Early evening saw me driving south for Interstate 70 to get back to Cincinnati. I was pretty much ready to fly back to San Diego and home the following Thursday, but felt a need to get back on the road and do some thinking.
On the way through Terre Haute, I stopped at the cemetery where my grandparents are buried, found their graves, not far from my great-grandparents’ graves and stood for several minutes, thinking about what had happened that day. It was truly strange and extraordinary.
I had the letter – there was never a question from Annie about its ownership – but insisted she keep the one ounce gold coin that had been in the envelope. The gold coin was, I had to admit, a touch of genius on the part of my Grandfather, who according to Liz had told both her and Annie about the letter just before my family left Belton in 1952. My grandparents invited the two women over for dinner on one of their last nights in town and told them that they had hidden an important letter and a gold coin in a beam in the basement of the house. When the ladies asked why they were telling them about it, my Grandfather just said "so you’ll remember it. Don’t forget the gold coin."
They actually hadn’t remembered it, until a few months after buying the house in 2003, Annie and her daughter were talking and the subject of my family came up. The mysterious envelope with the gold coin was remembered, and they had Liz’s son extract it from the beam and together had read it. Then on this day in 2005, the circle that started in November of 1933 closed. I insisted that as payment for keeping the letter safe, the coin was obviously intended for them. Annie convinced me to have a piece of the apple pie she had baked for the day, but I politely refused the offer to stay the night. I wanted to be by myself to think this strange, crazy thing through.
While I drove in darkness, Belton, Terre Haute and the cemetery behind me, I looked down again at the envelope in the passenger seat. It was laying on its face, but in the dim light I could imagine that it was just a plain envelope. No faint, pencilled names or dates. But I knew they were there. I supposed that I could have some microscopic testing done to be certain that the "fourth of June in 2005" and "November 17, 1933" were written at the same time, but just by looking at them, I was sure they were. And somehow, my signature had been put on that envelope almost 72 years before.
It was puzzling, but also a rather exciting mystery, too. Was it possible that at sometime in my future, I will travel back 1933? Time Travel stories had always been my favorite sci-fi to read, starting in about the fifth grade when I read a book about a two kids who travel back to the 17th century, I think. I don’t remember the title of the book, or its author, but I remember it completely captivating me.
More recently, I loved The Time Traveler’s Wife
The miles slid by, and as I again passed south of Indianapolis, I used my cell to call one of my best friends, Dan, probably the most analytical person I know. Not surprising to anyone who has ever met him, Dan has undergraduate degrees in both Electrical Engineering and Physics, so yes, he’s a bit of a geek, with a tolerance for New Age concepts of approximately zero. After catching up, I told him the day’s entire story, start to finish. It took three different phone calls as he was driving too, through the outback of West Texas on some Jeep-devouring extreme trip. Cell coverage is spotty there, and since his Jeeps are his main source of amusement outside of work, many of our conversations go this way.
Dan listened, obviously looking for the scam in it all and after the basic outline of the phenomenon had been related, he asked a number of questions that showed he too was skeptical of Annie and Liz and what they stood to gain by all this. But even he admitted he couldn’t see the angle in it. They hadn’t asked for my phone number, address, social security number or anything, so how they would profit from it all? Neither of us had an answer for that. But then, my friend shocked me.
"You really need to read Yoga of Time Travel
I’d never heard of the book, but the name was familiar. "Fred Wolf?" I said.
"He was the physicist in What the Bleep Do We Know!?
"Oh yea! The guy with the beard." I was astonished. "You HATED that movie," I reminded him. I had sent Dan a DVD of the controversial documentary, which he promptly watched and then trashed in an email to me, calling it a bunch of metaphysical hogwash trying to legitimize itself with a little bit of science.
"Fred Wolf is a brilliant man," he said, his cell signal breaking up slightly, getting ready for another dump. "But to be in a movie with a woman pretending to channel a 5,000 year old warrior was a bad career move." Dan can compartmentalize quite well when he needs to.
"Read the book," he continued. "There might be something there. You really think that’s your signature on the envelope? Is there any possible way they could have gotten hold of it?"
I thought about it for a few seconds. "I really can’t think of any possible way those women could have gotten my signature," I said. "And it looks just like my signature today. A couple weeks ago, I came across something I signed 15 years ago, and it was different. This one could have been at the bottom of one of my checks last week."
"Wow." Never before, when faced with a problem had I seen Dan at a loss for words.
A few seconds later I sensed the connection had again terminated, and unable to get anything but an immediate voicemail pickup, I gave up, realizing he had traveled out of range. I felt that in a way, so had I.
* * *
The rest of the drive to Cincinnati was uneventful, and uncharacteristically quiet. I didn’t even want the radio interrupting my thoughts. The background hum of the road and the white noise of the wind flowing over the top of my car, heard through the open sunroof was enough. I tried to remember how I got my name. Could my grandfather in 1933 or before, decided that his first grandson would be named "Richard?" No, I decided. I was named after my mother’s grandfather, a man I’m sure my grandfather never met. Were there any other Richards in our family? I couldn’t think of a single one. Sherlock Holmes, one of my literary heroes, said that "once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth," and I was doing my best to eliminate the impossible.
I hadn’t talked to my wife since I was on my way to Starbucks that morning for my coffee, so I gave her a quick call from the road, catching her and our teen-aged daughter on their way home after their weekly catch-up dinner at Soup Plantation. I told her about my sudden road trip, but only mentioned the letter and its mystery as "kind of a cool thing the lady who owns my grandparents’ old house gave me" and promised to fill her in later. Being occupied driving, that satisfied her so we caught up on the day’s happenings in San Diego and hung up with "I love you" spoken into each cell phone.
I pulled into Cincinnati and my rented corporate apartment’s parking lot just after 10pm. Exhausted, I wasted no time in turning in for the night. I was tired from all the driving, and had enough of this mystery banging around in my head, so sleep came within seconds.
Morning seemed to come within seconds as well. It seemed like I hadn’t yet fallen asleep, when the dull, early morning light started glowing through the blinds in the apartment’s bedroom. Nevertheless, as I thought about it, I found that I felt really well rested, and after the day I’d had on Saturday, this was pretty surprising. But I got up, pulled on some running shorts, a t-shirt and nikes and went for a run. It was still early enough in the summer that the mornings had a bit of crispness left in them, and the run was great. The events of the previous day were still puzzling, but sleep had apparently done its job sorting a bit of the situation out, and it didn’t seem so overwhelming on Sunday morning. I did two miles in pretty good time and still had the energy to take the stairs up to the second floor of the apartment building two at a time. A hot shower followed, and then I got dressed and headed toward Starbucks, grabbing my laptop bag and Seattle Mariners baseball cap on the way out.
When I got to my favorite Starbucks, I ordered and received my Venti Vanilla Latte, sat down and opened my laptop. BoingBoing popped open with Cory Doctrow going on about chocolate (which I’d given up after realizing that headaches would often trail consumption of the stuff), Dave Winer at Scripting News blogging about Steve Jobs’ reality distortion fields (one of my favorite topics) and a host of other web writers writing about things that interested them. The drama of the previous day slid into the background as I got back to more familiar territory.
Thirty minutes later, my daily blogs and latte exhausted, I cracked open the bottle of water I’d bought with the coffee and entered the URL "amazon.com," then "fred wolf yoga of time travel," and was rewarded with the first result: Yoga of Time Travel: How the Mind Can Defeat Time
Closing my laptop and packing up, I noticed that the coffee shop had gotten a lot busier as it was almost 10am, and I realized I needed to get a few last details cleaned up before I packed up the car, turned it over to the auto-transport company and got on an airplane for San Diego on Wednesday. Dumping the laptop case in the back seat, I climbed in the car, started it, and pulled out of the parking space.
The shopping center my most frequented Starbucks is in is on a busy state highway, at a traffic-light controlled intersection with another highway. The second highway Ts into the shopping center, so leaving the center is a simple matter of just driving out on a green light straight onto the highway. Which I did to go back to my apartment. When the light turned green, the car ahead of me pulled forward and I followed. Neither of us saw the black Hummer approaching from the left, its driver preoccupied with his cell phone. The Volvo in front of me got off scot free, but I wasn’t so lucky. The Hummer hit me broadside at about 40 miles per hour, it would later be determined, striking my Chrysler Pacifica on the left side, just about even with the back passenger door. I don’t remember anything but an explosive avalanche of noise, and the extremely brief sensation that I was on the wildest-ass merry-go-round in the world. Spinning, trying to find something to hold on to.
After that, I have a vague recollection of music playing. I can’t recall the tune, or if there were any words. Just the faintest hint of music.
* * *
I woke slowly, groggily, like clawing my way out of a vat of tar. It was dark and humid, but not uncomfortably so. I could smell vegetation. I was outdoors, and if I curled my fingers, I could feel grass and a peaty soil give way beneath my hands. I pushed myself away from the ground, sat up and looked around. Tropical plants, a very real jungle surrounded me and there was absolutely no sound, except for any noise I made. I realized that I was in one of the most comfortable places I’d ever been. I was wearing a pair of light, almost white shorts with Keen sandals. I had my favorite olive-green RL t-shirt on.
A sudden realization and memory of the crash surfaced and I felt the blood rush to my head. Oh shit. I’m dead. And I’m apparently in Hawaii, I said to myself with no small measure of irony. I guess if anyplace on earth could represent heaven, it would be Hawaii. I walked around and found the clearing I was in to be circular, bounded by the thick, impenetrable jungle to the outside, some sort of pit in the middle. Huh. No metaphor there. Between the pit and the jungle was a stretch of 40 to 50 feet, the clearing being a smooth and lush carpet of grass. It was clearly daytime, light filtering through the jungle canopy, but there wasn’t enough of a view of the sky to get a feel for what time of day it was.
Now, at some point in the next few minutes, I somehow came to the realization that this was all a hallucination. It all felt real enough, sure, but there was just something unreal about it. That’s the only way I can describe it, but I know there was a lot more going on because though I remember what I did next like it was yesterday, I can’t explain the thought process that led up to my actions. It all just happened.
I stood up, walked straight across the belt that separated the jungle from the hole, stood for a second at the edge of what I can only describe as an abyss. I then spread my arms out to the sides and let myself fall forward into what felt like a perfect dive into something that I couldn’t begin to see or even judge what it was. Again, I don’t know what compelled me to do this, or what set of skills I called upon to do it. I’m a passable swimmer, but no kind of diver at all. It sure felt like an Olympic medal winning dive though, and it continued for what seemed like minutes, until I hit the water, my hands slicing into it perfectly, making way for my head, shoulders and then the rest of my body. The water was the same temperature as the air, so I just felt the sudden impact and resistance that let me know I’d entered it. I could feel my body slowing down, though I couldn’t yet see anything.
And then the water was gone, I seemed to be laying down and sleep was overtaking me so fast, it barely registered that I was even sliding into it.
* * *
Music again, this time it was much more than a hint. There was a tune and words.
Hand me down my walkin’ cane
Hand me down my hat
Hurry now and don’t be late
‘Cause we ain’t got time to chat
You and me were goin’ out
To catch the latest sound
Guranteed to blow your mind
So high you won’t come down
I knew that song. Spinners. Or was it the Four Tops? Mid 70s, at any rate. Again, the grogginess, like I’d taken a two-cap dose of Nyquil, or was being awakened in the middle of a dream. The music was loud though, and coming from just above my head. I was in bed, covered up and extremely comfortable, but the music seemed insistant, like it wanted me to wake up.
Hey, y’all prepare yourself
For the Rubberband man
You never heard a sound
Like the rubberband man
You’re bound to lose control
When the Rubberband starts to jam
It was annoying, because I no longer needed alarm clocks to wake up. The cleaning lady must have accidently set it when she was cleaning. I was lying on my stomach, so I reached out with my left hand to hit the snooze, but my hand hit empty air. I opened my eyes, but in the dark couldn’t see the glowing lights of the clock’s face. As my eyes fully opened and adjusted, I realized I wasn’t in my bed. I jerked awake, sitting up and my left arm whacked the wall next to me, with a loud thump. Damn! I looked around. The room was very dim, light coming in underneath the door to the right. At the foot of the bed a desk, sitting along the wall. Beyond that, a dresser and mirror. The mirror was dark though, reflecting a dark corner of the room to my right that the sliver of light under the door couldn’t illuminate. As I looked down, it was apparent that I was sitting on a small twin bed. Turning around, I saw that the music was coming out of an old beige Emerson analog clock radio. My hand went instantly to the knob on the right, the stem part of the knob really, since the larger bit of it had long ago slipped off and was gone. After turning the volume down I froze. Holy shit. This was my bedroom when I was in high school.
At that point, memory of "Hawaii" and my spectacular dive temporarily gone, I laughed, realizing that I was in the middle of a dream – a lucid dream. I’d had a couple in the past and found them a lot of fun. If you can stay in the lucid dream, you can make all kinds of things happen, all while knowing that you’re dreaming. It’s great. I’ve read more about them than I’ve actually had them, but it’s very cool to be standing on a street corner one second, then in the next you’re flying, or shooting hoops with Michael Jordan. It’s all driven by thought. But before flying off, I thought I’d look around my old room for a minute. I walked the 3 steps over to the chest of drawers and flipped the light switch. Wow. Just like I remembered it. My desk, a full-size office desk, with three or four stacks of books on it, dresser with TV, lamp and portable 8-track stereo player sitting on top. That HAS to be my Chicago 10 8-Track in it. I walked over to check it out. Yep. I laughed. Opening the closet to the right of the dresser, I first noticed my reflection in the mirror. I was 17 years old, but for an instant, didn’t recognize myself.
But looking, I couldn’t believe it. This was the kid who thought he was ugly and fat at 17? I had broken my leg in two places the winter before, and the period of inactivity had packed an additional 20 pounds on me, but compared to the normal course of adulthood and what aging does to most people, I hardly saw the 20 in the mirror. I shook my head. Someone once said that one piece of advice she always gave was to never pass up an opportunity to have your picture taken, because you’ll never again look as good as you do at that moment. Seeing myself in the mirror without all the adolescent insecurities raging was warm and comforting. Youth and vigor radiated. But then, I noticed my leg. The old pain and weakness eased back in, after being gone for so long. Just think it away, I said to myself. This is a lucid dream. Nothing’s here that I don’t want to be here.
Except that the pain didn’t go away. It was still there, and now that I was aware of it, it was growing a little. Creeping in, from just above the knee almost to my hip. A dull ache that when it was at its worse, could make me whimper at the unrelenting agony it brought. It was that ache that got me addicted to pain medication in college and caused me to flunk out of Purdue University. It was that pain that made my late teens and 20s a time I wasn’t too keen to revisit. Think it away, I thought.
But the pain stayed. And it got worse.
I sat back down on the twin bed and conciously relaxed, closing my eyes and imagining I was outside in a big, green, short-cropped grass field.
Nothing.
Crap. This apparently isn’t a lucid dream, and I know I’m not dreaming, so it’s not a standard, run of the mill dream, either.
I seemed to really be in my old bedroom in our house on the west side of Indianapolis. So weird. And then the memory of the accident, or at least all that I saw of it (which wasn’t much) came flooding back in, returning me to thinking that I very well might be dead. I remember thinking if this is my life flashing before my eyes, why is it taking so long, and why does it start at age 17?
But again, like in the clearing in "Hawaii," this didn’t seem to be the right answer. What was it then?
About then, I heard footsteps oustide my room, someone coming closer. Masculine steps. So, if this was my home in high school, that would be…
Someone opened the door that separated the house’s entryway from the hall that ran past my bedroom, walked three steps and rapped on the sliding doors that provided my privacy. "Richard," a deep male voice said. "7 o’clock."
I immediately opened both sliding doors, and standing there in my briefs with no shirt, saw a sight I hadn’t seen in 30 years, my father exactly as old as I am now, writing this. 47 years old. I couldn’t believe it. He looked closer to 37, hair dark with little grey and a lot of The Dry Look men’s hairspray. His sideburns were fashionably long, and glasses fashionably big. "Dad!"
My face must have given away a lot more than I intended, because the look I got back from my father suggested that he thought I must still be asleep and sleepwalking. "Morning, Rich. Uh…It’s 7. Time to get moving." His expression went from surprise to suspicion, and he looked around, clearly wondering what was going on.
"I’m up," I replied. "Just got up a few minutes ago."
Pause.
"Okay," he said. "Well, I’ve got to get going." He started to move on down the hall toward the garage. Could I really be back in high school? Could this really be happening?
"Hey Dad," I said, realizing I didn’t have a clue what I was supposed to be doing that day, or even if this hallucination, dream, or whatever would even last another 5 minutes. "What’s the date today?"
"April 27th. It’s Tuesday," he said, again looking suspicious.
"Thanks!" I cheerily replied to his back as he continued on to the garage. "And for the bonus…What’s the year?"
"1976, wiseass. You’d better get dressed."
Some things never change. I looked down at what I was wearing and, though I can’t be sure I’m remembering it correctly, think I said aloud "when do I switch to boxers, anyway?" Reading that back after writing it seems like what was happening was kind of a light sitcom or "Back to the Future" moment, but it wasn’t. In reality, at best I was disoriented, at worst, I was scared to death. Something was going on that I felt I had virtually no control over, and in retrospect, it certainly didn’t feel like a good time to be cracking jokes, but the unreality of something like this warps your normal perceptions and the way you process what is happening to you. I was alternating between intense fear and curiosity about the experience, and all of that was alternating with the feeling that it wasn’t even me it was happening to.
If that sounds confusing, well, you should have been standing where I was at that moment, briefs and all.
