The Murder of Jesus Christ

Chapter 1

In the future, if I ever witness another spaceship blasting off from Cape Canaveral, it’ll still never cease to be an astonishing event.

However, this launch was two hours late, and I had to pee. I tried to ignore the pressure, because once the word was given, I’d only have a few minutes to start taking photos. A little discomfort was nothing I couldn’t manage.

My name is David Abelman and even though I’m sure you’ve heard about me, I should take a minute to introduce myself. I’m a science photographer. I shoot pictures of just about anything, as long as it somehow relates to science.

I’ve been fortunate in my career to have photographed covers for Discover, Natural Geographic, Time, and dozens of other magazines.

Some consider me lucky. I’d be one of those.

The Sagan was two miles away. Far enough that I could barely see the tiny speck of metal reaching up from the ground, majestically pointing to the sky and beyond.

There were five crew members on board the rocket. One of those astronauts was Karen Anderson, about whom you will learn more later. She’s important to this story.

Man, I really had to pee.

“Suck it up, buttercup,” I whispered to myself.

The astronauts might have to go, too, but their space suits would take care of that. Just for a moment, I was jealous of them. I did have an empty Coke bottle from earlier, but even with nobody nearby, it felt like something a teenager might do. I was twenty-five years old, and I’d damn well behave like it.

Unless I couldn’t. I needed to think about something else.

My tripod was set, with my best Canon EOS SLR camera ready to go into action. I own nine cameras, but I only use three for serious business. The EOS was my favorite and my go-to camera when I really needed the shot.

I refreshed the NASA app on my iPhone. It was all splashy and colorful, but the only thing it was showing now was the launch time.

And it was moving again.

5 minutes 15 seconds to launch.

“Finally.”

It’s not unusual to have launch delays. The weather, final systems checks, any of a hundred other things could cause Mission Control to take the safe route and halt the timer temporarily.

Now that time was running again, I felt a familiar queasiness in my stomach.

What if I screwed up?

Nat Geo had commissioned me to cover the launch of the Sagan. They’d paid for me to fly to the Cape, put me up in the best hotel, authorized whatever I wanted for expenses, and a fat ten-thousand-dollar fee. Twice my usual commission.

They wanted this cover badly. So did every other publication. The people on this spaceship were going to meet the aliens on the far side of the moon.

That still sounded so foreign. Aliens. Everyone on Earth knew they were there, but nobody had even the most basic information about them. We didn’t know what they looked like, what they sounded like, if they were living creatures or some kind of machines sent from their home planet. For that matter, we had no idea where their home planet was.

All we knew was that these five astronauts were taking the first step to find them.

This launch reminded everyone of the first voyage of Christopher Columbus leaving Spain to discover the New World.

And somehow, I was lucky enough to be one of the primary photographers.

I smiled, knowing my photos would end up in the history books.

Unless I screwed it up.

My fingers were shaking.

“Take a deep breath,” I told myself. I followed my own instruction and it helped.

2 minutes 43 seconds to launch.

“Good luck, Karen. God bless.” I felt a melancholy pitch in my stomach as I thought of her.

There was some commotion in the distance as some utility vehicles moved farther away from the launch pad.

I looked through the telephoto lens for about the thousandth time to be sure the Sagan was centered. Looking through the camera, the rocket was slim, tall, majestic.

I clicked some practice photos. You never know when pre-launch pictures might be useful.

Before I knew it, I heard, “T minus 30 seconds” booming throughout the area. There were a half-dozen other photographers at the official viewing area, all scattered about. I knew most of them from other projects.

Just then my phone beeped, scaring the crap out of me, which I did not need right at that time. A text message. I ignored it. Whoever it was would have to wait.

“Ten… nine…”

“Game time.”

The countdown continued and then the horizon was smeared out by a blazing explosion that seemed to be as bright as a nuclear blast. Even expected, it still shook me, like the entire launch pad had been destroyed.

When I saw the spaceship rising from the ground and thrusting into space, I realized I had been holding my breath.

Fortunately, my professional reflexes kicked in, and I had already clicked a dozen images by the time my mind clued into things.

Three months earlier, I’d done a photo shoot of the NASA control room. There were thirty men and women monitoring their stations, simulating the launch. That shoot had sold to Discover and was one of my favorites. I was able to capture the tension on the technicians’ faces as they all thought, “What if I screw up?”

At least that’s what I believe they were thinking. Right then, I was hoping they were paying attention to whatever data signals were being routed to them.

That’s when the shock wave hit.

The ground shook, as if a magnitude-6 earthquake was rolling over the area. My tripod shook slightly, but it didn’t matter. The Canon was top of the line, with anti-shake technology that allowed it to continue to focus on the rocket, ignoring the tremors.

What I felt at that point could never be adequately expressed with a camera, but the writer who covered the story later wrote that the immense shock wave from the launch was the most brutal and forceful display of American force she’d ever seen.

I liked that description.

Karen and the other astronauts must have been going through absolute hell as the g-forces crushed them into their seats, while the shock waves made them feel like they were in a blender.

Click, click, click.

“This is NASA Control. The spacecraft Carl Sagan has successfully achieved liftoff and will shortly be injected into Earth orbit.”

I took some last snaps of the diminishing contrails left behind by the ship. It was only a few minutes before the Sagan was out of sight, already a hundred miles offshore over the Atlantic Ocean.

My finger was still clicking, but there was nothing more to see, so I forced myself to stop. The launch had been amazing. I glanced at the counter on the camera to see that I’d taken 153 photos in that tiny period of time.

“I have the best job in the world,” I said. I absolutely believed it.

Sometimes I wished I could be an astronaut, but knew I didn’t have what it takes. This group of five was the best of the best. They had to be, in order to have been chosen as the first group of alien hunters.

A woman named Lucy Tyler was sitting in the Control Room in Houston, probably madly scribbling down notes and impressions of the launch. She would be writing the story my photos would accompany.

Within the next few days, we’d have to merge our perspectives, so that I picked the very best photos to bring out her words.

One more in a long string of great days.

I thought of calling somebody to go for a celebratory drink, but wanted to head home and load the pictures onto my Mac and start working on the storyboards.

That’s when I remembered how badly I needed to pee.

I grinned and loaded my equipment back into my two-year-old silver Toyota Camry, then ran over to the closest building. There were several scattered on the grounds nearby, and I knew this one was primarily an old storage area. There was a bathroom inside.

After relieving myself, I remembered the text that had popped into my iPhone during the launch. I clicked it open.

I stared at the screen and the euphoria of the day fell off me like icicles melting on the first warm spring day.

It was from my grandmother. My heart sank, knowing exactly what the text signified.

Chapter 2

A hundred miles above David Abelman, The Sagan orbited the Earth, once every ninety minutes.

Karen Anderson was both afraid and ecstatic. It still seemed impossible that she could be flying in a spaceship. A year earlier, she’d been working in her lab, trying to decipher something—anything—from the radio waves emitted on the far side of the moon.

After the ship had entered orbit, she’d released herself from her crash belt and had been floating free in zero gravity for the past hour. Although the sensation was amazing, it was also oddly sickening. Her stomach felt like she was continually in an elevator whose cables had snapped. She’d been told that the ship in orbit was basically falling non-stop around the Earth, but she hadn’t really understood that until now.

The captain, Murray Thomson, and the other NASA crew members on the flight all had duties assigned. They were ignoring her, which was also very much expected.

Karen would have little to do for the next four months. She’d become accustomed to the Skywheel, while more crew arrived and they worked together to assemble the ship to carry Karen and the rest of the crew to the moon.

I’m going to the moon, she thought in awe. How cool is that?

She pushed herself to a window and could see the Earth shining brightly below.

David was down there. Somewhere.

She wondered if she’d be able to see the photos he was taking at some point. After she returned to Earth, for sure, but she would like to see them earlier. Even though they were no longer a couple, she still followed his work whenever she knew about it.

She also wondered if he’d been thinking of her during the launch.

Probably not. He’s too much the professional.

Karen had spent the past two years working on the moon project.

The radio waves that had been intercepted initially seemed to stop shortly afterward. That initial burst had six hours of data. It was a stream of binary, 1s and 0s, that streamed out into space from a relatively tiny crater near the Moon’s south pole but on the far side.

With the limited data stream, Karen and hundreds of other scientists around the world had a wonderful puzzle to solve. Everyone assumed aliens had initiated the broadcast, but nobody knew what it said or why they had sent it.

Karen loved the challenge. The idea of creatures from a faraway planet nestled so close to humanity made her curiosity almost burst.

Another part of her, though, wondered how it could be possible. If God made mankind in His own image, who made the aliens?

It was a passing thought that sometimes woke her at night.

Another: how would the aliens react when she and the rest of the crew landed near the tiny crater Daedalus.

After that initial radio burst, a new satellite was launched and sent to orbit the moon.

It was more finely tuned and scientists quickly realized the radio beacon sent from Daedalus was focused like a tightly-wrapped cone. It had never been noticed before because a receiver had never been in the right place. The new satellite fixed that.

A steady stream of data was captured after that, six hours every day.

It was being sent in the direction of the star Gliese 581, which was assumed to be the home of the aliens.

In the two years since a complete set of data had been tapped, nobody, including Karen, had made the slightest bit of headway in understanding a single word.

“Maybe they’ll talk to us in person, though,” she’d told herself. “Just maybe.”

She’d be one of the first to find out.

Chapter 3

My grandmother’s name was Ariela Abelman. She was ninety-two years old, and her whole life was defined by a single six-month period when she was thirteen.

Everyone called her Mrs. Abelman except me. I called her Grandma or sometimes Ariela. I was one of the few people left who knew she was never a Missus, had never been married, had never even had a serious love interest in her life. That six-month period ruined her for all that.

When I arrived at the hospital, she was a crippled old woman. She lay in her rickety hospital bed, quietly gasping for each breath of precious air, sucking in what little she could.

I knew what to expect, because I’d been here to visit her prior to heading to Cape Canaveral. That didn’t make it any easier, though. Grandma was the one constant in my life, the one person who had loved me, without condition, from the day I was born.

Her eyes were blurry and weepy, not from fear but from the aging that had finally brought her to her final hours.

She was ready to die and to meet her God.

When I entered the room, she didn’t immediately notice me. It took all her energy to concentrate on getting air.

Grandma had told me she’d signed a DNR, so when her body started to fail, nobody would go to any extraordinary measures to keep her alive. She hated the thought of having a machine breathe for her, or having some other contraption extending her life for no purpose.

“When it’s my time, God will take care of me.” I remember her saying that my whole life. She’d already been old by the time I could understand aging and death, and I was fortunate to have had her in my life as long as I did.

That wouldn’t make it easier to say good-bye to her for the last time.

“Grandma?”

She jumped at my voice, but only for a moment.

“David,” she whispered.

She’d known I’d be there, of course. When she texted me earlier in the day, it probably used the last bit of energy she could manage.

How many ninety-two-year-old women can text while on their deathbed? Grandma was nothing if not resourceful. One more of a thousand reasons she meant so much to me.

She stared, same as she always had, making me feel a tinge of embarrassment as I wondered if my hair was combed or if I had a speck of food on a tooth. She was my biggest critic and my biggest supporter.

Ariela. I love the sound of her name. I’ve never known another woman with that name, and perhaps never will. This one was enough. She rocked my life.

“I came as soon as I could. I was in Florida, taking photos of the spaceship blasting off and…”

She nodded. She always knew my schedule as good as I did. She insisted on that.

I thought about telling her more about the lift-off. She always loved to hear about what I was doing. I’d always talk to her about my trips around the world to record whatever important scientific event was happening. I think it made her feel like she was traveling alongside me.

Grandma kept every magazine my work had been published in, which amounted to a large stack in the corner of her small living room.

Her voice was thin, only a pinch above being no sound at all. “I’ll never go home.”

I took her hand and leaned over to kiss her cheek. She smelled like disinfectant.

I hate hospitals. I especially hated Grandma being stuck there to die.

Over the years, she’d told me in bits and pieces about her life. She could remember the tiniest details of everywhere she had lived, from the small basement apartment with her parents in Hungary when she was little, through various other apartments and small houses. She finally bought the house she would live in most of her life—a small bungalow in Minneapolis. It wasn’t much, 1,500 square feet, with two small bedrooms, one of which she used for storage.

She loved it until she got too old to manage the garden in the summer and the snow in winter, at which point she moved into the apartment she had so recently vacated.

“I needed to see you before I die,” she whispered.

I leaned in close so I could hear her better.

She’d lost so much weight that her hand felt like a bird’s claw. She’d never felt ashamed about that, or anything else about her appearance for that matter. She just needed to go to sleep forever.

She blinked to get my face into focus again and tried to smile. She was so tired, though, and before she could say anything more, her eyes drifted shut, and she fell asleep.

I stayed in Grandma’s room. The hospital was a horrible place, but she needed to be there. Terrible thoughts crossed my mind, because I wasn’t sure if I hoped she’d pull through and live another day or if she should die quickly and avoid any further pain.

This was the first time I’d experienced death up close. It wouldn’t be the last.

Her face was still tight, her body still fighting the pain while unconscious. It couldn’t help but make me remember what she’d gone though when she was only a young teen. It was like two bookends of horror with her calm life spreading between.

“You’re my whole family,” I said as I held her hand.

The most positive part of my life was about to end, and there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it.

My mother was Molly Abelman. She died when I was five years old. She’d been forty-four at the time, overweight and lazy, and she’d had a massive heart attack. I remembered the incredible loss, although it had trickled away to almost nothing. Sometimes I look at photos of her, unsure if I remember her, or other times looking at photos.

And I have no memories of my father. None.

My only family for most of my life was Grandma, who bridged the broken link when Molly Abelman died, and she raised me as her own child. That was no small challenge, because she was already seventy-two at the time. She’d been the exact opposite of my mother, fit and healthy, and sometimes it seemed incongruous that she could have ever carved my mother from her own flesh.

Now Grandma was going to leave me, and all I could think about was how she’d taken care of me my whole life.

Her hand was cold. I didn’t know if that was significant or not.

While I sat there, a nurse came in and checked the instruments recording Grandma’s last days. She smiled at me, and I tried to smile back, but my heart wasn’t into it.

I think the nurse was going to tell me something, but she hesitated and then changed her mind. Maybe it would have been, “It won’t be long now,” or “It was good that you could be with her at the end.”

“I love you, Grandma.”

I wanted to lean over and hug her, but she wouldn’t even know I’d done that. I worried about crowding her. It felt like nothing I could do would be the right thing. She looked like death.

Then, with no warning, Grandma’s eyes snapped open, and she smiled. I jumped back and felt my heart pound.

The next thing that happened was impossible. I know it was, but I also know it happened. You can tell me you don’t believe me, and I would totally respect that. Hell, if somebody had told me the same thing, I wouldn’t have believed it, so why should you accept my word?

Grandma smiled more broadly. Then she sat up. That alone would have been a big enough shock, but it was how she sat up that caused the “What the fuck?” moment.

She was weak and her bones brittle and fragile. She had no strength to even hold my hand.

That didn’t stop her. She gave me that big broad smile and then her body swung up from her waist. It was like she had decided to do a sit-up, with the top part of her body swivelling up straight.

Fuck?

When she spoke, her voice was clear and young. She acted and sounded like she was thirty. Her face was still etched with age, but her eyes were bright and her movements graceful.

“David, you must go to my home. Everything is waiting for you on the dining room table.”

For a moment, I couldn’t reply. I wondered if I had fallen asleep and was dreaming, but I knew it was real.

I wanted to talk to her, to shout for joy because she was back to being my surrogate mother again. She laughed a long laugh that made me remember the days when I was a little kid.

I waited too long to say anything, though, and as quickly as she had turned “young,” her eyes fluttered and closed. Her mouth shrunk to a fine old line, and then she fell backward to her bed. She was unconscious again, and I couldn’t help wonder if I’d imagined everything that had happened.

A machine started to whine and beep, and I couldn’t help myself. I stood over her and shook her shoulders, trying to wake her again.

“Grandma! Wake up!”

Two nurses and a doctor rushed into the room and moved me aside while they tried to keep her comfortable.

I wanted to scream at them to help her, but they were only doing what Grandma had told them.

Do Not Resuscitate.

The nurses and doctor exchanged glances and finally the doctor turned to me.

“I’m sorry.”

I crashed down to a chair and started to cry.

Chapter 4

Ariela Abelman had one of the happiest days of her life when she turned ten years old. Her mother gave her a necklace that belonged to her mother.

“This belongs to you now, my sweet angel. You must wear it forever.”

The necklace was silver-colored. Although with rare exceptions she wore it for the next eighty-two years, Ariela never had the necklace checked to see if it was actually silver or some other metal. It never mattered to her. She loved it, and she loved that it was handed down for some vague number of generations.

It was the very next day the Nazis invaded Hungary, or at least the small town of Ashue, where she lived with her parents in a tiny basement apartment.

Julianna, her next door neighbor, was sixteen, and knew everything about the war. She was Ariela’s window into the big wide world. That afternoon, Julianna ran over and hugged her.

“Your family must hide!”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“The Germans are here. The Nazis. They’ll take you away and kill you!”

Ariela couldn’t comprehend that somebody would want to kill her. That only happened in fairy tales like Snow White and Goldilocks.

“WHY?”

Julianna looked over her shoulder as if she expected to be hauled to justice for talking to her little next-door neighbor.

“Because you’re Jewish.”

“So?”

“They hate the Jews. You need to tell your family to hide.”

Ariela’s parents were not home. She hid in the corner of her bedroom and spent the afternoon crying in fear.

Her mother arrived home a couple hours later and called out, “Grab a bag and pack whatever you can carry!”

“Are the Nazis coming?”

Ariela didn’t know what a Nazi was, but in her mind they were big and scary monsters, like wild bears.

Her mother stared at Ariela and then ran to hug her.

“Very soon.”

They left and met Ariela’s father at a farmhouse south of town.

“Whose house is this?”

“Don’t ask questions,” snapped her father. “They are friends. That’s all that matters.”

Ariela and her parents climbed down a ladder to the basement. The ladder was accessed from a secret trap door covered by a ratty throw rug.

She didn’t leave the hidden basement for three years, never saw sunshine, never saw another human being except for her parents, and found herself thinking she was just some dirty animal trapped in the wilderness by a gang of hunters waiting for her to show herself.

Sometimes she wanted to come out and let them kill her, but most often, she wanted to fight. She wished they would come to her so she could beat the shit out of them. In her mind, that was very possible.

In reality, when the German soldiers found her family, Ariela was under-nourished, scrawny, a zombie who didn’t even know her age. The soldiers herded her and her parents out, making them walk for hours along with a bunch of other people Ariela didn’t know. They marched and marched until she wanted to drop to the ground and let the others walk over her, but somehow her feet kept moving.

When they finally were allowed to stop, they were at a train station. Her eyes brightened. She’d always liked trains, and if they were going for a ride on one, that would be at least one small pleasure.

She looked for the cars with the windows, thinking of sitting comfortably on one of the cushioned seats, like the trains she’d heard about, but she didn’t see any windows.

Instead, these trains only had cars that were big metal boxes. Her family was pushed along and told to get in one.

The train stank of shit and piss and other horrible things. There were no seats. They had to squat on the floor. When the door closed, it was pitch black, and Ariela’s fear came back.

“Mommy?”

“I’m here.”

“Where are they taking us?”

“I don’t know. Try not to worry about it. Everything will be fine.”

Fine. Ariela swirled the word around in her mind, wanting to believe it, but instead she had a sinking feeling that nothing would ever be fine again.

The train rattled and shook, and eventually they arrived in the Auschwitz camp in Poland, where they were crammed into pens that looked like they should house cattle. There were thousands of other people stuck together in the pens, and armed guards watched over them with rifles.

Ariela saw a man try to escape, but it was hopeless, and he was shot to death in front of her.

There were bad rumors about what the guards would do to them at the prison camp, but nobody knew what was going to happen for sure.

Three days after they arrived in the camp, though, Russian soldiers stormed the area, and as fast as Ariela’s ordeal had begun, it was over. They were liberated, and eventually freed.

The Germans had surrendered.

Ariela and her parents were returned to Hungary, but their lives were never the same.

Eventually, she learned that six million Jews were slaughtered by the Germans under the leadership of Adolph Hitler. That was more than two-thirds of all the Jews alive in Europe. They were families, like her own, and it didn’t matter how old the people were. Women and children were killed first, because they had no value.

At Auschwitz, the preferred method was to use Zyklon B gas, which was a pesticide made of hydrogen cyanide. Ariela read how the Jews were stripped naked and told they were being taken for delousing and a shower. They were locked in the gas chambers and the Zyklon B released inside. Horrible shouts and screaming followed as the people suffocated. Then their bodies were hauled to the crematorium and burned.

When she was sixteen years old and found out about the history of the Holocaust, Ariela decided she no longer believed in God. After all, what kind of a God would allow a monster like Hitler to live?

Chapter 5

I stared into Grandma’s apartment from her doorway. I’d just unlocked it and let the door swing open. I half-expected to hear it creak, like I was walking into an ancient tomb, but it glided open without the slightest sound. It was just like her to get rid of any wayward squeaks.

My grandmother, Ariela Adelman, was that most perfect of perfectionists. It wasn’t that she was showing off or felt the need to compete with anyone. It was who she was. I remembered when I grew up that she never sat still to watch The Bachelor or Grey’s Anatomy on TV like some of my friends’ moms. She always worked. She cleaned, she washed dishes, she re-painted her bedroom, she took the garbage out to the dumpster in back when the bag got half-full, she balanced her check book, she walked half a mile each way three times a week to the grocery store, she dusted and vacuumed even when there wasn’t the slightest hint of dirt, and she raised me to be the best child she could.

She wasn’t doing any of that to impress anyone. Nobody visited her. Nobody cared. She only had me.

Now, her apartment was empty, and the silence seemed to roar at me. I hated it. It took me a moment to put my foot forward to get inside, because all I could think of was how I was violating her space.

Silly, I know, but that’s how it felt.

“Ridiculous,” I said to the walls. “You’re dead.”

Didn’t help.

In my mind’s eye, I saw her eyes light up and a broad grin spread across her face.

That contrasted with my last image of her, when her body swung up and she delivered what would be her last words.

“David, you must go to my home. Everything is waiting for you on the dining room table.”

The creepy image of her swinging up that way made me think of an old EC comic book, like Tales From the Crypt, where some forgotten and moldy body crawled out of his grave to chase the unsuspecting teenager.

“Stop that,” I told myself.

Yes, I have a habit of talking to myself when I’m alone. After all, I’m alone a lot. I like being by myself, but I hate the quiet. I’d rather have people think I’m crazy.

Grandma hadn’t had to tell me how to get into her apartment. She’d been living there for almost six years, since shortly after I moved out to live on my own. I was nineteen at the time and already selling photos to major newspapers and magazines.

When I left home, I think she felt abandoned and needed to find a different place to live so that she wouldn’t feel my ghostly presence everywhere. I’m only hypothesizing that, because she would never have said a word that would bring guilt to me. She said she wanted a place with a view.

So, anyhow, I knew she kept a spare key under a fake rock in the tiny garden outside the front door. I closed the door and switched on the lights.

I felt a little guilty, because it was after 9:00 p.m. and Grandma had clearly wanted me to find whatever the heck she’d left me. Unfortunately, there had been a lot of details to work through at the hospital. Not to mention my heart was broken.

Above all else, Miss Ariela Adelman was very Jewish. I knew she’d haunt me for the rest of my life if I screwed up her funeral.

According to Jewish custom, I knew Grandma had to be buried within seventy-two hours of her death, and not on the Sabbath, which ran from Friday evening to Saturday evening.

Today was Wednesday, so the burial had to happen even sooner, before sundown two days from now. I needed to arrange everything with the funeral home as fast as possible. That was just fucking wonderful. Pick out a coffin. Music. Notifications. The service. Was there a specific rabbi who should deliver it? I think my brain overflowed and I don’t remember what I even picked for most of the options. At least I didn’t have to worry about flowers. Jewish funerals didn’t have flowers.

I suspected I’d be the only one attending the service.

Confession time: even though Grandma tried desperately and even though I call myself Jewish, that’s really just a word to me—a word that has few concrete impacts.

I don’t believe in Grandma’s God any more than I believe in the Jesus that Christians follow. I will sneak a pizza with pepperoni or a ham and cheese sandwich, but at least I avoided doing that around her. I did respect her beliefs. I just couldn’t share them.

Grandma was the friendliest person in the world. But she also was afraid of almost everybody.

And who can blame her? Certainly not me.

I almost forgot not to let her be embalmed, but fortunately Jason Sanders, the funeral director, had seen many Jewish burials in his time.

After all the discussions, I sat in my car and cried. I don’t have a clue how long I stayed there, but eventually I blinked and it was twilight. I grabbed some tissues and wiped my eyes and blew my nose and pulled out of the funeral home parking lot to head to Grandma’s apartment.

“What’s here, Grandma?” I called. Of course, I knew she wouldn’t answer me, but there was always a chance somebody else was in her apartment—landlord, distant cousin, who knows?—so, I wanted to announce my presence and not walk in like I owned the place.

Nobody answered my shout.

I thought I could smell her, but that might have been my imagination. I knew I’d soon forget that smell, and that thought made me sad.

People die and then they die again. Grandma had died, and soon her scent would be lost forever. My memories of her would stop assaulting me every second, and eventually I’d only think of her once in a while, then only on special occasions.

Maybe one day, far from now, I’d think of her for the last time. My job takes me around the world. What if I abandoned Minneapolis and lived in Houston or New York? I’d have no obvious reminders of my grandmother, and one day, my last thought of her would be exactly that.

That’s when she’d be truly gone.

I wanted to vow never to let that day come. I would surround myself with reminders. I’d take her alarm clock wherever I moved and think of her as I woke each morning. I’d use the same brand of air freshener she used and I’d go to the synagogue for service each Friday evening.

Well, let’s not get carried away.

When I walked into the main area of the apartment, I could see it was spotless. Of course. She was meticulous about ensuring there was nothing out of place. That drove me batshit crazy when I was a teenager. Now it’s amazing.

In the small kitchen, there wasn’t so much as a single unwashed coffee cup.

The apartment was tiny, only about 900 square feet. I could see everything easily—the kitchen, a small living room, and a nook over on the left that had a long oak table. Grandma used that for fancy dining, which happened just about never-time. The bedrooms were at the far end, beyond a small bathroom.

I looked back at the dining room table, which had several items sitting on it. I hesitated, but then I walked over and pulled out a chair.

The envelope on my left had two words hand-written, clear, no nonsense.

In my mind’s eye, I watched her write that, but I was also quite confused. You see, Grandma was in the hospital for eight days. Had she set the table like this before she left? I remember she’d fallen and pressed the emergency call button she wore around her neck.

The ambulance took her to the hospital, and the attendant told me they found her on the floor, exactly where she’d fallen.

So, when did she write the note to me?

“I miss you,” I whispered.

I wished she was sitting across from me at the table, her bright eyes laughing at me, her gray hair pulled back into a shoulder-length ponytail.

She’d say, “Don’t be silly. I’ll always be right with you.”

I glanced up, convinced she was sitting there with me. I nodded, pretending to see her, and then I looked at the other items on the table.

Beside the envelope welcoming me was a file folder that had about a half inch of paper inside. Then there was a hardcover book with odd writing on it.

The next item that caught my attention surprised me. It looked like a hand-drawn family tree.

And finally, the document I had expected to find: her last will and testament. It looked short, only two or three pages.

“You were very prepared,” I said.

“Of course.”

I smiled. “Not that I’d expect anything less of you.”

I thought I heard her chuckle, and that made me smile again. It was the first time I’d smiled since reading her text earlier in the day.

Man, that seems like a million years ago.

Because it was the most visual item on the table, I reached for the family tree.

At the bottom in a small rectangle all by myself: David Colby Abelman. It listed my birthdate.

Above that was a box holding my mother’s name: Molly Ann Abelman with her date of birth and death.

Remember when I said about somebody being truly dead when nobody thinks about them anymore? I felt tears come to my eyes when I realized I hadn’t thought about my own mother in many, many years.

That wasn’t right. But, it was true.

I shook my head to clear my thoughts and looked at the rectangle above my mom’s. Grandma. Ariela Holdman Abelman.

The date of her death was accurately filled in.

“Who added that?”

I glanced over to the invisible ghost across from me. She was silent.

Then it hit me. Grandma must have given all this stuff to somebody to put on the table whenever she died. Whoever that mysterious stranger was would have been directed to fill in the date of her death.

My theory collapsed as soon as I thought of it. I knew with certainty that there was nobody she would have trusted with this. Nobody except me.

In the family tree, it showed Ariela had six brothers and sisters. One sister, Julie, died the same day she was born. I wondered if she was stillborn or if my great grandparents had held her and heard her cry at least once before losing her.

Grandma’s other five siblings all listed 1944 as the year of death, with no specific date. Underneath each was a caption in tiny letters: Murdered at Auschwitz.

Ariela’s parents were both listed in the chart, also with the same note: Murdered at Auschwitz, also sometime in 1944.

Eight of my grandmother’s aunts and uncles were listed on the chart, and they all had the same sad commentary.

This was a tiny slice of my history. On this one sheet, I had thirteen ancestors who had been killed in the Holocaust. I’d never known how the genocide had swept through my own flesh and blood.

The chart fell through my fingers.

They’d all be dead by now, anyhow. Does it matter that they died in the war? That’s the idiotic thought that went through my mind. Of course it mattered. Some of them died when they were little kids.

Of course it mattered.

I grabbed a tissue and blew my nose, then rubbed tears from my eyes.

“This day has been awful.”

“Worse for me than you,” I imagined her saying.

Hard to argue with that.

“You needed to see our family tree. That’s your heritage.”

I nodded but decided not to look any more at the family tree. There was another generation listed above, but I decided I’d look at it later, when I could manage it better. At a glance, at least I could see there were no other deaths at the concentration camp.

“Why don’t you get a drink, David?”

I nodded and went to the refrigerator. There was no milk or anything else that could go bad. The fridge had been totally scrubbed neat.

There were a half dozen Coors Light.

“My beer, Grandma. You really prepared for tonight.”

“Sure did.”

I smiled, thinking I was so close to actually hearing her say those words.

I didn’t want to sit again right away, so I walked around the apartment, almost pacing, wasting time rather than see what else Grandma had left me. Again, to no surprise, her bed was neatly made, and the toilet was clean and bright.

When I grabbed my second beer, I sat down again at the dining room table, and I ripped open the envelope that had my name on it.

Once again, I stared at the empty chair across the table from me. I could hear her voice reciting her letter.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Shelljah?”

I wasn’t even sure how to pronounce the unusual word. I picked up the heavy book sitting in the middle of the table. There was a yellow duo-tang binder underneath I hadn’t noticed before. Another surprise.

The book felt old. I’m not sure what that even means, whether it was the weight or the crinkles of the paper as I lifted it, or maybe the slight musty smell. Whatever, I was immediately convinced the book had passed through many decades, maybe centuries. There was a word on the cover that I knew must be Hebrew:

“Faith?”

I was worried about damaging the frail book, so I held it on the table while I carefully opened the pages and saw that it was written completely in Hebrew.

I’d never learned to read or write Hebrew. It was one of the few things in life where I know I had disappointed Grandma. She wanted me to learn the Jewish traditions, culture, religion, and philosophies, but none of that interested me when I was a kid. Or now, for that matter. I chose science over religion, any religion. And old Jewish traditions felt like a slice of religion. I wasn’t interested.

The book was hand-written, faded, and ancient. I wondered how it lasted so long. Was it a hundred years old? A thousand? There was nothing I could see to help me know, and I suppose in some ways it didn’t matter. It was a precious gift from my grandmother.

“Where did you get this from, Grandma?”

I couldn’t read any of it, so I closed the book and grabbed another beer from the fridge before looking inside the duo-tang binder.

There I found a forty-page manuscript with the title, “My Life,” written by Ariela Abelman. I flipped quickly through the pages of her autobiography, but didn’t read it in detail. That could wait until after the funeral, when I wouldn’t have hundreds of nit-picks to worry about. I wanted to savor her story when I did read it.

The folder was the last item I hadn’t inspected. I opened it to find a detailed list of Ariela’s finances. It included her most recent bank account statement, the passwords to her online accounts, and a couple dozen bills and other assorted statements.

A cover letter stated that all her bills were paid and current.

Of course they are.

And the last sentence: I cancelled the electricity and cable TV this morning, so you don’t have to worry about those.

Nothing like being prepared.

I looked at her will and was surprised (but maybe not really, because what else was she going to do?) to find that she’d left her estate to me. Taking a quick look at her bank account and other assets, that wouldn’t amount to all that much, but I didn’t care about that. I have a good-paying gig going and have never lacked for anything.

Maybe I’d donate whatever money there was to the Holocaust Museum.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Grandma?”

I could almost feel her pride shining all around me.

Before long, I had finished all six beers she had left for me in the refrigerator, and finished browsing through the items.

Eventually, I realized my eyes were drooping. It was one o’clock in the morning. I fell asleep on the couch, having put aside all flights of fancy regarding time. After all, if nothing else, I was a complete pragmatist, and I didn’t believe in miracles.

Chapter 6

I woke in the middle of the night, needing to pee. I really didn’t want to get up, but what can you do? I went to the bathroom and then checked the time: 4:42 a.m.

Shit.

I was wide awake. I splashed a bit of water on my face and stared in the mirror. The image facing me looked a lot older than my twenty-five years. I could see the first touches of gray in my otherwise brown hair. Not that I was the least bit concerned. I try to take care of myself, but I’m not one who worries about what other people think. If my hair goes gray, it goes gray. If my face starts to sag or any other signs of aging come along, it won’t bother me. I’ll do my best to stay healthy and active, and whatever else happens, happens. I want to be comfortable with who I am.

Some of that includes being the best photographer I’m able to be, and in the back of my mind I felt a ticking clock warning me that I’d soon have to get back to working on the photos I’d taken for the launch of the Sagan.

My deadline to National Geographic wasn’t for another week, but I knew I’d have to take time to review, organize, lighten, check backgrounds, and dozens of other details before I could send in the final choices.

I wanted them to be perfect.

At the same time, Grandma’s funeral took top priority. No question.

That funeral was only a day away.

Not surprisingly, Ariela had organized that as well. I wished I’d seen these notes before talking to the funeral home, but nothing much was different than I had chosen. She left me a (very short) list of people who should be notified of her death along with email addresses for each of them. She’d prepaid for a burial plot, and she’d lined up her pall bearers, the rabbi to perform the service, and all the other details. Later, I would call the funeral director to update him on some of her wishes. Pretty much all that was left was to fire off those few emails, so I took care of that while sipping my first coffee of the day.

The sensation that Grandma was nearby was even stronger. I didn’t believe in life after death, of course, but I do know about the power of the human mind and how it fills in holes that needed to be taken care of. It didn’t bother me at all to talk to empty air and seemingly hear answers.

I wanted that link with her to continue, forever.

“You didn’t have a list of flowers for your service, Grandma.” I don’t know why I said that. I knew the drill.

“Flowers are a complete waste of money. We don’t do flowers. They just get thrown in the garbage after the ceremony.”

I wasn’t sure what to say about that. I knew the “we” referred to Jews, but it always seemed like an odd restriction. I suppose it was wasteful, though.

“So, what’s this thing you wrote me about time?”

“Best to just try it. You won’t believe anything I tell you.”

“Probably true.”

“Definitely true. It would sound like magic because it is magic.”

“So you said. Jewish magic.”

“You got it.”

“Never heard of that.”

“Neither have most people, but that doesn’t make it any less true. How many people know a proton is made of two up quarks and one down quark? Just because it’s not common knowledge doesn’t make it fantasy.”

“Hardly the same thing.”

She didn’t reply to that, making me feel that they were exactly the same thing.

“How would I go about trying it?”

“Concentrate and feel the faith within you. Don’t worry that you think it’s not there. It is. You just hide it. The Shelljah is easily found when you look for it.”

I had no faith at all. Don’t believe in that. I believe in cause and effect. I believe in gravity, and the first law of thermodynamics, and I believe people write their own histories by their actions. I didn’t believe in mysticism.

But I had to try. If my grandmother had given me some weird kind of farewell gift, well, even though it made no sense at all, I had to try it.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I wasn’t quite sure how I was supposed to do this, so I tried to close my mind to everything else.

I’d learned various calming exercises during a photo-shoot in Tibet years ago. They had helped me many times to remove stress. Physiology, not magic.

Eyes closed, thoughts of Ariela moved to the side, no worries, no concerns, just emptiness. Deep breaths, in and out. I thought of the beautiful mountains surrounding Tibet, the peace of the monks, the soft music that had surrounded me there.

I love meditating and made a mental note to not let so much time pass before doing it again. The last time I could remember was when I was going through the tough times with Karen Anderson, who was floating in space, 250 miles above me.

As with everything else, I tried to move my fragmented memories of Karen to the side. Empty my thoughts. Nothing about Karen. Nothing about Grandma. Nothing about death or funerals, nothing about Hebrew magic. Nothing about the photos I had to get to my editor.

Just peace and serenity.

At first, nothing happened. I felt relaxed, like I always did when I meditated, but then I could feel a warmth radiating from deep within my soul. I concentrated on it and felt myself moving toward that invisible heat, as if I was on a Los Angeles beach and some clouds parted to let me feel the warmth of the sunshine raining down on me.

The sensation grew and I was overfilled with a rush of feelings: fear, awe, love, jealousy, anger, and excitement all pinged as they circled around my mind. It was a wild ride of conflicts and enlightenment.

It was all the emotions of my life, mixing together.

“What the hell?”

My eyes were still closed, and I shocked them open to find myself moving backward. I had no conscious feeling of wanting my body to move, but it was, completely, without me helping.

Backward in time as well as space.

There are no words to explain how stunned I was, an observer riding as a passenger in my own body.

I felt myself retracing the steps I had most recently taken, looking at the items Ariela had left, sleeping, waking and drinking and reading the material, and then backing out of her apartment and re-tracing my steps further back in time. I was now thirty-six hours earlier and finding myself in the hospital as she died.

This time, though, she gasped herself awake from death and stared at me with a grin. I knew, even before she said anything, what was going to happen.

“David, you must go to my home. Everything is waiting for you on the dining room table.”

Everything was going at super-speed, so her voice sounded like she’d sucked a helium balloon. I imagined driving a car going too fast and used my mind to press on an invisible brake pedal to stop my traveling.

Time returned to normal.

“Grandma?”

She nodded. “It worked, didn’t it?”

“How is that possible? How can you be alive again?”

“You mean still. I haven’t died yet, but I’m about to. Thank you for taking care of everything. I knew you would.”

“It’s not possible!”

“Of course it is. You’ve just proven that yourself. A scientist who doesn’t trust his own eyes is pretty useless, isn’t he?”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I think my mouth hung open.

“Now you need to hurry,” she said. “In your true time, I’m getting closer to my burial, and you’ll be back to normal. The magic won’t leave my grave. Don’t waste your chance.”

She closed her eyes and took her last breath, again.

I looked for a doctor or nurse, but I knew they would be here in a moment, and there was nothing they could do.

“Good-bye. Again.”

I relaxed and felt my consciousness being drawn back to my true time. My body raced forward, pulling me back where I belonged. I allowed myself to spring back, moving a hundred times normal speed.

Occasionally I pushed my imaginary brake and watched as the world slowed to normal speed. I pressed harder and… everybody stopped moving.

“Frozen in time…”

I had been walking down a street near my grandmother’s home. There were a dozen people nearby, and they were all locked into whatever they were doing.

I had pressed the Pause button on my life.

A young woman was talking on her iPhone, her mouth open and a tear falling down her cheek. Her long dark hair was half-blowing in the breeze, but she didn’t care. I wanted to brush the tear away and ask what happened, but I knew if I started time going forward again and asked her, she’d be freaked out and frightened at this strange man who had suddenly appeared out of nowhere. I wanted to, though. I wanted to tell her everything was going to be all right. I wanted to hug her and take her fears and anger and send them flying to the wind.

I could do nothing, though.

An older man leaned on a cane, and it looked like an impossible pose, as if he should fall to the ground any second. I watched him. The man’s eyes were staring directly ahead and his lips were pursed together. The walk was a struggle for him, but he was determined to complete whatever task he had set for himself, pain or no pain.

A car had driven though a puddle and a wave of water was rising from the road. It was going to splash onto a dog walking nearby. The collie was starting to turn its head toward the sound, its mouth open and tongue lolling.

From what I saw, it was like I’d been transported into a wax museum. Part of me wondered how it was remotely possible to stop time like that, but I knew I’d never find the answer to that puzzle, so maybe it was best to put that thought aside for now.

I moved time forward by using my imaginary gas pedal, and everyone started to grind into motion again.

The girl cried, the old man puffed, and the dog barked when it got soaked from the splashed puddle.

Everybody had a story, every day.

I stared but found myself moving along with the other people, moving toward Ariela’s apartment building, where I would find the will, the family tree, and the book of Jewish magic.

I sped time up and raced through everything, and then it felt like I’d hit a sponge wall. Time snapped back to its normal speed.

Looking around me, I knew I was back in true time. I checked my watch. No time at all had passed since I had left.

Chapter 7

A thousand miles to the east of David Abelman, a 19-year-old black girl sat in her bedroom and looked at her reflection in the mirror.

Her name was Erika Sabo.

Erika lived in a small town called Aynsville in upstate New York. Most of the people who lived there thought Aynsville must be the place farthest from any other place in New York State. Not close to Buffalo, let alone the Big Apple, it was hidden away where nobody knew about it.

She had shoulder-length coal-black hair that was frizzy and looked like a bit of a rat’s nest. Only her family and a few close friends knew her hair style was intentional. She liked it that way, and she didn’t give a damn what anybody else thought.

Everything in her life was that way. She felt driven and focused, and nobody could tell her to do something in a way that she didn’t want to. She was of the mind that if somebody didn’t like her as she was, well, that was their loss.

Erika was slim and healthy, and she radiated a wide and infectious smile at all times. Most of the boys in town thought she was beautiful, although they rarely said that out loud.

She herself didn’t care about that. She had bigger things on her mind. That had been true since she was six years old and she found her real history buried deep in her soul. Since then, she’d kept her secrets, but she’d also worked toward fulfilling her destiny.

The Sabos were one of only six black families in Aynsville, but she rarely thought about that or bothered to worry about being different. She was different in too many other ways. Her skin color was a fact about her, the same way her black hair was a fact and the fact that she was five-foot-one. Nobody cared about her hair color or height, and she could never figure out why anybody would care how much pigment her skin happened to carry.

It had only been an issue once.

Erika had a younger brother, Sam, who was now twelve years old. He was quiet and afraid of pretty much everything in his world. That was a bad set of characteristics when the bullies showed up.

Sam’s anxiety and fear was born from his shyness. As he grew older, the shyness mutated into more and more extreme anxieties, almost a pathological fear of conflict of any kind. Erika and her parents were always careful to be calm and loving to him. Home was the only place Sam felt safe.

It was three years earlier, when Sam was nine years old, that he was walking home from school, head down, as if he could ostrich himself enough that nobody else would see him. He walked alone, as always, and the farther he hurried from school and the closer he came to home, the better he felt.

Bad timing fell on him, because Peter Smythe and Jason Chartz were walking behind him, and they were already pissed. They were fifteen, Erika’s age, although she barely knew them. They’d been sent to the principal’s office mid-afternoon for “accidentally” spilling glue in Cindy Jones’s hair. They now owed writing a thousand-word essay each, explaining how their behaviour was wrong. So, they were in shitty moods, and Sam happened to be their first target. They ran to catch up with him, and Sam’s eyes grew wide with fear. This was the worst of all his nightmares.

“Well, lookit the little nigger boy!” said Peter. “What are you afraid of, little nigger?”

To Sam, Peter and Jason looked like giants. He was short for his age, like Erika and their parents, while the two older boys were six years older and easily double his weight.

Sam couldn’t find a way to say a single word or to try to run away. He lowered his head further and closed his eyes, as if he were wishing the whole situation away.

“Hey, you dumb runt!” said Jason. “We’re talking to you. Can’t your dirty little ears hear us?”

That’s when Erika caught up with them.

Jason noticed her running over and nodded toward Peter, catching his eye. The two boys quickly lost interest in Sam. There was a new game in town.

Peter grinned. “Well, if it isn’t another dirty little nigger come to play.”

Erika stopped about five feet from the two bullies.

“Sam, come with me,” she said. She tried to ignore Peter and Jason and took a curved route around them to get to her little brother.

“Hold on, sweet cakes.”

Peter grabbed her shoulder. She turned immediately to glare at him, yanked herself free, and then pushed her arm out as if to smash him away from her.

What happened next was the subject of rumor for months. The only people who really believed it were Peter and Jason, but they were known liars, so whenever they said anything about the incident, everybody they knew would raise an eyebrow with disbelief. After all, it made no sense.

Erika pushed her arm straight out toward Peter, but she didn’t touch him. There was at least a foot of empty space between them.

From Peter’s perspective, she might have looked closer, but he knew for sure that she didn’t touch him. Jason had the clearest view, standing to one side. He knew there was a good twelve inches. That grew to twenty-four in his re-telling.

The separation didn’t help Peter. He went flying into the air, six feet above the ground, and then he crashed into the lawn beyond the sidewalk.

Everybody froze, wondering what the hell had happened. Everybody except Erika.

Peter moaned and pulled himself into a fetal position.

Erika walked over and knelt beside him. “Are you okay?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he crawled slowly away from her.

“Stay away from me.”

Erika put her hand on his shoulder and whispered, “You don’t have to be afraid of me.”

He continued to crawl for a few seconds but finally stopped. He looked up at her. “How did you do that?”

She shrugged and smiled at him. “Afraid everyone will know a girl could throw you? Just a bit of karate.”

“That wasn’t karate.”

“Well, some other martial art, then.”

He shook his head.

“But it doesn’t matter,” she said. “I can see into your heart, Peter. You’re not a bad person. You just need to stop doing bad things.”

“You hurt my knee.”

Peter tried to stand but his leg collapsed and he cried out in pain.

“Shh…”

Erika smiled at him and put her right hand on his knee.

“Try again.”

He stood, the pain gone. He glanced over at Jason and then back to Erika.

“You’re a witch or something.” His voice no longer sounded fearful. He looked uncertain, but when she kept a smile fixed on her face, he smiled back.

“Or something,” she agreed. After a moment, she added, “Go have a good rest of the day. Sam and I won’t bother you any more.”

Peter could only nod.

“Sam, let’s go home.”

Erika took her brother’s hand and they hurried away.

Chapter 8

I woke up Thursday morning after a deep sleep. I’d had the strangest dream, a vision of myself moving back through time, changing the speed of time, and even stopping it.

“Holy shit.” I snapped my eyes open.

It was real.

I remembered the note from my grandmother and how I’d found the peaceful and tranquil place within myself, enabling me to control time.

Jewish magic.

I’d never heard of Shelljah before, and like everybody else, when that happens, I do the logical thing. I ran a Google search and got zero hits.

“Crap.”

I think this was the only time I’ve ever searched for anything at all that Google didn’t know a damned thing about.

Last night, I’d programmed Grandma’s coffee machine to start a pot brewing at 7:00 a.m. I could smell it now, so I stretched my arms, went to the bathroom to splash water on my face, and then finally poured myself a cup while I sat at the kitchen table.

Then it hit me:

I can go back in time and fix anything I want.

The thought was unbelievable, and it was followed by an equally challenging question.

What would I want to change?

The answer came to me almost immediately, but I was reluctant to actually do it. What if there were unintended consequences? I turned on the television that was sitting on a small table in the corner and flipped it to CNN. I knew they were covering the launch extensively. After all, the aliens were the biggest story in, well, forever. The Sagan was taking the first steps to figuring out the answer to a thousand mysteries.

Where were the aliens from?

Why are they on the far side of the moon?

How long have they been there?

Have they already gone home and left automated transmitters?

What are they transmitting home?

Are they friendly?

What can they teach us?

Were they hostile?

And on and on…

I wasn’t alone about one thing. Everybody I knew felt overwhelmed at times knowing the aliens existed. On the plus side, it did vindicate me regarding some of the arguments I’d had with Karen. After all, if there was a God, and that God created humanity in His own image, how could aliens exist on some distant planet that look very different from us? There was no hint of that in the Bible.

“What if they look the same as us?” Karen would reply.

I laughed at that. Anybody who’s ever studied even a tiny bit of biology knew that a species evolved trillions of miles away would look nothing like humans. What would they look like? Maybe we’d find out soon.

CNN wasn’t showing anything about the Sagan’s trip, though. They were talking about a famine in southern Africa. One more fact that showed there was no God. Why would He let millions of small children starve to death?

Karen always glossed over the facts. Only faith mattered.

We were completely incompatible.

So, why did I feel a hole in my heart?

The second time I moved backward in time, I was able to do it much easier, since I knew what feeling I was searching for inside my soul.

Time slowed and then stopped, and using the invisible gear shift in my mind, I switched to reverse. It was easy and natural to see my body start to move backward. I was a passenger again, riding myself. I moved slowly at first and soon found my way back to bed, where I fell asleep and reverse-snored. Then I moved faster and faster, pure acceleration, and my life raced like a movie reel rewound.

I pressed the pedal harder, and raced even faster. The days sped by, a calendar fanning through time. I no longer questioned how such a thing could happen. That didn’t matter anymore. How and Why were just words. What mattered was Karen.

Three months peeled away, then six, and then I screeched to a stop.

“I love summer,” Karen said.

“The best time of the year, for sure.” I was temporarily surprised to hear the words come out of my mouth, but then remembered the conversation. I was back where I’d wished to be.

I was riding right behind my own eyes, able to take control when I wanted, but if I did nothing, my life rolled along as it had originally.

So far, I didn’t want to interrupt things. Karen and I were lying in the grass at Sutherland Park. It was the first hot day of summer, and we both embraced the warmth and our love. There was nothing that needed fixing here.

Having her so close reminded me how much I loved her.

I put my arm out, and Karen crawled closer to me. We rested and touched fingers and smiled and didn’t have to say a word. After a few minutes, I leaned over and kissed her, tasting the love on her tongue. That was me taking control. The first time we experienced this moment, I didn’t do that. It was the best kiss I’d ever had.

I loved re-living this day.

I wondered what would happen if I decided to stay here, not return to my home time. Would that work? Or was there some cosmic law that would make that impossible? There were lots of crazy laws in physics, and although traveling through time felt like magic, I knew it was some kind of scientific phenomenon we hadn’t yet discovered.

Even as I wondered, I could feel a tiny pull, which I understood to be my own true time wanting me back.

You will only have until my burial, Grandma had said.

Were the minutes ticking by at the same speed in my own time as they were here? If so, my time was limited. I would never forgive myself if I missed her funeral.

The first time I had traversed back, I returned to the same instant I had left. I wanted to trust that would happen again. The thought of leaving Karen was impossible.

I wish you’d told me about the Shelljah before this, Grandma.

“Let’s go,” whispered Karen.

We wordlessly got up and started walking back to her apartment. Neither of us needed to say much. We were totally comfortable together.

Except…

I shook that thought aside. My body was walking alongside Karen, and I wanted to pay attention to her, not to what had happened before.

This weekend was the only one recently that we’d had together. Her work at NASA kept her busy almost non-stop, including weekends. She was going into space, a monumental undertaking. The full training took a year, and she had only finished a few months so far.

Part of me wanted to tell her to give it all up and marry me. But, mostly, I wanted her to experience everything in life she could manage, and this was something that almost nobody would ever be able to boast about. She was going alien-hunting.

Earlier that day, Karen had told me all about what they did in training. The physical and mental challenges never seemed to end. I wondered if I would have the stamina to keep going, and I was pretty sure I wouldn’t. I wasn’t proud of that, but I was proud of Karen for pulling it off.

We got to her apartment, and she took me by the hand, leading me to her bedroom.

“I’ve missed you so much,” she said. I kissed her deeply as we sat on the bed. Then I undid her blouse, and she stopped to lift my T-shirt over my head. Within a minute, we were both naked and lying beside each other.

Karen reached down to take my hard penis in her hand, and I couldn’t help moaning with pleasure. It’d been so long…

I lowered her onto her back and kissed her neck softly and gently, then moved to kiss her breasts. Her nipples were erect and waiting for my mouth.

Throughout our lovemaking, I rode the earlier version of my body, remembering every move I’d made, every touch she’d given me, and every bit of love we shared.

It was the best we’d ever had, and the last.

That was what I needed to fix.

After we finished making love, we fell asleep, our bodies still tangled together.

Karen held onto my leg, as if to make sure I didn’t leave while she napped. I could feel her fingers on my skin as I fell asleep, and loved it.

After about a half hour, we woke, and I licked my lips. I looked at the girl beside me and marvelled at how beautiful she was and how fortunate I was to have found her again.

The tug of time wanting me back was stronger now.

I had first met Karen at a Starbucks coffee shop while we both were waiting for drinks. I’d ordered a cappuccino and she a mocha macchiato. We stood nearby and while we waited, she received a text.

Later, she told me what it said: Congratulations, Karen. You have been selected.

“Oh my God!”

At the time, of course, I had no clue what was happening. I heard this squealing girl beside me and turned to see if something was wrong. Her mouth hung open in shock, but she didn’t seem unhappy.

“Are you okay?” I asked. I wouldn’t normally get involved, but her open mouth had turned into a wide grin, and she’d looked up and caught my eye. I had to say something.

“It’s…” She shook her head. “Unbelievable.”

“What is?”

She laughed and shook her head again. I don’t believe in love at first sight, but this was awfully close. I needed to find out more about her. She looked close to my age, long black hair, and that infectious smile would haunt me forever.

She held up a finger to say, “Hold on a second,” and texted back to her NASA contact. Totally thrilled!

At that second, Karen knew she was going to the moon.

After she sent the text, she looked up to me as if noticing me for the first time.

“Sometimes everything seems to just work out,” she said.

“Well that sounds like something worth celebrating!”

Later, I told her she’d misunderstood my comment. I meant that she should go celebrate with her friends. She thought I was suggesting the two of us celebrate together.

Best misunderstanding of all time.

“We can grab a table here if you want,” she said.

I have no idea why she agreed to that. It was totally out of character for her to sit with a stranger to have a coffee. Maybe the adrenaline rush of the news, or maybe it was God’s will, if you believe in that kind of thing. Whatever the case, she didn’t question it, and so I didn’t either.

“Sure, I’d like that. My name is David. David Abelman.”

“Karen Anderson.”

She didn’t tell me about the moon trip until we’d been dating for two weeks. Up until then, she said it felt like it was all a dream that could be yanked out from under her at any time.

Memories were made from shared lives.

I need to interrupt myself right now before we continue. The thing is, you don’t know me, and I don’t know you. If you were a close friend or somebody else who I’d known my whole life, I wouldn’t need to stop here, but I have no idea who might read my story at some point (and it’s certainly possible it’s nobody at all, in which case this is a little pointless).

My grandmother was Jewish. So was my mother. And in theory, so am I.

In theory? Yes, because I was raised in a Jewish household, learned the various customs and traditions, was taught about Hanukkah and all about lighting the menorah instead of Christmas, observed Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and the rest, and for many years I was dragged to the local synagogue to listen to Rabbi Pfeiffer tell us all about the things we should know.

Typical Jewish kid, with one difference. None of it stuck.

In all the years I was supposed to be studying Hebrew or learning the Torah, none of it called to me, not even a little bit. Something inside me rebelled at every chance, daydreaming for Rabbi Pfeiffer or yawning by the time the third candle was lit in the winter. All my grandmother’s teachings fell away, shed like rainwater when the sun came out.

What was the sunshine?

Science. That is the religion that called to me. I learned at a young age that the universe was created in the Big Bang about 15.8 billion years ago. There was no creator necessary, just the laws of quantum mechanics and general relativity.

My gods were people like Albert Einstein and Niles Bohr, Edwin Schrodinger and Max Planck, Paul Dirak and Werner Heisenberg, and their lessons stuck to me like glue.

Judaism, Christianity, Islam… I always knew they were all pointless attempts to explain things, but I also knew that real explanations came from understanding the laws of physics.

From the time I was ten, science was my yellow brick road, and taking photographs of science was my life’s goal.

As I’m typing this, I know how foolish this all sounds, so humor me for now. Trust me when I say that my beliefs were as ingrained into me as the Ten Commandments were into Moses.

That doesn’t mean my behaviour was forgivable or even understandable, but I hope it does help you to at least appreciate a little bit of how things unfolded.

I was certainly not immune to being pig-headed, and a bigot on top of that.

I touched Karen’s hair and that woke her from her slumber.

“Hi there, sleepy-head,” I said.

She smiled.

A rush of excitement fell through me. It hit me again that I was waking up with Karen, the girl I’d missed so much the past six months. I could feel her skin beneath my fingers and smell her familiar scent. I held her close and wanted to stay that way forever.

“David?”

“Hmm…?”

“You know it’s not long before I start more serious training. I’ll have to be in Houston for that.”

I’d forgotten that, even the me experiencing this for the first time had forgotten. I knew it, of course, but I’d pushed the details to a far corner of my mind, hoping they’d trickle away.

“When?”

“I should be there by the end of July at the latest. So, a couple of weeks… I’ll need to get settled and everything. NASA will help me find an apartment, but I want to get to know the routine and meet the other trainees.”

“I’ll visit as often as I can. I’ve always liked Houston.”

How often would that be? I didn’t know. I did know Houston wasn’t my choice of place to live. Grandma lived near me in Minneapolis, and it was hard to imagine moving elsewhere.

Grandma.

The thought of her living not far from here made me miss her terribly. I could go see her right then. But, of course I was exactly where I wanted to be.

“I want you to pray for me while I’m gone.”

I stared at her. “You know I don’t believe in praying. It’s just hocus pocus.”

“You once told me a story about Niels Bohr. He’s one of your heroes, right?”

I didn’t answer. I knew what she was going to say.

“I probably won’t get this right, but a visitor came to his house and was surprised that he had a horseshoe hung above his door. The visitor said, ‘I thought you didn’t believe in stuff like that.’”

I finished the anecdote for her. “And Bohr answered, ‘I’m told it brings you luck whether you believe in it or not.’”

Karen smiled, and my heart ached.

“So, I need you to pray, whether you believe in it or not. It’s for me, not for you.”

I leaned back, and she surely knew I wasn’t happy. Grandma had long ago stopped trying to convince me of the power of prayer. She knew better. So did Karen.

“I’m going to find a church in Houston,” she said. “I’m going to be making connections within that church, and I’m going to pray and read my Bible every day. I need that security. Otherwise I won’t have the courage to do this.”

“You’re a scientist.”

“Yes.”

“How can you believe in that crap?”

Karen had a Ph.D. in molecular genetics. She was the author of a dozen papers that detailed how evolution had worked its magic on humanity. When aliens were discovered on the far side of the moon, NASA reached out to the top biologists in the country to look for volunteers to join the program. Karen sent in her resume, expecting to be rejected along with a hundred other applicants.

She told me she’d never really thought about actually flying to the moon. That was crazy talk. Until it wasn’t.

“You know what I believe,” she said. “I’ve never hidden that from you.”

“But, it’s different now. Everything is different.”

“No, nothing has changed.”

“There are fucking aliens on the moon! Did your God make them? Doesn’t the Bible say that Earth was created by God for his creations? Did He lie?”

“I don’t pretend to know all the answers, David. You shouldn’t either. We’ve been through this before. I just know what I believe.”

I should have stopped.

I should have learned from the first time around this argument, but I couldn’t help it. The differences between science and religion were so core to my true self, that I couldn’t let it go. It’s one of my least admirable qualities.

“You believe a bunch of nonsense! Why is the Old Testament chock full of miracles, but nobody ever parts the Red Sea or turns water into wine nowadays? Why doesn’t your God just show Himself and convince people like me that He is real? It’d be easy for Him to do, wouldn’t it?”

That was the line I remember most, and I’d now spouted it twice to the girl who meant the world to me, convincing her that in fact she meant very little.

It would have been so easy to just listen to her.

I hadn’t done that. I was as full of anger and loss as the first time we had this fight.

I had always believed in my science, not some kind of magical God who sat on the clouds somewhere with his long white beard, judging people and micro-managing everybody’s movements simultaneously. It was ridiculous to think that nonsense was true in any meaningful sense of the word. Karen was smarter than that.

She shut down, staying quiet. I wasn’t sure if she was thinking about what I’d said, or if she was ready to throw me out. I suddenly wanted to take it all back and to not have her beliefs crushed by me. I was supposed to do it better this time.

My heart sank, because I knew exactly what was going to happen. She was going to say good-bye to me for the last time. We were too incompatible, she’d say, and she couldn’t be with somebody who refused to accept her religion, or at least accept that she believed it to be true and needed it to be a central part of her life.

I didn’t want to live through that farewell again, so I stomped on the imaginary accelerator in my mind, thrusting me forward in time, past the rest of the argument, past my feeble attempts to apologize, past Karen moving to Houston, faster and faster, until I hit my true time.

I was in Grandma’s apartment, and I sat down on her couch, a tear falling down my cheek. I wiped it away and knew I had messed up my chance to fix things with Karen.

Maybe I could take another run at it, moving back in time once more to find her and to not have the same argument. I knew I could do it, but it wasn’t the right thing to do. She was right that we really were incompatible at a very basic level. I’d be lying to her by trying to pretend otherwise, and that wasn’t any way to build a future together.

I glanced up, as if I could see through the ceiling at the spaceship high above, where Karen floated with her crewmates, racing around the globe at 25,000 miles per hour.

Chapter 9

Karen Anderson couldn’t help it. No matter how much NASA had prepared them to meet up with the Skywheel, when the Sagan finally caught up with the orbiting American space station and she could see it from the small cabin window, it amazed her.

She’d seen photos and news clips, of course, but that didn’t prepare her for the majesty of the station.

A decade earlier, the U.S. had decided to no longer continue funding the International Space Station. After its initial launch in 1998, the ISS was the jewel of space, built with the cooperation of Russia, the European Union, and many other nations. The old space station hadn’t aged well, though, and NASA started construction of the Skywheel years ago, rushing the past few years. The discovery of aliens on the moon’s far side had made its completion critical.

This time the U.S. was going at it alone.

“Pretty impressive, isn’t it?” asked Major Murray Thomson. Thomson was the commander of the Sagan. He’d been in space several times before, including once to help bring construction materials for the Skywheel.

“Amazing,” Karen said.

And it was. She looked back and stared again.

The station was a giant wheel, spinning around its central axis at three RPM. With the wheel being seventy-five feet across, that created an artificial gravity on the ring of about one-third that of Earth, twice that of the moon. The Skywheel could hold a crew of 106 people.

Today, there were about fifty on board. Several would be joining Karen on the trip to the moon. They would leave in three months. They needed the time for the technicians to finish constructing the Golden Luna, the ship they would take to the moon.

Until then, the Skywheel would be home.

Karen could see a shadow of her reflection in the window, and that of Major Thomson behind her. She suddenly felt self-conscious about her hair, and she turned and smiled at Thomson and used her hands to brush her hair back behind her shoulders.

“What’s it like on board?” she asked.

Thomson smiled back at her. He was floating in the tight capsule, only a few inches from where she also floated. She’d gotten used to the odd sensation that came with zero gravity and had stopped throwing up, which was a great relief.

They had told her, but she still hadn’t appreciated it, that free-fall feels like you’re falling from a high building, every second of every minute, falling nonstop. The sensation never stopped, but she was grateful it no longer seemed to make her vomit.

“It’s beautiful,” he answered. “Big, bright, and full of every comfort you could ever want. The sleeping quarters are on the rim of the wheel. Very comfy, with gravity pulling you down, so it feels much more natural than here.”

“I’m looking forward to that!” Karen laughed.

“The hub is also very large, but with no gravity. You can push off one edge and float over to the other side. It takes about twenty seconds.”

“What happens if you get stuck in the middle? There’s no way to move.”

Thomson grinned. “You always have some momentum, so eventually you’ll float to the other side.”

Major Thomson had been on the Skywheel for six months on a previous mission. Karen was glad he was going to accompany her to the moon. He had an air of confidence about him that she thought would be needed. One other crewmember would join them, and also two other scientists, to make a total of five travelers leaving the Sagan to live in the Skywheel.

Karen hoped the others were as easy to get along with as Thomson. She smiled again and looked at Thomson’s face, hard and chiseled, but with soft eyes and dimples when he smiled.

Thomson was a war hero, having fought the ground war in Syria. She remembered hearing about how he’d saved several members of his platoon, pulling them from danger without regard for his own safety. He had been on the news a lot back then, and she was a bit star-struck being on the same mission as him now.

“Are you okay, Karen?”

She shook her head and realized she’d been staring down at the deck below as she floated. She tried to shake off the feeling that she was way out of her league. NASA wouldn’t have asked her to come if she wasn’t the right person for the job.

Would they?

“I’m fine,” she answered. “Thanks. I think I might need a rest. It’s been quite a day.”

“Sure. Need a hand to get to your station?”

“No, I’m good.”

She left by pushing herself from a hand grip nearby and swam toward the back of the ship. What she really wanted was her church, but she’d go to her sleeping pod instead and pray in silence.

The sleeping pod looked like a giant car seat. She pulled herself into the pod and wrapped a seat belt and shoulder strap around herself to stop herself from floating away.

Nobody else was napping, but she’d been awake for more than sixteen hours, and she wasn’t needed to operate the ship, so it was no big deal for her to sleep.

She closed her eyes and imagined the Earth spinning below her. It was an even more amazing sight than the Skywheel, the home planet stretching out beneath her. It was easy to make out a hundred different places that she’d seen on maps, but it was completely different viewing it from 250 miles up. The globe seemed to spin visibly below as she’d watched, even though she knew it was her rocketing around the planet. It felt like she wasn’t moving at all and it was the Earth spinning.

Down there somewhere, David Abelman was taking photos.

“Are you thinking of me at all, David?” she wondered aloud.

How could he not think of her, at least occasionally?

It’d been six months since their fight, and Karen still couldn’t help feeling anger at him whenever she thought about it.

To David, science was everything. She knew better.

Science was critical, but no scientist in the world can explain why e = mc2. Nobody knew why quantum mechanics worked or why evolution selects for the members of a species that are most adaptable to change. David couldn’t tell her why an apple falling from a tree uses the same law of gravity that currently pulled on her to send her on her own orbit around the Earth.

Who decided those things, David?

He never had an answer to that, of course. He preferred to think that discovering natural laws was all that was needed. There was no need to explain how the laws were built in the first place.

Karen rubbed her eyes and yawned. God created the laws. What was so ridiculous about that?

Chapter 10

I ate some lunch and thought about what I had left to do before the funeral. Nothing seemed urgent, so I tried to think about memories of Grandma instead.

She was a kind woman, always rushing to get things done. I wondered if that was because of her experience in Auschwitz. That time scarred her for her entire life, especially when she was rescued but so many of her family members weren’t, having already been murdered.

Somehow, though, she not only survived, but she thrived. She had a daughter, my mother, and then she became my own surrogate mother.

She was never married, and once when she was worn to the bone from working all day, she let out one of the few secrets she ever told me.

“Never married, David. Never wanted to.” I must have looked puzzled at her, because she did have a child, of course. “None of your business how things happened, but just know that I loved your mother with all my heart. I loved her as much as I love you, but if it’d been my choice, I never would have borne her.”

“How did it happen, then?”

I think I was about fifteen when I asked her that, and her answer reminded me how little I knew about her life.

“I was raped.”

Those three words were all I ever found out about my heritage, and as soon as she said them, I felt a confusing shame come over me, as if it was somehow my fault. I went to hug her, but she stood and went to the bathroom. She stayed there for more than an hour, and the guilt grew in me, both for how my mother was conceived in the first place and for falling into this conversation with Grandma that was obviously so hard on her.

Even now, a decade later, it weighed on me. I finished my egg salad sandwich (which included Ariela Adelman’s secret ingredients of mustard and a pinch of sugar) while I thought more about my mother.

Her name was Molly. She was a big woman, quite obese. I hate saying that, but it’s true. I’ve seen a couple of photos that Grandma had of her, and she must have been close to 250 pounds.

My mother was another of my grandmother’s secrets, things she didn’t like to talk about. Almost certainly that was partly to do with how she was conceived, but there was something else I never figured out.

I find it odd to call her Mom, so I’m going to call her Molly. She died when I was five years old, and I don’t remember anything about her.

The few other things I know from Grandma: Molly was thirty-nine years old when I was born. She also was never married. Grandma never mentioned any steady boyfriends, so it’s a mystery how Molly got pregnant with me. I hoped it was a happier story than Grandma’s, but I have no idea.

Five years after I was born, Molly Abelman was rushing down the street, with me in tow, rushing to her mother, Ariela. There was urgency to the trip, because Molly was late for work and had to drop me off for the day. Grandma would babysit.

My mother worked at a factory that made automobile tires. I don’t know anything more. I don’t know what job she did there, what the name of the company was, whether she liked what she did or hated it… nothing.

She rushed, though, and… well, it’s not really a surprise, is it? She had a massive heart attack and died on the street.

Every once in a while I try to think back to that event. Why can’t I remember anything about it? Five is old enough to have that burned into my memory forever. At least that’s what should have happened. Now, though, the only images I have of my mother are vague yells and some thumps as she walked through our home.

I don’t remember ever having a hug from her, and one question had bothered me for many years: Did my mother love me?

If she had loved me, surely I would have retained some sense of that, even now. Wouldn’t I? I’d remember her holding me, lying beside me to comfort me if I was sick, playing games or going to the beach together. Why didn’t I remember any of that?

Thinking of it made me realize how little I knew of my entire family history.

Ariela had left me the family tree over on the kitchen table, and once we were past the funeral and the grieving, I planned to research some of my family, starting with my mother. I don’t know why I never googled her name before, but it was time to find out my heritage.

Then I snapped to attention.

Why would I bother searching online for my mother, when all I had to do was go back to when she was still alive?

After all, my dead grandmother was a working time machine.

I closed my eyes and forced myself to relax. It was getting faster each time to find the right way to meditate and find the secret area of my brain that allowed me to use the Shelljah magic.

Soon, I felt the now-familiar experience of taking control of my body as a passenger. I pressed the brake pedal, and time slowed to a halt. Pressing the imaginary reverse pedal moved my body backward, backward, faster and faster. Time travel was a magical science. I had a long journey, and as I concentrated more, my body ended up blitzing into the past, my life an unfocused stream of fractional images, bright and dark flashes, and in my gut I knew how long to keep going, even though I couldn’t really understand a damned thing I was seeing as the years scattered by.

It felt like intuition, knowing the right time to stop, and when I halted travel, the images morphed to real life again.

I felt light, small, almost fragile.

My body hadn’t yet reached its fifth birthday. The consciousness that controlled it was awkward, not always knowing how to do anything. I didn’t interfere, since the shock of being a child was overpowering. I felt both my twenty-five-year-old mind and my four-year-old mind at the same time. The younger self frightened me. I wasn’t sure he had any idea what he was doing.

It didn’t occur to me to look in a mirror to find out what I looked like. I didn’t have to. I was in my own body with my own set of memories and experiences, limited though they were. I’d looked in the mirror every day to brush my teeth, and those experiences were as real as any others. I knew exactly what I looked like because I was that four-year-old.

We were outside, a nice summer day. I had a red rubber ball with a blue stripe circled around it. It was about the size of an orange.

The ball felt clumsy in my hand. I threw it against the side of our home, and when it bounced off, I almost tripped with every step I took to recover the ball again. Over and over, I played the game, because it was one of the few things I could do for fun. I had no friends, because they all laughed at me for having such a fat pig for a mother.

I wanted to hug myself and tell little David everything would turn out all right. Eventually.

My adult self didn’t remember any of this. The memories of my childhood were gone, and even re-living them didn’t help me recall anything.

After about twenty minutes, the younger me grew tired. We were sweating and our T-shirt was wet.

“Oh.”

My younger self was worried, but I didn’t know why. He hung our head in shame and thought about peeing his pants, but thankfully he didn’t.

We were worried about sweating.

Everything was confusing. It was hot, we sweated. So what?

He turned our head to stare at the back door to our home. He was afraid to go in, but he had to find the bathroom or things would be a lot worse.

One step, then slowly, another. Little David kept his head bowed down. I wanted him to lift his head and smile, to realize childhood is a privilege that doesn’t last very long, but he carried a dark cloud around with him.

As much as I wanted to, I didn’t really like my younger self.

He was scared and beaten. It shocked me to realize the “beaten” part wasn’t about him being verbally knocked down. We had been abused physically, too. Many times.

We pushed onward and finally opened the back door. The house smelled like dirty laundry and rotten fruit.

“David.”

“Hello, Mommy. I have to—”

“Come here.”

“I have to pee.”

“I said come here!”

Molly Abelman was sitting on a couch in the living room watching some TV show I didn’t recognize. She had a cigarette hanging from the side of her mouth and three empty beer bottles on the table beside her.

I knew Little David wanted to do anything at all except go to our mother. The only thing that kept him moving forward was knowing what would happen if he disobeyed her.

“Yes, Mommy?”

“You were sweating again.”

“I’m sorry.”

Our legs were weak and Little David couldn’t help himself. He grabbed his crotch with one hand to help relieve the pressure of having to urinate.

“What are you doing grabbing yourself like that?”

“I have to pee.”

“Let go of yourself, right now!”

We reluctantly let go. Little David felt himself getting ready to cry. I tried to force him to raise his head and stand up to the crazy bitch on the couch, but he didn’t want anything to do with that, and I didn’t push hard.

“I need you to get me a beer.”

“Okay.”

We slinked back to the kitchen and found another Coors in the fridge. Once we handed it over, she shook her head and said, “You’re a disgusting pig.”

That was all it took. Little David burst into tears and then ran to the bathroom and slammed the door behind him. He immediately got scared that she would be mad about the slam and he panicked and hid in the corner behind the toilet. He knew there was a good chance she would beat him for that.

He wanted to get out.

To make matters worse, he had peed his pants.

There was no chance avoiding a beating for that.

He cried, and I cried with him.

After a few minutes, panic came over us. I knew I should take control of the body and get Little David out of this situation, but I was fighting an overwhelming and confusing anxiety. All I wanted was to get out of there.

So, I did.

With the little sense I retained, I floored my imaginary accelerator, to get me back to my true time as fast as possible.

Life flew by, a steady stream of random images, colors, and sensations. I felt sadness and laughter and love and hate and every other emotion fleeting through my mind like tiny stardust sprites. With each passing glimpse of time, I relaxed. I was safe from my mother.

Then everything went black.

For a long time, there were no sounds bombarding me, no images flashing onto my eyes, no feelings. Darkness. Nothingness.

That’s when I realized what I’d done. In my panic to get away, I’d pressed the reverse pedal in my mind instead of the forward pedal. I’d been traveling younger and younger, and now I was in a time before I’d been born.

As I figured out my mistake, a new set of images lit up my consciousness.

What the hell? I thought. How could that be?

I stopped pressing the pedal and let time slow to normal speed.

Without a second’s hesitation, my mind melded with the body I was riding. It wasn’t mine… but, it was.

My name was James Peller. I was fifty-two years old, a coal miner in West Virginia. It was now 1996, three years before “I” was born.

But the body I was in was mine, just as much as when I’d gone back to see Little David.

James Peller was a gruff man. We knew that and to be honest, we didn’t care. He was married but had few friends. There was Olav and Roger, but we only met them at the local bar to down a few after climbing out of the damned coal mine.

That mine was slowly killing us. Our lungs were filled with black crap and the doctors had given us only a couple more months to live.

Shelby was sitting beside us in a chair, knitting some damned fool thing. Probably another sweater. We kept telling her that we don’t like to wear fucking sweaters, but that didn’t stop her from making yet another one.

She looked old, much older than her forty-four years. Her hair was unkempt, and gray streaks ran through the brown locks. My own hair had thinned, but who gave a shit about that?

All of a sudden we started coughing. It got worse and worse, with us wheezing and waving our arms to try to get air. Shelby rushed to us and hit us with a fist on our back, but it didn’t help.

Maybe it was our time.

We grabbed the bed rails, shaking them, and barely noticed when a doctor ran inside. He put some kind of mask on my mouth and injected me with something.

Sleep took us from the coughing.

When we woke again, we were breathing fine. Shelby was asleep in her chair. The David part of me wondered why she stayed. I knew her life was hell with the James part of me. Fortunately for her, she would be free soon.

I was in a past life.

Living a past life? How’s that work?

Well, sometimes it turns out that science doesn’t have all the answers, yet.

A hundred years ago, no scientists had guessed DNA or genes existed, so they had no real clue how children could inherit blue eyes from their parents, but they took it on faith that the answer would come one day.

Two hundred years ago, the only known electricity was in lightning, which wasn’t very useful. Benjamin Franklin and others figured out how to generate their own electricity.

Science doesn’t have all the answers. Yet.

So, before this day, I would have laughed at people who claimed to remember previous lives. They never had the slightest proof.

Now, I have my own proof that past lives exist.

I didn’t much like the person I once was. James wasn’t nice to anybody, especially the woman who shared his bed; he was a drunken fool, and he was willing to fight anybody at the slightest provocation. He was angry a lot and had been his whole life.

I didn’t want to share this body anymore, so I decided to get out.

Carefully this time, I used the Shelljah to move into the future. I wanted out as quickly as I could, and it wasn’t very long before I was flying into the darkness between my lives.

The bright light when I was born shone briefly before I accelerated through my early years, past my teen troubles, and raced through to finally hit my true time, where I landed with a bit of a thud.

I checked my watch. I’d been gone for no time at all.

Grandma’s funeral was still scheduled for tomorrow.

Chapter 11

Later that evening, I sat in Grandma’s living room staring at some news broadcaster talking about the latest riots in New York City, the most recent battle in the Middle East, an earthquake in China, and a drought hitting Ethiopia the Red Cross was calling the worst disaster in Africa in twenty years.

It was all so depressing. It felt like I was surrounded by bad news, choked by it, and overriding it all was the body of Ariela Abelman, still lying at the funeral home waiting to be buried.

I thought about going to see her, but I knew that if I did I would end up feeling worse. Tomorrow was soon enough. She had planned a typical Jewish closed-casket ceremony. The funeral home had taken her from the hospital, and were preparing the service. If they needed anything, they had my phone number. I’d been clicking my phone to life to check for messages every few minutes, in case I somehow missed the chime of a call. Nothing.

Grandma would have been pleased with how smooth everything was going. Nothing left to chance.

It was so like her to be so precise and organized about her own funeral. As much as she sometimes drove me crazy with her attention to detail, it was a trait that had served her very well over her lifetime.

Somehow, I figured she’d learned those skills as a result of her time in the Nazi concentration camps. I walked to the dining room table and flipped again through all the material she had left me.

I kept being drawn back to the family tree. So much death in our family at the hands of Hitler and his crazies. The victims would have had a terrible death, the Zyklon B gas crawling over them, drowning them. They would try so hard to hold their breaths, but eventually they had to breathe in the poison. They knew they would die, but their bodies demanded something be pulled into their lungs.

I know I spent a lot of time feeling terrible about the six million Jews killed in the gas chambers, not to mention the blacks, the gays, and the many other groups Hitler decided weren’t fit to live.

While browsing through Grandma’s material, though, I also wondered at the book that talked about Shelljah. I couldn’t read a damned word of the Hebrew text, but maybe one day I would learn.

Clearly I needed to find out about Shelljah one way or the other.

I barely believed I had gone to a past life. As much as I wanted to trust that one day science would explain things, it felt more mystical as the twilight rolled over Minneapolis. The darkening of Grandma’s apartment seemed to wash away logic and science, making room for magic and miracles.

“Hogwash,” I said.

I closed the book and a thought hit me: If I had one past life, maybe I had one prior to that one, and one before that, and…

And ideas flooded my mind.

This was time travel in a way that nobody had ever thought of.

“Ariela Abelman, you were hiding such big secrets.”

Then I added, “Or did you even know about past lives? Maybe you never made the mistake I did and zoomed into the wrong direction?”

Across the table from me, I imagined her sitting there, a smug look on her face, challenging me to figure things out for myself.

Well, I doubted I’d ever know unless she left me some more concrete notes in the material I’d now managed to scatter all over the table.

I’d finished the last two beers Grandma had left in the fridge for me. It had been a long day, but I wasn’t tired at all.

Less than twenty-four hours before I would lose the ability to travel in time. Grandma’s burial was going to stop the magic.

I went back to the more comfortable chair in the living room and closed my eyes. It wasn’t long before I found the spot in my mind, and I was again in control of my reality.

With a few questions in my mind—if I was the one going crazy, and whether my plan had any chance of succeeding—I slammed onto the reverse pedal.

Immediately, the world started to rush past me in backward order. I again saw the flashes of light and darkness, the highs and the lows glancing by me.

I pressed harder and harder, and my life was a blur.

Soon, the darkness came and then the different light, the light from my prior life when I was James Peller. Without slowing, I remembered my new life and felt shame at the man I once was.

I tried to ignore Peller and slammed through his life, bits of pain and anger rushing through me like bullets. I never wanted to spend time re-living that life again. I’d already seen more of him than I wanted.

James Peller was born in 1920. When I rammed through that date, all went dark again, this time for a longer period, but then the light came back. I didn’t slow, but immediately knew my name was Louis Larrange, a French fur trader who spent much of his life exploring the northern part of Hudson Bay. The frozen wastelands were lonely but we had made a good living by trapping beavers and otters.

He was only thirty-two when he died, so my flashing through his life was quick.

Then came Peter Buttlesworth, a lawyer in London, England.

Michael Robinson, Benjamin Tosh, Mark Graves. The names and lives flew by faster and faster, as I grew closer to my destination. All my lives were men. All were Jewish. I don’t know why.

The journey lasted for what felt like hours. I grew tired of the names flying through me, each surrounded by a coat of memories I knew in detail, because I had lived every one of their lives.

The truth of past lives only made sense if each of us was actually endowed with a soul.

I didn’t like that thought, but I didn’t have any other explanation. The concept of a soul sounded like religious crap.

Finally, my personal time machine slowed and then halted. I had no way to explain why I stopped where I did, except that however the apparatus worked, it knew which body I needed to travel to in order to meet my demand.

The ground was baked clay. The sun beat down on me like a furnace, and I gasped at the heat. It was unexpected and gruesome.

My body was used to it, though. It moved on its own, looking for a lost sheep.

I was twenty-three and my body was old. In this time, nobody lived a long life. The sun and the work and the lack of food and water and the illnesses with no cure brought everyone an early death.

The valley around me was full of rolling hills to the east and stark landscapes to the west. The sheep was probably going to die.

I was Adlai, son of Asher.

I was a fisherman. My father was a sheep herder, and it was for his lost sheep I was searching. My father was soon to die at the ripe old age of forty-one. We didn’t care much if we actually found the sheep, but I had to do a cursory look. The lost animal was vital to my father, as the few sheep he owned were his only way to make money for food.

My clothing consisted of loose wraps and a cap for my head with rope holding it on, not that there was much wind to tear it away.

The area I stood in was both beautiful and terrifying. I was alone in the middle of nowhere, looking for a sheep I knew I would never find.

Part of me wanted desperately to get back to the river Jordan to fish. Right now, my livelihood was more important than my father’s.

The me that was riding this body soaked in every aspect of this ancient land.

I knew exactly where I was, since my ancient self knew.

I was in biblical Judea, not far from the city of Jericho. The journey I had planned for was starting to unfold along with my singular task: I was going to find Jesus Christ and kill him.