The Time Machine (for Kamille)

I met you in a bar, a dimly lit honkytonk with no windows and black walls. It had the feel of a bunker. It only needed cans of gasoline and rations stocked against the walls. A band played too loud for a thinning crowd. Old rock’n’roll. Turn the page. Play that funky music white boy. Every AC/DC song in the goddamn universe. Distracted drunks stumbled about like zombies, flailing on the dancefloor, eyeballs twitching. Heads on swivels for someone new for the night. Nothing lasts that is made in bars. Except the popcorn that never goes stale because of the salt. The machine is the sole light in the room, except the back wall lights and the soft glow of a green bulb above a pregnant bartender’s head. I leaned on the bar in the least conspicuous place, near the trashcan. Lamenting the recyclables being tossed into the trash. Waiting for nothing. A better song, maybe. I never went there, especially not alone. I was hoping they would play a Doors song but they played Honkeytonk Women when you walked in, wearing black. We were both alone. I thought you were with the creepy guy with the limp who swooped in on you like a vulture on a fresh deer carcass. A bleached blonde train-wreck spoke to me, her husband stalking her through the bar. We’re getting a divorce, she said nervously not moving her teeth so he couldn’t read her lips. He was in prison for beating me, she added grimly. He had tattoos on his throat and face. She asked me to meet her there on Thursday when her husband wasn’t around. I almost left thinking it was a mistake. Then you turned and said “Hello, my name is Tracy.” I half expected you to give me a story about the vulture with the limp. We’re getting a divorce, you might say. That sort of thing.  

The day after, you wrote a note about an amazing man you met ― October 12, 2012. Three years, mostly happy but for an illness I didn’t cure until the damage had been levied and the carnage was too great for you to forgive. I was driven mad and we drifted and eventually you felt I wasn’t as amazing as I was then. You left me for an opportunity at happiness that I no longer afforded you. We had a beautiful daughter. I became a recluse. I took courses at the community college and online tutorials on Quantum Physics. I stayed in my dad’s small apartment and began to search the dumpsters where people threw away old washing machines and dishwashers and TVs. I concocted the idea to build a time machine in the garage. Late nights working away I forged metal and connected circuits and built the machine that was a giant metal wheel which would spin in place. There was a seat inside the wheel, taken from an old bicycle and a sprocket and pedals that would activate the plutonium that would activate time travel. Only I in the center would move, the apparatus would remain in place. You wouldn’t believe how difficult it is to get plutonium and other necessities these days. The FBI visited my apartment twice before I learned to order the necessary compounds to various addresses. I poured the plutonium in an old gas grill tank which I controlled with a blue lever. 38 years it took, studying, getting it right. Every free moment I had. I did nothing else. I purposely did not watch your life because I didn’t want to know, figuring it was subject to change when I went back and made it right. I only wanted to remember you as you were before you left me. Kamille and I were always close. I enjoyed watching her grow into the beautiful woman she is, but I always shied away from conversations about you. At events I kept a distance and didn’t look your way, or I didn’t attend at all. Only when I had to go did I go, when I knew she would be dismayed if I didn’t. She asked me recently how I met you and so I began to document this in a notebook. On the cover I wrote: The Time Machine. Maybe when I am gone, or if this doesn’t work and I get stuck in 1956, she will understand how much I loved you and her.

They’d think I was crazy if they knew what I was doing in the garage. They made the mistake of giving all the tenants free electric. That will probably change soon when they get the bill. I have a dog I talk to named Edison. People give Edison, the inventor, a hard time. They say Tesla was the bee’s knees and Edison was a charlatan. I don’t agree. Edison, the dog, knows more about Quantum Physics than most people. He absorbs it like a furry sponge. I made a seat for him in my time machine because I cannot imagine losing him ― going back and chancing not ever being able to meet him. He was a stray, after all. A fellow dumpster diver looking for bones when I was looking for condensers and coils. The hardest part of all this is overshooting my mark, improper math and inadequate proportions. With too much plutonium and electricity, I will go back to 1932. I did that several times. Edison and I didn’t stay long because we knew we had to stay focused on the task at hand. He was as much a hopeless romantic as me. My time machine has been in a cornfield in 1932 and 1947 and 1965 and 1984. So more research and studying and trial and error led me to land in October 12, 2012. I knew it was the right time because I was in the garage and my things were in boxes. This is where I lived in 2012 when we met. I shared the apartment with ― my dad. My dad! I never thought of it before I got back here. He was still alive. His car was parked in the lot and I walked to the door and saw him through the window. He was watching Finding Bigfoot. I smiled at him and I wanted to say hello, but I realized looking into the reflection of the window that though time had changed, I hadn’t. I was 40 years older. What was left of my hair was gray and I was wrinkled. I saw a light in my bedroom and myself as a young man on the computer, writing. My other self got up to get ready to go. Say something meaningful to dad, I wanted to scream. Give him a hug! Tell him you love him! I didn’t. I said goodbye, be back later, and I watched young me head to the car. I was standing across the walkway and young me gave old me not a second thought. But he petted Edison and gave him a smile. Good boy, he said with a flicker of familiarity in his eye. Premonition, I suppose.

Of course I followed young me to the bar. First, Pink Cricket. I watched myself from an inconspicuous booth. I left Edison tied up to a tree in the bank lot. Then I followed young me to the bar where we met. And I saw you, so beautiful, saunter in just as the band played Honkeytonk Women. I saw young me talk to the bleach-blonde, and beautiful you endure the passes of the limping vulture. And I read your lips as you turned to young me and said, “Hello, my name is Tracy.” I lived vicariously through myself, smiling like a fool. I sat there across the bar in the shadows as a 76 year-old man and ate salty popcorn and drank a High Life. I thought of what I could possibly do. Could I reason with my young self? Talk some sense into me? Would I listen? Or would I think I was deranged and commit myself? Should I beat myself up? No, I decided. I was 76, I couldn’t even throw a good punch. What could I do? So I unleashed Edison from a tree behind the bar and walked back to the apartment, to the time machine. I saw you and my young self pull into the parking lot in my dad’s silver Mitsubishi. I saw you get out and I smiled at us. Edison smiled, too, the way dogs smile. You didn’t see us. I smiled remembering the feeling of being in your presence. I realized there was nothing I could do to change the past. What was, was. What is, is. But then I decided what I could do. I could write this all down and go back and give it to you in some way. Perhaps, you would be impressed that I spent nearly 40 years building a time machine hoping to come back to make things right with you, overlooking the obvious fact that I was old when I perfected the machine, and would thus be old when I returned. Too old to make a difference. But maybe you could overlook my wrinkles and gray hair, my liver spots and bad knees, I thought briefly before dismissing it. I thought if I saw you face to face it might freak you out, or you wouldn’t believe me. So I will leave this story for you. Kamille is still a baby now. Yet to grow and to ask me the question that spawned all this writing. But she grows to be such a beautiful and kind girl and woman. She looks more like you … well, you will see. I cannot change the past. But there is nothing I wouldn’t do to try to make it right. Not even if I have to score black-market plutonium. I hop on the time machine now and then and go back and find us. I watch us being in love and I remember everything when I was that amazing man of your dreams and you were the most beautiful woman to ever say hello. I revel in dreams, in memories, and I only hope that you know that love doesn’t fade away. It makes things right, or tries to. Now Kamille knows how I met her mother. And she knows it was beautiful, so I am at peace. I hope, still, that reading this might change things in you― that I might not have to build a time machine and be a recluse. I hope that you will find me and say again, to start anew, “Hello, my name is Tracy.”

This is how I say I love you.