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Everything I can remember about that day plays over in my mind in a slow-motion blur: the gentle breeze from Boston Harbor, Catherine's soft hand holding mine, the grin of the flower vendor as I grabbed the roses and stuffed a fifty in her hand, my heart pounding as I ran to catch up to Catherine, the screech of the tires and the thud that followed, the scream of a teenage girl, a bloody fender, Catherine's still form and her lifeless eyes, tears...innumerable tears...
...the next thing I can remember clearly is walking along the docks down near the water shuttle. I'm not sure how much later it was, a few weeks at least, but the pain was no less intense. I recall something of a funeral, a trip back home, and many, many friends. There was this song. Yes, a song - the last one I was ever going to write - running through my head. The sun was rising that early August morning, peering out over the watery horizon. The walls of the office buildings were tinged with gold, the air was barely still. Here and there bustled an early morning riser or a newspaper vendor preparing to ply his trade in the business district. I, on the other hand, had been up all night. Sleepless nights were all too common then. So were tears.
I turned to walk down the longest pier. As I stood at the end and looked out at the rising Sol, I felt a presence. I turned suddenly, but no one was there. Nothing was there, save for the newspaper stand that had yet to open for the morning. I turned back to look at the sea below me, wondering how cold the water must be and if this city would miss just one more lonely musician.
"It wouldn't solve anything, you know." came the voice. I honestly wasn't surprised by it. I didn't even turn.
"Wouldn't it?" I asked the ocean.
"In the short run, it might, but-" I had heard no footsteps, so I turned slowly. I was astonished to see a small man a mere yard or so behind me. He had short wavy black hair crunched under a light colored hat and he wore a black coat over a multi-coloured sweater (how could he stand it in this weather?) and black trousers. He carried with him a black umbrella with a strangely-shaped bright red handle, though the sky bore no signs of rain. But most unique - and memorable - about him was his knowing, penetrating gaze. Without my telling him, I perceived that he knew my entire story...and all the pain that went with it. Though his face showed him to be about 45ish, I somehow sensed a wisdom far greater than his apparent age implied.
"But what?" I prompted him.
"But the short run isn't what I'm concerned about." he concluded.
I smirked and turned back to the water, experimentally extending my foot over the edge of the pier. "I suppose you're going to tell me that I'll imperil my immortal soul if I do what you think I'm contemplating."
"Perhaps, but that's not my purview. Imperiling your chance at a happy life, now that is my concern."
Great. The nuts were out of the monkey house early that Monday morning. How could I ever have a happy life? Yet there was something about that man...
"Make your pitch." I said, willing to hear him out but not feeling particularly patient.
"I don't have a pitch, Mr. Donovan, just an offer. I'll make it and you can take it or you can leave it."
"Okay. I'm listening." I was not entirely surprised that he knew my name, though I suppose I should have been. I leaned up against the lamp post and waited for the gentleman to speak.
"I have a key, Mr. Donovan." he said, and held up a strange-looking piece of metal attached to a long silver chain.
"To what?" I asked.
"To your future...and your past. I can help you heal your pain by putting you back on the road you belong on."
This was all so strange to me. Anyone else would have taken him for an escapee from Midtown Mental and walked away, but his eyes met with mine and I knew that somehow he was not only serious about what he was saying, but that maybe he was capable of doing whatever he might claim.
"What do you know about the road I'm on? How can you know what I've been through?" I asked, testing him.
His eyes stung me deeply and images of that day flooded into my mind. The flow was unstoppable and I was nearly drowned by it. The next thing I knew I was sitting at the foot of the lamp, sobbing, the Stranger kneeling beside me, braced up by his hands upon his umbrella, using it like a cane. His eyes still met mine. "I know." he said and helped me up. He turned and started to walk away. I ran after him, driven by my burning curiosity and drawn by his enigmatic wisdom.
"Wait!" I cried and clutched his arm as he reached the newsstand. "Please. Who are you? How do you know so much about me?"
The Stranger turned towards me slowly. "Mr. Donovan..." he broke for a moment, lost in thought or in some internal debate, "...I am going to offer you a chance that very few people ever get. But if you accept my offer, you also accept the condition that comes with it."
I nodded in understanding, though I had no idea at the time what he meant by "condition".
"I am offering you a second chance, Mr. Donovan. A chance to change what happened to - to her."
This was getting more and more impossible to believe. I stared at him as if he were mad.
"I can give you that chance, Mr. Donovan. I do not make this offer lightly."
"All right. If--" my voice was beginning to crack with emotion. "-- IF you somehow have the power to change what happened, why Catherine? Why not change something more important, like a world event? Why not save the Titanic or stop Pan Am 103 from taking off? Why Catherine?"
"I have my reasons."
That answer wasn't satisfactory and I told him so.
"I have my own reasons for taking an interest in your situation, Mr. Donovan. They are my affair, not yours. Simply accept that I have the power to help you and that I want to help you."
I hesitated. I could sense he was telling the truth, but the whole idea was ludicrous! What could this man do to change what had already happened? My common sense clashed with my longing and loneliness.
His eyes turned empathic. "Trust me...Patrick."
His tone pulled a memory from my mind. Something Catherine had said to me when we were first getting to know each other. It spun around in my mind and came out my mouth before I could stop it.
"It is better to live happily in risk than to be depressed and safe."
"What?" asked the Stranger.
I smiled, perhaps the first real smile since the accident, and he seemed pleased to see it. "Something Catherine once told me. Something I had almost forgotten until just now."
The man patted my back and motioned for me to follow him. We walked around the newsstand to the far end. He held up his "key" and proceeded to open the building up. I was rather amused at the idea that this man had a key to the newsstand, until it occurred to me for the first time that the stand shouldn't even have been there! I looked around at the back and, sure enough, it was completely blocking the ramp down to where the water shuttles took on passengers. What was it doing there?
"After you." he said, drawing my attention to the open door. A moment of deep suspicion took me as I wondered if he intended to lock me in the booth, but I gave in to my intense curiosity and stepped through the portal. I use that word for a reason...
...for it was a portal unto another world. After a brief space of black, which I took to be the enclosed interior of the newsstand, I emerged into a large, brightly lit room. It was a good twenty feet across, hexagonally-shaped, with a door at the far side and a video screen of some kind on the wall near the door, on which appeared a picture of the sun rising above the Atlantic outside. The wall was adorned with platter-sized disks, each lighted from behind. The ceiling featured a complex lighting system made up of concentric circles. In the center of the room stood a six-sided console covered with various display screens, keyboards, control panels, buttons and levers. From the center of the console rose a Plexiglas column, inside of which there moved a beautifully-crafted, multi-tiered crystal sculpture, lighted from within. The whole room hummed. The sound penetrated me to the bone and spoke wordlessly of the power it represented. Suddenly I knew, without a doubt, that the Stranger would deliver what he had promised.
My host entered behind me and walked to the console, depressing a tall lever which closed the large doors we had passed through. Another switch closed the viewing screen and suddenly I was cut off from the world outside, left in that sterile atmosphere.
"Welcome to my ship."
"Ship?" I asked.
"Well, it's really my home, but it is a ship nonetheless. It's how I'll help you. It's a time machine."
Things began to fall into place. Anyone else, I swear, would have been losing their marbles by now, but I was beginning to understand - and accept - the Stranger's world. The only way he could help me would be to take me back in time to the day Catherine died so that I could prevent the accident that took her from me. My heart began to race at the prospect of being with my love once again.
"It was June 25th, around 6pm -."
"Not yet, Mr. Donovan."
"But you promised..."
"And you accepted a condition, Mr. Donovan."
He was right. "What kind of condition?"
"You have to learn the gravity of the crime I am committing by helping you."
"Crime? What crime? How can helping me save my wife be a crime?"
"Mr. Donovan, do you think that I could devise and build such a machine as this by myself?"
I shook my head.
"Though I have renounced their society, my people, who have mastered traveling and monitoring events in time, have a strict code of laws concerning the manipulation of, and intervention in, events in the Universal Timeline. They do not take kindly to meddling, no matter how many lives it may save. They are content to sit and watch the universe pass them by."
I absorbed this. A race of time travelers, lords of time. How often had they come to my home world to watch us toil in our daily struggles with, as Wells put it, 'minds vast and cool and unsympathetic'? Why non-interference, when they could do so much good?
"Somehow I get the impression that you weren't content to just sit and watch."
"No." said the Stranger. "I wasn't."
"We're you caught?"
"Yes."
"And punished?"
"Yes."
"Apparently not too severely."
"It depends on how you look at it. It was interminably severe to me, but not as bad as it could have been. One of my race was executed for his crime, while others have been sentenced to remote prison planets."
"So why do you continue to do it? Why offer me a chance to do the very same thing for which your people punished you before?"
"As I said, it's personal...and it's a matter of cause and effect."
"Cause and effect?" I asked.
He walked around to the other side of the console and faced me. "Something good comes of almost every event that happens in the universe, Mr. Donovan, though it may be millennia or even eons before that good is seen. You mentioned the Titanic, so I'll use that as an example. A fellow member of my race once found himself in a position where he could have prevented that tragedy, but fortunately he knew how important the sinking of that great ship was. The Titanic disaster prompted the nations of the world to pass laws requiring 24-hour radio operators and to enforce stricter safety measures on ships to prevent such great loss of life. Did you know that the Titanic only had enough life boats for less than half of the passengers and crew?"
"I read something of the kind once." I answered, feeling like a student back at college.
"The destruction of Pan Am 103, however devastating and emotional the loss of innocent lives was, helped improve the security of air travel throughout the world and thwarted more terrorist acts than you could ever hope to know about, saving more lives than were lost that day over Lockerbie."
I began to understand what the Stranger was saying, but it seemed as though he were giving me reasons that Catherine should not be saved.
"But what about Catherine? What possible good can come of her death?"
He looked up from the control panel he had been punching buttons on and said, very matter-of-factly, "None."
I was getting confused again. "I thought you said -"
"I said that something good comes of almost every event that happens in the universe. Almost every event."
"But not this one?"
"No."
A look, half of confusion and half of elation, came over my face. "How do you know?"
"I've looked into your future, Mr. Donovan. On the morning of August 1st, 1994, you stepped off that pier and drowned in Boston Harbor."
I was stunned. "You mean, when I was out there, just a few minutes ago, I was going to...I would have...?"
"Yes. You would have ended your own life. Catherine was gone, so you believed you had no right to go on. Your story was buried somewhere in the back pages of the Globe. Your friends back home mourned for a very long time. Your best friend, John? He never got over it. Your music sank into obscurity, never getting a chance to be discovered and published, which is the real shame, because so many people truly enjoyed it. All in all, a fragment of the Universal Timeline that dead-ends in 1994. No good comes of it at all, Mr. Donovan, no good."
If there had been a chair in the control room, I would have sank into it in despair. I always thought that to know my own future would be a wonderful revelation. But hearing this, knowing that I should be dead at that very moment and that so many people would be hurt because of it, I couldn't accept it. I have never wanted to be a part of hurting others. I needed a chance to act, to change this bleak future.
"So what do you want of me? What is your condition?"
"I will return you to a point in time prior to the accident on June 25th. When you have successfully altered the events of that evening, you will be pulled back into yourself near the point where time was changed. You will remember your alternate future, the one in which your wife dies and in which you meet me. The condition is that you never discuss it with anyone, not even Catherine. My people have eyes and ears everywhere."
I walked around the console to the Stranger. I looked at his knowing face, into his eyes, and tried to see my way into his soul. Who was he? Why was he doing this for me? I couldn't see past his wisdom and gentleness. I extended my hand.
He took it and we shook firmly. "What time did you say, Mr. Donovan?"
I stepped out of the ship into the alley, the Stranger behind me. He closed the door to what now appeared to be a trash dumpster. Amazing. We walked to the front end of the alley. It was a mere one hundred feet from where Catherine had met her death. I winced with pain from the memories, or was it something else?
"What time is it?" I managed to say, despite the knot in my stomach.
He pulled out his pocket watch and glanced at it. "About 6:10. Are you feeling all right?" he asked.
"I've got a pit in my stomach. I guess it's from seeing everything from that night.."
"Partly, but most of it is because you are so close to your June 25th counterpart."
"Huh?"
"Ever hear of anti-matter?"
"Sure. Anyone who's ever watch Star Trek knows about that." I told him, though he seemed a little unhappy with the source of my scientific training.
"Yes, well, when two particles of matter and anti-matter collide, they result in a tremendous discharge of energy. A similar concept applies to time. When the same two people from different times physically touch, they create a rip in the fabric of space and time. The closer you two get together, the more discomfort you're both going to feel. You're counterpart down the street there is probably feeling a little queasy himself about now."
I smiled. "He probably thinks it's the Thai food he just had for lunch."
The Stranger grinned. "Now here's where things get difficult. You only have one chance at this. The Blinovitch Limitation Effect won't allow us to try again."
"The what effect?"
"The Blinovitch Limitation Effect. It will be discovered by Professor Andrei Blinovitch during the Zigma Experiments of the 51st century. What it basically means is that a large amount of temporal distortion around any one event is produced when time travel to that event occurs. The more confined the event, such as this street corner here and fact that the whole thing only took a few seconds to happen, the greater the distortion. This distortion prevents any further time travel to this event."
"What about something widespread, like the Kennedy assassination? It covered a lot of ground. One person could try and go to the book depository and another could try and stop the car. Failing that, another attempt could go to the police."
"You're learning, Mr. Donovan. You are quite right, several attempts could be made. They have been made and were stopped. Now those events are blocked by the Blinovitch Effect."
"Stopped, how?"
"By agents of my people. Unofficial agents. People who, like myself, feel that our government's policy of non-intervention is too strict and that other races suffer unfairly at the hands of those who would exploit or conquer them. Plus there are others out there with time travel technology that would use it to gain power by changing history."
I glanced at the Stranger. "Are you one of these 'unofficial agents'?"
"Not officially." He grinned. "I go where I please, do as I please. Occasionally I find a wrong that needs righting or an injustice that needs to be rectified. But I don't work for anybody. I work for Right and Good."
"And what you're doing for me...?"
I saw his mind fall back away, recalling memories of something from long ago. "...is Right and Good, Mr. Donovan."
We looked down the street. It was 6:15. The flower vendor was filling out her emptying buckets with fresh roses and carnations.
"The accident occurs in three minutes." said the Stranger, checking his watch again. I was beginning to quake with anxiety.
"How can I do this? If I screw up again, she'll die all over again."
"Mr. Donovan...Patrick, you must accept that what happened before was not your fault. The driver had no control over the car, the brakes were gone. You had no way of knowing that Catherine would be standing right where the car came up on the curb. It was not - your - fault."
His eyes implored me to understand. This last hour had taken such a toll on me that I was exhausted, but I understood that he was right. I knew it in my heart. It was just my fear speaking out.
"The simplest method is often the best. Just call out to her when she gets near the curb. She'll think it's you down the street. Two minutes."
I could see now the bright blue and white print dress of my Catherine down by the bistro. Next to her was myself, in my own green leaf print shirt and brown slacks. I felt a cramp deep in my gut and a surge of pain in my forehead. I grasped both areas and half doubled-over. The Stranger put his thumb and forefinger on my head and the pain seemed to diminish to the point where it was tolerable.
"Remind me to thank Professor Blinovitch with a kick in the stomach if I ever meet him." I muttered.
When I looked again, Catherine and I were passing the flower cart, where she glanced over at the blossoms and smiled, then leaned over and exclaimed to me about how beautiful they were. We were half a block away with just a minute-and-a-half to go. I watched myself telling her that I would be right back and turn back toward the flower seller. Catherine continued on up the block, passed our alley, and stood a mere ten yards away from us. We remained hidden behind some trash cans, but it took all my emotional strength to keep from running up to her and embracing her sweet body.
"Thirty seconds, Patrick." prompted the Stranger.
June 25th - the old June 25th - played over in my mind. Any second now I would turn from the flower stand - yes, there I went - and I would start after Catherine. I turned back to look at my love as she stood there at the curb, looking at me and laughing at the huge bundle of roses in my arms. Next to her appeared a teenage girl, the one who had screamed when Catherine was hit before, who touched her arm and asked her a question.
"Now Patrick, now!"
I almost choked on my words, but I managed to get something out. "Catherine! Come look at this."
Almost instantly she stepped away from the curb, waved at the teenage girl, and proceeded back towards me - the old me. My heart grew and I turned to the Stranger, grasping his hand as Catherine walked past our hiding place.
"Thank you so much. So much. I don't know how to repay you."
He seemed as pleased as I was. "You succeeded, that is repayment enough for me." He put his hand on my shoulder. "Any second now you'll revert back to your other self and -"
"Oh my God, no!" I cried and dashed out from the alley. I seem to remember the Stranger's voice calling after me, but I had shut it out.
As the Stranger had been talking to me, a screeching noise had begun to fill the air and my gaze had been drawn to the curb where Catherine had been standing. I realized at that moment, no matter what the Stranger had promised, someone was going to have to pay for this change. Maybe Time required a death, in that very spot, at that very time. But instead of Catherine - who was now safely in my arms down the block - the fate had shifted to the teenage girl who had moved to where Catherine had been standing moments before. I had only seconds to act.
I felt a strange sensation and I was seeing Catherine's beautiful face hovering in front of my eyes as I moved toward the girl. Then I realized that the transference the Stranger spoke of must be taking place. I was merging with this time, because the timeline which the Stranger had picked me up in was being overwritten, and I was becoming one with myself down the block. I prayed for a few more seconds of corporeal form, just a few seconds. I was feet from the girl and I reached out for her arm...
The scream snapped me out of my dazed state. Catherine was dragging me up the block to where the teenage girl lay at the curbside, one leg bent beneath her body and spots of blood here and there on the concrete. The car had stopped dead at the curb, the driver laying comatose against the steering wheel. I looked at the poor girl and closed my eyes, letting out a breath of despair. Suddenly her head stirred and Catherine knelt down beside her. She smiled meekly and started to sit up, but Catherine urged her not to move until the ambulance arrived.
"You'll be all right, hon. Just relax and lay still," my wife urged her.
The girl began muttering as others gathered about. I heard enough from her to know that she felt something grab her arm and pull her off balance just as the car struck the curb, but no one in the crowd would admit to saving the girl's life. Off by the alley I saw the Stranger as he raised his key and nodded. I tried to bustle through the throng of people, but the crowd closed further in. By the time I reached the alleyway, the dumpster was fading out of sight. The Stranger who had given me back my life, was gone...
Not long ago I saw the Stranger again. Catherine and Angela, our little girl, were sitting in the audience while my band was rehearsing for our first big concert. I happened to glance around backstage and I saw him, standing beside the curtain controls. I told the band to take five and I slipped off to see if I could find him. He was standing back by the stage door with a very bright-looking girl, probably in her late teens. He smiled as I approached and offered me his hand.
"I never thought I would see you again." I said, shaking his hand profusely.
"It's good to see you again, Patrick." he motioned to his companion. "This is my friend, Dorothy."
The girl gave him something of an icy stare, but extended her hand to me. In it she held a copy of one of my tapes and a pen. I gladly took them and autographed it for her. The Stranger rolled his eyes. After handing them back to Dorothy and shaking her hand, I turned once again to him.
"Is she another lost soul you've committed your resources to?"
He grinned. "You could say that. She's a special project of mine." The girl poked him in the side. It seemed they had a very special relationship.
"Why are you here? Did you need me for something?"
"Believe it or not we're here to see your show. We've become fans."
I blushed and asked if they were the first members of my intergalactic fan club. We all laughed. I reached into my pocket to give them some of my front row tickets, but he held up a pair already in his hand.
"I won't ask how you got...how you get those tickets."
Jake, our drummer called me from the stage. They were ready to rehearse again. I told them I'd be right there.
"Nothing I can say will be enough thanks for what you did for me. I'll always remember it."
"And I hope you'll always remember your promise, Mr. Donovan."
I looked at Dorothy and smiled. "Does he make you feel like you should be taking notes?"
"All the time." she quipped.
"Your secret will always be safe with me. No one will ever know what you did."
"Then be sure no one ever finds that document on your PC, Mr. Donovan."
I blushed. "Trust me, no one will ever know."
"Patrick?" I heard from the curtain. It was Catherine with Angela. I hugged her and kissed my little girl on the cheek.
"Catherine, this is an old friend of mine, um -"
"- Doctor John Smith. Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Donovan, and your little one. This is my companion Dorothy."
They finished exchanging pleasantries. Catherine urged me to get back out on stage, as the band was ready to finish rehearsing. I said my final good-byes to the Stranger and his friend and walked arm in arm with my wife onto the stage. We performed that night to a fairly sparse audience, but that didn't deter us. Everyone who was there applauded and cheered enthusiastically. We knew they liked us and that others would come to like us eventually. The Stranger and Dorothy seemed to enjoy it all, especially when I dedicated one of our songs to 'an old friend who changed my life forever'. It was a wonderful night.
After the concert I looked for the Stranger again, but they had apparently slipped out during the encore number. Catherine asked me about them during the post-concert party. I felt bad having to hide the truth from her, but I made a promise to the Stranger and I intended to keep it. I told her that he was a former professor of mine who helped me find direction in my life, literally saving it. The truth - of a sort. I also told her that I could never forget what he had done for me. The truth - period.
I'll probably never know exactly why the Stranger helped me save Catherine that day, but I can imagine. Someone like that, traveling around through time and space, must have lost someone at some time. Maybe he wasn't able to save them. Maybe it was an event where a greater good came from his pain and he would have altered history too much if he had acted to prevent it. Perhaps he saved them vicariously through me and others like me. I like to think I was able to alleviate his pain, even if just a little. It is the least I could do for him, considering what he did for me...for us.
This copy is all that exists of this adventure, outside of my own memories and those of the Stranger. Once this printout is made, the file is being wiped from my computer. I am locking this document in the safe at home and I will keep it for the day when, maybe, I will be allowed to tell it to my wife. For, through all of this, she is the reason it all happened. She and Angela are the only reasons I have for living.
June 25th, 1994, was first the worst - then the best - day of my life...and I owe it all to the Stranger. Whoever he is.
