It was a cool and bright May morning, and the cemetery was empty of anyone living except for one young man who was kneeling down at a new looking headstone. He was changing the flowers on the grave of his mother. It was just barely a year since she had died and like his grief the headstone was still freshly carved. She had died in a car accident, her small hatchback slamming into the back of a jack-knifed lorry only to be hit by another truck as it came up from behind. Amazingly she had not died immediately but had survived for three days, clinging onto life tenaciously. But on the third day she had died, in the intensive care ward at Dumfries General Hospital and Martin Myle’s life had changed forever.
‘In living memory of Agnes Myle, born 1964, taken tragically from us’ read the new headstone in sharp gold-leafed gothic lettering. She had been only twenty when Martin was born, he had never known his father and Agnes hadn’t talked about him much. He had been much older than his mother and had died of cancer when he was two. Martin didn’t remember him. So when he went to University in Aberdeen, he had left his mother, living alone but still young, in Dumfries. She had died on the bypass, coming up the A74 to see her son.
The guilt had never left him and each day on waking, the world that he lived in would come crashing in and he would have to face up to his infinite loneliness again. Whenever he came down to visit his mother's grave, (he took the train) he would bring fresh flowers and remove the old ones. There was a compost heap across the graveyard where the old flowers could be thrown, beside the grave-diggers corrugated iron hut.
As always he talked to her. ‘Well, mum, third year is going fine. I have part time job on the student newspaper as well. I am going to interview a woman who was also in a car crash a couple of years ago.’
Martin was dark haired and wore it slicked back with hair gel. His fashion sense was way beyond help, as many of his friends were fond of pointing out. He wore a green anorak and national health spectacles. He wasn’t quite at the tank top wearing stage, he wore a blue jumper underneath his anorak, but he still managed to look like someone from the 1950’s.
‘My councillor thought it would be a good idea. Cathartic maybe. I don’t know. Sometimes I think the pain is lessening, then I feel guilty all over again because I think that might be me forgetting you. Elaine says I need a girl friend, but how can I go with a girl when I am this .. this .. broken.’
Martin didn’t often smile, but he did now, sometime he liked to pretend that she could still hear him.
The next day he was back in Aberdeen and as he had already said at his mother's grave he was in the office of Dr Stephanie Imell, PHD, Lecturer in Advanced Physics. She was a dark skinned Caribbean lady, in her late forties. She was very beautiful, to Martins eyes, and she had an easy elegance about her that made even the brewing of a pot of tea look like ballet. She had a scar on her forehead that disappeared into her scalp. Where the scar was had turned the hair white in a long lightning bolt.
She handed him a cup of tea and sat down beside him at her desk. Her office was in a port-o-cabin behind one of the older buildings of the University Campus in Old Aberdeen. Locked in on old sides by ancient sandstone buildings that looked down on it in stern disapproval, the small grey huts of the extension huddled together on a muddy patch of grass like sheep sheltering beside a wall. It was raining outside, quite heavily, and Martin had removed his anorak and hung it up as soon as he had arrived in the small cluttered office. Loose papers and folders threatened to topple off the filing cabinets all around him and crush them both, but there was enough space, just, on the desk to brew and serve tea.
Martin noticed that much of the paperwork was in Braille. That was odd he thought, he had never been told she was blind, and she could quite clearly see well enough to get round her office.
Taking a sip of tea, Stephanie broke the silence and said, ‘So, you're from the Voice, is this about my course? I don’t think anyone will be very excited about it – it’s pretty dry!’, and she laughed musically.
‘No in actual fact,’, he said and cleared his throat, ‘Actually it’s about your accident. My.. ah.. my mother died in a car crash last year and I thought I could write something about your crash. You know, human interest .. um..’
Dr Imell gave him a queer look and touched her hair just where the scar was and then pulled her hand up to smooth back the streak of white in her otherwise raven black curls.
‘Oh no, I could never have anything about that published.’
In utter embarrassment Martin made to stand up and leave, but she took his wrist and said,
‘But I can tell you about it if you like? Off the record as it were.’
‘Yes, I would, very much’, and he sat back down again and smiled gratefully.
‘So’, she began, and they both settled back into their seats as the rain came down by the window, ‘I was driving back from a party. I had had nothing to drink, was just on my way home on a Saturday night. Just at the Bridge of Don, were the beach road joins on, a car came flying up to the lights. He shot straight through them, the crash investigators said he must have been doing eighty. He hit me side on and we both went over onto the river bank. We took the Donmouth nature reserve sign with us!’, she exclaimed and laughed her musical laugh again.
‘Well, I don’t really remember any of that. And I don’t want to either.’, she said this very finally.
‘But I do remember waking up in the hospital, all bandaged up like the invisible man. The other driver had died. I think he had drowned in the river, his car was upside down. But I survived. With brain damage.’
And she touched her head again, pointing to the white streak in her hair.
‘I could hardly speak. My vision was all wrong and I hallucinated for a long time. It took months with the speech and language therapist at the hospital before I learned to speak again.’
She looked down into her tea at this point in reflection.
‘Well, sometimes very strange thing happen to people with brain damage. Sometimes their short term memory goes and they can’t remember things that happened even five minutes ago. Or maybe they can’t walk, or ride a bike anymore, all the stuff they learned as a child is lost to them. With some people, they lose the ability to see three dimensional objects. They might look at a chair,’ and she nodded at chair in the corner of the room with a stack of papers on it, ‘and not be able to tell you which of its four legs was nearest to us and which was furthest away. They have no idea of how to process three dimensional imagery.’
Martin was nodding and listening to her musical, beautiful voice, enraptured, his tea growing cold in his hands.
She sighed and continued, ‘Well, that’s sort of what happened to me. I will never get it back, I don’t think so, but after all these years, I still cannot read. I just cannot process two dimensional images in my head. The eyes see it, but the more I look at a page of text, the more I just get sucked into a tiny infinite point. As for the television, the same, it’s like looking down into a black hole. I can’t read at all, but I can write, if I keep my eyes closed. My lecture notes are in Braille.’
Martin was having trouble visualising this but nodded for her to continue.
‘And three dimensional images are like 2D to me. The whole world is like a slide show. I can’t drive any more, I would be a danger to everyone. I have no idea at all about distances. I even had trouble moving around a room for a long time. But if I get familiar with a place, then I remember for instance that it is three steps to the kettle and four to the door. I can see it, but it’s like a picture in a magazine.’
There was silence and Martin felt he had to say something, ‘That’s incredible’, was all he could manage. He was enjoying listening to her melodic voice and was happy just as long as she was talking.
A wicked grin came of Stephanie’s face and she said,
‘Well now, here is a puzzle for you then Martin. If 2D becomes 1D and 3D becomes 2D, then what?’
Martin had no idea what she was talking about and shrugged his shoulders.
‘You’re an intelligent young man, you should come to some of my lectures. But think. Two becomes one, three becomes two, what becomes three?’
‘Four?’
‘Exactly!’, she clapped her hands and laughed her musical laugh.
‘But the fourth dimension, that’s time isn’t it? That’s …’, he mumbled.
‘Ridiculous? I quite agree and that’s what I thought at first! But think of it. Think of time as a three dimensional landscape. You can get in your car and drive to Edinburgh, from one point in three dimensional space to another one. Now when you feel like it, you could get back in your car and drive back. Both places still exist as points in space. Now imagine the same in a
four dimensional landscape. What if someone was able to travel back and forth in four dimensions as easily as we all can do in three?’
Martin was smiling now, he knew she was joking with him, but it was a very interesting joke.
‘Well they would be a time traveller for sure!’ he laughed.
‘That’s right! If you ever get the chance Martin, read Slaughterhouse 5, because for the first relative year after my accident, and I stress the word relative here, I was like Billy Pilgrim in that book. I was a spastic in time. Just as someone in just three dimensions might lose control of themselves, unable to control their limbs, I had lost control of myself in time, and I flitted back and forth from my very first moment when I was born to my last dying breath. I die in bed by the way, at the ripe old age of ninety-three. At first I thought it was all part of the hallucinating but it was all so real, I decided to take everything I experienced on face value and to hell with the consequences. Anyway, I am here and not in a looney bin. Whether that says more about me or Aberdeen University I don’t know.’
‘You are still like this? That would be incredible! How long have you been ‘here’? I mean you could have just zapped in five minutes ago!’
‘That’s how I was like’, she explained, ‘But gradually I learned how to control myself again. I managed to get my life flowing in a more or less constantly linear direction, from start to finish.’
Martin nodded and she began again,
‘So, to continue, imagine you wanted to sit on that chair over there, what would you do? You would pick up the papers and move them. You would manipulate your three dimensional space. Or say you wanted to get a good view, you would go to the top of a tower or something. Time is just the same, it can be manipulated. One person could never move a mountain, but maybe at the right spot they could set one stone moving that would then hit another, then another, until they had caused an avalanche. And time his high ground as well. Sometimes I have no more idea of what will happen next than most people, like driving through a tunnel. And in some places you can stand on a tall mountain and see everything laid out around you for a hundred miles.’
Martin was enjoying her wild imagines and was leaning forward, his tea put down on the desk and long forgotten.
‘I can’t move mountains anyway,’ she said, ‘But just as we can move small things around in three dimensions I can move small amounts of time around. Just as you can build things in space I have learned how to build things in time.’
‘How? By reliving the same bits of time again and again?’
‘More or less. Although the span of my years is ninety-three I have lived, in relative terms over three hundred. So far I have not been able to go back further than my birth or beyond my death. But I am building a temporal machine that hopefully I will be able to use to travel beyond these boundaries’
‘Wow’, gasped Martin, ‘You have a time machine? Can I see it?’
‘You not keeping up young man!’, she laughed and shook her head, ‘The machine isn’t built out of three dimensional objects. What good would that be? It’s built out of four dimensional objects of course!’
Martin sat back and looked up at the ceiling for a second in bemusement. Looking back down at her, he said,
‘What does a four dimensional object look like?’
She laughed again, finding his confusion highly amusing
‘Well in a sense we are all four dimensional objects. Everything travels in time, although usually only in one direction. But it goes a little deeper than that. If you can encourage something to exist simultaneously in more than one point in time then you are halfway there. Yet you cannot see or even conceptualise such an object in just three dimensions. It is outside of human experience. And even the building blocks are hard enough to make though. Even the tools that make the building blocks are hard to make. It’s like starting again from the beginning trying to make something incredibly complex. Imagine if you, and you alone, wanted to get to the moon. By yourself you would have to build a rocket ship wouldn’t you?’
‘Yes, that would be difficult.’
‘Yes, but building a temporal device out of four dimensional objects makes building a rocket ship look like making sandcastles. First you would have to try and understand the physics of space travel. Then you would have to figure out what materials you would need to make our rocket. Then you would have to build the tools that you would use to do it. And a million other
complex issues would come into play. Impossible, utterly impossible for one person to do such a thing alone, no one lives long enough. Luckily I have plenty of time.’
‘And then what? When you have built your rocket?’
‘I don’t know. I can only guess what will be there when I get there. Maybe others like me. Maybe I will be the world's best historian, in that I will be able to go and see events in history as they actually happened.’
‘Gosh! But what about cause and effect? You could alter the course of history?’
With that she sat back and smiled silently for a moment then finally said,
‘Who is to say I haven’t already?’
‘Right’, Martin felt obliged to remove his spectacles and clean them.
Dr Imell clapped her hands together and giggled girlishly.
Martin shook his head, ‘Amazing. I can’t even begin to think of all the things you could do. Stop wars, or start them? If you didn’t like someone, you could just … rub them out. You would never be late for anything, you would get as many practice attempts as you liked at anything you ever did. It would be very confusing.’
‘Yes, very confusing, but immense fun. Not being able to watch TV looks like a small sacrifice eh?’
Martin stood up and looked out the window at the rain.
‘There is so much you could change, so much you could do.’
‘Yes, but remember what I said. Nobody could move mountains. All I can do is tinker with cause and effect. I can’t cure the world of AIDS for instance, but perhaps if I could get back that far I could arrange that Mr and Mrs Hitler never met for instance? Thinks like that happen by such complete chance. Turn down one street instead of another and the world splits in two.’
‘But you would alter the course of history completely!’
‘Oh yes!’, she said gleefully, ‘Believe me, when I go hiking over the mountains of time, I am very very careful about not causing avalanches!’
Martin turned to looked at her blankly.
Suddenly she waved her hands in the air and started to laugh shaking her head in unbridled amusement. Finally she managed to gasp out,
‘Dear dear me! What a face. What a picture you are! I have talked you into a right old knot haven’t I? Please don’t worry about it! I just like to play jokes on people. I’m afraid all my accident did was leave me disabled and I like to make stories up to appear more interesting than I am.’
Martin replaced his glasses and looked at her. Her dark skin and white smile, her white streak of hair making her look like the West Indian version of the Bride of Frankenstein, her young face, but with a mature knowing quality. Martin thought she was much more than merely interesting.
She broke the silence by saying,
‘Tell me about your.. mother was it, that died? What was she like?’
And Martin told Stephanie about his mother. How it had always been them together and how they had never needed anyone else. How young she had been and how guilty he had felt about leaving her when he came to University. About the day of the crash and how his every waking moment, and most of his sleeping ones had been a torment of guilt, rage and dread every since.
Dr Imell listened silently through it all and nodded gravely when he had finished. Then it was time for him to leave, she had a class to teach and Martin would have to go over to see his editor, Elaine, and tell her that he had no story for the newspaper after all.
Much to his amazement and delight Stephanie gave him a hug and a kiss on the cheek just before he left and he was still blushing as red as beetroot when he crossed the cobbled road on his way to the small officer from which the Voice was run.
A car beeped its horn angrily at him and he leapt back onto the pavement. He had not even seen it and it quickly whipped past him and sped up dangerously to get round the junction ahead before the lights changed.
Shaking his head he again crossed the street and continued on his way. Just then his mobile phone started ringing and he plucked it from his pocket. It was his mother.
‘Hi mum’, he said to her. He had just left her yesterday but he was always happy to hear from her.
‘Martin, you know you left some of your notes down here?’
It took him a second or two to figure out what she was talking about. Notes? Why would he leave notes at the .. wait .. at their house in Dumfries. Why did he think for a second it had been sold? Where else could he have been when he was down there?
‘Ah yes! My notes!’, he said and laughed with such delight that it stunned his mother at the other end of the line.
‘Sorry mum! Don’t worry, I don’t need them urgently. I have plenty of time!’
‘OK, well, just so you know. I can’t talk though. The dogs want out. I will call you tonight!’
‘OK mum, speak to you later!’
He hung up his phone and put it back in his pocket. Why did he feel as if a massive weight had lifted from his shoulders? He hadn’t even realised he was missing any notes. I should send Dr Imell some chocolates or something he thought, talking to her today has really cheered me up!
If you enjoyed this, then try the collection it is from :) : http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00X8RLP3S
