Tom had always regretted his father’s suicide. While his father poisoned himself to death in the family kitchen one night, ten year old Tom had slept blissfully through until morning.
“If only I had woken up” became his subconscious mantra, haunting him every waking moment for the last 28 years.
He’d never fully gotten over that night until finally, after two failed marriages and the total estrangement of his only son, he had learned not to feel sorry for himself. Or for anything.
More powerfully, he had mastered the ability to transmute his grief and the tremendous anxiety it produced into his work, that of a physicist.
He had become a scientist solely to rail against “the powers that be,” as he angrily and atheistically thought of God: To prove that God did not control humans, only humans did.
And now nearly three decades later, the manifestation of this childhood grudge against the unknowable: That is – why his father killed himself, and who – if anybody – was responsible for this crime against a young child – was about to be addressed.
Because Tom, you see, had invented a time machine. Or, as he called it, a “Furtherance Device.” And in it he planned to travel back in time and visit his father, if for no other reason than to ask him “Why?”
He knew his plan was foolhardy. He knew the impossibility of it all. Of the potential problems mentioned in all the standard fictional tales of time travel from Wells to Bradbury:
Not being able to alter the past; how killing a butterfly a million years ago could lead to the destruction of the world as we know it; of possibly being trapped in the past forever, etc. etc.
But he didn’t care about the world. Or himself. He only cared about his father, and why he had done what he had done.
Tom’s machine was nothing like he’d ever seen or read about. In fact, it wasn’t really as much a machine as it was a room.
A room with a chair on which to sit, a bed on which to rest, a pantry stocked with enough food and water to last him a month, clothing for all variations of weather, and a blue bottle filled with sleeping pills. Just in case.
And a desk with a laptop computer on it, from where Tom would control the machine.
The power source lay within the thin white walls of the room of the scientific miracle that Tom believed he had created. A near indescribable energy that Tom, while employed by a large government corporation, had happened upon quite by accident while performing some of his early experiments in electromagnetic induction.
Before any of his fellow scientists realized what Tom had discovered, he abruptly destroyed his notes, quit his job and began work full time on the Furtherance Device in his laboratory.
This was six years ago.
Today was now the 12th. His father had died on the twelfth. It was twelve o’clock and Tom had wound himself up enough to begin the process. Let the countdown begin.
Tom sat in his chair and put his hand on the laptop. The screen read December 12, 2012. Tom pushed “enter” on his computer.
Instantly a whirring sound began and the light in the room changed to a dark amber.
Tom glanced at the date on his screen – it was moving backwards!
He had set his sites on December 12, 1974, the day he had stopped being a little boy.
His father had killed himself in the family home some 1,600 miles from where Tom’s room now had began it’s backward push through time. So as a side effect of being able to travel through the fourth dimension, Tom’s had created a room that could also levitate and act as a sophisticated flotation device.
His plan was simple:
His room would serve as time machine and airship: That is, once he’d arrived at his time, he could then fly his machine to the site where the long ago tragedy had occurred.
As thorough as he was, Tom could not solve all his questions.
What would happen if, when the machine re-manifested, that is, finally reached its destination and re-solidified: Could people see this ‘box’ flying through the air? Would they report it, try to shoot it down? Tom didn’t know nor care. He considered these problems minor and unknowable.
What was important was that once he arrived and as soon as possible, he had a safe haven. He had planned on parking it in a cave he used to play in as a child, somewhere in the dense forest that stood next to his old family home. A forest that he knew like the back of his hand. Inside a cave that only he knew of.
2009 …08 …07 …06 …the time literally flew by. The white walls of his enclosure became opaque, then transparent. He could see the world transforming beneath his feet.
Tom’s biggest concern had not been for his own safety. His chief worry was that he could actually stop the machine at the time he’d hope for. Perhaps there was a lag or slingshot effect making it possible to miss his target date by years.
If he ended up stopping too early, that is after his father had killed himself, did he have enough energy and tools in his machine to recalibrate and try again?
It was with this thought in mind that he realized it would be far better to err on the side of going too far back. Which he did.
****
Tom knew something was wrong when he saw the buildings below his room disappear. He was going too fast. He tried to slow the machine, but to no avail. Soon he saw a forest appear where his laboratory had stood.
In the blink of an eye, the forest disappeared and was replaced by a river. Then by a lake that turned into an ocean that turned into ice then into a lake then into a river that turned into a desert.
Tom was hurdling back in time at breakneck speed. And although his screen read ‘1988’ he could tell that he had traveled eons further back in the past than he intended.
It took all the strength he had not to panic.
“Don’t worry,” he thought to himself. “I can always reverse. I can always reverse.”
But nothing Tom did to the keyboard effected his rapidly escalating backward trajectory.
Beneath him the world rocked, shook and exploded, ensconced in a continual array of blinding lights. Volcanoes had appeared everywhere, only to disappear and reveal large lizards roaming about.
They too quickly disappeared and gave way to even more primitive and grotesque life forms which rapidly vanished.
Soon the world was encapsulated with water – steaming hot jets flew from it, creating a giant steam bath below him.
Fissures of steam, explosions caused by meteors rocked the world by the thousands.
Eventually all this disappeared leaving bare the jagged landscape below it.
Inside Tom’s room, all was tranquil. Tom watched what must have been the greatest show of eternity.
His computer screen continued to slowly flash numbers, still insisting that he had not yet reached his target date of 1974. And yet below his feet the world gave an appearance of a ragged asteroid.
He looked at the sky. There a full yellow moon, as vivid as any he had ever seen, suddenly vibrated then broke apart:
It momentarily stood atop a thousand mile long comet of dirt water and ice, connected to the earth like an umbilical chord, then sucked back into its mother and disappeared, leaving a dark, moonless sky.
For a moment the stars in the heavens took on a brilliance only matched in cinematic fantasy.
Suddenly, the ball of dirt and rock beneath him crumbled and flew away from itself, drifting off into space and coagulating with large amounts of other dust and particles.
Tom realized the unbelievable:
He had gone so far back in time he was now witnessing the Big Bang – in reverse.
He had never even contemplated this. Sweat beads began to appear on his forehead.
He felt he had to lay down.
As his head sunk into his soft 21 st century pillow, he stared mindlessly upwards where he witnessed a thousand stars, which the moonless sky now revealed, begin to hurtle towards some mutual distant starting point before time immemorial.
Supernovas, quarks, colossal comets following their tails, all lit up the sky in their backward race towards the beginning.
And despite the universal cataclysmic chaos around him, despite the encroaching darkness the likes of which he could never imagine, his room never moved.
Tom could not comprehend it. It was too much. Too great. Too unbelievable. He closed his eyes, wondering if he would ever see his father again, and slept.
*****
Tom’s mind regained consciousness, but he refused to open his eyes – he was afraid to.
He lay there and pondered how long he’d slept: A few hours? A few million years? An eternity? And more importantly, what was he going to see?
After an unknowable amount of time Tom did open his eyes. What he now saw, was this:
Gone were the explosions, the unbelievably large canvas of lights and electrons. Gone was any movement at all. Gone was the increasing and inevitable blackness of the universe.
In it’s place there was only one thing. A light, white fog.
Tom lay on his bed like a little boy. Sheet up to his chin. His eyes, wide open and childlike, reflected the world above him.
After a few moments, Tom reached out to the white cloud which now enveloped him.
“Fog?” Tom thought. “Is it fog?”
Like an old man he slowly lifted himself from his bed and went to the computer. It read: “0”
“Zero …what does that mean …zero?”
Tom couldn’t think. He had no ideas at all. Thoughts of his father, of meeting him and solving the terrible riddle that had occupied his mind all these years had receded. Now all he felt was confusion.
He quickly thought that he might die here. But this didn’t worry him.
What did was the fear of not knowing. Tom had always known. Or at least he could formulate a theory, an answer. He had been a good student and a brilliant scientist, renowned for finding all answers.
But, when it came down to the one question that mattered most to him in this life, he had simply – not known.
And now, here, again – he did not know.
Tom buried his face into his pillow and began to cry.
****
He dreamed. With unimaginable clarity he imagined that his soul, long tortured and trapped, had somehow flown outward and freed itself.
In his dream he began to hear voices …millions of soft murmuring voices. Kind voices. Familiar voices.
And out of this cacophony came the one: Clear, audible, tender. It shocked Tom back to consciousness.
Again, he did not immediately open his eyes. This time for fear of losing the voice. Of losing this strangely vivid dream.
Lying there, Tom began to feel things he had not felt since he was a small boy. A joy began to envelop him. A lightness lifted him and for the first time in an eternity he had begun to feel.
As Tom lay underneath the soft, white, enveloping fog, in a place that was no place yet everyplace, a place where he had never known yet had always hoped he could go to, a smile came across his face.
Tom had travelled to where he would always be happy. Where he would never be sad or hurt. Because here, in Heaven, there were no sorrows, no questions.
There was only he and his Father.