Cecil Adkins, Writer

One More Time

By Cecil Adkins

Previously published in Allegory, Volume 10/37, Fall 2009

PART ONE PART TWO PART THREE

After hearing the car accident on the street below, Erik didn’t wait to make sure it was Alexandra. He knew it was, could feel her slipping away from him yet again. He rushed into the bedroom, stepped over his younger self’s body, and grabbed the backpack. He’d have to try again, and do something appreciably different this time, to make sure that there was no way Alex would make it down to her car, to her death.

This time, he went back forty-five minutes, and watched himself walk backwards into the bedroom, watched himself kill his younger self in reverse. A shiver ran down his spine; he realized that he’d have to kill two Eriks this time around. As his only slightly younger self squatted by the bed, where he had waited on the younger-by-two-days Erik to come into the room, Erik climbed onto the bed and pointed his gun at his younger-by-forty-five-minutes self’s head. Right on time, the wormhole deactivated, and he was in real time again. The other Erik registered a moment of surprise, but only a moment. A moment was all he had, before the bullet found his forehead. The base of Erik’s neck tingled intensely again; he wondered if the sensation would happen each time his activities created a new quantum universe.

He killed the younger-by-two-days Erik without conversation this time and dragged his body next to the younger-by-forty-five-minutes Erik. He rolled his eyes and sighed. This business was starting to get a little creepy.

***

Erik opened the door almost before Alexandra finished knocking. She looked shocked at his quick response, but she also had a look that he hadn’t noticed the first two times, a look of pleasant surprise.

“Oh,” she said. “I wasn’t sure you’d even be home this early, but I called your office and they said you’d left early.”

“I was hoping you’d come by,” he said. “Want to go for a walk?” He had to significantly change the scenario this time around, and getting her away from the apartment was the first thing that came to mind.

She blinked. “You’re serious? With or without your laptop?”

He smiled. “My laptop gets to spend a quiet evening alone in my apartment.”

“It’s raining,” she said. She seemed impatient, inconvenienced by his sudden attention.

“I’ve got an umbrella,” he said.

She allowed him to take her by the hand and lead her down the hallway to the elevator. They didn’t speak on the ride down, but she rested her head on his shoulder and he smiled more than he could remember smiling in his life. This was it; he was going to do it.

Outside, the thunder made its presence known. Erik made sure to lead her away from her car, walking a block or so, turning a corner, walking another block, turning a corner. She sighed a few times, seeming to start to say something, and then thinking better of it. Finally, she began the familiar conversation.

“Erik, I’m just not sure we can go on seeing each other.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, repeating his line.

“It’s just your work,” she said. “I know how important it is to you – and I…”

He put a hand over her mouth. “I’m giving up my work, Alex. Completely. I want nothing more than to be with you and make you happy. End of story.”

She stepped back a bit, out from under his umbrella, and the rain hit her hard in the face. She didn’t seem to notice. She started laughing.

“You’ve said all this before, Erik. What makes it true now, if it wasn’t true before?”

“Because I’ve finally realized what you mean to me,” he told her. “I finally realized that I can’t live without you, and that if I keep obsessing over my work, I’ll lose you for good.”

She nodded, tears forming again in her eyes, mixing with the rain. “Well, you’ve got perfect timing, Erik. Perfect timing.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ve met someone else!” she screamed. “One of the reporters I work with, who’s not afraid to leave work at work and make love to me in the night! Someone who I wish with all my heart could have been you, but he’s not.”

Her words cut him to the core. “I don’t understand…”

“I’m in love with someone else,” she said slowly, as if explaining it to a young child. She slipped off her engagement ring and handed it to Erik. “I’m sorry, Erik. Even if there weren’t someone else, it’d be over. You can’t stay away from your work. You can’t help it, I know that, but I can’t help the fact that I’ve got to start living my life. Goodbye.”

Alex slipped past him to cross the street, heading back to her car. Erik had his back turned to her, and glanced at his watch. Even in the daze of this horrible revelation, he still had his mind on his mission. It was a full five minutes after the time of the accident, so there was no way Alex was going to die tonight. But she still wasn’t going to be Erik’s after all.

The skin on Erik’s neck started crawling, which confused him since he wasn’t doing anything to cause a divergence in the timeline right now. A heavy sense of dread enveloped him as he heard tires screeching and a sickening thump from around the corner. He rushed towards the sound and cried out when he saw Alex’s lifeless body sprawled in the road, bathed in the headlights of a flame-red pickup truck, the same truck that had killed her now for the third time.

He felt a nearly irresistible urge to kill the driver of the truck, and that urge coupled itself in his mind with a plan that would surely save Alex’s life this time. He couldn’t act immediately, though, not without his time machine. There were already people gathering to look at the vulgar sight of Alex’s body, destroyed there on the ground. Repressing his anguish as well as he could, Erik ran back to his apartment to get his backpack. He felt a great sense of urgency, even though logically he knew he had all the time in the world. He strapped on the pack, grabbed his gun, and activated the negative-time field.

He made his way back to the scene of the accident. With time flowing backward all around him, he was able to witness Alex’s death in reverse. Her body flew up from the ground and against the truck, pushing it backwards along the street. The wormhole disengaged just in time to see the truck strike Alex again and send her smashing into the pavement.

Erik realized that he could have stopped her death directly, could have gone back just a minute or two further, could have shot and killed the driver of the truck before he got near this street. But his goal was to both save Alex’s life and to salvage his relationship with her – and he couldn’t do the latter in the here and now, since she had found someone else.

So he watched in silence as his younger-by-a-few-minutes self screamed over the sight of Alexandra’s broken body in the road, watched as that other Erik – who already seemed like a completely different Erik than himself – ran back to his apartment for the time machine. Then, he casually snuck up behind the driver of the truck as he climbed out of his vehicle and shot him in the back of the head. There were plenty of witnesses to this latest murder, as the gawkers who had come to see Alex’s lifeless form got a bonus death out of the evening, but Eric would soon be slipping backwards in time once more.

Erik took the driver’s wallet from his back pocket and reactivated the wormhole, purposely turning his back on the street so he wouldn’t have to witness the horrible scene in reverse yet again.

***

It was difficult, to say the least, for Erik to travel back in time for nearly a year. Difficult to spend his days and nights in Alexandra’s apartment, watching her live backwards through her adulterous relationship with the guy from work. He had to travel back to a point before her infidelity started so he could resume his mission with some chance of success, but it was hard to stand around and not do anything when he saw her in another man’s arms.

Erik didn’t see what Alexandra saw in this guy anyway. Erik knew he wasn’t exactly Prince Charming, but this guy wasn’t any better. He had dull green eyes that looked glazed over most of the time, and he had a bad habit of leaving his underwear hanging from the posts on Alexandra’s bed. Alex had said her lover was a reporter, but Erik didn’t think he looked intelligent enough for the job. Probably covered the local high school sports scene.

Once he happened to come out of the negative time field shortly after Alexandra and her young stud had made love (or rather, before they started – the part in the middle looks much the same whether you’re viewing it forwards or backwards). Unable to get the images of the things they had done (or would do) out of his head – things he’d never done with her – he shot Alexandra’s lover in the back of the head, showering Alex with blood and brains. With Alexandra screaming “Phillip!” (which is how Erik learned the young stud’s name), Erik turned his time machine back on and went back to kill yet another of his selves to stop that little incident.

After six backwards months of Alex’s affair and several more backwards months in which the affair was apparently nonexistent, Erik decided he had waited long enough.

***

//06.27.2022//

Late in the evening, he made his way across town to where the driver of Alex’s death truck – thirty-seven-year old Stan Bostic – lived, according to the driver’s license Erik found in his wallet. The license was renewed a full two years before the accident, so Erik reasoned that the address should be accurate, and a quick check of the current telephone book confirmed it. The truck was parked in the driveway.

The timing was right; he had just enough time to get inside the back seat of the truck while under the effects of the wormhole’s invisibility. There would be no witnesses to see him lying in wait for Bostic. Soon the wormhole deactivated, and Erik waited for more than seven hours before Bostic finally got into the truck around dawn. A quick shot to the back of Bostic’s head ended his life and his threat.

Erik switched on the time machine and hurried out of the truck so he wouldn’t have to watch Bostic’s dead body come to life as time flowed backward. He made it to his own apartment by the time the negative time field dropped and killed yet another Erik. Then he slept for a very long time.

***

So Erik assumed the role of his younger-by-nearly-a-year self, and rediscovered things about Alexandra that he’d forgotten some time ago. Little things – like her favorite ice cream (chocolate chip cookie dough) and big things – like her paranoia that there were bigger things going on around her – things perpetrated by either the government or aliens (or time travelers?) – than she knew. It was the happiest ten months of Erik’s life, and he hardly thought about time or traveling through it at all.

***

//04.30.2023//

The knocking on the door and the thunder outside started at the exact same time and sent chills down Erik’s spine. He opened the door, surprised to see Alex standing there. They were supposed to go see a new play in town tonight, but he was supposed to go to her apartment to pick her up. Alex looked distraught.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, his heart thumping. But then he calmed himself. He hadn’t so much as mentioned the time machine for eight months now, since he had told her he was giving up his work once and for all, so she could hardly be here to leave him over it.

“Erik…” she began. “We need to talk, but…”

“What is it?”

“Well, I’ve been trying to tell you for weeks now, but I can’t think of a way to do it that’ll soften the blow,” she said. “So here goes: We can’t see each other anymore.”

Erik felt his heart break. It hurt so badly he glanced around instinctively to see if any other Erik was behind him with a smoking gun.

“What do you mean?” he asked, involuntarily reciting the lines from a play he thought he’d unwritten.

“It’s just… I’ve found someone else,” she said, choking the words out. “It’s someone I work with, and…”

Erik swallowed hard. Was there such a thing as destiny? Did some higher power deem him not worthy to be with the love of his life?

“Why?” he asked through dry lips.

“It’s hard to explain,” she said, her face wet with tears. “And I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but… Well, it’s your work. The time travel thing.”

Erik was acutely aware of the rain tapping on the windows. “But I gave all that up. Gave it up for you.”

She nodded. “I know, Erik. But ever since then, you’ve… lacked purpose. I don’t see that same spirit in you that I fell in love with, that sense of adventure, of dedication to a goal. I’m sorry.”

She slipped off her engagement ring, as she had done before, as she apparently was destined to do, and handed it to him. It felt heavy, like it had the weight of time itself. And then she walked out of his apartment, closing the door behind her.

He couldn’t accept this. He’d sacrificed too much for this to fail right now. He flung open his door and ran down the hall, catching her before she could get on the elevator.

“You can’t do this to me,” he pleaded. “You don’t understand how much I love you.”

“Yes, I do,” she said. “That’s why it took me so long to tell you about this.”

The elevator doors opened and she started to step inside, but Erik grabbed her arm and turned her around to face him.

“Let me go, Erik,” she said. “You’re hurting my arm.”

He rolled his eyes. “Oh, I’m hurting your arm? Your arm?! You just reached into my chest and grabbed my heart and smashed it! Does your arm hurt as bad as that?”

“Let me go,” she repeated. The elevator doors closed again. She pulled away from him and headed for the stairs. “I’m sorry it’s over, but it is. Over.”

He reached for her as she started to step down. She turned to avoid his grasp and lost her balance. He tried to catch her, stop her from falling, but couldn’t. He watched helplessly as she tumbled down the steps, hitting her head on the wall and finally the floor below. Blood seeped from her face, and her body was every bit as twisted as it might be in a car accident. Erik didn’t need to go to her side, didn’t need to check her pulse, to know that she was gone.

Outside, thunder rolled and rolled.

Falling over himself, he ran back into his apartment and got the backpack from the safe in the closet. He had no idea what he was going to do or to what day he was going to go; he was acting on instinct now.

Continue to PART THREE

Special thanks to my wife, Tiffany Adkins, and my friend Vox Anon, for their advice while writing this story. Visit Vox Anon's website only if you're prepared for awesome poetic verse and apocalyptic visions.

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Like this story? Hate it? Cecil would love to hear any comments you may have. Please send them to ceciladkins@yahoo.com .