time, not both. Without blatantly revealing the ending, Matt discovers several things (but not how time travel actually works). He does discover that he really loves Martha and treats her honorably, ultimately marrying her. He also discovers his "niche" if you will, by becoming a brilliant scientist, but only in the past. It's a little easier to be, or at least seem brilliant, if you know what scientific discoveries are about to be made. Martha discovers more, but for me, one discovery was sad. She loses her faith, but does fall in love and marry Matt. I suppose never seeing the return of Christ (or the coming of the Messiah, from Matt's perspective) would have to lead to the conclusion that the Bible, both Christian and Jewish, is just a collection of morality tales, not much different than the novel I'm reviewing. Martha leaves Christ behind and earns a degree in one of the sciences before "settling down" and having babies. Matt considers this an achievement far greater than his own. He achieves "greatness" by virtue of using what any 21st century physics grad student would know in a past where that knowledge was just on the cusp of being discovered. Matt (and thus Haldeman) considers Martha earning an undergraduate degree more significant, because he had to leave the fantasy of her faith behind to do it. Are education and faith truly mutually exclusive? The young couple finally take the one piece of advice Matt's father ever gave him, which was to "play the cards you're dealt". Sans time machine, Matt and Martha make a life for themselves in the time and place they were sent to by their saviors from the far future. At this point, domestic bliss is almost irrelevant and the next several decades are described in mere paragraphs. This unhappily bypasses the opportunity for both Matt and Martha to narrate their impressions on a history that the audience would have either lived through (the 20th century) or at least have heard about from their parents (or people like me). It could have been the most significant part of the novel but Haldeman treats it as an afterthought. The ending is ultimately unsatisfying to me. While Matt and Martha happily set up their household and family at some point in the near (historically speaking) past, their fate is as much accidental as anything else in this tale. The novel seems to reveal a certain truth about secularist and atheist thought; that life is random and ultimately meaningless. You end up where you end up, live, breathe, work, have babies, and then die without a point. There really are no lessons learned unless you take into consideration that a mediocre mid-21st century MIT grad student finds his purpose only by going into the past where foreknowledge makes him seem "cutting edge". Aren't we all like that though, at least in our fantasies? Who hasn't said to themselves, "If only I could go back with what I know now..." Sorry, Mr. Haldeman. This is a nice little piece of fantasy with liberal (politically and otherwise) amounts of personal and social commentary, but not your best work. Of course, if I re-read The Forever War after so long, would I be as disappointed?