Cecil Adkins, Writer

One More Time

By Cecil Adkins

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

PART ONE PART TWO PART THREE

Erik lost track of how many backwards journeys he made. Refusing to believe in Destiny or Fate of any of that nonsense, he watched helplessly as Alexandra died time and time again, always on April 30, 2023. His hair started to gray, and he started to dye it so that he could look reasonably like his younger self. Even though the backwards journeys weren’t costing him anything but his sanity, he was living through years and years of normal time, and it was starting to catch up with him. He remembered his goal to become fit, but he couldn’t let his appearance change too dramatically, or he’d never be able to pull off replacing himself in the past.

Erik was guilty of at least three murders each time he went back: his own, younger self; Stan, the driver of the death truck; and Phillip, the young stud from Alexandra’s work. How many murders would be weighed against Erik’s soul in the end wasn’t something he ever considered. The only ones that counted would be the ones in whatever timeline Erik found Happily Ever After with his Alexandra.

He tried changing everything he could, but the outcome was always, horribly, the same. First he tried going back ten months again, killing his younger self, Stan, and Phillip, and then letting time take its course. Alex still died on April 30, 2023, only this time she lost control of her car on her way home from work, overturning it in a shallow creek and drowning. Erik tried going back a day and making sure Alex didn’t go into work on the thirtieth, but a burglar nervously shot her when he attempted to rob her apartment. Erik went back yet again and tried something he swore he wouldn’t do – explaining the whole thing to Alex. She was horrified by what he’d done, that he’d dare to play with time, with her life, like he had, and fell down his apartment steps yet again trying to get away from him. So he went back again. And when that didn’t work, he went further back in time. And when that failed, he went again. And again. And again and again and again and again and…

And then he hit upon a plan which to him was the most brilliant thing he’d ever thought of, and he couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it before.

***

//04.29.2023//

Erik looked in on his twin two-year-old boys, Justin and Joel, as they slept. His heart was filled with warmth whenever he looked at them. They looked just like he did at that age, with pudgy pale faces and dark wavy hair. He couldn’t bring himself to feel guilty over the chaos and the deaths that he had caused in his traveling, since it ultimately resulted in their being born. Erik and Alexandra had been married before, in one of the other timelines, but Alex had died while pregnant that time (on April 30th, 2023, of course). This time, everything was perfect, and Erik would make sure it would stay that way.

Alexandra had gone to bed, too, so now it was time to act.

Erik quietly pulled back a piece of carpet and then a floorboard in the closet, and pulled the time machine from its hiding place. In this timeline, he’d worked on the device in secret, lest Alexandra again become impatient with his “obsession.” He strapped it on, and then made three separate trips back and forth, going each time to the government facility which housed the time machine. He’d take a backpack, step back in time a couple minutes, and take another, and then one more.

He returned to the house and took out three needles, filled with a drug that would keep his wife and sons asleep through what he had in store for them. He went into his sons’ room first, and injected them both with the drug at the same time. Then he did the same to Alex. He carried his boys into the master bedroom and laid them on either side of their mother. At no point did Erik consider the wisdom of what he was about to do; it seemed right, it felt right, and it was the only way to make sure that Alexandra would not die on April 30, 2023.

He would make sure that none of them experienced April 30, 2023.

Having re-lived several years of his life, he was able to use his foreknowledge of the time machine to develop better and better iterations of the device. Now, the time machine’s negative time field was accelerated, so that travel to the destination point was nearly instantaneous. He’d also finally discovered the secret to accelerated forward time travel.

He carefully strapped a backpack onto each of them and set the destination times to be exactly the same. He programmed the information into his own backpack and then got into bed with his family. He turned on Justin’s pack first, then Joel’s, and watched as they disappeared from his perceptions. He did the same with Alex, and she vanished.

When he tried to turn on his pack, it wouldn’t work. His heart pounded as he checked and rechecked the readings on its virtual screen. Everything appeared to be normal, but it simply wouldn’t work. Perhaps it had taken him on one too many trips.

Well. He only had a little more than 24 hours to wait before his family reappeared.

It was the longest 24 hours of his life.

***

//05.01.2023//

Having seen a few of his younger selves reenter normal time, Erik thought something looked wrong about the way his sons popped back into his perceptions. The air around Justin and Joel seemed to shimmer, to warp, as they reappeared. They flashed in and out of existence a few times, and Erik tried getting to their packs’ virtual computers when he could see them. What he saw on the screens shouldn’t be possible, but yet there it was. The destination times kept changing rapidly, so fast that Erik could barely make them out.

Finally, the boys stayed visible, and Erik reached for Justin’s pack to unstrap it. Before he could, however, he saw the destination time change again, this time to a date 3000 years in the past. Then he was gone again.

Erik screamed out and grabbed at the empty space on the bed where Justin had been. Regaining his senses, he rushed to Joel’s side and tore at his pack, but it was too late. Joel disappeared, too, and his screen had him going 3000 years into the future.

Erik fell to the floor trembling as his wife popped back into existence. He glanced up at her and saw that she was seizing. Her hair was brittle and gray, falling out all around her, and her once smooth skin was now lined with more wrinkles than Erik had thought possible. Horrified by the sight of her, he managed to look at her pack’s virtual screen. It told him that she had been popping in and out of time just like the boys had been, but her time field had been unstable. It had kept her from experiencing hunger or other bodily functions, but it hadn’t kept her from aging like it was supposed to.

According to the screen, she had traveled a total of a hundred years.

Alexandra stopped seizing, uttered a low moan, and then was still.

***

Erik sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the decaying body of his Alexandra. All of his work had been for nothing, had in fact ended up making things worse. His boys were lost at different ends of time, and Alexandra had died, just like she always did. The time machine was useless now, nothing more than a reminder of the things that he had done. He felt stirrings of his old passion, a resurgence of the scientist within, which made him wonder why the packs malfunctioned just when they did. Perhaps having four copies of the same wormhole in close proximity, in the same moments of time, caused a catastrophic interference. Perhaps it was just Fate. It didn’t matter either way. His loss, his pain, his futile plan, doomed time and time again… it was all too much to bear.

He did the only logical thing left for him to do. He shoved his trusty silenced 9mm into his mouth and prepared to commit his final murder.

And that’s when another Erik appeared, the one who started it all.

“Well,” he said, a bushy white eyebrow angled sharply above his left eye. “I see I came at a bad time.”

Erik fought hard to suppress hysterical laughter.

The old man looked over Erik’s shoulder at Alexandra’s corpse. “I don’t remember that happening…”

“Parallel universes created by timeline alteration,” Erik mumbled. “What happened to Alexandra in your past?”

“Is that the dead girl there?”

“You… you don’t know Alexandra?” Erik asked.

“Nope,” the other Erik replied.

Erik didn’t think he had any sanity left to lose, but now he felt a little more slipping away.

“How could you not know her? She’s the love of my … of our life…”

“I’m telling you, I have no idea who you’re talking about,” he said. “My Barbara died last year from cancer; we were married for forty-four years.”

Erik buried his face in his hands. “Why are you here?” he asked.

“I was hoping to give this little gadget a head-start,” the older Erik said, holding up his left wrist to show a band around it that resembled a wrist-watch. “Thirty years from now the world’s a nasty place, and the only hope we have is if we can go back and change things. Time travel is a powerful weapon, but I’m afraid I didn’t invent it soon enough.”

The idea that he was the true inventor of time travel, even in a timeline without his special foreknowledge, did little to temper the anger that was building towards the old man.
“You didn’t mention you made any other stops before you came to me when I was fifteen,” Erik said.

“Well, I hadn’t planned on making any others,” the old man said. “I thought I’d finally made a perfect version of the device, one with a lot more flexibility and control. I programmed it to find me at a certain point in my past, but this is the wrong point. I wonder if you’ve made things unstable with your parallel universes…”

“All of this is your fault,” Erik said. “You destroyed my life. You turned me into someone who could do this!” He jabbed a finger towards Alexandra’s body.

“I don’t have time for this,” the older Erik said, stifling a laugh. “That sounds funny, doesn’t it? When I get to you in the past, I’ll be sure to warn you about using the time machine so frivolously.”

“No,” Erik said.

“What?”

“You can’t,” Erik said. “If I never met you back then, I would have lived the life that I should have lived. Do you know how many people I’ve killed because of you?”

“I’m sorry for whatever petty things you feel I’m responsible for, but I have to do what I have to do,” the old man said. “The future world demands it.”

“I don’t care about the future,” Erik said. “I’m concerned about the past.”

He raised his gun and shot a hole in his future self’s head. Before the old man’s body hit the floor, Erik felt the familiar tingle along the back of his neck and new that he’d created a universe in which his younger self would have a chance at a normal life.

He sat there for a moment and looked at his older self. He suddenly found it hard to breathe, and a shooting pain ran up his arm and into his neck and jawbone. He felt flushed.

He looked at the time device on the older Erik’s wrist. Presumably, it was still functional, unlike his worn-out backpack. A plan started to form in his brain, but it was starting to feel very warm and his chest felt tight and it was very hard to think. Sweat started to roll down his forehead.

Get his time machine, he heard a voice (his?) say. You can fix all of this if you try just one more time.

He knelt down on the floor and loosened the old man’s wrist strap. He clutched at his chest as the worst case of heartburn (it’s not heartburn, the voice told him) he’d ever felt hit him. The time machine was sleek, beautiful. A soft green glow emanated from a pin-sized hole in the middle. He needed to figure out how it worked, how to… how to make it…

He sat back hard against the bed as his chest pain intensified, and he dropped the time machine. He wanted to pick it up again, but now he realized what was happening to him so he left it lying in the floor. It took great struggle to crawl back onto the bed, but he wanted to be next to his Alexandra.

He was holding her when his heart gave out, and as he closed his eyes for the last time he had a dream. In the dream, two men stood over him, men that looked so much alike they must have been twins. They wore time machines on their wrists.

One of the men said to the other, “They’re gone.”

The other man wiped tears away from his ice blue eyes and said, “There’s nothing we can do.”

The first man looked at his twin and smiled, holding up his time machine. “Oh, isn’t there?”

END

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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