In a world of unlimited possibilities—intersecting timelines, echoes of actions reverberating forever—complimenting Janey’s Doc Martins was the only thing I could have done right. “Some real kickers you got there.” I’d said the right thing—that’s the only explanation for why she invited me closer. Everyone wanted to be her lab partner.
“Yours have seen better,” she said. “But at least they’ve clearly been to work.”
Janey’s eyes swung up from my army surplus boots to my face, and she smiled. Blue eyes. I thought she was complimenting me, maybe even flirting, and not condemning me to revisit her words for all eternity. You see someone on the street, share a smile, and you invent a future—you live a life in ten seconds—then reality moves on. Strangers cross your path in waves, some friendly, some not. You imagine a future with the ones who remind you of something. It’s a dream. Does this only happen to me?
From day one at Montgomery College, I have more in common with the custodians than any of the adjunct professors. Janey shouldn’t be in my life any longer than a forgotten dream. At most, someone I share a few hours with over a fall semester lab tech class. But it doesn’t turn out that way. When I sign up for the 1-credit Lab Tech, I’m thinking chemicals. I think I might practice being a chemist who blows things up. The military might use a guy with that type of experience. But this is a windowless room of circuit boards and unconnected batteries. The experiments require Janey’s type of brain, not one like mine. The most problem solving you can ask of me is guessing how much strength I’ll get from eating two cheeseburgers. A passing grade, even a D, will help me get recruited up the Army chain so I won’t have to enter at ground level. That’s what is waiting for me, but now I need to help Janey. Over weeks of shifting pleasantries and quiet moments where Janey’s patience with me flows outward, where I stop giving suggestions because it takes too much effort to explain why I’m wrong, I try to pay attention, to contribute, but this is always happening—Janey talking and me losing focus.
“It’s a block tower. When it falls, you have to put it together again. It doesn’t even matter what the new structure looks like. It’ll work.”
Janey takes one look at me—her disheveled lab partner, recently if not currently intoxicated—and says, “It’s not boring. And even if it were, someone has to do it. Go find whatever you can in the library.”
In another world, in another time, if we’d met in my arena and not hers, we might have been something. But I want to help her. So, in the library I find a book: Notes on temporal dislocation: field studies, 1938-1939. Johannes Frankenheimer. It’s library-bound, with that plastic alligator skin. It’s located in the “special collection of faculty letters,” and I have to ask a work study student for help and wear gloves to touch it. Wikipedia explains Johannes was German and a refugee, a guest of the U.S. government, who’d earned top secret clearance and a research position at an undisclosed educational institution. Too bad for Johannes. When he left Europe after WWI, he was probably thinking Yale or Princeton—maybe Georgetown, when they made him stay near D.C.—but instead he got stuck at our CC just past the border into Maryland. No way the Germans would find him there. I scan ahead; he died in 1954—a car accident. Portrait mode on my phone makes two beautiful photographs of the professor’s hand-drawn pictures, some notes with numbers he had recorded. I print those photos along with the Wiki article and return to lab.
“Time travel,” says Janey. “Not what I was expecting you to find, but—cool.”
She paraphrases the idea so I can understand: “In 1939 a CC professor constructs two energy-transfer boxes based on an invention developed the previous year—the photocopier.”
“I saw those boxes in special collections,” I say, remembering two metal sculptures the work study student had told me not to touch. “Boxes made of metal and electrodes and stuff?”
Janey shakes her head as if saying don’t interrupt.
“Yes, electrical currents insufficient, energy model unstable—”
She is talking to herself, I think, or at least I can’t tell if she is talking to me.
“Yes, we can do this experiment. The electrical grid wasn’t sufficient in 1939. We might create a power outage now, but it shouldn’t take long to get back online. They’ll never know it was us. Let’s get those boxes from special collections.”
So she was listening to me, I think.
“It’s not a time machine,” says Janey, en route to the library. “More like a fax machine. Professor Frankenheimer primed the two boxes eighty years ago. If they’re still charged…”
That’s the last of the science-talk I understand. We can’t send an object to a German scientist stuck working at our community college in 1939, but we can send a message. Hopefully we can make him happy—that’s my thought. Janey assumes it’s going to be difficult getting the boxes from the special collections room, but I only have to say, “Look that way for ten seconds,” while holding a twenty to the work study kid.
“You get to choose the message,” says Janey, smiling at me. “You found the book.”
I put my message into the machine while Janey is busy attaching industrial jumper cables to the box and checking math with her phone’s calculator. A blank piece of paper is placed in the second box, to be used for a return message from the professor.
“Ready?” asks Janey.
The lights go out before I can answer. A door knock echoes through the darkness into my stomach. The lights go on. A custodian with a nametag JOE enters the room.
“You’re just kids,” says Joe.
Between the two of us, I feel most likely to relate to a custodian named Joe, so I say, “Yeah, just here with my lab partner, Janey. We’re about to finish up.”
“My name is Jeanette,” says Janey. “Please pronounce it correctly.”
Janey is scolding me, like we’ve been over this before. Why would she say that? Her eyes are a different color than they were seconds ago—I’m sure of it—lighter, now almost gray. I say nothing. What else has changed?
“Okay, then,” says Joe. “Just checking on the power outage.” And then he is gone.
“What type of accent was that?” I ask Janey.
“Look at this,” she says. The second box is open. In cursive handwriting the note on the paper reads: I’ve sacrificed my family for my research, always doubting. Changes will be made. My sincerest thanks. It is signed and dated: Johannes Frankenheimer / 5-Nov-1939
“I don’t understand,” says Janey. “What was your message?”
I hold up the Wikipedia page I’d slipped into the first box. Janey snatches it from my hands. She is such a fast reader. “He worked on the bomb.”
“The atomic bomb?” I ask.
“What if he didn’t finish working on the bomb?” she says, still talking to herself. “Without the bomb, we don’t win the war.” She scribbles a new message on the paper—FUTURE DEPENDS ON CHANGING NOTHING—and restarts the machine.
I hesitate, not wishing to offend her, thinking surely she will catch her error—she is so smart. I stutter: “You wrote it on the back of the Wikipedia page.” And then my final words to her: “The machine is double-sided.”
Again, we are in darkness. The lights come on. I am alone.
“Janey?” I shout. “Jeanette!”
I look at the new message in the second box:
I loved her. In this strange country I said I would die for her. Still, I thought about it every day for fifteen years—would I get in the car or no? / Johannes Frankenheimer / 15-Apr-1954
There is no knock on the door this time. The custodian Joe is in the threshold, waiting for my attention. “My name is not Joe—it’s Johannes.” I nodd as though saying, yes, professor, I believe you. He motions over his shoulder with his thumb. “I only changed one thing in the past.”
I stutter again. “The bomb?”
He shakes his head. He looks about the room, finds what he wants, picks it up off the floor. The Wikipedia page. The date of his death is now replaced with three question marks. This man resembles my father—past his athletic prime, but solid. If he punches me in the stomach, it will hurt. I count the decades on my fingers. “You should be one hundred and twenty years old.”
“I never got in the car, and I haven’t aged since the day I was meant to die.” He looks at his feet. “I’ve had time to think, and you should know something. As time continued without me, logic tells me each historic outcome since my aborted death all the way to your present moment has had to reprove itself. Each historical coin once flipped—50-50—was tossed in the air again.”
“Did we win the war? Did that coin flip go the same way?”
“Did we win the war,” he repeats slowly, as though pushing to understand. “Oh, I see.”
My fists are clenched. I’ll join the Marines tomorrow, if necessary.
Johannes shrugs his shoulders. “You’re right to fear this. As a child plays with blocks, when he destroys a tower and rebuilds, if he rebuilds, the reconstructed tower is rarely the same. But it’s always the same blocks building the tower, isn’t it? When you leave this lab, venture outside, only you will know what originally happened, and what parts of the tower have since come to be rebuilt, and how.”
“Janey,” I whisper as another man appears in the threshold of the door, excited and out of breath, possibly from running. An identical version of Johannes. The two men stare at each other. There’s a word for this in German, I think.
“Two messages, two opportunities,” says one Johannes.
“You didn’t get in the car either,” says the other.
I rush home on the bus. An instinct takes me another way, upstairs instead of down to my basement apartment. I don’t need to knock. The key is in my pocket. The shower’s running. The bathroom door is ajar, kept from closing by the uniform on a hanger over the doorframe. The nametag is my name, my last name, and I’m hit with the pride of every moment that’s lead to that nametag making its way onto this jacket. I feel my history without knowing it.
Janey gets out of the shower, spins her hair up in one towel and her body in another before wrapping her arms around my neck. I’ll call her Jeanette if it means this is real. She touches her lips to my forehead, then my nose. This is our first kiss, but it comes with the memory of someone who’s loved me through a thousand kisses. I feel this history without knowing it. As she dresses, I’m frozen by the thought of everything that must have happened to get us to this point, what I’ve missed.
“You’ll stay and complete your research,” she explains, the continuation of a conversation we must have begun earlier. “I’ll call as soon as I land in-country.”
The uniform is tailored to her shape. My last name, I realize, is now hers.
“Someone has to do it,” she echoes.
It would be so easy, I consider, to restart the machine. But it was Janey who pressed the button, who knew what to do. I search my body for those instincts that will tell me how to make sense of life. They tell me to kiss Janey again, while I can.
She’s nearly out the door.
“Don’t joke,” she says. “Say my name.”