the New Pantagruel

Midafternoon Apocalypse

by J. Mark Bertrand

HATE time travel stories. The people who dream them up have no idea. Think about it: in the average time travel story, we find one of two scenarios:

Option A. The future is great.
Things are so good, people from the future come back to help us.
We’re too stupid to listen.

Option B. The future is screwed.
Things are so bad, people from the future come back to stop us.
We’re too stupid to listen.

What never occurs to us is that people from the past might travel forward to fix the future—which, for them, is the present. It never occurs to us that the present is screwed and the future is only going to get worse. Someone needs to come and fix things, only they can’t be fixed. So if anyone invents a time machine, do us all a favor and send it back to the beginning.

Send it back to the garden and pull the plug.

*

My mistake was introducing Stella to my friends. This name, it has connotations: A Streetcar Named Desire. Some idiot at a bar screeching out an imitation of Brando thinking he might have a shot with the girl. But she despises Tennessee Williams. Stella’s father, anemic academic, named her after a sonnet sequence by that Elizabethan dandy, Sir Philip Sidney. Astrophil and Stella. Star-lover and Star. So my Stella was proud. Born to be the object of desire. Proud, but not aloof. What she possessed was an accessible hauteur.

“My family is very religious,” she said, “and I am, too. I believe in doing good. I believe in keeping pure. I believe I was meant for something more than all this.”

Her credo came at the end of a drawn-out fight. Conflict does wonders for her rhetoric. Her cheeks flush red like a heroine’s and her voice thickens, reminding me of the sound a cello makes when the bow drags slowly over the strings. Stella was a fine instrument.

We were discussing my friends—specifically Walt, who should never be allowed a third drink, should never be encouraged to do his Brando impersonation or to think a girl like Stella is in his league. Walt was an embarrassment in public, but I tolerated him. He was a genius. You had to make allowances.

“I won’t go to a place like that again,” Stella said. “I won’t expose myself to people like that.”

“Walt’s all right,” I told her. “And you weren’t exposing yourself.”

But how do you argue with the object of desire? By the time I left her place it was half past two and everything Walt had done was down to me.

*

His messages stacked up on the machine. The first one was angry and slurred. The second doleful. Then there were a couple of apologies that grew increasingly coherent as the morning approached. Walt was a sensitive guy after all. It was obvious from the recordings that as the effects of drink wore off, he remembered less and less of what had happened. By the second to last message, he just seemed baffled.

The final message caught my attention.

“I’ve had a breakthrough,” he whispered. “I was trying to brush my teeth and it just came to me. Call me ASAP.” He pronounced it ay-sap, and he was the only person I knew whose revelations came by means of oral hygiene.

When I called, the white noise machine was blasting in the background. Walt couldn’t think without that thing going. He said it canceled out environmental sounds and created a zone of auditory exclusion. I begged him to turn it down.

“It’s about time travel,” he said. “The breakthrough, I mean. Do your gums bleed when you floss? I was looking at the sink, at all this blood, and it hit me: they couldn’t have made it. They didn’t get far enough.”

“Who?”

“The future. They tried—you know they tried—but either one of two things happened. They discovered it was impossible, that’s option one. Or they—”

“Wait a second,” I said. “Shouldn’t you be talking about this in the future tense? How can you say they ‘discovered’ something if they haven’t even been born yet?”

“Who says they haven’t? They could be babies now. Or grown men. They could be older than us at this moment. How can we know? How can we have any idea?”

“I just mean, in the future, things will happen. They will discover that time travel is impossible.”

“They might, or they might not. That’s what I’m getting at.”

“I’m just saying, you don’t want to talk about the future in the past tense.”

I loved to needle him like this.

“Semantics. Are you listening or what?”

“Go ahead.”

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