Gone - Part 5

What do you say to someone who just told you that the woman who looks not a day older than you is your mother rather than your sister?  Normally, you would tell them they are insane.  But I had already said that to Peter before he said what he just said.  In the bizarro world in which I find myself, it is his insanely, impossible statement, a statement that I know perfectly well to be true, that convinces me he's not crazy.

When I turn back around, as I'm trying to figure out what to say, he stands up and looks at me.  "We should go," he says.  He pulls out a few twenty dollar bills, throws them on the table, and we walk out the door.

When we're finally away from people who could hear us, I begin, "How could you possibly..."

That's as far as I get.  "I'm a time traveler," he says.  He stops walking and sighs.  "Well, that's not strictly true.  I'm an interdimensional traveler, but it basically amounts to the same thing."

I'm just staring at him trying to decide if I should bolt, trying to decide how much I really want to find out what's happened, what's going to happen, with my mom.  Finally, the most clever thing I can come up with is, "Oh yeah?"

He smiles just a little and nods.  "Yeah," he says.  "And this isn't the first time I've had this conversation with, well, some version of you.  It's always gone badly before."

I scoff.  "And it's not going badly now?"

His smile grows just a little more.  "This is heaven compared to the other times I've tried to talk to you."

"Okay, let's just suppose I do believe you," I venture.  "Can you give me a little more... information or explanation or something?"

His face breaks into a full out grin.  "You have no idea how long I've been waiting for you to ask that," he says.  He glances around.  "Maybe we should find a bench or something and sit down.  This isn't exactly going to be a short talk."

"You know what," I say, "why don't we go back to my place.  My mom is there.  I think she'd want to hear it, too."

His smile drops just a little.  "Are you sure?" he asks.

I feel confused.  "Why wouldn't she?  I mean, this concerns her most of all."

He sighs and nods.  "Yes, I suppose you're right," he admits.

"Is there any reason why we shouldn't involve her in this conversation."

He shakes his head.  "No," he says, "it's just, well..." He's almost back to looking said.  He looks down and then looks back up at me, "It's easy for me to forget that you don't know me as well as I know you."

I'm feeling that urge to bolt again when he shakes his head again and says, "Nevermind."  Then he's back to smiling.  "Let's go talk to your mom."

---

My mom rushes to the door when she hears me return, clearly wanting to hear all about how the date went.  She's clearly surprised to see Peter there with me.  She tries to cover it up with a smile and a teasing tone.  "Sis!" she exclaims, "You should have told me you were bringing a cute boy home."

I feel my face grow red as I say the only thing I can think to say.  "He knows."

Now its her turn to look confused.  "Knows what?"

Peter steps forward and says, "I know you're her mother."

Mom takes a step back, "That's crazy," she says, just like a normal person would.

He shakes his head.  "You know its not," he says.  "I know you're her mother.  I know you were gone for 20 years, by her count, and I know that you're sick but you're going to get better."

"What are you..."

I decide it's my turn to step in, and step forward.  "Let's just hear what he has to say," I suggest, holding my hand out to calm her.

My mom looks at me and at him and then back at me again and finally she nods.  I don't understand why she seemed to think he was so crazy for knowing the truth.  I know I was starting to feel more and more relieved.  Finally, here is someone who might have some answers.

We walk over to the kitchen table, the same table where I sat when I first told my mom that she had been gone for so long.  For a moment, all is quiet.  Then Peter speaks.  "The first thing I want to point out," he says, "is that this 'time travel' that happened to you," he's addressing my mom, "it's that time travel that saved your life."

My mom says nothing, so I reach out and take her hand and say, "Yes, we've realized that."

He looks over at me and says, "Then I hope you'll be more receptive and less angry about what I'm about to tell you next."

"And what's that?" I prompted.

He looks back at my mother again.  "My father was the one who transported you through time," he says.

"How is that possible?" I demand, my mother still being silent.

He looks back at me again and takes a deep breath before proceeding.  "We're from the distant future," he says, "at least the distant future in this world."  I'm about to interrupt, but he keeps going.  "You see, there are many parallel worlds running simultaneously, just a few years apart.  So parallel to this world is another one where, if you went directly to it from here, you would find yourself three years in the past and yet another one where you would find yourself three years in the future.  So your mother, when she was taken from you, was taken from a parallel world that is aligned with this one twenty years in the past.  That's why no time passed for her but twenty years passed for you."  He ends there as if either that's supposed to explain it all or that's all he has to say.

I just sit there and stare at him, probably with my mouth open, for a full minute, before I lean forward, shake my head, and exclaim, "What?"

"I know its a lot to take in," he says, "and frankly, I'm just glad we've gotten this far into the conversation."

"What do you mean this far?" I ask.

"I told you before that I've failed at this conversation many times before," he says.  "The exact number of times I've failed is fourteen.  I always either waited too long and you were angry for not telling me sooner or I didn't wait long enough and you didn't want to talk to me at all afterwards.  This time, I finally decided that the perfect time to tell you would be our first date."

"You say that as if we're going to have another date," I say.

"In another parallel world, we have," he says.  "In one of them, I almost..."

"You almost what?" I ask.

"I almost proposed to you," he says.

I stand up suddenly, knocking my chair aside.  "That's crazy!" I exclaim.  "Why would you tell me that?"

"Because it's the truth," he says.  "And if I've learned anything from the past fourteen failures, it's that I need to tell you the truth."

I'm stunned.  I stand there, staring down at him and say, "Listen, you got in this door because you told me something crazy that I know to actually be true, but that doesn't mean I have to listen when you tell me something crazy that I don't know to be true.  I hardly know you."

He nods.  "I know, you're right.  But I know you.  And I think I've finally figured out the right way to tell you all of this, and best as I know, this is it."

There's silence for a minute and then it's my mom who finally speaks.  I'd almost forgotten she was there.  "Sit back down, sweetie," she says.  "Let's hear more of what he has to say."

I raise my eyebrows, look at this man I basically just had a little crush on who was also basically a stranger, practically telling me he loved me in another lifetime, and I just sit back down, just like my young mother told me to.

"There really isn't a whole lot else to tell, really," he says.  He shakes his head and actually seems a bit amused.  "It was a lot harder, in some ways, all the times that I was lying to you."

"Just go on," I prompt, trying not to sound annoyed but very likely failing.

He glances at me and there's something that almost looks like pain in his eyes.  This time he decides to address my mom.  "My great-grandfather was an astrophysicist," he says.  "He and a research team were studying the possibility of there being life on other worlds.  It was a question that was already centuries old by the time they picked it up, but they discovered something no one else had before.  They found that, through certain tears in space, there were other worlds with life on them, billions of them, actually.  They did experiments, trying to see if they could communicate with the other worlds or reach them in any way.  All of their experiments failed.  Then my grandfather took over.  He was able to pick up on some radiation waves from the other worlds and eventually discovered that the worlds did not just contain life, but contained extremely human life, so human, in fact, that they were broadcasting shows and programs and using technology identical to what we had on earth, 10, 15, 20, 30, any number of years prior to that current time.

"Through this experimentation, my grandpa was able to catch attempts by my great-grandfather to communicate with the other worlds.  I don't mean he caught signals that my father had sent from his own world several years before.  I mean he caught signals coming from a couple of the billions of other worlds.  It was mind-blowingly bizarre.  But my grandfather was unable to communicate back.

"It wasn't until my dad came along, that he actually found a way to interact with the other worlds.  It involved lots of weird particle physics but, well, we had already developed human transportation by the time my great-grandfather was alive so dad basically just applied that technology but to transport someone from one world to another.  He started out with animals rather than people, of course, and when that worked, the first person he transported was himself.  He was gone for five years before he reappeared to tell me that he was himself from one of those other worlds.  At the time he came back, I was only twenty, just starting graduate school.  He told me of all the potential this discovery had to help people, to transport them from a time when their life was terrible to a time when it could be better.

"I pointed out to him that we couldn't just take all the people from a hundred years ago and bring them here.  He said I was right, but we could save one.  And that was when we decided on your mother.  We didn't want to mess with anything that was too close to our own time, so we went to medical records from three hundred years prior, and that was how we found you.  And the rest, as they say," he smirks a little bit as if he thinks what he's about to say is terribly clever, "is history."

At the End

No one thinks about the end when their story is just beginning.  Maybe that's why we're so fascinated by stories that jump to the end and work backwards, or tell the sequence of events out of order, especially if it isn't clear at first what's going on.

No one thinks about the end when their story is just beginning, but they sure want to know about it later.  If that weren't the case, the supposed clairvoyants and palm readers would be out of a job.

I went to a palm reader once.  She told me I was going to die.  I was a little surprised, not because I didn't think I was going to die, but because I thought palm readers tried to reassure people, make them feel good about themselves, make them think they were God's gift to the world and that their life was going to be perfect.  Telling someone they're headed for death is not really the best way to get a good tip or a return visit.  I suppose, unless you're working on fear and you tell them that for three easy payments of $9.95, you can tell them how to avoid their demise.  My palm reader didn't do that, though, and I wouldn't have believed her even if she did.

We don't think about the end because it scares us.  We don't want things to end.  A friendship, a relationship, a career, a life.  We'd like these things to be immortal, indestructible.  We don't want the friend to move far, far away.  We don't want the divorce papers to show up on our door step.  We don't want our boss to say we're fired.  We don't want our doctor to say we have a terminal disease.

Yet, all these things intrigue us when we see them happening to someone else.  We know our hero is doomed, but he fights on anyway.  We know the romance isn't meant to last, but its so sad and tragic and we just want to see it go on, never mind the fact that these two characters are clearly suffering and would be better off apart.  The star actor playing a doctor on TV says she has cancer, but she's going to fight.  She's going to over come.  And even if she doesn't, we're sure going to get a great story out of it.

Our lives aren't cinema.  Sometimes, the lesson isn't so clear.  Sometimes it seems like there is no lesson at all.  Sometimes, things just end unexpectedly, without a neat little conclusion, and they leave us wondering why or what was the purpose or what was it all about or why did I waste 20 years of my life with you, of all people.

I think, at the end, it comes down to this:  we all want to feel like we were loved, we all want to feel like we had a purpose, and none of us want to feel like we wasted our opportunities to find either of those things.

With this in mind, I think we should think about the end, especially when our story is just beginning.  Forty years from now, will I be happy with my life?  Will I have found satisfaction in my career?  Will I be surrounded by people who love me and whom I love back?  Will it all have been worth it?  If you don't think you'll feel peace when you answer these questions, maybe it's time to rewind and try again.

But what do I know, anyway.  I'm just a girl.  I have my whole life ahead of me to try and figure it out.  Unless, of course, that palm reader is right.  If what she said is true, I'll be dead at the end of the year.  But I don't want to consider that possibility.  I like to believe that my end is still a long way down the road.  At the end, I think we all do.