Time

Time

"Thou Shalt not Kill"

2^nd August  2018

What a difference a day makes! This evening I am literally bursting with excitement to tell someone, anyone, what has happened! Last night could not have been more different.  I was sure that my time had come. I was sure that I just could not carry on. I saw no way out. But today – well, today is a different time. 

And that word time is all I have to tell you about. That word time will never be the same again. Nothing will ever be the same again. But I think I’m moving too fast. Just for perspective (when you start reading today’s joyful diary entry later on) I want you to read what I wrote last night in the depth of my despair:

1^st August  2018

I am a sick man. My illness may be viral. It may be bacterial. It feels terminal. I suppose terminal is when hope is hollowed out; when it becomes just another word. I am almost there.

This is the problem: I am a time traveller. For the past few months I have been travelling to the past. I travel to the past of wherever I happen to be about once every seventeen hours.   I stay there for about thirty minutes. I do not control it. It controls me. Sometimes the gaps between the ‘timeshifts’ (I have to call them something!) are short; sometimes they are longer. The shortest interval was about two hours; the longest over two days.

An important thing: when I am transported into the past I can see but I cannot be seen. This was almost as big a surprise as the shock that I was suddenly travelling through time itself. It is the nature of the beast, though:  I can wave, I can shout, I can leap into the air like a jumping jackass but strangers, people I know, are oblivious to my presence. No matter how much I shout into my parents’ strangely youthful, un-lined faces or grab my classmates (exactly as I remember them at seven or eight years old!)  by their lither, lighter shoulders and try to shake them into just for a moment seeing me, I cannot connect with any of them.

No-one knows about what has happened to me. Who would I tell? I am not sure that time travel is something I can openly discuss with anyone. So I'll write this: A diary entry. To be honest, it's starting to feel more like a suicide note.

I don’t trust doctors; give them a pretext like this and they’d have me filleted up for dissection before I could say temporal displacement. 

Oddly, given my atheism, I trust priests. Maybe I can talk to a man or woman of God?  For all I know this window that has been opened is proof of the existence of God? Maybe I need to discard that casual, faux-urbane assertion that ‘I am an atheist’ and just submit myself to the ministrations of the church? I don’t know. I mean, even if I have become a prophet or seer this gestalt disturbance has been going on for a while now – months – and I have not seen a message, a sign, a miracle. Oh, you say, is not this new vision itself a gift from the Lord? All of that may well be but that’s the thing – I have no faith whatsoever and besides I can’t for the life of me work out the point of this whole time-disruption thing so, God, if you’re listening, choose someone else to be your servant.

The first time it happened it was early morning.  I was waiting for a bus. There I was; one of five people standing around in vague proximity to the bus stop in that haphazard way that people do in Dublin when there was a soundless explosion of white light, just like that footage of the flash of a nuclear explosion that used to appear on TV during the cold war to terrify children. The saturation was soon broken up as the spectrum returned to normal. 

Obviously I was stunned.  My first thought was just that – a nuclear explosion. Soon, however, I could see that life was still going on around me; People and traffic, buildings and a mushroom cloud-less sky.  But while I was still on the same street everything on the surface of things had changed completely! The colours were all wrong – dull browns and blacks, greys and deep greens where before there had been  brighter shades. The buildings had changed, too. Shop signs were muted, doors were narrow and wooden where before there had been chrome and glass. Where was Starbucks? And the Texaco? The background noise was lower, too. There were fewer cars on the road but the pavement was choc a bloc. Men, women and children, all of whom wore shades of grey, black and brown, stood, walked and rushed up and down the street. 

I must have been standing there with my mouth open for ages when a little girl of about 6 years old, wearing what looked like a communion dress knocked into me and I fell over, winded.  I was about to apologise when a foot landed on my face and I felt a sharp stab of pain and the taste of blood in my mouth. I put my hand to my mouth and saw I was bleeding. I looked around and saw a little boy, perhaps the girl’s brother walking away from me through the crowd. Neither of the two children bothered to stop or to see if I was hurt.  I was about to get even more hurt. I tried to get up but I was knocked down again, this time I felt the sharp pain of a kick in my lower back and I fell flat on my face. I shouted in outrage and I turned about ready to fight - but there were so many people around me, above me, that I could not see who had kicked me.  Now I was being trampled! An old woman stood on my hand, a younger woman walking a dog kicked me in the balls, while her dog just scampered over my chest!  “Let me up, you mad bastards!” I howled at the mob. They carried on regardless. I managed to get onto all fours, all the time getting kicked and shoved in the side and face and legs and arse. “Stop!” I shouted again, but the punishment continued. I eventually managed to get to the side of the street where I stood warily, ready to jump out of the way of this torrent of this human flotsam.  

Once more I tried to get my bearings.  It goes without saying that I was distressed. As you can appreciate the enormity of what had taken place forced me to take things in gradually, in small bits and pieces. I noticed there were more bicycles than I remember (no-one wore florescent or rain proof clothes and the bicycles were all huge, black iron affairs that moved in a ponderous jerky spurts). The buses were black and white! I mean, I remembered these dimly from my childhood but here they were: queues of the dirty, noisy, heavily laden monsters of my early memories of this city. As you can imagine my brain was reeling. My first ‘explanation’ was that I had been clubbed over the head and somehow had been enlisted as an extra in a costume drama. I’m not sure if I even articulated it all that clearly – I was not in any state of mind to process what was taking place. Who would have been? 

The actual measurement of time was beyond me at that stage. I do remember cowering against the wall for a long stretch. All I could do was watch the insanity unfold. I saw two men wearing heavy, knee length woollen coats and trilby hats walking towards me. As they approached I got a snatch of their conversation, I distinctly remember one saying to the other “the water is very turbid” and I still don’t know what ‘turbid’ means,  but that is ‘by the by’;  I tried to ask them where I was but they walked past me as if I was not there at all. As I said, this pattern was going to repeat itself in the weeks to come: no-one can see me, no one can hear me, I do not exist.

The obvious conclusion for me was that I was dead. I felt nothing. It meant nothing. In fact I remember thinking. So this is the afterlife? Dame Street circa 1970? Why? I mean why not Pericles’ Athens or Hugh Hefner’s Mansion? What a lost opportunity. The next thought was an obvious one and in fact, a more sensible one. This wasn’t heaven. This was hell. “Oh, shit” I said aloud “I knew that I shouldn’t have stolen that money from my Auntie”. 

From about ‘stolen that money…’ onwards I said the rest of that sentence in the present day. I was back at the bus stop. It was morning and the same five people were there, exactly where they’d been when I ‘left’. I know that I fell flat on my face and let loose a string of profanity that would have shamed a docker (had there been any dockers in Dublin in 2018) I got to my feet, still swearing. I was bruised and confused, and in no mood for any more annoyance so I scowled at one of the other commuters – a twenty-something bearded fool in skinny jeans  -  when he dared to look askance in my direction and I said “What the fuck are you looking at you dopey looking prick?”. He looked away, his nose twittering in disgust. The bus arrived, I got on and headed off to work for the day.

At first, the hardest thing was to plan ahead. For example, one morning, not long after this whole phenomenon had begun I went out for the newspaper and a litre of milk. It happened halfway to the to the shop. The flash of light came and slowly cleared. Wherever – sorry I should say whenever but it just feels unnatural  -  I ended up it was bitterly cold and I was in the middle of an icy rainstorm. Great. The street was now just a muddy, rutted trail. There was a lot of cow shit, no houses or people; a ditch punctuated by trees ran on one side of the trail while a meadow ran down a valley to the left.  At the bottom of the valley I could see a settlement of some kind shrouded in mist. There were no paved roads or motorised vehicles leading down to the town/village so I guess I was somewhere in the middle ages. That’s as far as my speculation went.  I had to get shelter.  In my present it had been a fair morning in June and so I had gone out wearing a tee shirt and shorts. Now I was getting soaked by rain that already fallen about a thousand years ago. I waited for twenty minutes under a tree until the episode had passed. Then I was back in the present - inexplicably soaked through to the skin and sniffling. I continued on to the shop, got what I had set out to get and hurried home. I spent the next three days in bed with a cold. Sure, the time shifting continued but I told myself that my bed was a safer platform from which to view the past.

Soon, though, I learned to be prepared for the vagaries of time travel.  I never go out without an inconspicuous khaki rucksack containing the items of my survival kit:

1 pair of black waterproof trousers

1 black waterproof jacket.

A pair of thermal gloves

A Thermal hat

A fleece.

A pair of sunglasses

A bottle of sunblock

50 pounds in pre-decimal cash and coins.

A change of socks.

A tee shirt

A shirt

A pair of light trousers.

A pair of unfussy shoes.

A toilet roll

Wet wipes in a plastic bag

A bottle of water

Paracetemol

Antiboitics

A Stanley knife

I fear, however, that this survival kit is not going to save me. There is nothing in that rucksack that can minister to the sick feeling I have right now. I have no control over my life any more. My brain and my body are victims to the whims of some inscrutable, and I can only conclude, vicious intelligence. I am at breaking point already!

You know, if you’d told me before all of this happened that I’d become a time traveller I would have been chuffed. Time travel has always been my number one, all time fantasy. I was brought up on a diet of TV shows like The Time Tunnel and later, Quantum Leap and I was transfixed. Maybe I was always a precociously nostalgic child – I remember one day when I was about nine or ten years old crying because I knew that I could never go back to an earlier stage of my childhood. I mean what business did I have crying over lost time at that age?– but for as long as I can remember the past has been a vital, exciting place.

Not anymore.  The past is beginning to bore me senseless. I never arrive back to see the discovery of America or the birth of Jesus. I don’t get the chance to intervene in history. A quiet word to the wise in Captain Smith’s ear as he sets sail in the Titanic? Going for a walk with Adolf Hitler (I mean, if you had thirty minutes with Hitler and you knew that you were going to be lifted out of there would you hesitate to throw him under a tram?) Forget it.

As I said, no-one can hear, see, feel or, I guess, smell me. But that is not the real problem. Who or whatever is making this happen has seen fit to land me at the most unremarkable, idiotically banal moments in the irrelevant wastes that make up the lives of history’s most unremarkable people. 

Why can’t I meet Elvis? No, just some crappy busker murdering ‘Ground Control to Major Tom’ in the early 1990s on Grafton Street. Even De Valera would do. Not a chance – some hick counsellor scabbing votes from the parishioners outside Finglas church sometime in the late 1950s is the closest I’ve got to rubbing shoulders with greatness.

I guess if Ryanair did time travel it would be something like this. I get to where I’m going (the location is identical so I don’t actually go anywhere) but there’s no telling what year I’ll arrive and I can be taken at any moment in the middle of my day. I arrive back at the moment I left. I guess to others I have become a very strange fish altogether; prone to sudden bodily jerks, random bruising and bleeding, inexplicable, dazed looks and weird, occasionally terrifying non sequitur utterances, grunts and squawks.

I can’t say my eyes haven’t been opened!  A few weeks ago I arrived back in 1982. The housing estate where I grew up was raw and unfinished; scruffy children were all over the place but what I saw in Mrs Halpin’s house changed my view of my childhood. There she was, a woman notorious for her devotion to the Catholic Church and aggressively forbidding of sin of any kind in others, bent over performing fellatio on Father Roche, the local parish priest. I swear, between the slurps and moaning I could hear him reciting decades of the rosary.

But the predominant mode has been fear and pain. It is really getting me down. This episode is typical: 

One evening I was sitting down in front of the TV to eat a pizza and crack open a beer. I had just - three hours previously  -  been back from a terrifying thirty minutes in the frozen wastes of the Palaeolithic. I spent most of this time hiding up a tree to escape from some kind of giant carnivorous monkey (how come  there are no fossil records of such a beast?!) and so I was not really expecting another timeshift. But, one minute pizza and beer in 2018, next I’m standing on some kind of pyre in the middle of a Viking fertility rite. On fire. I roared in agony, leapt off the pyre and hopped into a pond. When I got out I was quite seriously burned on one leg and my pyjamas had been burned straight off my body.  Poor me: the unfortunate souls  who’d been up on the pyre with me were still burning – their frenzied gut wrenching screams of agony were joined  by a chorus of side splitting guffaws, and a sustained, fanatical volley of abuse from the Norsemen  to make an overall cacophony that will haunt me to the grave. By the time I was shifted back to my pizza and beer I had lost my appetite.  And I had third degree burns.

And some of the stuff I come across is just macabre. I was in the cinema  with my girlfriend when all of a sudden I wasn't in the cinema  with my girlfriend. I was standing outside in complete darkness. The kind of darkness where you can’t see the hand in front of your face. That kind.  I tried to see my hand; I was waving it, I couldn't see it. “Oh, for fuck’s sake” I said aloud, exasperated, “where…I mean…when am I now?”   I could see nothing, as I said, but I could feel the weighty heads of some kind of barley-like  grain crop knocking against my palms as I reached out and hear a light breeze rustling around. There didn't seem to be much to do but wait so I crouched down to rest. However, almost immediately I heard voices. They were men. They were speaking Irish (I think) and were, from the rustling sound of their passage, moving more or less towards me through the barley. The movement stopped. Of course, by this stage I knew I could not be heard so I walked towards where I’d heard them last. At this stage of my time travelling career I knew the score; I knew that I couldn’t be seen or heard. Nonetheless I was racking my brains for some words of Irish as I went. I had just formulate something like “gabh mo leithscéal” when I saw faint light about twenty metres ahead. It was an oil lamp. 

As I got closer I could just make out two men dressed in rough brown shirts and leather trousers working together to dig a hole. Next to where they dug I could see another man lying on the ground. He wasn’t moving.  I walked up to the men and they were, of course, oblivious to me.  I could see that the man on the ground was dead. I could also see that he was wearing a red uniform. A dead British soldier, I assumed. The two grave diggers worked on in silence, occasionally speaking in Irish but mostly concentrating on the job in hand. Next I was back in the cinema with my girlfriend. I don’t remember what the film was. I knew that there was a dead body under the cinema. Who would I tell? The Gardai?  How would I start? “Someone was buried under this cinema about two hundred years ago; I think he was murdered by the Fenians”?  Right, so. Shut up and eat the popcorn.

The more I have gone on the more I have become freighted with partial yet at times, portentous knowledge. Did it matter that this knowledge was about people who didn’t matter, living lives that were limited and cramped? Yes, it did matter because I did not have the historian’s training that would have shown me where to store these snapshots. I didn’t know where to put them and so I took them with me. Mrs Haplin and Father Roche, the giant carnivorous monkey, the entire family sacrificed to Odin, the dead soldier, that fucking busker. The detritus of history. They all haunt me, they remind me with each of my breaths that one day, very soon, those breaths will stop;  I will expire and rot. What gormless time travelling clot will be watching me at that time, just as I watch others in their muddling through the time allotted to them – who’s watching me now?

Then at times I think everyone is like this; we all exist out of time, sensorily isolated from the people we encounter, invisible to them, a blind spot that never goes away.

And what if I just throw myself under a train? Believe me, if this goes on much longer I will start to consider it. Who then will see what has happened? Is it so important that I be sent to see these things? It’s not as if I will ever share what I have seen. It’s not as if I can affect the lives that I see given the voracious effect of time – even on those very much still alive. My death would close a portal to the past that has no meaning. In fact, I think I’m just going to kill myself. There. I’ll do it first thing in the morning. After breakfast – wherever/whenever that is.

2^nd August  2018

I’ve read over yesterday’s diary entry/suicide note. What a miserable swine. Who would want to read such tripe? Well as I said at the outset it will give you some perspective on today’s news:

The day started just like the others have done recently; I awoke cowering, clutching my survival kit to my chest. Opening my eyes I could see that I was still in 2018. Getting dressed without taking off my survival rucksack is a pain but I have learned to do it. I put some clothes on and went to get some breakfast. I had planned to kill myself as soon as I had eaten.

I got as far as filling the kettle when I was visited by the by now tiresome melodrama of light saturation. When the light faded, however, it seemed as if I had not travelled far at all. I was still in my kitchen holding the kettle. Except that the identical kettle was on the counter in front of me. Almost identical. I held ‘my’ kettle up against my ‘other’ kettle and noticed that the ‘other’ one was oddly two dimensional. When I looked at its side it became invisible – not instantly, mind you, but it sort of faded away from sight. I moved my head back to where it had been at first and the face of ‘other’ kettle came back into view.  I soon discovered that the rest of the kitchen and the house was the same – each object was two dimensional. I was in a film-set version of my own house where all of the props were holographic projections rather than cardboard or wooden cut outs. The front door opened. I had gone upstairs so I leant over the bannisters. There I was.  I was walking down the hall towards the kitchen. I ran downstairs, into the kitchen and stood face to face with myself. I noticed that I had fresh burn marks on my legs – the burns that I had got two months ago on the Viking pyre! I was very puzzled to see that I was in some kind of trance. My eyes were closed though I could see them moving spasmodically in REM jerks. My arms and legs were twitching as if I were being electrocuted. My mouth was open and I was producing sub-verbal noise as lines of drool trailed from the corners of my lips. What was this? I moved closer and, I don’t know why I was shocked by this but it seemed that this ‘other’/’two months ago’ me was two dimensional – just like everything else in this house! I circled myself. 

When I came 180 degrees around I reappeared again but the back of my head was flat and glassy. I touched the surface.  It lit up. A screen. I touched it again and, of course, there was a scrollable menu of icons: “Full Sensory Mode” “Motor Disable” “Sight Mode” “No Pain Mode” and some others. I touched an icon “Temporal Mode” and it gave a series of sub options “Time Random” “Place Random” “Time and Place Random” “Full Temporal Control” and so on.  I navigated back to the first menu of icons. My finger hovered over the option “Exit TimeApp”.

Of course I didn’t switch it off. I went back into the programme, selected “Full Temporal Autonomy” “Integrated Temple Dashboard” and “No Pain”.  I tapped “Apply Changes”. Not a moment too soon. I was back in ‘my’ 3-dimensional kitchen again! I checked everything just to make certain. Sure enough, one blink of my right eye and I could see the Temporal Dashboard!  I scrolled through the options with a few more flicks of my eye: “Select Time and Date”; “Select Place by Coordinates”; “Duration Settings”;  “Emergency Shiftback Settings”; “User Manual”; “Historical Narrative Display”; “Historical Safemode” 

(I pointed to that one to get a description: Historical Safemode once selected will prevent you from interfering in history in such a way as to give rise to Temporal Paradoxes;  for example, killing your own grandparents would entail a logical contradiction where the agent of the action  - the temporal operative – would no longer exist due to the action undertaken. It is highly recommended that you select this option unless you are fully cognisant of the implications of your actions in any given historical epoch. Please be aware that the personal and, indeed global consequences of actions undertaken without Historical Safemode selected are potentially catastrophic)

I will switch that one off for sure.  This is going to be a real adventure.