Stefan Bolz
The Traveler
Remember, as far as your travels take you,
You are always at home.
Originally Published by Samuel Peralta as part of The Time Travel Chronicles
1
They told me I couldn’t go into his workshop. They didn’t understand. They thought it would bring back too many memories. But there weren’t too many memories. There weren’t enough memories. Not nearly enough. I wanted to hold each one, put them in a jar and keep them with me so I could go back whenever I needed to. But instead, they began to drift away, however much I tried to hold on to them. There were painful ones, yes. But they were only from the time when he was in the hospital. Those were the ones I couldn’t get back to. How his face was fallen in, how his speech was slurred, how he grasped for things that weren’t there.
No. I wanted to go back further. I wanted to remember the Saturday mornings when we worked side by side in his shop. He was always building something. Always. The smoke from the welder filled the air; the blue arc illuminated the walls each time the welding rod connected with the steel. He told me never to look directly into it, to shield my eyes from its intense burning light. For my ninth birthday, he gave me a welding mask. He fitted it perfectly to my head and I didn’t take it off for the whole day. It was one of the fancier ones where you could lift the front cover up to look at the welding line and see if it was straight and contained enough filler metal to make a perfect weave bead.
The other gifts—a karaoke machine and Just Dance 4 for the Wii—were nice but they didn’t make my heart swell up. The welding mask made me an equal to him. Still an apprentice, yes, but equally capable of using some of the tools and equipment. My stepmom didn’t understand why I loved it so much. She couldn’t understand a lot of things.
My sister, who was much older than me, got married right around my twelfth birthday. My dad and I made her a bouquet of flowers for her wedding. He let me attach several of the flower petals to the top of the stems. I messed up a few and burned holes into the thin metal pieces. But he cut out new ones each time, and after the fourth one, I finally was able to attach it. Once the bouquet was done, I painted the petals in yellow and white and the stem in dark green.
My dad had a stroke three days after the wedding. He died one week later. That was two months ago. A few days before he passed away, I sat next to his bed in the hospital. My stepmom let me miss school. I think part of her knew that these were his final days. Whenever I could, I read to him. I was convinced that he was able to hear me. I read to him from the same book he had always read to me. I loved the Eloi. I hated the Morlocks. They scared me. Whenever he’d get to a scene in the book that had Morlocks in it, he would ask me if he should continue. I always said yes. I knew we had to go through the bad scenes, through the scary stuff, to get to the end. The time traveler had to endure it. And so should I.
It happened right after lunch on the fourth day of his hospital stay. I had almost reached the end, the part in the book where the traveler had come back to eighteenth-century London only to disappear again a few hours later. This time for good. First I saw one of his fingers move. After a while I realized that he was pointing at me. His skin was clammy and cold when I took his hands. There was no strength left in them. The hands that had built things, had held tools for all his life, the hands that had carried me through all of mine. His mouth opened. I took an ice cube from the tray and moistened his lips with it. He might have said something, I wasn’t sure. His mouth moved as if he wanted to form a word.
"Do you want to tell me something? Dad?"
I leaned over, my ear close to his mouth. There was nothing. No sound. No word. I felt silly all of a sudden. But something in him wouldn’t let go of me. There was a word on his lips. I tried to read it. It was like an ahhhh or maybe a duhhh. He seemed to repeat it over and over. Once I thought he said druhhh.
That day, I left the hospital defeated. I knew there was something he had wanted to tell me but I couldn’t make out the word. When he died a few days later, without ever lifting his finger again, I couldn’t comprehend that he was gone. I went back to school. My sister and her husband moved into our house. They had to sell their house right after my brother-in-law lost his job.
One evening during dinner, they started talking about my father’s things. They wanted to sell the tools and the equipment. I think it was my sister’s husband most of all who wanted to sell it. My sister just nodded. My stepmother was still too grief-stricken to oppose. I told them if they were going to sell his things, I would stop eating. They didn’t believe me. I made it without food for three days. On the fourth day, I collapsed during gym at school and went to the hospital. I was released a few days later. They didn’t sell my father’s things. They even let me go into the workshop.
The shop was in an old barn a bit further down from the house. The first few times I went there after his death, I sat at his welding station in the dark, listening to the silence, trying to feel if he was still here, if part of him was still around. The smell of his pipe tobacco and the damp coal in the forge lingered. I wasn’t able to stay for long. One day, I decided that it would be a good idea to straighten up the place. I had always been responsible for cleaning after we worked together. I swept the floor planks, making sure the metal sheathing around the welding station was clear of anything combustible. I straightened out the tools and cleaned the forging hammers with oil, then swept the two workbenches. I cleaned the shelf that had all the leftover parts like copper fittings, pieces of iron, steel rods, plates, and other items. I emptied the ash container in the forge, polished the anvils, and greased the spindles of the vices.
I had my own leather apron. It hung next to my father’s under a small shelf that had our gloves and welding masks on it. When I looked at it, I started to cry and couldn’t continue that day. I didn’t go back for a few days. One morning, I woke up thinking about him saying druhhh. I began to scribble the word on pieces of paper during class at school. ‘Draw’ was the closest I could come to making sense of it. Did my father, with his last word, tell me to start drawing?
That afternoon, I went back to the shop. I turned the light on, kindled a fire in the wood stove, and sat in the corner opposite the chimney. From there, I could see the whole shop. I had a large drawing pad and a pencil and began to sketch the room. First, I tried to get the right perspective and proportions. Then I added the chimney and the large workbenches. After that came the welding station, the forging area, the large shelf with the materials, the small old dresser that had been converted to hold small boxes of nuts, bolts, washers, rags, and smaller parts. From there I went to the tool carts, the other chairs, and the larger tools like the stand-up drill and belt grinder.
After a few hours, I was done. I hung the picture in my room where I could see it from my bed. I lay awake for most of that night. The moon rose around 11 pm and I took the drawing with me into my restless sleep. In my dream, the picture was made from charcoal from the forging oven. But it was washed out and almost unrecognizable. When I woke up again, my clock showed 1:45 am. Druhhh. Druhhh. Draw. I said the words out lout. Druwh. Drough. Drought. Dry. Draw. I looked at the drawing again. Drum. Drawl. Draw. Drawer. Drawer. Drawer.
DRAWER!
I sat up. Drawer. The moonlight on the wall was enough to illuminate the drawing. The old dresser. I’d never looked inside the drawers, hadn’t gotten to organizing them yet. I got out of bed, put on my thermal pants, a long-sleeved shirt, and a wool sweater. It had gotten cold during the last few days. The first flurries of snow had fallen yesterday. I went downstairs as quietly as I could and put on my boots. I left the house through the back door and walked along the silvery path toward the dark silhouette of the barn. My heart was pounding when I arrived. I didn’t want to turn the lights on so I grabbed a flashlight from the hook next to the door. I kindled a fire in the stove and stood in front of the dresser for a while. Part of me couldn’t wait to open the drawers and see what was in there. The other part wasn’t so sure. What if there was nothing? What if I was chasing a ghost? What if my dad had simply told me that he wanted water?
There was no point in stalling. I needed to know. I opened the first drawer. On the right side, an assortment of bolts of different lengths and widths was organized into sections, separated by narrow pieces of thin, dark wood. On the other side of the drawer were nuts and washers. Over time, the sizes had gotten mixed up and now it was just a mess of bits mingling together.
I should have taken better care of this, I thought. Instead, I’d let it get to this level of disorganization. The next drawer wasn’t as deep. It held a few pieces of sandpaper for the belt grinder. Nothing else. I closed it. Then I opened it again and looked closer. It wasn’t deep enough for the size of the drawer. I took out the sheets of sandpaper and placed them on top of the dresser. A false bottom. I could see it right away. There was a small gap between it and the back board of the drawer. I pulled it up. It dislodged easily.
The beam of my flashlight illuminated what looked like a spiral notebook. It was blackened from grease and metal dust and its corners were bent upward. Large parts of the spiral were missing. I carefully lifted it up. Below it lay what looked like a piece of metal sheathing. Maybe a square foot and a quarter of an inch in thickness. I took it in my hands, expecting its weight to be much more than it actually was. It felt like lead but without the weight. I tapped at it with my fingernail. The sound was similar to that of glass when touched with a metal object. Pling! I carefully laid it on the ground.
I went to the stove and added a few logs to the embers. The chill hadn’t left the room yet. I pulled a chair close, sat down, and opened the notebook. The first page, written in perfect pencil lettering, started with Table of Contents. Below that, and perfectly aligned according to its sections, it said:
1—Parts
1.1 Centrifugal Rotor
1.1.1 Core
1.1.2 Outer Ring
1.1.3 Connectors
1.2 Power Supply
1.2.1 Battery Compartment
1.2.2 Capacitor Board
1.3 Controls
1.3.1 Left Foot Pedal
1.3.2 Right Foot Pedal
1.3.3 Display
1.4 External Parts
1.4.1 Chassis
1.4.2 Faraday Cage
1.5 Traveler’s Chair
1.5.1 Head Rest and Neck Stabilizer
1.5.2 Seat and Back
2—Construction and Assembly
3—Setting Dates
4—Travel
5—Clothing and Accessories
6—Safety
7—The Traveler
What followed were twenty pages of neatly written text intertwined with drawings, sketches, and mathematical formulas. Then several pages with lists of materials needed. This list was separated into items we had in the shop and others that needed to be bought. The list had everything in it, from metal wire fencing to pieces of copper, from steel piping to Neodymium rare earth magnets that could be ordered through the mail.
The Construction and Assembly section described how to put it all together, piece by piece. I recognized my father’s writing—how he phrased certain sentences and how he began some of the lines with "Careful there!" He had used this phrase many times throughout his teachings.
"Careful there, don’t apply too much pressure on the welding rod. Let it be pulled into the steel rather than push it into the bead."
I could hear him as if he stood beside me, reading to me in his deep voice. I had to stop several times. During those moments, I felt both the pain over his loss and the love he had left behind.
I still had no idea what the finished product would be. Until I got to the end of the section. The drawing took up a whole page. It was detailed and seemed to be to scale. It took me all but two seconds to see what it was. One person could comfortably sit inside. The chassis was made from galvanized pipes. The cabin holding the traveler was surrounded by metal fencing. A faradic cage. There was an engine of sorts and two pedals, one for each foot, to control the machine.
Did he expect me to build this? He must have wanted to give it to me much later, maybe five or ten years from now. Surely he hadn’t expected to die so soon. I stared at the notebook for a while, then closed it carefully and placed it back into the drawer. I was cold all of a sudden. The fire must have gone out. "I’m sorry, Dad, but what you want me to do is impossible," I said into the silence. I listened for a moment, in case there was an answer. But the shop was quiet. When I left, the grey sky loomed overhead.
2
After that night, I didn’t set foot into the shop for a week. Instead, I glanced at it from the window of my room during the night—a dark shape against the slightly lighter background of the meadow behind it. An emptiness had spread through our house during that time. My stepmother was a ghost, busily moving from room to room, organizing my father’s belongings. My sister was consoling her but I could see that it was her who needed consoling more than anyone. She and my dad had had a difficult relationship. It didn’t help that when she was a teenager, I began to want to help him in his shop and therefore spent much more time with him than she ever did. Now I could see in her the regret of never wanting to listen to him when he spoke about the furniture he’d built or the iron gates and door hinges he had made.
I rarely went downstairs anymore except when I had to eat or do chores around the house. I spent most of the time up in my room, doing homework or looking at the shop from my window. When I lay in bed at night, my thoughts always went back to the notebook. Why did my father tell me about the drawer if he knew I would never be able to build the machine? The question kept me up at night and even my days were filled with trying to answer it. He had written the manual for me but it was clear he had intended to build it with me, not have me try it all by myself. In the hospital, he probably thought I should have it to remember him. But I didn’t want to remember him. Remembering him was too painful. I wanted to see him again. I wanted to feel his gentle touch on my shoulder when I worked on a project in the shop, hear his words of encouragement when I burned a hole into the steel or the welding rod got stuck in the bead.
I caught myself thinking about the items on the list and where to get them. A 12 Volt/700CCA car battery, the magnets, a six-by-six foot piece of metal fencing, a few copper connectors, about thirty feet of one-inch galvanized piping, a seat cushion (if needed), the display of an analog alarm clock and a few other things I could get at our hardware store. If I were to try to build it. Which I wouldn’t. But as much as I tried not to think about it, I couldn’t stop. I had forty two dollars and seven cents in my savings box. That would barely be enough to get the magnets. If I wanted to do this, I needed to get a job. But I didn’t want to get a job because I couldn’t possibly build the machine. I paced back and forth in my room, but this made me even more agitated than I already was. Eventually, I sat down on my bed and, just as I did sometimes, opened The Time Machine without any particular page in mind.
"I told some of you last Thursday of the principles of the Time Machine, and showed you the actual thing incomplete in the workshop. There it is now, a little travel worn, truly; and one of the ivory bars is cracked, and a brass rail bent; but the rest of it is sound enough. I expected to finish it on Friday, when the putting together was nearly done, I found that one of the nickel bars was exactly one inch too short, and this had to be re-made; so that the thing was not complete until this morning."
I closed the book again. Should I try it? I’m not sure what happened at that moment but something inside me gave way. I couldn’t hold out any longer. I guess the pain over not being with him was greater than the fear of building a machine that would, in the end, be just that—a machine with no purpose but to have made a fool out of me. I got dressed and went downstairs.
"Where you going?" I heard my stepmother call from the living room.
"I’ll be right back. Just going out to the shop."
I’m sure she didn’t want me to go. It was almost ten o’clock at night and tomorrow was a school day. But she couldn’t forbid it either. I felt for her at that moment. Her loss was mine and while I stood at the entrance door, we were joined in our grief over whom we had loved the most in this world.
The shop was cold. Freezing. I could see my breath when I turned the lights on. I kindled a fire and warmed my hands for a while. It would take a half hour for the room to become comfortable. Better get to work. I decided to clear one half of the shop to have an area where I could place all the needed parts. That way, I could see what was missing and add to it without losing a sense of where everything was. I also wanted to get an inventory of what tools I might need so that I could move the rest to the opposite wall.
It occurred to me that the notebook didn’t mention any finishing work on the metal. No metal rasp to soften the edges and joists, no steel wool to smooth out the welding lines. My dad was never about appearances. It didn’t interest him. He always said that appearances hide the truth behind them. In everything. I never understood this until much later. Whenever we spoke about our book, my dad would give me one or two items from his philosophy about time. Like the Traveler in the book, he would speak with great conviction, sucking on his pipe once in a while to give me time to think about what he had just told me.
"It only appears," he would begin, "that we are bound to three dimensions and that the fourth—time itself—is a given and cannot be changed. I don’t accept that. I don’t believe that. And neither should you."
I loved listening to him too much to interrupt him, even though I understood but a small portion of what he told me back then.
"Time travel is a constant. We are always traveling through time. Right now, at this very moment, we are traveling through time. Otherwise we would be frozen in that very instant and no longer exist. We can only be here if we move through time. Who says that we cannot accelerate the speed of travel? And if one object moves forward in time and the rest doesn’t, the object will disappear. Just like if you and I would have a race, and you, because you are much faster than me, would move ahead and eventually be gone from my field of vision. You would not occupy the same moment with me anymore."
I moved the belt sander and band saw all the way to the wall next to the door. Both machines were heavy and it took me a long time, sitting on the floor and pushing them, inch by inch, with my feet. I cleared the area of all the leftover piping and metal pieces and moved them toward the wall as well. Then I swept one more time. I used a piece of charcoal from the forge and drew a square with four equal parts inside. One was dedicated to the centrifugal rotor, one to the battery compartment and controls, the third to the chassis, and the fourth to the rest—the seat, the display, and other miscellaneous parts. For the next three hours, I arranged what I found in the shop and applied it to the sections. I thought we had more than we actually did but at the end of the night, I had a list with tools and items I needed to get.
After school the next day I went to the hardware store. Paul McGuiness, the owner, knew me from the countless times I had accompanied my father and, later on, was sent on errands to get parts for the shop.
"How are you doing, kiddo?" he asked.
"I’m okay," I replied. “I think.”
Paul had cried at my dad’s funeral. He had known him since they went to school together forty years ago.
"What you got?" Paul finally asked me.
I gave him the list with items. He looked it over.
"You sure this is right?" he said. "What’s this gonna be after it’s done?"
I hesitated. He looked at me for a while over his reading glasses. Then he wordlessly got up and began to collect the material.
"I actually just wanted to see how much it all costs," I said. "I don’t have the money right now."
"Your dad had store credit," he replied as he added up the items at the register. The amount came out to $134.45. "It was a bit more than what this comes to so I’m adding a few packs of WL-20 welding rod. I think you might need them."
"Thank you," I said.
"How are you gonna get the stuff home?"
I hadn’t thought about it. It didn’t even occur to me. I had some space in my backpack but that wasn’t nearly enough.
"Wait here a moment," Paul said.
When he came back a few minutes later, he was wearing his jacket and held his car keys in his hand. "I’ll drive you. There are a few eight-foot, one-inch pipes outside as well."
We left the store. He turned the sign to closed and locked the door. I helped him load the piping onto the truck and we drove off.
"Are you doing okay in school?" he asked.
"Yes."
"You were always a good student. Your dad told me. He said that one day you’d be an engineer and build large and beautiful things. But for that you’ll have to stay a good student. I know these are tough times and if you can’t stand it at home or somethin', you’re always welcome to do your homework in the store."
"Thanks," I replied. I smiled at him briefly. He was wiping his face the whole ride to my house. I didn’t say anything, didn’t know what to say. When we got there, we unloaded the parts and leaned everything along the outside wall of the barn. When he left and drove past the house, my stepmother talked to him for a few minutes. Then he drove off. My stepmom waved to me. I waved back. She disappeared into the house.
3
When we had dinner that night, my stepmother asked me if I wanted to earn some extra money doing minor chores at Mr. McGuiness’s store. He could use a hand. My eyes must have lit up at that moment because my stepmom smiled at me for the first time in a while. I’m sure she didn’t know what to do with me other than to tell me not to set the shop on fire when using the welding equipment. I’m sure she was glad I would have some supervision in the afternoons.
I started at Paul’s store a few days later. We agreed on minimum wage. I thought it was more than fair. I wasn’t officially old enough to work but he said he’d give me cash every week. I had a few more costly items on my list, including the battery, the magnets, and the 50 Amp wire. Paul told me that he could help me with the wire and the connectors and would give them to me at wholesale.
From then on, every day after school, I walked straight to Paul’s store. I was able to do most of my homework during homeroom and worked from three to six in the afternoon. Afterward, I went home, ate, and went straight out to the shop. During that time, around the beginning of December, I began to build the chassis. The galvanized pipes needed to be cut to length and welded together according to the drawings. It was difficult without a second person there but I made a contraption with a few sandbags from outside to hold the pipes in place while I welded them together. I made good progress and after a week, I was mostly done.
Then I realized something: Were I to leave the machine in this part of the shop—and assuming that I’d successfully travel back in time—I would end up right on top of the belt sander. There was no place in the shop where I could position the machine without creating chaos the moment I landed. I would have to move it to a place where it wouldn’t bother anybody. Behind the barn, and accessible through a door, there was a storage area. It was freezing cold in there but there was enough space to fit the machine without having to disturb anything. I decided to build the individual components in the main shop and put everything together next door. But the chassis was already bigger than the relatively narrow door. I’d have to go outside through the double doors and around back to the sliding door of the storage area.
The other problem was the weight of the individual parts. The rotor, once the magnets were attached, would probably be really heavy. The same for the chassis. I needed something to help move the components. I found a palette that seemed mostly intact, and a rusty, beat-up shopping cart in one corner of the storage room. I took the wheels off and mounted them onto the palette. The wheels were rusty but sufficient.
That Friday evening, I moved the chassis onto the palette. It was barely big enough to hold it. On Saturday morning, I worked at the store and went home with seventy-two dollars and fifty cents and a 50 Amp wire. Paul had subtracted the seventy-eight dollars for the wire, purchased at wholesale price, from the one-hundred and fifty dollars and fifty cents I had made during that week. The seventy-two dollars and fifty cents wasn’t enough for either the battery or the magnets. It would probably take me an additional three weeks to come up with the money. That would put the completion date right before Christmas. I thought about asking my stepmom if she’d order the magnets for me in exchange for the money. But I decided to wait until I actually had the money in hand. The battery I could get at the car parts store in town.
If the chassis was fairly easy to weld together, the centrifugal rotor was a different story. The instructions talked about forging a three-dimensional blade, not unlike a fan blade, out of the plate I had found in the drawer. I had never done anything like it. I was afraid I would burn out the material and render it useless. The magnets were to be placed along a semi-circular shape that was open at the top. The fan blade would then be centered inside the magnets. "If done correctly, the magnets should hold the blade in place without any further assistance," it said in the instructions. If done correctly. I began to doubt my ability to do this. The chassis was crude work. I had welded pipes together many times before. But this wasn’t a task for an apprentice. It needed the hand of a master. Someone like my dad.
For the next few days, I couldn’t make myself light the forge and begin. Instead, I sat in the shop unable to do anything. I wasn’t ready. I shouldn’t have started. I simply couldn’t do it. Even Paul noticed my change of mood and asked me a few times if everything was all right. I nodded each time, certain he wasn’t able to help me.
"You know, your dad thought very highly of you," he said one day while we moved bags of salt from the back to a spot near the front door of the store. "And I don’t mean only as a person. He spoke highly of you as an apprentice. Her heart is in the right place, he said. She can figure anything out. The more challenging, the better for her."
"He must not have known what I can or cannot do," I replied.
"Do you really believe that?" Paul asked.
"What do you mean?"
"Do you think it likely that a master blacksmith of nearly forty years does not know what his apprentice can or cannot do? Or is it more likely that he knows precisely what your limitations are and how to overcome them?"
I wanted to say, "Yes, it is likely. And not only is it likely, it’s true. He doesn’t know my limitations. Only I know them." But I didn’t say anything, mostly because I didn’t want to offend Paul, knowing of his deep friendship with my father.
"A master only becomes one through the very mastering of what he was not able to master before. Otherwise anyone can call himself that. The taller the task, the further the learning carries you."
When he placed the last bag of salt onto the stack of other bags next to the door, he stretched his back and wiped his hands on his pants. "If your dad thought you could do it, I’m sure you can. Whether it’s easy or not, doesn’t matter, does it? His confidence in you should be enough to erase the doubt in your heart."
Paul sent me home two hours early that day. He assured me at the door that I would still get paid for the time. I went home, emptied the dishwasher, and helped my stepmom put away groceries.
"So what are you doing out there in the shop every day?" she asked.
I stopped for a moment and looked straight at her. I could almost see the cloak of sadness surrounding her.
"I’m building a time machine so I can go back and talk to Dad."
She started to cry. I didn’t know what else I could have told her except the truth. I made tea in a thermos and brought a couple of apples and a jar of peanut butter with me to the shop.
Then I lit the forge.
4
I worked for seven hours straight. In the end, I couldn’t feel my shoulders and lifting the thermos seemed an impossible task. I left it in the shop that night. As I lay in bed, I could still feel the heat of the scorching coals in my face; the smell of the thick leather gloves was still on my hands. I took the noise of hammer on steel with me to my dreams. I’m coming to you, Dad. I’ll see you soon. I’ll see you very soon.
I went back to the store the next day after school. I was tired and sore but I didn’t want to miss more than the two hours from yesterday. Paul had made hot cocoa in his tiny little kitchen. It was only three in the afternoon but the sky had darkened already. A few flurries of snow had fallen. He asked me how it went last night and I gave him the short answer. "Good," I said, hoping he wouldn’t detect the insecurity in my voice. I didn’t really know how it went. I’d finished the task but I had no idea what the outcome would be. I’d basically put together parts with no way of knowing how it all would turn out.
We put up Christmas lights around the bay window, which was just me handing Paul the individual string lights and, at the same time, holding the ladder so he wouldn’t fall over. We’d been working quietly for a while, only interrupted by a few questions he asked and me giving him very short answers, when he stopped and turned toward me.
"May I ask you another question?" he said.
"Sure," I replied.
"You know I’ll help you in any way I can, right?"
"Yes. Thank you."
"I owe it to your father. But not only that. I think you’re a bright kid and…you’ve been through a lot…with your mom and now your dad. My question is…"
I saw that he was looking for the right words to use. Part of me wished he would stop there and not say anything.
"Forgive me but…what are you building?"
I didn’t answer for a while and Paul didn’t say anything either. I think he wasn’t sure if he should have asked. When my stepmom asked before, I didn’t think about it much. Maybe it was the way he asked. His tone of voice was kind and genuinely concerned. Up until now, I hadn’t questioned what I was doing. I’d only questioned my ability, not the fact that I was doing it. I had followed the instructions from the notebook blindly. His question stirred something in me—something I didn’t think about before. The last couple of weeks, I was too busy going forward and the task itself had blotted out the purpose of it. What was I doing? Did I truly believe it possible to build a machine that would bring me back to my father? To tell Paul the truth seemed silly all of a sudden. And in saying it out loud to him I would expose the lie and realize that there was nothing on the other end of this, that I had sent myself on a fool’s errand. I couldn’t stop the tears from coming. Pain suddenly washed over me. My wish to see my father again had made me blind to the reality of it.
Paul sat down next to me and held me. I couldn’t control my tears anymore and sobbed into his arm. It was as if the flood gates had opened. I had never felt pain so deeply before. I thought about my father and my mother and each time I thought it was over, I started again. Paul didn’t say anything. He knew this was a necessary evil, that I needed to cleanse myself and face my loss head-on. After what seemed like a very long time, I let go of him and he handed me a box of tissues. I told him about the hospital and what my father had said to me. At least what I thought he’d said to me. I told him about the drawer and the notebook and the machine and while I did that, I saw the sadness in Paul’s eyes. It occurred to me at that moment that, throughout my own grief, I had never thought about his.
"I don’t know what the right answer is," he said after a while. "It’s completely up to you whether or not you want to finish it."
"I want to finish it." I was surprised by my answer. As soon as I said it, I knew it was the truth. I wanted to finish what I had started. "Can you order the magnets if I give you the money?"
"Of course," Paul said.
"I don’t want to order them before I have all the money."
"Okay. Let me know when and I’ll do it."
When I went to the shop that evening, I lit a fire in the stove and filled two of the galvanized pipes with sand. The notes suggested using sand inside the pipes and then sealing them off so they could be bent into a circular shape without breaking. Once that was done, I drilled twelve holes in each one at equal distance to each other and on both sides of the pipe. The magnets would be attached to them. The pipes would then be welded to the back of the chassis.
By the end of the following week, I had finished the controls, battery compartment with connectors, and the seat with head rest and neck stabilizer. I also made another one-hundred and fifty dollars and fifty cents. Paul kept the money and ordered the magnets. They arrived the next day and I mounted them to the outer ring of the centrifugal rotor.
All that was left to do was to install the battery and work the wire fencing into a cone-like shape, not unlike that of a pilot’s cabin. It would cover the upper part of the traveler’s seat like a cage. I brought the rotor out back. The storage area was freezing. I was wearing fingerless gloves and within ten minutes in there, I couldn’t feel my fingertips and had to go back to the shop to stand in front of the stove. The light wasn’t great either and I had to wear my head lamp all the time. When I finally set the rotor into the center of the magnetic field, I didn’t expect it to hold. The shape I had forged wasn’t perfect, rudimentary at best. But when I very slowly let go of it, the rotor held its position in the center of the magnetic circle.
I welded the hinges onto the cabin top and connected them to the chassis. To get into the seat, one had to move one side of the cage up and climb inside. It could then be closed from the inside. But I yet had to climb into the cabin. I had thought about it a few times but I never did.
That Friday after school, I went to the store to work. It was very busy in there. I never realized how many people buy Christmas gifts in a hardware store, but there were a lot of sons and daughters who were there with their mothers buying last minute gifts for their dads. They were buying power drills and wrench sets and multi-function tools.
I don’t remember ever having felt sorry for myself up until that day. I was angry at them for buying gifts that were so cheaply made. My dad always told me that the tools one uses should reflect the value of what you’re making. I don’t think he ever bought a cheap tool in his life. In my mind, they were buying those gifts because they didn’t know what else to give. I could have come up with a dozen items to buy for my father that day. He needed a new handkerchief. His old one had holes in it from being washed so many times that the fabric had thinned out. He could use a couple of cans of Worker’s Miracle heavy-duty hand cream because the skin on his hands would crack periodically. So much so that he sometimes slept with gloves on, his hands thickly covered with cream. There were those thermal socks he really liked, and he could always use a new pair of leather gloves. He was always wearing his until they would literally fall off his hands during work.
I didn’t realize that tears were running down my face until Paul gently put his hand on my shoulder.
"You okay?" he said.
"Yeah." I wiped my face quickly and returned to the shelf I was stacking at the moment. We had gotten a delivery of Christmas lights that day and I was only halfway done moving them onto the display shelf.
When Paul gave me my weekly pay, I went to the car parts store and got the battery. I didn’t think of how heavy it would be. I thought about asking Paul to drive me but I felt like I was asking too much of him already. He had helped me more than I could ever pay him back for. It was a two-mile walk home and thick snowflakes had begun to fall onto the quiet street.
My thoughts were all over the place and I noticed a sting of fear creeping up inside me. As the moment of truth approached, I didn’t have much left to hide behind. Eventually I would have to climb into that seat and turn on the switch. I tried to avoid thinking any further than that. There was no backup plan. It would either work or it wouldn’t. I couldn’t imagine just going on with my life if it didn’t work. I had no idea what I would do. Everything else aside, working on the machine for the last two months had given me a purpose, had prolonged my father’s life somehow. I didn’t want this to end, didn’t want to face the possibility that turning on that rusty old switch I had installed, as per his instructions, would do absolutely nothing.
As disheartened as I was that evening, I installed the battery and connected it via the 50 Amp wire to the capacitor. There were only a few pages left in the notebook. They mostly had to do with safety, like not touching the cage surrounding the traveler’s cabin when turning on the switch, or bracing for impact when the charge hit the cage. The last chapter was called The Traveler. I’m not sure why I hadn’t read that one yet. I felt I needed to wait until I’d completed the assembly of the machine.
The machine. As it stood there in the dark, illuminated only by the light of my head lamp, it felt dead. Like a randomly assembled collage of lifeless pieces. Usually whenever I built something, I felt pride and a sense of accomplishment. Not this time. I felt empty. I left the shop at 10:30 PM. My stepmother was still watching TV in the living room. I put hot water on the stove for tea and sat down next to her. She moved the bowl of chips between us and I ate a few.
"I’m sorry," she said. "I’m sorry I couldn’t be there for you more."
I saw that she was crying. It wasn’t loud or anything. She didn’t even make a sound.
"I was so wrapped up in my own grief that I forgot yours."
I didn’t tell her that I’d had thought the same about her a few days ago.
"You’ve known your dad much longer than I did. Well, not much longer, but a few years at least. And I know you loved him. Loved him so very much."
I didn’t say anything in return. I don’t know why. I wanted to, but the words wouldn’t come out. I wanted to tell her that I was sorry too, that I knew it wasn’t easy for her and that, even though I had known him longer, she’d been married to him for eight years. That had to count for something. I went to bed and cried for a while.
Then I opened the notebook and began to read the last chapter.
The Traveler
The Traveler is an essential part of the machine. Without it, the machine will not function properly. Assembling the machine is one thing. Bringing it to life is another. The Traveler must know at all times where she wants to end up if she ever hopes to set it in motion. She must have a clear understanding of the consequences of her travels. To that effect, when travelling to the past, she should choose a destination time and date that is most likely not visited by her own self at the same moment. Much thought has been given to the paradox of meeting one’s self within the same moment in time. To avoid complication, it is suggested that the Traveler journey to a point of least impact for herself and others.
One single moment can change a person’s life and stir it onto a different path altogether. The Traveler must exercise the greatest caution to not set off a chain of events she cannot foresee. The gentle traveler, kind in thought and treading lightly on the path she is on, yields the biggest chance of a favorable outcome.
It is at the Traveler’s discretion to bring her affairs in order before the outset of the journey and all I ask for myself is for her to burn this notebook to cancel out the possibility of someone other than herself recreating the machine.
It is my sincere hope that I have taught her enough to prepare her for whatever is to come. She should always remember that however far she travels, she is always at home.
Once I finished reading, I started again from the beginning. The Traveler is an essential part of the machine. I had no idea what that meant. I closed the notebook and placed it on my nightstand. Then I shut off the light. I thought about going to the store in the morning to say goodbye to Paul. But I didn’t know how he would react, so I decided not to. I also didn’t want to say anything to my stepmom. "Remember that time machine I had told you about? I’m about to use it and I won’t be coming back."
I fell into a deep sleep. In my dream, I forged a mask of iron that resembled my father’s face. I tried to make it speak to me but it stayed motionless. He’s gone, was the first thought I had when I woke up the next morning. He’s gone and you’ll never see him again.
5
The snow lay heavy on the tall pines, their lower branches almost touching the ground from the weight. I had to shovel a path to the shop. I saw my sister’s husband cleaning off the front stoop and clearing a walkway to the garage. We nodded at each other. I never spoke to him much. My sister and he lived in a completely different world. For them it was all about Christmas decorations and holiday cards and filling stocking stuffers. They wanted to make this year special to keep my dad’s spirit alive through the holidays. I found myself thinking that was a nice sentiment but I couldn’t bring myself to admit it to them.
I made a small fire in the woodstove, if for nothing else than to burn the notebook. I didn’t really want to burn it. It was filled with memories and seemed the last remaining document involving my dad that meant something. I sat in front of the stove for a while, at one point thinking that I should have made copies and hid them somewhere. Just in case. Eventually I opened the fire door and tossed the notebook into the flames. I’d never thought of myself as brave. I think that moment was the first time. Brave or stupid. It couldn’t be helped. Some things you can postpone only for so long.
I opened the door to the storage area. The light came through a few gaps in the siding and illuminated the machine enough to see its contours. I walked around it, inspecting the chassis like a pilot checking her airplane before take-off. Then I climbed into the seat. It was cold but surprisingly comfortable. I had never thought about where to travel other than into the past. According to the notebook, the machine did not travel automatically to a predetermined point in time. After activating it, I needed to use the pedals to move. Left for the past, right for the future. The display of the old alarm clock was supposed to give me an idea where I was at any given point in time. So far so good. I closed the cabin top over my head. The metal fencing allowed me to see out with almost no interruption in my visual field. Just don’t touch it, I thought to myself.
I had mounted the on/off switch to the right side of the alarm clock display. It was a basic one-way toggle switch. It seemed too simple, too rudimentary a device to control my travel through time. As I sat there, I became aware of my sweaty palms, despite the cold. I didn’t want to think about the notion that the switch would do nothing; that it wouldn’t jumpstart the machine, and me, into a different time. I felt a wave of nausea creep up inside me. All this time, I had held on to the hope of this moment and now that it was here, I was paralyzed and unable to move my arm and flip it.
"Dad, help me," I said into the quiet. "Please."
There was no answer. Of course there was no answer. Did I really expect one? I stretched out my hand. My fingerless gloves were worn and smudged with grease. My fingernails were dirty. I had stopped cleaning them a few weeks ago. The dust of the forge had settled deep into my skin. I touched the tip of the switch, applied a little bit of pressure, not quite enough to move the lever. I breathed in and out once more and flipped the switch. Except the echoing sound of the switch itself, there was nothing. The battery should have released electrical current into the large capacitor and from there, a charge should have jumped up and over the top of the cabin to the back where the centrifugal rotor was installed.
So silly, I thought. Did I really think this would work? I sat there for a while. The knot in my stomach slowly grew. The feeling of failure was a thin blanket over the truth—the realization that I had spent the last six weeks trying to avoid the unavoidable. That this was a well-meant gift from my father to occupy my mind and get through the hardest part of the grieving process. It had worked. Up until now. The tears blurred my vision. It was as if the ground below me gave way and I’d dropped into a dark nothing. The pain, as excruciating as it was when I had felt it a few weeks ago, was so powerful now that I keeled over in my seat. I opened my mouth but no sound escaped it. I couldn’t breathe or form words or even thoughts except the one that I would never see my dad again. Ever. That he was gone and I had no way of feeling his hand on my shoulder or him ruffling my hair.
I began to moan. It seemed to help with the pain. My moans became louder. I saw my hands holding the bars of the seat on either side. I didn’t feel the cold of the pipes beneath my fingers. And when I could not hold it in any longer, I screamed. It was as if all my pain, my heartache, and the loss of my father’s love, my father’s big love, was in that scream. My voice was raw and I let it swell to a high-pitched sound while everything poured out of me and into the world. At that moment, it was as if he had called me and I had answered…
The blue spark was blinding, and even though it was brief, I couldn’t see anything for a few seconds. It was followed by the sound of the arc—the moment the welding rod connected with the steel. It obliterated my scream for an instant. A second spark followed. I could see that it came from the front where the battery compartment was installed.
And then, through the blur that was my tears, I saw the charge leave the capacitor and rip across the top of the cabin to the back. I felt my hair standing up in all directions. A snapping sound was followed by a deep humming sound. The light in the storage room was suddenly so bright that I had to close my eyes. When I opened them again, the walls of the shed were bathed in golden light. The machine was activated.
When I lifted my left foot, it shook uncontrollably. But I was afraid the activation was only temporary and I wanted to go back as fast as I could. I put my foot onto the pedal and applied the tiniest amount of pressure. The alarm clock display moved. First, it was only a few minutes. Then a dozen and, next, an hour. I took my foot off the pedal. The display moved another hour before it stopped. Saturday, December 22nd, 3:08AM. I didn’t see anything different in the shed. The light was as bright as before. I pushed the pedal down again. The display went back a few more hours and into Friday the 21st. I increased pressure and skipped three days at once before I slowed down again.
Gently, I reminded myself.
I figured it would be best to go back to a weekday morning, maybe three months ago. I would be at school then and my dad would most likely be in his shop. I could tell him that I had come home from school earlier and he wouldn’t get suspicious, especially if I came in through the main front door. I pushed the pedal down again, this time a little harder. The days became a week, then two and three. I slowed down again, applied only minimal pressure until I came to September 14th. I stopped at 10:52AM. For a moment, I wasn’t sure whether to turn the machine off or not. I decided to leave it on. Other than someone actually stepping into the shed, nobody from the outside would notice it was there.
I moved the cabin top to the side and climbed out. I tried to look at the centrifugal rotor but the light was too intense. I would need a welding mask to be able to see it. I left through the back door and was hit by a breeze of warm air. The snow was gone. The trees had not even started to yellow. My mittens. I’d completely forgotten to take off my winter clothes. I decided to leave my gloves, wool cap, and jacket next to the door of the shed. I still felt a bit overdressed.
My heart was pounding as I walked around the barn to the front door. I felt like I had sawdust in my mouth. I heard the metallic banging sound of a hammer on steel before I reached the door. I couldn’t remember having ever heard something that made me happier. I opened the door and stepped inside.
He stood next to the forge, a large hammer in his hand, wearing his leather apron and a short-sleeve shirt. He saw me and without stopping, he said, "What are you doing here so early?"
I couldn’t answer. I tried to smile but my face muscles didn’t follow my order. They began to twitch suddenly.
"Oh, Dad," was all I could whisper before I ran to him and held him in my arms. I couldn’t stop the tears from coming. I didn’t want to cry. I didn’t want to make him suspicious that this was anything other than an early dismissal from school and me being happy to see him.
"There, there," he said. "What’s the matter?"
He placed the hammer on the side of the forge.
"You okay?"
For a long time I couldn’t say anything.
"Yes," I said eventually. "I’m okay. I just wanted to say hi and see how you’re doing."
"I’m doing fine. But I need to get different coal. This one burns too dirty. Can you smell it?"
"Yeah," I said, suddenly happy over the sulfury smell in the shop.
"Is everything all right? You seem upset."
"I’m okay. Just missed you, that’s all."
"Okay. Then let me get this formed before it cools down too much."
"Okay," I said. "Sounds good."
He picked up the hammer again and pushed the metal piece he was working on back into the embers.
"See you later," I said.
"Yep. See you later."
I left the barn with the sound of the hammer ringing in my ears. As I walked around back, I felt lighter, as if a burden had been lifted from me. When I looked through the dirt-smudged window, I saw my father stop hammering for a moment. As if he’d just thought of something. Then he shook his head and continued.
I stood behind the storage shed for a few minutes and let the sun warm my face. Then I entered, picked up my gloves, jacket, and wool cap and climbed into the machine. I closed the cabin top and began to push the right pedal down. The days on the display passed by. When it moved into December, I slowed down. I don’t know what had changed, but I wasn’t sad anymore. Maybe it was knowing that I could visit him whenever I wanted. Or maybe it was good enough to see him doing something he had loved so much.
My eyes were fixed on the display. I felt the pedal beneath my right foot, the pressure of the forward motion against my leg. When December 22nd approached, something in me clicked. The Traveler must exercise the greatest caution to not set off a chain of events she cannot foresee. I realized that he must have known, that he must have thought this encounter to be too strange to have been a normal occurrence. Did my visit, as brief as it was, change his outlook in any way?
And while I pondered the ever paradoxical nature of travelling through time, I knew, suddenly and unmistakably, what he had said back in the hospital room. He didn’t say, "Draw." Nor did he say, "Drawer." It sounded like it because those were the only words I could think of at that moment. No. It wasn’t druh, it was trah. It was the way he pronounced the ‘a’ differently. More like an uh. He must have known that I had built the machine and came back to him.
It wasn’t drawer. It was traveler.
Remember, as far as your travels take you,
You are always at home.
Originally Published by Samuel Peralta as part of The Time Travel Chronicles
1
They told me I couldn’t go into his workshop. They didn’t understand. They thought it would bring back too many memories. But there weren’t too many memories. There weren’t enough memories. Not nearly enough. I wanted to hold each one, put them in a jar and keep them with me so I could go back whenever I needed to. But instead, they began to drift away, however much I tried to hold on to them. There were painful ones, yes. But they were only from the time when he was in the hospital. Those were the ones I couldn’t get back to. How his face was fallen in, how his speech was slurred, how he grasped for things that weren’t there.
No. I wanted to go back further. I wanted to remember the Saturday mornings when we worked side by side in his shop. He was always building something. Always. The smoke from the welder filled the air; the blue arc illuminated the walls each time the welding rod connected with the steel. He told me never to look directly into it, to shield my eyes from its intense burning light. For my ninth birthday, he gave me a welding mask. He fitted it perfectly to my head and I didn’t take it off for the whole day. It was one of the fancier ones where you could lift the front cover up to look at the welding line and see if it was straight and contained enough filler metal to make a perfect weave bead.
The other gifts—a karaoke machine and Just Dance 4 for the Wii—were nice but they didn’t make my heart swell up. The welding mask made me an equal to him. Still an apprentice, yes, but equally capable of using some of the tools and equipment. My stepmom didn’t understand why I loved it so much. She couldn’t understand a lot of things.
My sister, who was much older than me, got married right around my twelfth birthday. My dad and I made her a bouquet of flowers for her wedding. He let me attach several of the flower petals to the top of the stems. I messed up a few and burned holes into the thin metal pieces. But he cut out new ones each time, and after the fourth one, I finally was able to attach it. Once the bouquet was done, I painted the petals in yellow and white and the stem in dark green.
My dad had a stroke three days after the wedding. He died one week later. That was two months ago. A few days before he passed away, I sat next to his bed in the hospital. My stepmom let me miss school. I think part of her knew that these were his final days. Whenever I could, I read to him. I was convinced that he was able to hear me. I read to him from the same book he had always read to me. I loved the Eloi. I hated the Morlocks. They scared me. Whenever he’d get to a scene in the book that had Morlocks in it, he would ask me if he should continue. I always said yes. I knew we had to go through the bad scenes, through the scary stuff, to get to the end. The time traveler had to endure it. And so should I.
It happened right after lunch on the fourth day of his hospital stay. I had almost reached the end, the part in the book where the traveler had come back to eighteenth-century London only to disappear again a few hours later. This time for good. First I saw one of his fingers move. After a while I realized that he was pointing at me. His skin was clammy and cold when I took his hands. There was no strength left in them. The hands that had built things, had held tools for all his life, the hands that had carried me through all of mine. His mouth opened. I took an ice cube from the tray and moistened his lips with it. He might have said something, I wasn’t sure. His mouth moved as if he wanted to form a word.
"Do you want to tell me something? Dad?"
I leaned over, my ear close to his mouth. There was nothing. No sound. No word. I felt silly all of a sudden. But something in him wouldn’t let go of me. There was a word on his lips. I tried to read it. It was like an ahhhh or maybe a duhhh. He seemed to repeat it over and over. Once I thought he said druhhh.
That day, I left the hospital defeated. I knew there was something he had wanted to tell me but I couldn’t make out the word. When he died a few days later, without ever lifting his finger again, I couldn’t comprehend that he was gone. I went back to school. My sister and her husband moved into our house. They had to sell their house right after my brother-in-law lost his job.
One evening during dinner, they started talking about my father’s things. They wanted to sell the tools and the equipment. I think it was my sister’s husband most of all who wanted to sell it. My sister just nodded. My stepmother was still too grief-stricken to oppose. I told them if they were going to sell his things, I would stop eating. They didn’t believe me. I made it without food for three days. On the fourth day, I collapsed during gym at school and went to the hospital. I was released a few days later. They didn’t sell my father’s things. They even let me go into the workshop.
The shop was in an old barn a bit further down from the house. The first few times I went there after his death, I sat at his welding station in the dark, listening to the silence, trying to feel if he was still here, if part of him was still around. The smell of his pipe tobacco and the damp coal in the forge lingered. I wasn’t able to stay for long. One day, I decided that it would be a good idea to straighten up the place. I had always been responsible for cleaning after we worked together. I swept the floor planks, making sure the metal sheathing around the welding station was clear of anything combustible. I straightened out the tools and cleaned the forging hammers with oil, then swept the two workbenches. I cleaned the shelf that had all the leftover parts like copper fittings, pieces of iron, steel rods, plates, and other items. I emptied the ash container in the forge, polished the anvils, and greased the spindles of the vices.
I had my own leather apron. It hung next to my father’s under a small shelf that had our gloves and welding masks on it. When I looked at it, I started to cry and couldn’t continue that day. I didn’t go back for a few days. One morning, I woke up thinking about him saying druhhh. I began to scribble the word on pieces of paper during class at school. ‘Draw’ was the closest I could come to making sense of it. Did my father, with his last word, tell me to start drawing?
That afternoon, I went back to the shop. I turned the light on, kindled a fire in the wood stove, and sat in the corner opposite the chimney. From there, I could see the whole shop. I had a large drawing pad and a pencil and began to sketch the room. First, I tried to get the right perspective and proportions. Then I added the chimney and the large workbenches. After that came the welding station, the forging area, the large shelf with the materials, the small old dresser that had been converted to hold small boxes of nuts, bolts, washers, rags, and smaller parts. From there I went to the tool carts, the other chairs, and the larger tools like the stand-up drill and belt grinder.
After a few hours, I was done. I hung the picture in my room where I could see it from my bed. I lay awake for most of that night. The moon rose around 11 pm and I took the drawing with me into my restless sleep. In my dream, the picture was made from charcoal from the forging oven. But it was washed out and almost unrecognizable. When I woke up again, my clock showed 1:45 am. Druhhh. Druhhh. Draw. I said the words out lout. Druwh. Drough. Drought. Dry. Draw. I looked at the drawing again. Drum. Drawl. Draw. Drawer. Drawer. Drawer.
DRAWER!
I sat up. Drawer. The moonlight on the wall was enough to illuminate the drawing. The old dresser. I’d never looked inside the drawers, hadn’t gotten to organizing them yet. I got out of bed, put on my thermal pants, a long-sleeved shirt, and a wool sweater. It had gotten cold during the last few days. The first flurries of snow had fallen yesterday. I went downstairs as quietly as I could and put on my boots. I left the house through the back door and walked along the silvery path toward the dark silhouette of the barn. My heart was pounding when I arrived. I didn’t want to turn the lights on so I grabbed a flashlight from the hook next to the door. I kindled a fire in the stove and stood in front of the dresser for a while. Part of me couldn’t wait to open the drawers and see what was in there. The other part wasn’t so sure. What if there was nothing? What if I was chasing a ghost? What if my dad had simply told me that he wanted water?
There was no point in stalling. I needed to know. I opened the first drawer. On the right side, an assortment of bolts of different lengths and widths was organized into sections, separated by narrow pieces of thin, dark wood. On the other side of the drawer were nuts and washers. Over time, the sizes had gotten mixed up and now it was just a mess of bits mingling together.
I should have taken better care of this, I thought. Instead, I’d let it get to this level of disorganization. The next drawer wasn’t as deep. It held a few pieces of sandpaper for the belt grinder. Nothing else. I closed it. Then I opened it again and looked closer. It wasn’t deep enough for the size of the drawer. I took out the sheets of sandpaper and placed them on top of the dresser. A false bottom. I could see it right away. There was a small gap between it and the back board of the drawer. I pulled it up. It dislodged easily.
The beam of my flashlight illuminated what looked like a spiral notebook. It was blackened from grease and metal dust and its corners were bent upward. Large parts of the spiral were missing. I carefully lifted it up. Below it lay what looked like a piece of metal sheathing. Maybe a square foot and a quarter of an inch in thickness. I took it in my hands, expecting its weight to be much more than it actually was. It felt like lead but without the weight. I tapped at it with my fingernail. The sound was similar to that of glass when touched with a metal object. Pling! I carefully laid it on the ground.
I went to the stove and added a few logs to the embers. The chill hadn’t left the room yet. I pulled a chair close, sat down, and opened the notebook. The first page, written in perfect pencil lettering, started with Table of Contents. Below that, and perfectly aligned according to its sections, it said:
1—Parts
1.1 Centrifugal Rotor
1.1.1 Core
1.1.2 Outer Ring
1.1.3 Connectors
1.2 Power Supply
1.2.1 Battery Compartment
1.2.2 Capacitor Board
1.3 Controls
1.3.1 Left Foot Pedal
1.3.2 Right Foot Pedal
1.3.3 Display
1.4 External Parts
1.4.1 Chassis
1.4.2 Faraday Cage
1.5 Traveler’s Chair
1.5.1 Head Rest and Neck Stabilizer
1.5.2 Seat and Back
2—Construction and Assembly
3—Setting Dates
4—Travel
5—Clothing and Accessories
6—Safety
7—The Traveler
What followed were twenty pages of neatly written text intertwined with drawings, sketches, and mathematical formulas. Then several pages with lists of materials needed. This list was separated into items we had in the shop and others that needed to be bought. The list had everything in it, from metal wire fencing to pieces of copper, from steel piping to Neodymium rare earth magnets that could be ordered through the mail.
The Construction and Assembly section described how to put it all together, piece by piece. I recognized my father’s writing—how he phrased certain sentences and how he began some of the lines with "Careful there!" He had used this phrase many times throughout his teachings.
"Careful there, don’t apply too much pressure on the welding rod. Let it be pulled into the steel rather than push it into the bead."
I could hear him as if he stood beside me, reading to me in his deep voice. I had to stop several times. During those moments, I felt both the pain over his loss and the love he had left behind.
I still had no idea what the finished product would be. Until I got to the end of the section. The drawing took up a whole page. It was detailed and seemed to be to scale. It took me all but two seconds to see what it was. One person could comfortably sit inside. The chassis was made from galvanized pipes. The cabin holding the traveler was surrounded by metal fencing. A faradic cage. There was an engine of sorts and two pedals, one for each foot, to control the machine.
Did he expect me to build this? He must have wanted to give it to me much later, maybe five or ten years from now. Surely he hadn’t expected to die so soon. I stared at the notebook for a while, then closed it carefully and placed it back into the drawer. I was cold all of a sudden. The fire must have gone out. "I’m sorry, Dad, but what you want me to do is impossible," I said into the silence. I listened for a moment, in case there was an answer. But the shop was quiet. When I left, the grey sky loomed overhead.
2
After that night, I didn’t set foot into the shop for a week. Instead, I glanced at it from the window of my room during the night—a dark shape against the slightly lighter background of the meadow behind it. An emptiness had spread through our house during that time. My stepmother was a ghost, busily moving from room to room, organizing my father’s belongings. My sister was consoling her but I could see that it was her who needed consoling more than anyone. She and my dad had had a difficult relationship. It didn’t help that when she was a teenager, I began to want to help him in his shop and therefore spent much more time with him than she ever did. Now I could see in her the regret of never wanting to listen to him when he spoke about the furniture he’d built or the iron gates and door hinges he had made.
I rarely went downstairs anymore except when I had to eat or do chores around the house. I spent most of the time up in my room, doing homework or looking at the shop from my window. When I lay in bed at night, my thoughts always went back to the notebook. Why did my father tell me about the drawer if he knew I would never be able to build the machine? The question kept me up at night and even my days were filled with trying to answer it. He had written the manual for me but it was clear he had intended to build it with me, not have me try it all by myself. In the hospital, he probably thought I should have it to remember him. But I didn’t want to remember him. Remembering him was too painful. I wanted to see him again. I wanted to feel his gentle touch on my shoulder when I worked on a project in the shop, hear his words of encouragement when I burned a hole into the steel or the welding rod got stuck in the bead.
I caught myself thinking about the items on the list and where to get them. A 12 Volt/700CCA car battery, the magnets, a six-by-six foot piece of metal fencing, a few copper connectors, about thirty feet of one-inch galvanized piping, a seat cushion (if needed), the display of an analog alarm clock and a few other things I could get at our hardware store. If I were to try to build it. Which I wouldn’t. But as much as I tried not to think about it, I couldn’t stop. I had forty two dollars and seven cents in my savings box. That would barely be enough to get the magnets. If I wanted to do this, I needed to get a job. But I didn’t want to get a job because I couldn’t possibly build the machine. I paced back and forth in my room, but this made me even more agitated than I already was. Eventually, I sat down on my bed and, just as I did sometimes, opened The Time Machine without any particular page in mind.
"I told some of you last Thursday of the principles of the Time Machine, and showed you the actual thing incomplete in the workshop. There it is now, a little travel worn, truly; and one of the ivory bars is cracked, and a brass rail bent; but the rest of it is sound enough. I expected to finish it on Friday, when the putting together was nearly done, I found that one of the nickel bars was exactly one inch too short, and this had to be re-made; so that the thing was not complete until this morning."
I closed the book again. Should I try it? I’m not sure what happened at that moment but something inside me gave way. I couldn’t hold out any longer. I guess the pain over not being with him was greater than the fear of building a machine that would, in the end, be just that—a machine with no purpose but to have made a fool out of me. I got dressed and went downstairs.
"Where you going?" I heard my stepmother call from the living room.
"I’ll be right back. Just going out to the shop."
I’m sure she didn’t want me to go. It was almost ten o’clock at night and tomorrow was a school day. But she couldn’t forbid it either. I felt for her at that moment. Her loss was mine and while I stood at the entrance door, we were joined in our grief over whom we had loved the most in this world.
The shop was cold. Freezing. I could see my breath when I turned the lights on. I kindled a fire and warmed my hands for a while. It would take a half hour for the room to become comfortable. Better get to work. I decided to clear one half of the shop to have an area where I could place all the needed parts. That way, I could see what was missing and add to it without losing a sense of where everything was. I also wanted to get an inventory of what tools I might need so that I could move the rest to the opposite wall.
It occurred to me that the notebook didn’t mention any finishing work on the metal. No metal rasp to soften the edges and joists, no steel wool to smooth out the welding lines. My dad was never about appearances. It didn’t interest him. He always said that appearances hide the truth behind them. In everything. I never understood this until much later. Whenever we spoke about our book, my dad would give me one or two items from his philosophy about time. Like the Traveler in the book, he would speak with great conviction, sucking on his pipe once in a while to give me time to think about what he had just told me.
"It only appears," he would begin, "that we are bound to three dimensions and that the fourth—time itself—is a given and cannot be changed. I don’t accept that. I don’t believe that. And neither should you."
I loved listening to him too much to interrupt him, even though I understood but a small portion of what he told me back then.
"Time travel is a constant. We are always traveling through time. Right now, at this very moment, we are traveling through time. Otherwise we would be frozen in that very instant and no longer exist. We can only be here if we move through time. Who says that we cannot accelerate the speed of travel? And if one object moves forward in time and the rest doesn’t, the object will disappear. Just like if you and I would have a race, and you, because you are much faster than me, would move ahead and eventually be gone from my field of vision. You would not occupy the same moment with me anymore."
I moved the belt sander and band saw all the way to the wall next to the door. Both machines were heavy and it took me a long time, sitting on the floor and pushing them, inch by inch, with my feet. I cleared the area of all the leftover piping and metal pieces and moved them toward the wall as well. Then I swept one more time. I used a piece of charcoal from the forge and drew a square with four equal parts inside. One was dedicated to the centrifugal rotor, one to the battery compartment and controls, the third to the chassis, and the fourth to the rest—the seat, the display, and other miscellaneous parts. For the next three hours, I arranged what I found in the shop and applied it to the sections. I thought we had more than we actually did but at the end of the night, I had a list with tools and items I needed to get.
After school the next day I went to the hardware store. Paul McGuiness, the owner, knew me from the countless times I had accompanied my father and, later on, was sent on errands to get parts for the shop.
"How are you doing, kiddo?" he asked.
"I’m okay," I replied. “I think.”
Paul had cried at my dad’s funeral. He had known him since they went to school together forty years ago.
"What you got?" Paul finally asked me.
I gave him the list with items. He looked it over.
"You sure this is right?" he said. "What’s this gonna be after it’s done?"
I hesitated. He looked at me for a while over his reading glasses. Then he wordlessly got up and began to collect the material.
"I actually just wanted to see how much it all costs," I said. "I don’t have the money right now."
"Your dad had store credit," he replied as he added up the items at the register. The amount came out to $134.45. "It was a bit more than what this comes to so I’m adding a few packs of WL-20 welding rod. I think you might need them."
"Thank you," I said.
"How are you gonna get the stuff home?"
I hadn’t thought about it. It didn’t even occur to me. I had some space in my backpack but that wasn’t nearly enough.
"Wait here a moment," Paul said.
When he came back a few minutes later, he was wearing his jacket and held his car keys in his hand. "I’ll drive you. There are a few eight-foot, one-inch pipes outside as well."
We left the store. He turned the sign to closed and locked the door. I helped him load the piping onto the truck and we drove off.
"Are you doing okay in school?" he asked.
"Yes."
"You were always a good student. Your dad told me. He said that one day you’d be an engineer and build large and beautiful things. But for that you’ll have to stay a good student. I know these are tough times and if you can’t stand it at home or somethin', you’re always welcome to do your homework in the store."
"Thanks," I replied. I smiled at him briefly. He was wiping his face the whole ride to my house. I didn’t say anything, didn’t know what to say. When we got there, we unloaded the parts and leaned everything along the outside wall of the barn. When he left and drove past the house, my stepmother talked to him for a few minutes. Then he drove off. My stepmom waved to me. I waved back. She disappeared into the house.
3
When we had dinner that night, my stepmother asked me if I wanted to earn some extra money doing minor chores at Mr. McGuiness’s store. He could use a hand. My eyes must have lit up at that moment because my stepmom smiled at me for the first time in a while. I’m sure she didn’t know what to do with me other than to tell me not to set the shop on fire when using the welding equipment. I’m sure she was glad I would have some supervision in the afternoons.
I started at Paul’s store a few days later. We agreed on minimum wage. I thought it was more than fair. I wasn’t officially old enough to work but he said he’d give me cash every week. I had a few more costly items on my list, including the battery, the magnets, and the 50 Amp wire. Paul told me that he could help me with the wire and the connectors and would give them to me at wholesale.
From then on, every day after school, I walked straight to Paul’s store. I was able to do most of my homework during homeroom and worked from three to six in the afternoon. Afterward, I went home, ate, and went straight out to the shop. During that time, around the beginning of December, I began to build the chassis. The galvanized pipes needed to be cut to length and welded together according to the drawings. It was difficult without a second person there but I made a contraption with a few sandbags from outside to hold the pipes in place while I welded them together. I made good progress and after a week, I was mostly done.
Then I realized something: Were I to leave the machine in this part of the shop—and assuming that I’d successfully travel back in time—I would end up right on top of the belt sander. There was no place in the shop where I could position the machine without creating chaos the moment I landed. I would have to move it to a place where it wouldn’t bother anybody. Behind the barn, and accessible through a door, there was a storage area. It was freezing cold in there but there was enough space to fit the machine without having to disturb anything. I decided to build the individual components in the main shop and put everything together next door. But the chassis was already bigger than the relatively narrow door. I’d have to go outside through the double doors and around back to the sliding door of the storage area.
The other problem was the weight of the individual parts. The rotor, once the magnets were attached, would probably be really heavy. The same for the chassis. I needed something to help move the components. I found a palette that seemed mostly intact, and a rusty, beat-up shopping cart in one corner of the storage room. I took the wheels off and mounted them onto the palette. The wheels were rusty but sufficient.
That Friday evening, I moved the chassis onto the palette. It was barely big enough to hold it. On Saturday morning, I worked at the store and went home with seventy-two dollars and fifty cents and a 50 Amp wire. Paul had subtracted the seventy-eight dollars for the wire, purchased at wholesale price, from the one-hundred and fifty dollars and fifty cents I had made during that week. The seventy-two dollars and fifty cents wasn’t enough for either the battery or the magnets. It would probably take me an additional three weeks to come up with the money. That would put the completion date right before Christmas. I thought about asking my stepmom if she’d order the magnets for me in exchange for the money. But I decided to wait until I actually had the money in hand. The battery I could get at the car parts store in town.
If the chassis was fairly easy to weld together, the centrifugal rotor was a different story. The instructions talked about forging a three-dimensional blade, not unlike a fan blade, out of the plate I had found in the drawer. I had never done anything like it. I was afraid I would burn out the material and render it useless. The magnets were to be placed along a semi-circular shape that was open at the top. The fan blade would then be centered inside the magnets. "If done correctly, the magnets should hold the blade in place without any further assistance," it said in the instructions. If done correctly. I began to doubt my ability to do this. The chassis was crude work. I had welded pipes together many times before. But this wasn’t a task for an apprentice. It needed the hand of a master. Someone like my dad.
For the next few days, I couldn’t make myself light the forge and begin. Instead, I sat in the shop unable to do anything. I wasn’t ready. I shouldn’t have started. I simply couldn’t do it. Even Paul noticed my change of mood and asked me a few times if everything was all right. I nodded each time, certain he wasn’t able to help me.
"You know, your dad thought very highly of you," he said one day while we moved bags of salt from the back to a spot near the front door of the store. "And I don’t mean only as a person. He spoke highly of you as an apprentice. Her heart is in the right place, he said. She can figure anything out. The more challenging, the better for her."
"He must not have known what I can or cannot do," I replied.
"Do you really believe that?" Paul asked.
"What do you mean?"
"Do you think it likely that a master blacksmith of nearly forty years does not know what his apprentice can or cannot do? Or is it more likely that he knows precisely what your limitations are and how to overcome them?"
I wanted to say, "Yes, it is likely. And not only is it likely, it’s true. He doesn’t know my limitations. Only I know them." But I didn’t say anything, mostly because I didn’t want to offend Paul, knowing of his deep friendship with my father.
"A master only becomes one through the very mastering of what he was not able to master before. Otherwise anyone can call himself that. The taller the task, the further the learning carries you."
When he placed the last bag of salt onto the stack of other bags next to the door, he stretched his back and wiped his hands on his pants. "If your dad thought you could do it, I’m sure you can. Whether it’s easy or not, doesn’t matter, does it? His confidence in you should be enough to erase the doubt in your heart."
Paul sent me home two hours early that day. He assured me at the door that I would still get paid for the time. I went home, emptied the dishwasher, and helped my stepmom put away groceries.
"So what are you doing out there in the shop every day?" she asked.
I stopped for a moment and looked straight at her. I could almost see the cloak of sadness surrounding her.
"I’m building a time machine so I can go back and talk to Dad."
She started to cry. I didn’t know what else I could have told her except the truth. I made tea in a thermos and brought a couple of apples and a jar of peanut butter with me to the shop.
Then I lit the forge.
4
I worked for seven hours straight. In the end, I couldn’t feel my shoulders and lifting the thermos seemed an impossible task. I left it in the shop that night. As I lay in bed, I could still feel the heat of the scorching coals in my face; the smell of the thick leather gloves was still on my hands. I took the noise of hammer on steel with me to my dreams. I’m coming to you, Dad. I’ll see you soon. I’ll see you very soon.
I went back to the store the next day after school. I was tired and sore but I didn’t want to miss more than the two hours from yesterday. Paul had made hot cocoa in his tiny little kitchen. It was only three in the afternoon but the sky had darkened already. A few flurries of snow had fallen. He asked me how it went last night and I gave him the short answer. "Good," I said, hoping he wouldn’t detect the insecurity in my voice. I didn’t really know how it went. I’d finished the task but I had no idea what the outcome would be. I’d basically put together parts with no way of knowing how it all would turn out.
We put up Christmas lights around the bay window, which was just me handing Paul the individual string lights and, at the same time, holding the ladder so he wouldn’t fall over. We’d been working quietly for a while, only interrupted by a few questions he asked and me giving him very short answers, when he stopped and turned toward me.
"May I ask you another question?" he said.
"Sure," I replied.
"You know I’ll help you in any way I can, right?"
"Yes. Thank you."
"I owe it to your father. But not only that. I think you’re a bright kid and…you’ve been through a lot…with your mom and now your dad. My question is…"
I saw that he was looking for the right words to use. Part of me wished he would stop there and not say anything.
"Forgive me but…what are you building?"
I didn’t answer for a while and Paul didn’t say anything either. I think he wasn’t sure if he should have asked. When my stepmom asked before, I didn’t think about it much. Maybe it was the way he asked. His tone of voice was kind and genuinely concerned. Up until now, I hadn’t questioned what I was doing. I’d only questioned my ability, not the fact that I was doing it. I had followed the instructions from the notebook blindly. His question stirred something in me—something I didn’t think about before. The last couple of weeks, I was too busy going forward and the task itself had blotted out the purpose of it. What was I doing? Did I truly believe it possible to build a machine that would bring me back to my father? To tell Paul the truth seemed silly all of a sudden. And in saying it out loud to him I would expose the lie and realize that there was nothing on the other end of this, that I had sent myself on a fool’s errand. I couldn’t stop the tears from coming. Pain suddenly washed over me. My wish to see my father again had made me blind to the reality of it.
Paul sat down next to me and held me. I couldn’t control my tears anymore and sobbed into his arm. It was as if the flood gates had opened. I had never felt pain so deeply before. I thought about my father and my mother and each time I thought it was over, I started again. Paul didn’t say anything. He knew this was a necessary evil, that I needed to cleanse myself and face my loss head-on. After what seemed like a very long time, I let go of him and he handed me a box of tissues. I told him about the hospital and what my father had said to me. At least what I thought he’d said to me. I told him about the drawer and the notebook and the machine and while I did that, I saw the sadness in Paul’s eyes. It occurred to me at that moment that, throughout my own grief, I had never thought about his.
"I don’t know what the right answer is," he said after a while. "It’s completely up to you whether or not you want to finish it."
"I want to finish it." I was surprised by my answer. As soon as I said it, I knew it was the truth. I wanted to finish what I had started. "Can you order the magnets if I give you the money?"
"Of course," Paul said.
"I don’t want to order them before I have all the money."
"Okay. Let me know when and I’ll do it."
When I went to the shop that evening, I lit a fire in the stove and filled two of the galvanized pipes with sand. The notes suggested using sand inside the pipes and then sealing them off so they could be bent into a circular shape without breaking. Once that was done, I drilled twelve holes in each one at equal distance to each other and on both sides of the pipe. The magnets would be attached to them. The pipes would then be welded to the back of the chassis.
By the end of the following week, I had finished the controls, battery compartment with connectors, and the seat with head rest and neck stabilizer. I also made another one-hundred and fifty dollars and fifty cents. Paul kept the money and ordered the magnets. They arrived the next day and I mounted them to the outer ring of the centrifugal rotor.
All that was left to do was to install the battery and work the wire fencing into a cone-like shape, not unlike that of a pilot’s cabin. It would cover the upper part of the traveler’s seat like a cage. I brought the rotor out back. The storage area was freezing. I was wearing fingerless gloves and within ten minutes in there, I couldn’t feel my fingertips and had to go back to the shop to stand in front of the stove. The light wasn’t great either and I had to wear my head lamp all the time. When I finally set the rotor into the center of the magnetic field, I didn’t expect it to hold. The shape I had forged wasn’t perfect, rudimentary at best. But when I very slowly let go of it, the rotor held its position in the center of the magnetic circle.
I welded the hinges onto the cabin top and connected them to the chassis. To get into the seat, one had to move one side of the cage up and climb inside. It could then be closed from the inside. But I yet had to climb into the cabin. I had thought about it a few times but I never did.
That Friday after school, I went to the store to work. It was very busy in there. I never realized how many people buy Christmas gifts in a hardware store, but there were a lot of sons and daughters who were there with their mothers buying last minute gifts for their dads. They were buying power drills and wrench sets and multi-function tools.
I don’t remember ever having felt sorry for myself up until that day. I was angry at them for buying gifts that were so cheaply made. My dad always told me that the tools one uses should reflect the value of what you’re making. I don’t think he ever bought a cheap tool in his life. In my mind, they were buying those gifts because they didn’t know what else to give. I could have come up with a dozen items to buy for my father that day. He needed a new handkerchief. His old one had holes in it from being washed so many times that the fabric had thinned out. He could use a couple of cans of Worker’s Miracle heavy-duty hand cream because the skin on his hands would crack periodically. So much so that he sometimes slept with gloves on, his hands thickly covered with cream. There were those thermal socks he really liked, and he could always use a new pair of leather gloves. He was always wearing his until they would literally fall off his hands during work.
I didn’t realize that tears were running down my face until Paul gently put his hand on my shoulder.
"You okay?" he said.
"Yeah." I wiped my face quickly and returned to the shelf I was stacking at the moment. We had gotten a delivery of Christmas lights that day and I was only halfway done moving them onto the display shelf.
When Paul gave me my weekly pay, I went to the car parts store and got the battery. I didn’t think of how heavy it would be. I thought about asking Paul to drive me but I felt like I was asking too much of him already. He had helped me more than I could ever pay him back for. It was a two-mile walk home and thick snowflakes had begun to fall onto the quiet street.
My thoughts were all over the place and I noticed a sting of fear creeping up inside me. As the moment of truth approached, I didn’t have much left to hide behind. Eventually I would have to climb into that seat and turn on the switch. I tried to avoid thinking any further than that. There was no backup plan. It would either work or it wouldn’t. I couldn’t imagine just going on with my life if it didn’t work. I had no idea what I would do. Everything else aside, working on the machine for the last two months had given me a purpose, had prolonged my father’s life somehow. I didn’t want this to end, didn’t want to face the possibility that turning on that rusty old switch I had installed, as per his instructions, would do absolutely nothing.
As disheartened as I was that evening, I installed the battery and connected it via the 50 Amp wire to the capacitor. There were only a few pages left in the notebook. They mostly had to do with safety, like not touching the cage surrounding the traveler’s cabin when turning on the switch, or bracing for impact when the charge hit the cage. The last chapter was called The Traveler. I’m not sure why I hadn’t read that one yet. I felt I needed to wait until I’d completed the assembly of the machine.
The machine. As it stood there in the dark, illuminated only by the light of my head lamp, it felt dead. Like a randomly assembled collage of lifeless pieces. Usually whenever I built something, I felt pride and a sense of accomplishment. Not this time. I felt empty. I left the shop at 10:30 PM. My stepmother was still watching TV in the living room. I put hot water on the stove for tea and sat down next to her. She moved the bowl of chips between us and I ate a few.
"I’m sorry," she said. "I’m sorry I couldn’t be there for you more."
I saw that she was crying. It wasn’t loud or anything. She didn’t even make a sound.
"I was so wrapped up in my own grief that I forgot yours."
I didn’t tell her that I’d had thought the same about her a few days ago.
"You’ve known your dad much longer than I did. Well, not much longer, but a few years at least. And I know you loved him. Loved him so very much."
I didn’t say anything in return. I don’t know why. I wanted to, but the words wouldn’t come out. I wanted to tell her that I was sorry too, that I knew it wasn’t easy for her and that, even though I had known him longer, she’d been married to him for eight years. That had to count for something. I went to bed and cried for a while.
Then I opened the notebook and began to read the last chapter.
The Traveler
The Traveler is an essential part of the machine. Without it, the machine will not function properly. Assembling the machine is one thing. Bringing it to life is another. The Traveler must know at all times where she wants to end up if she ever hopes to set it in motion. She must have a clear understanding of the consequences of her travels. To that effect, when travelling to the past, she should choose a destination time and date that is most likely not visited by her own self at the same moment. Much thought has been given to the paradox of meeting one’s self within the same moment in time. To avoid complication, it is suggested that the Traveler journey to a point of least impact for herself and others.
One single moment can change a person’s life and stir it onto a different path altogether. The Traveler must exercise the greatest caution to not set off a chain of events she cannot foresee. The gentle traveler, kind in thought and treading lightly on the path she is on, yields the biggest chance of a favorable outcome.
It is at the Traveler’s discretion to bring her affairs in order before the outset of the journey and all I ask for myself is for her to burn this notebook to cancel out the possibility of someone other than herself recreating the machine.
It is my sincere hope that I have taught her enough to prepare her for whatever is to come. She should always remember that however far she travels, she is always at home.
Once I finished reading, I started again from the beginning. The Traveler is an essential part of the machine. I had no idea what that meant. I closed the notebook and placed it on my nightstand. Then I shut off the light. I thought about going to the store in the morning to say goodbye to Paul. But I didn’t know how he would react, so I decided not to. I also didn’t want to say anything to my stepmom. "Remember that time machine I had told you about? I’m about to use it and I won’t be coming back."
I fell into a deep sleep. In my dream, I forged a mask of iron that resembled my father’s face. I tried to make it speak to me but it stayed motionless. He’s gone, was the first thought I had when I woke up the next morning. He’s gone and you’ll never see him again.
5
The snow lay heavy on the tall pines, their lower branches almost touching the ground from the weight. I had to shovel a path to the shop. I saw my sister’s husband cleaning off the front stoop and clearing a walkway to the garage. We nodded at each other. I never spoke to him much. My sister and he lived in a completely different world. For them it was all about Christmas decorations and holiday cards and filling stocking stuffers. They wanted to make this year special to keep my dad’s spirit alive through the holidays. I found myself thinking that was a nice sentiment but I couldn’t bring myself to admit it to them.
I made a small fire in the woodstove, if for nothing else than to burn the notebook. I didn’t really want to burn it. It was filled with memories and seemed the last remaining document involving my dad that meant something. I sat in front of the stove for a while, at one point thinking that I should have made copies and hid them somewhere. Just in case. Eventually I opened the fire door and tossed the notebook into the flames. I’d never thought of myself as brave. I think that moment was the first time. Brave or stupid. It couldn’t be helped. Some things you can postpone only for so long.
I opened the door to the storage area. The light came through a few gaps in the siding and illuminated the machine enough to see its contours. I walked around it, inspecting the chassis like a pilot checking her airplane before take-off. Then I climbed into the seat. It was cold but surprisingly comfortable. I had never thought about where to travel other than into the past. According to the notebook, the machine did not travel automatically to a predetermined point in time. After activating it, I needed to use the pedals to move. Left for the past, right for the future. The display of the old alarm clock was supposed to give me an idea where I was at any given point in time. So far so good. I closed the cabin top over my head. The metal fencing allowed me to see out with almost no interruption in my visual field. Just don’t touch it, I thought to myself.
I had mounted the on/off switch to the right side of the alarm clock display. It was a basic one-way toggle switch. It seemed too simple, too rudimentary a device to control my travel through time. As I sat there, I became aware of my sweaty palms, despite the cold. I didn’t want to think about the notion that the switch would do nothing; that it wouldn’t jumpstart the machine, and me, into a different time. I felt a wave of nausea creep up inside me. All this time, I had held on to the hope of this moment and now that it was here, I was paralyzed and unable to move my arm and flip it.
"Dad, help me," I said into the quiet. "Please."
There was no answer. Of course there was no answer. Did I really expect one? I stretched out my hand. My fingerless gloves were worn and smudged with grease. My fingernails were dirty. I had stopped cleaning them a few weeks ago. The dust of the forge had settled deep into my skin. I touched the tip of the switch, applied a little bit of pressure, not quite enough to move the lever. I breathed in and out once more and flipped the switch. Except the echoing sound of the switch itself, there was nothing. The battery should have released electrical current into the large capacitor and from there, a charge should have jumped up and over the top of the cabin to the back where the centrifugal rotor was installed.
So silly, I thought. Did I really think this would work? I sat there for a while. The knot in my stomach slowly grew. The feeling of failure was a thin blanket over the truth—the realization that I had spent the last six weeks trying to avoid the unavoidable. That this was a well-meant gift from my father to occupy my mind and get through the hardest part of the grieving process. It had worked. Up until now. The tears blurred my vision. It was as if the ground below me gave way and I’d dropped into a dark nothing. The pain, as excruciating as it was when I had felt it a few weeks ago, was so powerful now that I keeled over in my seat. I opened my mouth but no sound escaped it. I couldn’t breathe or form words or even thoughts except the one that I would never see my dad again. Ever. That he was gone and I had no way of feeling his hand on my shoulder or him ruffling my hair.
I began to moan. It seemed to help with the pain. My moans became louder. I saw my hands holding the bars of the seat on either side. I didn’t feel the cold of the pipes beneath my fingers. And when I could not hold it in any longer, I screamed. It was as if all my pain, my heartache, and the loss of my father’s love, my father’s big love, was in that scream. My voice was raw and I let it swell to a high-pitched sound while everything poured out of me and into the world. At that moment, it was as if he had called me and I had answered…
The blue spark was blinding, and even though it was brief, I couldn’t see anything for a few seconds. It was followed by the sound of the arc—the moment the welding rod connected with the steel. It obliterated my scream for an instant. A second spark followed. I could see that it came from the front where the battery compartment was installed.
And then, through the blur that was my tears, I saw the charge leave the capacitor and rip across the top of the cabin to the back. I felt my hair standing up in all directions. A snapping sound was followed by a deep humming sound. The light in the storage room was suddenly so bright that I had to close my eyes. When I opened them again, the walls of the shed were bathed in golden light. The machine was activated.
When I lifted my left foot, it shook uncontrollably. But I was afraid the activation was only temporary and I wanted to go back as fast as I could. I put my foot onto the pedal and applied the tiniest amount of pressure. The alarm clock display moved. First, it was only a few minutes. Then a dozen and, next, an hour. I took my foot off the pedal. The display moved another hour before it stopped. Saturday, December 22nd, 3:08AM. I didn’t see anything different in the shed. The light was as bright as before. I pushed the pedal down again. The display went back a few more hours and into Friday the 21st. I increased pressure and skipped three days at once before I slowed down again.
Gently, I reminded myself.
I figured it would be best to go back to a weekday morning, maybe three months ago. I would be at school then and my dad would most likely be in his shop. I could tell him that I had come home from school earlier and he wouldn’t get suspicious, especially if I came in through the main front door. I pushed the pedal down again, this time a little harder. The days became a week, then two and three. I slowed down again, applied only minimal pressure until I came to September 14th. I stopped at 10:52AM. For a moment, I wasn’t sure whether to turn the machine off or not. I decided to leave it on. Other than someone actually stepping into the shed, nobody from the outside would notice it was there.
I moved the cabin top to the side and climbed out. I tried to look at the centrifugal rotor but the light was too intense. I would need a welding mask to be able to see it. I left through the back door and was hit by a breeze of warm air. The snow was gone. The trees had not even started to yellow. My mittens. I’d completely forgotten to take off my winter clothes. I decided to leave my gloves, wool cap, and jacket next to the door of the shed. I still felt a bit overdressed.
My heart was pounding as I walked around the barn to the front door. I felt like I had sawdust in my mouth. I heard the metallic banging sound of a hammer on steel before I reached the door. I couldn’t remember having ever heard something that made me happier. I opened the door and stepped inside.
He stood next to the forge, a large hammer in his hand, wearing his leather apron and a short-sleeve shirt. He saw me and without stopping, he said, "What are you doing here so early?"
I couldn’t answer. I tried to smile but my face muscles didn’t follow my order. They began to twitch suddenly.
"Oh, Dad," was all I could whisper before I ran to him and held him in my arms. I couldn’t stop the tears from coming. I didn’t want to cry. I didn’t want to make him suspicious that this was anything other than an early dismissal from school and me being happy to see him.
"There, there," he said. "What’s the matter?"
He placed the hammer on the side of the forge.
"You okay?"
For a long time I couldn’t say anything.
"Yes," I said eventually. "I’m okay. I just wanted to say hi and see how you’re doing."
"I’m doing fine. But I need to get different coal. This one burns too dirty. Can you smell it?"
"Yeah," I said, suddenly happy over the sulfury smell in the shop.
"Is everything all right? You seem upset."
"I’m okay. Just missed you, that’s all."
"Okay. Then let me get this formed before it cools down too much."
"Okay," I said. "Sounds good."
He picked up the hammer again and pushed the metal piece he was working on back into the embers.
"See you later," I said.
"Yep. See you later."
I left the barn with the sound of the hammer ringing in my ears. As I walked around back, I felt lighter, as if a burden had been lifted from me. When I looked through the dirt-smudged window, I saw my father stop hammering for a moment. As if he’d just thought of something. Then he shook his head and continued.
I stood behind the storage shed for a few minutes and let the sun warm my face. Then I entered, picked up my gloves, jacket, and wool cap and climbed into the machine. I closed the cabin top and began to push the right pedal down. The days on the display passed by. When it moved into December, I slowed down. I don’t know what had changed, but I wasn’t sad anymore. Maybe it was knowing that I could visit him whenever I wanted. Or maybe it was good enough to see him doing something he had loved so much.
My eyes were fixed on the display. I felt the pedal beneath my right foot, the pressure of the forward motion against my leg. When December 22nd approached, something in me clicked. The Traveler must exercise the greatest caution to not set off a chain of events she cannot foresee. I realized that he must have known, that he must have thought this encounter to be too strange to have been a normal occurrence. Did my visit, as brief as it was, change his outlook in any way?
And while I pondered the ever paradoxical nature of travelling through time, I knew, suddenly and unmistakably, what he had said back in the hospital room. He didn’t say, "Draw." Nor did he say, "Drawer." It sounded like it because those were the only words I could think of at that moment. No. It wasn’t druh, it was trah. It was the way he pronounced the ‘a’ differently. More like an uh. He must have known that I had built the machine and came back to him.
It wasn’t drawer. It was traveler.
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