And for a few days, at least, 1981 felt like a low-grade headache that never went away, muscle spasms that I couldn’t always control, dry mouth, difficulty swallowing. It smelled like a lingering olfactory hallucination of frying onions. It sounded like a ringing in the ears.
“So you’re the unnamed baby, huh?” Dara said that first morning when I woke up. She was reading a book, and set it down next to her on the couch.
I was disoriented: you and Dara had placed me in the southeast bedroom, the same one I slept in all through childhood. (The same one I’m recovering in right now.) I’m not sure if you thought it would comfort me, to wake up to familiar surroundings. It was profoundly strange, to be in my own bedroom but have it be so different: the striped wallpaper replaced with avocado green paint; a loveseat with floral upholstery where my dresser had been; all my posters of Buck Rogers and Superman replaced with framed prints of unfamiliar artwork.
“Dara?” I asked. She seemed different, colder. Her hair was shorter than the last time I’d seen her, and she wore a pair of thick-framed glasses.
She cocked her head. “That’d be me. Nice to meet you.”
I blinked at her, still disoriented and foggy. “We met before,” I said.
She raised her eyebrows, like she couldn’t believe I was so dumb. “Not by my timeline.”
Right. Time travel.
You rushed in then. You must have heard us talking. You crouched down next to me and stroked the hair back from my face.
“How are you feeling?” you asked.
I looked down at your fingernails, and saw again that they were smooth, no jagged edges, and a hint of white at the edges. Dara told me later that you’d arrived two days before me, just so you two could have a few days alone together. After all, you’d only left her for 1947 a few days before. The two of you had a lot to talk about.
“All right, I guess,” I told you.
It felt like the worst family vacation for those first few days. Dara was distant with me and downright cold to you. I wanted to ask what had happened, but I thought that I’d get the cold shoulder if I did. I caught snippets of the arguments you had with Dara; always whispered in doorways, or downstairs in the kitchen, the words too faint for me to make out.
It got a little better once I was back on my feet, and able to walk around and explore. I was astonished by everything; the walnut trees on our property that I had known as saplings now towered over me. Dara’s television was twice the size of ours, in color, and had over a dozen stations. Dara’s car seemed tiny, and shaped like a snake’s head, instead of having the generous curves and lines of the cars I knew.
I think it charmed Dara out of her anger a bit, to see me so appreciative of all these futuristic wonders—which were all relics of the past for her—and the conversations between the three of us got a little bit easier. Dara told me /
I pondered that, lying awake in my bedroom—the once and future bedroom that I’m writing this from now, that I slept in then, that I awoke in when I was a young child, frightened by a storm. The rest of that poem made little sense to me, a series of images that were threaded together by a string of line breaks.
But I know about names, and hearing the one that’s been given to you, and not recognizing it. I was trying to stammer this out to Dara one night, after she’d read that poem to me. And she asked, plain as could be, “What would you rather be called instead?”
I thought about how I used to introduce myself after the heroes of the TV shows my father and I watched: Doc and George and Charlie. It had been a silly game, sure, but there’d been something more serious underneath it. I’d recognized something in the shape of those names, something I wanted for myself.
“I dunno. A boy’s name,” I said. “Like George in the Famous Five.”
“Well, why do you want to be called by a boy’s name?” Dara asked gently.
In the corner, where you’d been playing solitaire, you paused while laying down a card. Dara noticed too, and we both looked over at you. I cringed, wondering what you were about to say; you hated that I didn’t like my name, took it as a personal insult somehow.
But you said nothing, just resumed playing, slapping the cards down a little more heavily than before.
I forgive you for drugging me to take me back to 1963. I know I screamed at you after we arrived and the drugs wore off, but I was also a little relieved. It was a sneaking sort of relief, and didn’t do much to counterbalance the feelings of betrayal and rage, but I know I would have panicked the second you shoved me into one of those capsules.
You’d taken me to the future, after all. I’d seen the relative wonders of 1981: VHS tapes, the Flash Gordon movie, the Columbia space shuttle. I would have forgiven you so much for that tiny glimpse.
I don’t forgive you for leaving me, though. I don’t forgive you for the morning after, when I woke up in my old familiar bedroom and padded downstairs for a bowl of cereal, and found, instead, a note that bore two words in your handwriting: I’m sorry.
The note rested atop the gilt-edged book that Grandma Emmeline had started as a diary, and that Uncle Dante had turned into both a record and a set of instructions for future generations: the names, birth dates, and the locations for all the traveling members of our family; who lived in the house and when; and sometimes, how and when a person died. The book stays with the house; you must have kept it hidden in the attic.
I flipped through it until I found your name: Miriam Guthrie (née Stone): born November 21, 1977, Harrisburg, IL. Next to it, you penciled in the following.
Jumped forward to June 22, 2321 CE, and will die in exile beyond reach of the anachronopede.
Two small words could never encompass everything you have to apologize for.
I wonder if you ever looked up Dad’s obituary. I wonder if you were even able to, if the record for one small man’s death even lasts that long.
When you left, you took my father’s future with you. Did you realize that? He was stuck in the slow lane of linear time, and to Dad, the future he’d dreamed of must have receded into the distance, something he’d never be able to reach.
He lost his job in the fall of 1966, as the White County oil wells ran dry, and hanged himself in the garage six months later. Dara cut him down and called the ambulance; her visits became more regular after you left us, and she must have known the day he would die.
(I can’t bring myself to ask her: Couldn’t she have arrived twenty minutes earlier and stopped him entirely? I don’t want to know her answer.)
In that obituary, I’m first in the list of those who survived him, and it’s the last time I used the name you gave me. During the funeral, I nodded, received the hugs and handshakes from Dad’s cousins and friends, bowed my head when the priest instructed, prayed hard for his soul. When it was done, I walked alone to the pond where the two of us had sat together, watching birds and talking about the plots of silly television shows. I tried to remember everything that I could about him, tried to preserve his ghost against the vagaries of time: the smell of Kamel cigarettes and diesel on his clothes; the red-blond stubble that dotted his jaw; the way his eyes brightened when they landed on you.