My friend Roshelle’s been building a time machine in her garage for the last eight years. She says, people get into the time-travel business for just the one reason, most of the time: they love someone who died. Traditional time machine construction materials: ivory, platinum, cardboard, microwaves. There’s a pattern, she says. The extravagantly rare and the exaggeratedly mundane. Because what else would be capable of getting someone from point B to point A?
Roshelle collects uranium glassware. Under ultraviolet light, it glows green. Lots of people think it’s fake. Too on point, that shade. She knows all about Hiroshima, White Sands, Chernobyl. I asked her, once, if that was what she wanted to go back and see. She said that doing time and space is a different can of worms entirely. Common misconception. One or the other, though—that’s not so outlandish.
• • •
Roshelle said, “The passenger compartment isn’t a true cockpit, yet, Annie. I’ll rectify that on the next pass. But for now, that means that the operator has to stay out here.”
And, “Do you really think I’d let anything happen to you?”
And, “Don’t you know how much I envy you?”
And, “This is your chance.”
• • •
We’re neighbors. I bought the house when I turned twenty-one. I didn’t know what else to do. I’d just gotten all the settlement money, and it seemed like, well, I’m done with college, I can check that off the list—and what’s next on the trajectory? You get married, you have kids, you adopt a dog, and you take up beekeeping or whatever. But I’m not so good-looking, and I don’t talk much, and I live in a red state, and most of it just wasn’t going to happen. The house, though, that I could do. It’s got three bedrooms, two baths. It’s got this big airy kitchen, which is what kitchens are supposed to be. And now I know how to do all this other stuff. I can handle the plumbing. I can clean gutters. And there’s this big backyard with oak trees and boulders and a pond. I got chickens.
That’s how I finally met Roshelle. The neighbors on the other side kept phoning in noise complaints, so when Roshelle showed up on my doorstep I assumed that’s what it was about—like, do you really need a rooster? But she was actually after one of the hens. It’d be real humane, she said. She didn’t want to make the jump all the way up to cats without at least testing the chicken-waters. She’d pay me the cost and then some.
We didn’t see each other at all in 2003 or 2006. I mean that. Usually she’s out on her porch in the evenings, rain or shine, tobacco smoke curling up under the eaves, or we’ll wave to each other at the mailboxes, but there are times when she’s just not around. And there were times when we didn’t speak: when I was with Carmen, when I got cable, when she told me I didn’t have much going on upstairs. The rest of the time, though, we saw a lot of each other. I started bringing her quiches, kale salads, rosemary rotisseries. Left to her own devices, all she ate was protein shakes, supplements, bottled water. She’s always been tall and vivid and thin, and she’s always had these tight brown curls twisting all the way down to her breasts, but when I first met her, her hair was falling out. She couldn’t keep a fingernail going to save her life. She’s pretty gray now, at the roots, but her hair stays in. I’ve managed that much.
I said I’d give her the hen for free if I could come watch. She dropped what I’d later come to know as her public face and surveyed me again, from my eyes to my clothes to my hands to my face. My skin tightened under her gaze. The thin curls around her ears and forehead were damp. I could smell her strongly despite the fact that she was all the way out on the far end of the welcome mat and I was fully inside my foyer: like sweet sourdough, like yeast with jasmine. Her jeans were stiff with sweat and grime. But despite these things I began to understand that it was I who was in danger of falling short.
• • •
I might not have had much going on upstairs, but I knew enough to know there’s a blueprint stage before you build.
“It’s about the individual by necessity,” she’d said once, after a long afternoon of welding. “Too unstable, if everybody’s doing it. From inception onward, you’re on your own.”
Seems like if that’s true, you take it into account when you’re figuring out what exactly to put in your cockpit.
• • •
The sun had almost set. The remainder of the light shone sideways through the blackened trees, reddish, and the shadows were nebulous. Roshelle was already out there on the porch, unmoving. There was an inconsistent breeze rustling the half-naked branches of the oaks, and the freeway roared faintly somewhere out to the west, but there was a particular caliber to this silence that I didn’t want to face head-on.
Arms full, I walked up to the porch and climbed the steps. Roshelle’s face and hands were clean. Her ashtray was full. I couldn’t speak first, but I could draw out this arrival, rattle a few forks, maybe. I set the casserole on the table—chicken, rice, cheddar, apple—followed by the pitcher. I lit a candle. I started to get the dishes out of my bag.
“I haven’t seen much of you today,” said Roshelle.
Maybe this was best, to get it out of the way. “I’ve been thinking.”
She watched me. I served. I was halfway done before I realized I should have been doing it more slowly.
“You’re not going to do this for me. Am I right?”
And then she said, “So what are you doing with your life, really?”
And then she said, “Do you think there’s anything moral about living the way you do?” And then she said, “I’m trying to help.”
• • •
The thing is, I knew I’d do it. For the past eight years, ever since I’d watched her vaporize my least favorite red hen, the rules had been consistent: I was allowed on the porch, and I was allowed in the garage. But I saw myself through the windows sometimes. Washing dishes in the kitchen. Emptying a dustpan.
I didn’t always know that the woman was me. I used to get jealous. She keeps her hair short, and she’s gotten a bit heavier, probably because she never leaves the house. Most of the time, when I do get a glimpse of her, she’s smiling. Well, not really. But she’s got that kind of face, those particular lines. She smiles all the time; I can tell. Laughs. She waved at me once.
I figured it out about a year ago. I’ve been getting used to the idea, I have. I just didn’t think I’d be the first human guinea pig. I thought I had more time. One day I made a plan: I said to myself, well, it’s October 19th, 2010, it’s three in the afternoon, and Roshelle’s busy in the garage. I walked next door and stood on the porch, alone. There was a cold breeze, and the boards were creaking, which maybe they always do, but you notice it more in October.
I thought, I’m gonna remember this day for the rest of my life. I thought, no matter what the rules are, no matter what Roshelle wants, if that’s me in there, I’m gonna come out on the porch on this date and time. I’m gonna say hello. I’m gonna get this thing confirmed.
And I didn’t do it. Stood myself up.
But at this point I’m wondering if that was supposed to be a message. I’d feel better about the whole thing if I’d gotten to have that conversation, but maybe I don’t want myself to feel better.
• • •
On the outside, the time machine looks like a thick pillar of silver and bronze, its side panels riveted in place. It’s so much taller than I am. On one of its five faces, there’s a broad bank of buttons and a sliver of a screen: just enough for a few letters, acronyms I don’t recognize. On another of the faces, there’s a hatch. Its roughhewn hinges are bigger than my fists.
On the inside, it’s dark. There’s a medical gurney bolted upright—nothing else. I’ve been strapped in, my arms with Velcro. No glowing buttons, no LED striplights, which I feel like I’ve been promised. A trembling, through the metal, and a noise that grows in intensity—but maybe it’s not a noise, because my ears don’t seem to be involved.
It feels as though I could breathe if I tried. The air thickens. I’m stuck, but I’m sinking. Submerged canoe at cross-purposes. Flood.
• • •
I called Carmen, which I’d promised her I wouldn’t do. We hadn’t spoken in more than a year. The static on her end sounded different than it did when she lived across town. I told her about the mail, about my painting, about the community garden. My projects, these days. That’s not what I called for, but even as I dialed I was realizing that I’ve got to make these choices on my own. If I asked her to talk it through with me, she’d think I was picking at our scabs. Why do you go over there every—What do you even talk about when—I can—You know so much about her, but she doesn’t—Can’t you—Can’t someone else—
“Annie, you need to move on.”
• • •
I’m sitting against the moldy wallpaper in Roshelle’s guest bedroom. It’ll probably be my room now. I’m lighting matches, dropping them on the shag carpet. They all fizzle out. Of course nothing happens. I don’t remember a fire.
• • •
“Try to remember what it feels like,” Roshelle says as she tightens a strap. There are so many buckles. She says I’ll be able to undo them myself if I need to. She’s moving slowly, almost whispering—I know that this is what she thinks it means to take care of someone. “You’re breaking new ground, after all. You’re a pioneer.”
Half an hour ago, at home, I took a shot of whiskey. I broke my dead mother’s china teapot. I didn’t mean to. I brushed my teeth. Now, here, my heart is beating differently, and it’s as if the bile in the back of my throat is speaking through me. “If you don’t want me to be scared then cut the shit, for God’s sake.”
Roshelle’s silhouetted, so I can’t see her face. “There’s a theory, and I believe it,” she says. “There’s—well. Some say that antimatter is matter, moving backward through time.”
A series of small jerks as she works a hand upward, tightening straps. She rests it on my shoulder for half a second.
“I don’t know how it will feel,” she says, drawing back. “I’m not sure if you’ll stay conscious, but you’ll make it.” She closes the hatch.
• • •
Breaking it down, like Roshelle would, into the essential questions:
Do I believe she’s got my best interests at heart?
Do I believe she’s good at what she does?
But why are those my questions? If I broke it down like Carmen: What do I want?
Answers never satisfy.
• • •
“Don’t hope for too much,” my older self said, easing herself down onto the foot of my bed. It was late and I had been asleep. The moon was making my white curtains glow, but the light didn’t really penetrate. “But it won’t be nothing.”
“Where have you been?” I asked. I reached out, touched my own arm, just to see if I could. I could. And she was cold. I thought there would be sparks or something. She was wearing loose, colorless clothes, and I knew what that meant right away—I’ve never been dainty, but some years are worse than others. Her hair was shorter, too. No jewelry.
“You’ll be fine,” my older self said. “Think about it. You’ve seen me. Things won’t be very different from how they are now.”
Another, older self opened the door—much older—and leaned against the frame just like Roshelle does. I couldn’t see her well, because she’d turned on the light in the hall. “They’ll all try to tell you that it has to be done because that’s what we chose. It’s already happened, yada yada. Roshelle’s going to spout a lot of nonsense about the internal consistency of a universe. Here’s the thing though. We talked to three guys before we chose what fencing to use for the backyard, right? Three guys. That’s all I’m saying.”
The woman at the foot of the bed went tense. “I’m not the type to make a promise lightly.”
“I’ve always been a fool,” said the woman at the door.
“She will sometimes seem cold,” said the woman at the foot of the bed, turning back to me, gripping my shins through the covers, “but she chose you for a reason.”
“She chose you because you’re alone,” said the woman at the door. “She chose you because she already knows she can take advantage of you.”
The woman at the foot of the bed began to cry. I felt bad for being disgusted by my own congestion. “Just remember,” she said, snorting back her snot, “what happened tonight. Because I did. I remembered all of this, and I’ve done everything I’ve done, and I don’t regret a second of it.”
“You’re so full of shit,” said the woman at the door.
“Just get out, just, please,” said the woman at the foot of the bed.
“Doesn’t your future look bright?” said the woman at the door.
• • •
I used to talk so continuously during those early dinners on Roshelle’s porch. I’d bring guests over, too, like the couple from down the road, the postmaster, the oldest cashier from the hardware store. It’s hard for me to remember what I said exactly, but I can guess: “Avocados were almost three dollars apiece down at Niko’s—did you see? Guacamole’s downright precious these days. But from where I’m standing it goes with the season! I’ve been trying this new marinade. No, I’d never use one of my hens; I’m too sentimental. You don’t think it’s too sweet? Too much brown sugar?”
It’s hard to imagine a dinner like that, now, but the funny thing is that I can’t remember how Roshelle communicated her distaste. I feel like I could produce a pretty accurate catalog of all the times she’s criticized me with a particular view toward changing my behavior. As far as I know, we’ve never talked about a guest policy, or about her position on small talk. Maybe it was just that, after a while, I paid more attention to learning what makes her shutters come down.
• • •
Roshelle opens the hatch, businesslike. She shines a light into one of my eyes, then the other. Starts undoing buckles. She’s not surprised to see me—she’s so perfunctory as she asks me how I am and do I remember my name and what’s her name, and as she does this, so coolly, I’m feeling everything inside me begin to orbit something small and hard and dangerous— until I remember that she’s had a few minutes to adjust, to make educated guesses about this silver-bronze column that just materialized in her garage.
She helps me over to a folding chair in the corner. She gets me a glass of water, watches me drink it.
“Now, write,” she says, handing me a spiral-bound notebook I recognize, yet to be coffee-stained. “How did it feel? Beginning to end. This is crucial.”
I try. I’m self-conscious about my handwriting. I can see hers through the back of the sheet before, and of course it is what it is—all-caps, straightforward. It didn’t hurt, I put down by way of a beginning. I don’t think I fell asleep. It felt tight. My skin still feels too tight. I paused, tried to think of the right comparison. It was like realizing I’d always been five-foot-nine instead of five-foot-six. Because how would that happen? And why wouldn’t you know? But it was like realizing I needed to be rebuilt, but the pieces weren’t being assembled from top to bottom or from inside out, they were being clumped and twisted and—
Roshelle stops me. “Save the poetry for later,” she says. “It’s too early for abstractions. Start again.”
I’m sitting in this garage. It smells like it should. The sun’s coming in through the high, narrow windows, and it looks right. But I am not right.
She watches me for a few minutes, and I look down at the eraser. Then she says she can’t “attend” to me any more at the moment—she needs to take some measurements before the “vessel” disappears. She knows the machine will disappear. She knows that’s how it’ll have been designed. She just doesn’t know when. So she turns away from me and gets to work, and I sit in my corner with my notebook, and I wonder which way it goes: I wonder if I write, or if I do not write.
• • •
Apparently, it’s 2008. This won’t be as far back as I go, Roshelle tells me, but I’ll be here for a while. I stand by the sink on this, my second November 8th, 2008, and I think about cockpits and control panels and the context behind that approach to the design. Of course Roshelle built the ship that way. That’s how she saw it, when it came.
I ask her whether she can do things differently this time around, and she says, firstly, that this is her first time around, and, secondly, that she wouldn’t know how to build any other kind of ship. This has always been the way this particular vessel gets made. One never changes the past, Roshelle says. Fundamental misunderstanding. Each incarnation of reality must be internally consistent—that is, if one goes backward in time, it’s not a disruption of the plan; it’s what always happened.
I ask her whether I can go for a walk, and she tells me she thinks it’d be more prudent to stay inside for now. She’ll leave me to my own devices. She’s got work to do, after all.
“What happened to that hen?” I ask her. I can see part of my backyard from her kitchen window. It’s cold. I can’t see any of the chickens, but I can see the coop, its barn-red walls, its dark gritty shingles. When I had it built, I knew what was expected. “The one I gave you. The one who disappeared.”
“I told you,” Roshelle says.
• • •
Roshelle’s smiled less than twenty times since I’ve known her. At least six of those smiles were just for me. Maybe my numbers are wrong. It did take me a while to start counting. Tainted data—results meaningless. But I can’t keep myself from remembering. The time I brought her an elaborately carved elephant tusk I’d found in an antique shop. The time I taught her something she didn’t know about omega-3s. The time she caught me planting daffodils in her flowerbeds. Neither of us said anything. The sun was just rising, and the porch rails were orange-white. She was wearing a loose, gray tank top, and there was grease in her hair and along her collarbone. She’d been up all night, I could tell. I smiled, and then she smiled. She leaned over the railing to watch me work, and she kept smiling until the sun was all the way up. That was the best time.
• • •
It’s a bright morning, and I’m sitting in
Roshelle’s kitchen, eating leftover meatloaf I know my younger self must have brought over the night before. It’s my family recipe. The cupboards are bare. There are two coffee machines, neither of which seem to work properly. Knowing Roshelle, they probably answer only to some warped ritual: grounds measured out to tenths of an ounce, weights and counterweights, rotation to a particular degree, percentage of direct sunlight. There are bug-husks in all the drawers.
Roshelle comes in—not from upstairs, but from the garage. As she passes me she squeezes my shoulder. There are pills on top of the fridge and opaque gallon jugs within. Three pills, swig. One more pill, swig.
“How do you pay your bills?” I ask.
She doesn’t pause, but she doesn’t turn. “Haven’t we talked about that?”
“A little,” I say. “But I’d like to hear it from you. How’d you afford this house? Why this house? Let’s start there.”
Now she does turn. Leans against the fridge. “It’s important to feel oriented in space-time. You’ve done something truly new, and we can’t be sure exactly what that does to a mind. I’ve drawn up some ideas. Different kinds of activities. Let me know if your experience today varies in any way from your typical performance of these tasks.”
I’m chopping my meatloaf into cubes with the side of my fork. “You told me I’d be going farther back,” I say.
Roshelle lowers her outstretched hand, to-do list drooping. “Yes. Eventually. It’s not completely up to—”
“So you’ve done this before,” I say.
“Yes.”
“You’ve had to talk me through this before.”
“Yes.”
“Why are you so bad at it, then?” Mashing one cube, then another. “I knew, well . . . I wasn’t sure, but I thought . . . I mean, no one promised me—”
“Of course no one promised you,” Roshelle says sharply.
“Of course not,” I say, looking up again at last.
• • •
I met Carmen at the farmer’s market in 2006. I kept meeting her, over and over again—I kept forgetting her name. She bought my eggs. Every other week, from May until August. We’d talk. And then one day she came late but stayed after, to help me take down my booth.
It was just after noon, fully hot. The broad vacant lot where we held the market was dusty, unpaved, and didn’t have much in the way of shade. Around us, other vendors were packing up or gone: there were gaps in the grid. Older women pushed wire mesh baskets, squinting in the sun, still thoroughly vigilant since closing time brings the best deals. Usually, I felt as though I was one of them, but today, here, I was different. My fingers seemed unusually stiff. I’d already closed up the big umbrella. I was taking my time with the table. I’d worn my hair loose, and although it was damp against my neck I was newly grateful that I’d forgotten a hair tie. I could feel Carmen watching me. She’d packed up my whiteboard and my coolers, and now there was nothing left for her to do but watch.
“Thanks so much,” I said, pressing the last of the table’s folding legs back into place. “For your help.”
“Any time,” Carmen said. “Hey, how are the chicks? The Ameraucanas? And the other ones, the silver ones?”
“The Silver-laced Wyandottes! Yeah, they’re settling in well, thanks for asking. They’ll start laying sometime this winter. And they’re so pretty,” I said, but I looked away at the last second. I didn’t want her to know I was actually talking about all the gold in her eyes, the length of her fingers.
“I bet.”
I’d already asked her about her week, about her dog, about her car trouble. I knew I had to keep talking, and I wanted to keep talking, and I wanted to say something important and meaningful, but instead I said, “It was a good
morning.”
“I think so, too.”
“Yeah,” I said, sliding the table into my car until it hit the back of the seats.
“Hey, Annie.”
I looked up, which felt like a risky move.
“Could I take you out to lunch?”
Let’s just say I’d gotten used to the idea that that kind of love would never be a part of my life. I was a realist, after all, and I’d known the score since kindergarten. But I forgot that dating and I were incompatible when we went out for that lunch. Halfway through, as if it were the smallest thing in the world, she took my hand. At first, I experienced that the way I experienced everything else: I was all too aware of the sweat on my palms, of my hot cheeks, of the fact that every second was another opportunity to fail. But then I realized, or rather discovered, that there was more than one person in this moment with me: her hand was damp, too, and I could feel her heartbeat in her thin wrist, and the table was shaking a little because, beneath it, so was one of her legs.
I got scared before and after every date for the first six months at least—but during? Only rarely after that first time. She made it so easy.
• • •
I hear it, from upstairs, when the vessel disappears. I hear it over the sound of the bathtub faucet, which I’ve been running on-and-off for two hours now. It’s going back.
I’m taking a bath instead of a shower because there isn’t a shower curtain. I stare up at the rod. Asking to go back—I couldn’t do it. And why not? Perhaps solving all of this would have been as simple as that. Perhaps that would have ended it. But the rules have changed now, it seems. Roshelle has a particular charge, a strong charge. My energy is no longer compatible.
So it seems, from where I am now, as though there are ways of going back that I can stomach and ways of going back that I cannot. If I were to ask her nicely, if I were to beg—well, I would not be making progress.
• • •
The Annie of 2008 is out on a long walk. She’s dog sitting for the couple from down the road, and their German shepherd needs lots of exercise. I break into my house. I go into the backyard, to the coop. It’s a cold day. I scatter an extra handful of seed. The Wyandottes are plump and inseparable and glad to see me, in their way. They place their feet carefully. They run their beaks through their plumage, black and white and regal. Over the course of their lives, they have grown, but they have never changed.
I’m pulling out of my own garage when Roshelle leaps in front of the car. I nudge her with the front bumper, but she doesn’t waver, her hands pressed against the hood as if she really believes it’ll be enough to stop me. I roll my window down, hoping to bait her around to the side. She doesn’t move.
“What’s the plan?” she asks, panting a little.
“I’m off to the bank,” I say, my past self’s purse prominent on the passenger seat beside me.
“You’re not,” Roshelle says slowly, processing, and her left hand twitches against the hood.
“You know this doesn’t happen.”
“It’s my life,” I say, “and it’s my money.”
“It’s not yours now.”
“It’s not yours yet.”
On the other side of the wall, my fridge rattles its way into silence. Dead leaves skitter across the concrete driveway.
“Is that what you think this is?” Roshelle asks, fully shuttered.
“Am I wrong?” I ask. “You’re wrong.”
Roshelle takes her hands off my hood. She straightens up. She turns and walks back toward her house. Her faith is in her posture: I will back the car into its proper place. I will put these clothes back. I will put the purse back. I will lock the doors and return the spare key to its pot of rosemary, and I will go back to her house, and I will ask my questions politely, and she will answer them if I deserve it.
I pull out across the lawn, leaving tracks in the mud—I let the engine roar—and I have the satisfaction of seeing her turn, seeing her face in my rearview mirror, so completely drained of trajectory.
• • •
Same old bank—large tinted windows stripping another layer of light from the clouds. There’s a plate of sugar cookies on the manager’s desk for the children, but the smell of the firm industrial carpet smothers all other scents, like new tires and baby powder. It’s always surprising how well the little booths dampen sound. There are lots of us, here in the lobby, but there’s not much to hear. It takes me a few minutes to realize that the woman in front of me in line is the oldest self I’ve seen yet. She’s a bit hunched, and her hands are softly shaking. She meets my eyes but doesn’t press. I wait for her to speak to me, but she doesn’t. I feel as though I should be surprised, or nauseous, or dizzy, but I can’t muster any reaction other than guilt. If she’s here—if I’ve come to intercept myself—this must mean I’ve done something wrong.
“Okay,” I say. “Okay. Want to get some coffee?”
We leave the bank and head down the street toward the bistro where I had my first date with Carmen. It’s probably not the closest place, but it’s a choice I feel my older self will understand, and it’ll buy me the opportunity to think. Then I realize that I’m not fooling anybody.
I look at her, as we walk. Despite any promises I might try to make myself, it seems I’ll still become the kind of person who will waste my own time. She keeps her eyes on her feet. Her skin is darker, and worn. Her clothes are unremarkable, gray and navy blue. She’s pulled her white hair into a careless low ponytail; I can see flakes of dandruff in the part. There are indistinct bruises twisting up her left wrist. This might not mean anything. I remember being told, a long time ago, that women in my family have always bruised easily. She has a plain silver chain around her neck, which she’s tucked into her blouse. I can’t see anything that looks like a time machine anywhere nearby. Then again, future models probably look different.
There are five or six reasons why she could be here—I mean, that I know of—I don’t have all the data. Or any data, really. Perhaps she’s here to warn me, or to tell me that I’ve always loved someone, or that someone has always loved me. Perhaps the past can be changed after all. Perhaps she’s here to teach me how to build my own device, or to give me hers. Perhaps she wants to vent, to tell me that I’ve ruined everything. Perhaps I don’t have enough information to make the right kind of guess. A bus roars past, and I find myself wishing I’d leapt out in front of it, just to see what would happen to her. But she’d probably just stand there, saying nothing. Probably wouldn’t even be sad. She knows how this goes. She’s already lived through it.
I stare at her, knowing that the two of us are the only ones responsible for this silence. At least one of us must want this. One of us has chosen. Her posture is patient—she has no intention of speaking—and I realize it’s not her job to make the next move. Of the two of us, I have the potential. Of the two of us, I am capable. She is here to react. I stop her, take her necklace. It’s still silent, but now we both know why. Only one of us will have to live up to expectations.
Jae Towle Vieira is a queer writer and editor from rural northern California. Their fiction has been published in New England Review, Carve Magazine, Passages North, Mississippi Review, Fairy Tale Review, and elsewhere. They are an assistant producer for the podcast Normal Gossip.
Photo by JOHN TOWNER on Unsplash