His frown changed to concern. “You’re not making sense.”
“I didn’t come directly here, either. “I went back to the night we talked, to right after I left the lab for the evening. From there, I came here.”
Max shook his head. “So what? You’ll still return, and I’ll just catch you a little earlier than before. I’ll have a little mystery of two of you, but when I see the machine, I’ll figure it out.” He smirked. “And you still can’t stop me.”
“I already have.” I showed him my watch. “You see, Ralph plans to blow up the machine.”
Max stared at my watch as the seconds counted down.
“If I’m right, none of this will happen. You shooting Anna, the light rail, the falling lighting rig—the machine will be destroyed before you ever had the chance to use it. You won’t be here any longer.”
“But neither will you.” He gritted his teeth as he spoke. He’d even started to sweat. “If you destroy the machine in the past, then you couldn’t have used it to go back a day, which means you couldn’t have gone farther back to this point. You won’t be here, either.”
I lowered my revolver, and when I did, Max pointed his gun at me. I didn’t care. He’d already lost.
“If she lives,” he said, “the perfecting won’t happen. You’ll never have built the machine, which means your changes never happened either.”
I shrugged. “A paradox. The machine never exists, which means she dies as a young girl, which means she can’t stop your perfect little tyranny, which means I build the machine… and so on. I admit that’s possible.”
I looked at the sun setting over the Rockies. “But you know, Max, I’m going to go on a little faith here and say I’m fated to save her.”
Max sneered. “Arrogance.”
“You should talk.” I looked at my watch one last time. Two seconds remained until the bombs went off. “I guess we’ll find out.”
Max’s face filled with rage. He took aim and squeezed the trigger, but the hammer never fell. I heard a small whoosh as the air rushed in to fill the space where Max had been. He and his gun were gone, as if he had never been there in the first place.
I didn’t breathe for a full five seconds. When I finally sucked in some air, I realized I was still there. And I still remembered everything.
I stood, stunned, holding the gun. I didn’t move until I heard the brakes of a car in the parking lot below. I leaned over the edge of the building.
Men in suits poured out of SUVs, and she followed. They escorted her inside the hotel via a back entrance. In seconds, she was gone.
I sat down, leaning against the small wall that wrapped around the roof of the hotel. I waited for the seconds to count down to the point where she’d be safe. I grinned like a lunatic when the timer hit zero.
~~~~
I stood on the corner early in the morning where the light rail turned north. I saw my reflection in a store window. I looked disheveled. Sleeping in the street would do that.
The day before, I had stood in an alley across the street and watched myself enter the junkie’s apartment. I had known that change would remain because I had destroyed the machine after I had gone back to visit the junkie the first time. I thought of pulling the distributor cap off the junkie’s car, just to be sure, but when I saw myself leave at three o’clock, I knew it wouldn’t be necessary. Part of me had wanted to run up and tell him what to expect in the coming hours, but he would find out soon enough.
I watched the SUV come around the corner. One block over, the light rail approached, turning onto the small stretch of Fourteenth before curving north onto California. I stood ready to charge into the street to warn the SUV’s driver. He might run me over, but that would stop the SUV as well.
The light rail glided along the rails and stopped at the light at Fourteenth. The driver waited patiently as the SUV drove through the green light. I saw Anna through the tinted windows. If she noticed me, I couldn’t tell. In seconds, the SUV turned and disappeared. The light changed, and the light rail’s bell sounded before it moved forward again.
I stood there for another ten minutes. I was hungry and tired, but I smiled the rest of the day.
~~~~
One year. That was how long it took to get my life in order.
I stole my social security card out of my personal lock box and used it to forge a new ID. I also took the money my younger self stored there for emergencies. It was enough to get me started until I set up something more permanent. I could have used my actual social security number, but I didn’t want to screw over my younger self. Well, I didn’t want to screw him more than I already had. My younger self would be livid, but he’d get over it. It was crazy. Was I the one who had robbed myself all along, or was I going to beat the real thief to the punch?
The details don’t matter. Suffice it to say my younger self eventually moved on. He wouldn’t return to Colorado. In the previous timeline, he had no choice, but I changed that. I hoped he’d have a good life somewhere. He was me, after all.
I managed to get work easily. Even in a rotten economy, mechanical engineers can find work. Anna was right. If I could build a time machine, I could build anything.
I spent the next year settling in. I’d forgotten what being free was like. On weekends, I’d drive through the mountains. I ate in restaurants in other cities and stayed out until three in the morning. I did anything that came to mind just because I could. I would have grown to love it except for one thing.
I walked into a grocery store and heard Anna again for the first time in months. Her soft, melodic voice came over the store speakers. Everything flooded back, as if it all had happened yesterday. “Guardian Angel” sounded as haunting as ever. I could still see her bloody body, a bullet through her heart. I remembered the lighting rig that had crushed her and her body lying in an alley—but that was all gone. She was safe. And she didn’t even know I existed.
I left the store and went back to sit in my car until I was sure the song was over. I wondered if I should’ve come back at all. I didn’t really need to. Destroying the machine would’ve erased all of Max’s changes whether I was in the past or not. If I hadn’t gone back, maybe I wouldn’t remember at all. I would’ve been changed along with the rest of the future, and that would’ve saved me some grief. After a few minutes, I went back inside the store.
While standing in the checkout line, I thought about it all. Why did I remember? If the machine never existed, then I shouldn’t remember. And yet I remembered everything. I even remembered Max disappearing right in front of me. The only thing that came to me was that the last changes the machine made remained. From my perspective, everything happened linearly. I built the machine, went back, and the machine was destroyed. It was destroyed in my past but in everyone else’s future. The irony was that I changed the past so the machine never existed, which meant I never could’ve gone back in time to make those changes. I was a living, breathing paradox.
Whatever. In the end, she lived. That’s all that mattered. I’d go on with my life, and she’d go on with hers. And what a splash she made. Max was right.
When it began, I only knew some political group had accused Anna of treating people unfairly somehow. When they approached her while she was signing autographs, she called them out on it. She accused them of bullying for their cause. She agreed with their cause, but she wouldn’t answer to every fool who insisted she provide evidence that she treated people nicely and fairly. Her fury was something to behold, and yet she never lost her grace during the whole episode.
The video of it was all over the Internet. Halfway through, I paused the video. In the background, I saw his face. Max stood, furious with not a trace of his legendary smile. I laughed for a good five minutes. Max must have seen that in one of the dualities. It wasn’t just the loss of his perfect society that angered him. She had humiliated him in front of the entire world.
I don’t know what happened to Max after that. I only know that, becau
se of Anna, he and his people never succeeded.
~~~~
I sat in front of the computer, watching the video again. I must’ve watched it twenty times. I had to hear her voice again, even if she spoke in anger. I couldn’t bring myself to watch her interviews or even listen to her music. But I watched that video over and over.
After watching it twice more, I closed my laptop. I leaned back in my chair, staring across my living room. One year, and my life was in order, except for her. A chill went through me as I realized she was right in her song. When you start to fall, you can’t go back. You can only keep falling.
I went outside, hoping the cool air would clear my head. Living in Evergreen, Colorado, meant a long commute, but the mountain air made it worthwhile. Two of the three houses on the street remained in a foreclosed state. Being alone bothered me a little at first, but I knew a new neighbor was moving into one of the foreclosed properties.
The moving truck rumbled up the steep road. It lumbered past and stopped in front of the house across the street. Three guys poured out and started unloading. I smiled when one of them wrestled a dresser down the truck ramp. I didn’t have to look at his nametag to know his name was Ralph.
Behind them, a gray SUV pulled up and parked in the street. The driver stepped out.
Someone could’ve pushed me over with a feather.
Anna watched the movers as they unloaded the truck. One of them handed her his phone, and they posed for a picture together. I smiled. She’d just finished a long and rough tour, but she still indulged people who wanted a picture.
She turned around, spotted me, and waved. I waved back. She started walking across the street. I could hardly move. In jeans, a hoodie, and only a little makeup, she was as beautiful as ever as she strode up my driveway.
Halfway to me, she stopped. Her jaw dropped open. “You!”
I raised an eyebrow. I thought that was my line.
“Oh, my God.” Slowly, she walked toward me. “Don’t you remember?”
“What?”
“Ten years ago.” Tears sparkled in her eyes. “You saved me.”
I should’ve known. Of course she would remember the man who saved her life. That happened before I destroyed the machine. How could I have forgotten that? I played along. “That was you?”
“And then you did it again five years later. That truck. It was you then, too, wasn’t it?”
I shrugged. “Just chance, I guess.”
“Both times you saved me, you wore the same clothes. Your hair was wet when you pushed me out of the way of the truck. What…?” She stopped, clasping her hands in front of her.
We both just looked at each other for a moment. Then she came the rest of the way and hugged me so hard my ribs hurt. It felt wonderful.
“Thank you.” She released me and took my hand. “I owe you.”
“No.” I squeezed her hand, just as she had squeezed mine in a timeline only I could remember. “I’m just glad I was there.”
She watched me for a moment, grinning as if I were the best thing that had ever happened to her. “This is incredible.” She still held my hand as she gestured at the house behind her. “This is all temporary. I wanted to get away from it all for a while. I did a show in Denver last year, and I loved the mountains.”
“I remember.”
She laughed again. “You were there?”
I nodded. Was I ever.
She released my hand, keeping her eyes on me. “It has to be fate.”
I shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Maybe?” She put her hands to her mouth for a minute. “What else could it be? Don’t you believe in fate?”
I shrugged. “I do now.”
Craig Allen was born in Houston, Texas but has lived most of his life in Denver, Colorado. After graduating college, he spent six years working in news radio before getting into the software development industry. He has always been an avid reader.He has been an avid reader all his life.
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Also by Craig Allen:
Kali’s Children
Beyond the Sky
Goodbye Sunshine
Season of Bliss
Without You
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