Somewhere in Time Read online

  Why did I say it?

  Such things are impossible.

  I mean, I have an open mind and everything but—that?

  All right, she looked at me as though she knew me. I reminded her of someone, that’s all. Of the man she’d known here.

  That’s all.

  Then why, of all places in the state and country, did I end up here? Without a plan. By sheer caprice. A coin flip, for God’s sake!

  Why in November?

  Why in the very week that she was here? Why did I go downstairs when I did? Why did I see that photograph? Why did it move me so? Why did I fall in love with her, begin to read about her? Coincidence?

  I can’t believe it.

  I mean, of course, I don’t want to believe it.

  Was it me?

  I think my head’s about to burst. I’ve been over it so many times I’m groggy.

  Fact: She came here with her company.

  Fact: She stayed here after they were gone.

  Fact: She didn’t act for ten months after.

  Fact: She retreated to her farm.

  Fact: She looked completely different from the way she had.

  Fact: When she returned to work, she’d changed completely as an actress, as a person.

  Fact: She never married.

  From what place did you come to me?

  From what place?

  Two oh seven a.m. No way to sleep; my mind won’t shut down. Can’t uproot the notion. It keeps growing, growing.

  If such a thing is possible at all, wouldn’t it be most possible in a place like this? Because, in a place like this, part of the trip has already been made. I’ve felt the past inside me here.

  But can I totally regain it?

  Might as well turn on the light.

  I’m looking at her picture; I cut it out from the book. Prosecute me for defacing public property. Make the trial date soon, though.

  Lying here … in this dimly lit room … in this hotel … the sound of surf in the distance … her photograph in front of me … the infinite sadness of those eyes gazing at me … .

  … I believe it’s possible.

  Somehow.

  November 17, 1971

  Six twenty-one a.m. Headache pretty bad. Can barely open my eyes.

  Listening and relistening to what I said last night. Listening in the quote cold light of day unquote.

  I must have been insane.

  Eleven forty-six a.m. Room service has just delivered my continental breakfast—coffee, orange juice, and blueberry muffin with butter and jam, and I’m sitting here, numb-headed, eating and drinking as though I were a normal fellow rather than a madman.

  The strange thing is that, now that the worst of the pain has gone, now, as I sit here at the writing table, looking at the sunswept strand of beach, the blue ocean breaking whitely on the gray sand, now, when one would assume that the notion would be dispelled by daytime logic, it persists somehow; why, I don’t know.

  I mean, let’s face it: in the aforementioned cold light of day it does strike one as the granddaddy of all pipe dreams. Go back in time? How nutty can you get? And yet some deep, indefinable conviction buoys me. I have no idea whatever how such an idea can make sense but, to me, it does make sense.

  Evidence for my uplifting conviction? Scant. Yet that single item seems larger every time I think about it: that she looked at me as though she knew me and, that very night, died of a heart attack.

  A sudden thought.

  Why didn’t she speak to me?

  Don’t be ridiculous. How could she? In her late eighties, talk to a boy not yet twenty about a love they might have shared fifty-seven years before?

  If it had been me, I would have done the same thing: remained silent, then died.

  Another thought.

  One even harder to adjust to.

  If I really did all this, wouldn’t it be kinder not to go back? Then her life would go on, undisturbed. She might not achieve the same heights of stardom but at least—

  I had to stop and laugh.

  How casually I sit here talking about changing history.

  Another thought.

  Making my ideas seem more possible than ever.

  I’ve read these books. Many of them printed decades, even a generation ago.

  What was done to her has already been done.

  Therefore, I have no choice.

  I must go back.

  Again, I had to laugh. I’m laughing as I say this. Not a laughter of amusement, true; more like that which notes the presence of a fool.

  That established, let’s examine the poser in detail.

  No matter what I want or feel or believe I can do, my mind and body, every cell within me knows it’s 1971.

  How could I break loose from that conditioning?

  Don’t confuse me with facts, Collier. At least, not with facts that prove it can’t be done. What I have to fill my head with now are facts which prove it can be done.

  Where do I find those facts though?

  Another fast round trip to San Diego. Barely felt it this time. Must have been the hotel’s influence with me; worn it like a suit of armor.

  Went to Wahrenbrock’s again. Immediate good luck. J.B. Priestley authored and compiled a giant book on the subject: Man and Time. Expect to get much insight from it.

  Also bought a bottle of red Bordeaux. Also a frame for her photograph. Lovely thing. Looks like aged gold with an oval opening in the mat. I call it a mat but it looks as though it’s made of aged gold too, with delicate scrollwork on it that twists like a golden vine around her head. Now she looks proper. Not pressed into a book as though she were a part of history. In a frame, standing on the bedside table.

  Alive. My love alive.

  The one thing that disturbs me still is knowing I’m the one who will put that tragic look on her face.

  I won’t think about it now. There are many possibilities. I’ll shower and then, sitting on the bed, her favorite music in my head, her favorite wine trickling down my throat, I’ll begin to learn about the time I mean to circumvent.

  And all this here. In this hotel. This precise location where, seventy-five years distant, even as I speak these words, Elise McKenna breathes and moves.

  (Richard spent a great deal of time transcribing and analyzing the Priestley book. Accordingly, it is in this section of his manuscript that I have done the heaviest pruning, since the subject, while fascinating to him, tends to slow his account considerably.)

  The opening chapter is about time-measuring devices. I don’t see how it could be of any value to me but I’ll study it, nonetheless, take notes on it the way I used to do at college.

  That’s the way to look at it. I’m taking a course on Time.

  Chapter Two: “Images and Metaphysics of Time.”

  Moving water, Priestley writes, has always been our favorite image of time. “Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away.”

  Intellectually, this is unsatisfying because streams have banks. Therefore, we are forced to consider what it is that stands still while time is flowing. And where are we? On the banks or in the water?

  Chapter Three: “Time among the Scientists.”

  “Time has no independent existence apart from the order of events by which we measure it.” So said Einstein.

  In this “mysterious realm,” as Priestley puts it, there is no place in which to discover any final meaning of space and time.

  Gustav Stromberg claims the existence of a five-dimensional universe which would include the four-dimensional space-time world of physics. He calls it the “Eternity Domain.” It lies beyond both space and time in their physical sense. In this domain, present, past, and future are without meaning.

  There is only a oneness of existence.

  Chapter Four: “Time in Fiction and Drama.”

  Say a man was born in 1900, Priestley writes. If 1890 still exists somewhere, he might be able to pay it a visit. But he could only do it as an observer be
cause 1890 plus his physical intervention would no longer be 1890 as it was.

  If he wanted to do more than stare at 1890, if he wanted to experience 1890 as somebody alive, he would have to make use of the nontemporal part of his mind to enter the mind of somebody living in 1890.

  What enforces this limitation, Priestley claims, is not the traveling itself but the destination. A man born in 1900 who dies in 1970 is a prisoner of those seventy years of chronological time. Therefore, physically, he could not be part of any other chronological time whether it was 1890 or 2190.

  That disturbs me. Let me think about it.

  No; that can’t apply to me.

  Because I’ve already been there.

  1896, without my physical intervention, would no longer be 1896 as it was.

  Therefore, I must go back.

  Part Two: “The Ideas of Time.”

  I’ve been reading and taking notes for hours. My wrist aches, my eyes are tired, I feel a rising hint of headache underneath.

  I can’t stop, though. I have to learn all I can so I can discover the way to get back to her. Desire is an obvious key. But there must be some technique, some method. I have yet to find that.

  But I will, Elise.

  The world of ancient man, writes Priestley, was sustained, not by chronology but by the Great Time, the Eternal Dream Time—past, present, and future all part of an Eternal Instant.

  Sounds like Stromberg’s Eternity Domain. Sounds, too, like Newton’s theory of absolute time, which “flows equably without relation to anything external.” Science has discarded this theory, but maybe he was right.

  This idea of the Great Time haunts us in many ways, Priestley continues, moving our minds and our actions. Man thinks constantly of “going back,” away from all worldly pressures; to neighborhoods which never change, where boy-men play forever.

  Perhaps our true selves—our essential selves—exist in this Eternity Domain, our awareness of it restricted by our physical senses.

  Death would be the ultimate escape from these restrictions—but escape before death is conceivable too. The secret has to be withdrawal from the restrictions of environment. We can’t do this physically, therefore we must do it mentally, with what Priestley calls the “nontemporal” portion of our mind.

  In brief: It is my consciousness of now which keeps me rooted here.

  Maurice Nicoll says all history is a living today. We are not enjoying one spark of life in a huge, dead waste. We are, instead, existing at one point “in a vast process of the living who still think and feel but are invisible to us.”

  I have only to lift myself to a vantage point from which I can catch sight of and then reach the point in this procession I want to reach.

  The final chapter. After this, I’m on my own.

  Priestley speaks of three Times. He calls them Time 1, Time 2, and Time 3.

  Time 1 is the time into which we are born, grow old, and die; the practical and economic time, the brain and body time.

  Time 2 leaves this simple track. Its scope includes coexistent past, present, and future. No clocks and calendars determine its existence. Entering it, we stand apart from chronological time and observe it as a fixed oneness rather than as a moving array of moments.

  Time 3 is that zone where “the power to connect or disconnect potential and actual” exists.

  Time 2 might be afterlife, claims Priestley. Time 3 might be eternity.

  What do I believe now?

  That the past still exists somewhere, a part of Time 2.

  That to reach it, I must, somehow, draw my consciousness away from Time 1.

  Or is it my subconsciousness? Is that my jailer? The inner conditioning of a lifetime?

  If that’s so, I have something definite to work with. Using the principles of Psychocybemetics, I can “reprogram” myself to believe that I exist, not in 1971, but in 1896.

  The hotel will help because so much of 1896 still exists within its walls.

  The location is perfect, the method sound.

  It’ll work! I know it will!

  I’ve spent so many hours on this book. Valuable hours, to be sure. Yet how strange that, for long periods of time, I’ve actually forgotten the reason I’ve been studying it.

  But now I lift the photograph from the bedside table and gaze at her face once again.

  My beautiful Elise.

  My love.

  I’ll be with you soon. I swear it.

  Just phoned room service for supper. Soup to nuts. Roast lamb. Salad. Big dessert. Coffee. And I’ll finish the Bordeaux.

  Lying here, glancing through her biography. Everything I’ve read is seeping into my subconscious, altering it. Tomorrow, I’ll begin to concentrate on altering it completely.

  Just ran across an intriguing item. In the back of the book is a list I didn’t see before. A list of books she read.

  One of them is An Experiment with Time by J. W Dunne.

  She had to have read it after 1896 because it wasn’t in print then.

  I wonder why she read it.

  Seven nineteen p.m. Just ate. Stomach full. Content. Assured.

  I’m lying here thinking about Bob.

  He’s always been so nice to me. So good.

  It wasn’t very kind to simply leave a note and vanish. I know he’s worried about me. Why didn’t I think about it before?

  Why didn’t I phone him right away let him know I’m all right? He could be frantic—phoning the police—checking with all the hospitals.

  I better let him know I’m all right before I travel really far.

  Mary?

  Yeah.

  Oh … not far away.

  Sure. I’m fine. Is Bob there?

  Hi, Bob.

  Well, I’d … just as soon not let you know if—

  Just personal, Bob. Nothing to do with—

  I had to, Bob. I thought I explained it in my note.

  Well, that’s all there is to it, really. I’m going to travel.

  Anywhere I want. I mean …

  I’m fine, Bob I—

  I just don’t want to tell you. Try to understand. I’m fine. I just want to do this thing my own way.

  Look, I’m all right. I phoned you to tell you. So you wouldn’t worry.

  Well, don’t be. There’s no need to. I’m fine.

  Yes. I can’t tell you why. I just am.

  No, Bob. Nothing. If I need something I’ll let you know.

  Not too far away Look, I have to—

  No, Bob, I can’t. I don’t want to—

  Because I …

  Let me do it my own way Please?

  Bob, for Christ’s sake!

  I’m watching Carol Burnett.

  She’s funny.

  So is Harvey Korman.

  Funny.

  Would you like to know why I’m watching them, folks? You can’t hear what I’m saying but I’ll tell you anyhow. Why am I watching Carol Burnett instead of going to sleep and preparing for my assault on Time tomorrow?

  I’ll tell you why.

  Because I’ve lost it.

  I don’t know when. It probably began when I was talking to Bob. Got worse when I relistened to my voice talking to him. The exact moment it vanished is unknown to me.

  All I know is it’s gone.

  I couldn’t believe it at first. I thought I was imagining it. I waited for the emptiness to be refilled. When it wasn’t, I got angry. Then I got frightened.

  Then I knew.

  It was finished.

  Me time-travel?

  Jesus, I belong in “The Night Gallery,” not in this hotel. I’m an idiot. This hotel’s not an island of yesterday. It’s an aging landmark on the beach. And Elise McKenna?

  An actress who died eighteen years ago. No dramatic reason. Just old age.

  Nothing dramatic happened to her here seventy-five years ago either. She just changed in personality, that’s all.

  Maybe she slept with Robinson. Or a bellboy. Or—

  Oh,
shut up! Forget it, Collier. Drop it, scrap it, dump it, end it. Only a moron would pursue it further.

  Eleven thirty-one p.m. Went to the Smoke Shop after Carol Burnett’s show was over. Bought a San Diego Union and a Los Angeles Times. Sat in the lobby and read them both through, doggedly, like a drunk off the wagon pouring liquor into himself. Reabsorbing the poisons of 1971 into my system. In angry defiance of what I’d felt.