Allergic To Time (4 page)

The nurse turned to me and raised a sharp eyebrow. “He can’t breathe the air. At all.” She shook her head. “It’s like his lungs can’t process it. It’s like he’s allergic to it.”

I stopped in my tracks, while she gave one last sharp look in the direction of the others and left the hall.
 

***
 

“I’m telling you, I have to leave right now.” Martin was pacing again. “You’ll have to drive me back now, there’s not enough time to walk.” Martin was still concerned about making his 3pm seminar. In the six years I had been his student – on and off – I had never known him to miss a single class, cancel a single lecture. And I would know, considering that as an eager undergrad student I had never missed one myself.
 

“I think we have more important things to worry about than a missed class!” I said, pointing towards the blue hospital room.
 
Martin leant against the windows, his arms pressed up against the glass and his head towards the floor. When he didn’t reply to me I walked over. “Hey,” I said. “Calm down, you’ll get to your class on time. Don’t go getting so stressed.”

“You don’t understand Anna.” He paused for a second. “Like I told you, you shouldn’t be here.” He checked around to see where the man in black was. He had made his way down to the other end of the hall where there was a window to the outside world that he was peering through. Still, Martin was careful, and whispered, “You can’t get caught up in this.”

I leant in closer to both the window and Martin. “Caught up in what?” My voice was also low, though I was sure the man in black was faraway enough that he wouldn’t be able to hear us. And besides, I wasn’t sure why it would be such a big deal if he could.
 

Martin’s hands returned to his hair, golden brown strands just beginning to be infected with grey. In the six years I”d known him I had never seen him this ruffled, this badly composed. Not even four years previously, around the time that his fiancé had died. My thoughts briefly returned to that tragedy, but Martin’s hushed voice quickly drew me back to the present moment.
 

But it wasn’t like I hadn’t managed to find out on my own. Did he really think that I wouldn’t stumble upon his secret life during my research? I’d pieced together enough of the puzzle: the articles written under a pseudonym, the locked files in his office, the mysterious visits from the man in black. Of course, I hadn’t been ready to confront him about it till I was absolutely sure - or I would have looked like a total nutcase, accusing my university professor of working for a secret government agency that dealt with time travel mysteries. Instead I antagonised him with my thesis and my own research, pushing for time travel to be included in the syllabus, watching him squirm every time the subject came up in class. He continued to toe the company line - backed up by his own published book on the subject - that time travel was impossible. Full stop.
 

But here we were, finally, at the scene of the crime so to speak. I hadn’t expected Martin to come completely clean with me right away, but I had expected some degree of honesty. But he was denying even the possibility that the guy in the hospital bed in could be a time traveller. I was so over all of it: I was over Martin’s dogmatic lectures that he gave every year, telling his admiring students that time travel was a physical impossibility; I was over his hostile attitude towards my own research, his haughty attitude, and his covering up his own secret second career as a time travel investigator.
 

“Well, come on,” I said, pushing him for a response. “If there was anyone,
anyone,
who you should have involved in this, it is me.”

I starred at him for a long minute, before he finally raised his head. He starred me straight in the eye. “Anna, you are the last person in the world who should be involved with this.”

“What do you mean? I’m an expert on this subject. I am far more of an expert than you are! You’re a skeptic! You cover this shit up.” I didn’t mean to swear but after months of keeping this to myself the professional niceties I usually kept toward my immediate superior were vanishing quickly. “Your career is based on disproving the possibility of time travel. You won’t even entertain the possibility. I, on the other hand, am perfectly openminded…”

I was interrupted by a light flashing above our heads and an alarm ringing. There was a thudding of footsteps coming from behind and suddenly the nurse we’d met earlier was running back down the hall in our direction. She pushed us out of the way and ran into the hospital room. Martin and I both swung around, startled to see that the man in black had suddenly appeared directly behind us.
 

For the first time that day an expression filled his blank face. He grinned and nodded towards the hospital bed. “Look’s like our guy is conscious.”

Chapter Four.
 

All I wanted, was to talk to him.
 

I could hear Martin and the man in black still bickering off to the side of me. “The very fact that he has survived — lived to tell this tale — should prove that he is not a time traveller,” Martin spat, but I was barely listening. My eyes were transfixed on the hospital bed that I could just barely make out through the window, where the strange man dressed in a purple jump suit was sitting up, staring eerily around, trying to make some kind of sense of his surroundings.

At first they wouldn’t let me in the room. Once the doctors and nurses had cleared out, the man in black pushed his way in, not even letting Martin follow him, at least at first.
 

After a brief harrowed conversation with the mysterious patient he glanced up and waved for Martin to join him.

“You stay here,” Martin said to me firmly, grabbing the door handle and pushing through into the room before I could argue back. Truthfully, as much as I wanted to be inside that room, I was also terrified of what I might find out. On the one hand this was what I had been waiting for my whole life.
 

“My whole life” – I thought back over that phrase, and thought about how strange it was that I’d possessed this drive and desire to prove time travel was possible for as long as I could remember. What kind of child was so fixated on time travel, so badly wanted it to be true, that she would grow up and dedicate her whole life to it?

I sighed and thought about my PhD thesis as the three figures inside the room carried on in hushed serious tones, lowering their voices, not even daring to look up at me. My much maligned thesis — which barely had the approval of my supervisor, let alone the physics department — had caused nothing but controversy since the moment I’d begun writing it, and there were doubts I would even be granted my PhD by the end of it. But - if this guy really had travelled through time, had come here, somehow,
someway
from
the 70s,
then that would change everything.

The conversation with the three of them continued for ages — almost 15 minutes passed with me staring at them through the window before my old nurse buddy appeared at my side. She introduced herself this time as Bianca, and asked me why I wasn’t inside the room with the rest of them.

“You’re part of whatever it is that.they do, aren’t you?” she asked. I looked at her with a mixture of sadness and annoyance, wondering how it was that this nurse knew more about ‘whatever it is that they do’ than I did.
 

I half shrugged my shoulders. “I’m not sure that I am, no.”

She looked worried. “Oh. Then, should you even be here?” She looked around the hall, checking for any other stowaways, like she was scared that we were about to get in trouble.
 

I didn’t mean for it to come out that way, but my tone was snappy. “Yes, actually I should be here.”

“Alright alright,” she said, like she wasn’t convinced but couldn’t be bothered arguing with me. She turned to stare into the hospital room, mirroring my own position. “Poor guy,” she murmured. “He’s here all alone. Doesn’t even know where he is, how he got here.”

I turned to look at her. “So you believe him too? You believe he’s a time traveller?” I was kind of shocked. How many people were there involved in this whole thing, involved in covering it up?

She seemed hesitant to say too much to me. I cursed the fact that I hadn’t just lied to her, pretended that I was indeed a key member of Martin and the Man In Black’s crack team of time travel cover up experts. Then she might have been willing to spill the beans a bit more. But I was terrible at lying, as much as I wanted to be good at it. I didn’t have a moral problem with lying, it was just that my brain and words could never form a dishonest sentence. Maybe it had something to do with my years of scientific training, my pledge to the truth no matter the cost involved.

She shifted side from side and continued on. “Look, I don’t know. All I know is that they turn up here from time to time.” She stared hard through the glass. “They look strange, usually. Their clothes and hairstyles.
 
Like nothing I’ve ever seen. And it’s always the same: they can’t breathe. And then these guys,” she said, nodding her head towards Martin and the man in black. “They always turn up. Sometimes before the patients die, but usually afterwards.” She paused for a second and looked sad. “But this guy made it. He’s breathing on his own.”

I’d fully turned to face her as she spoke. I could feel how wide my eyes had gotten. This was it, this was what I had been waiting a lifetime to hear.
 

I was finally being proved right.
 

Bianca elbowed me in the side and pointed for me to look inside the room. The man in black was waving for me to come in and join them.
 

***
 

I crept towards the bed slowly. I braved a quick look at Martin’s face: his expression confirmed my belief that he was not the one who wanted me to come inside the room. He wore a look of stony disapproval, along with one of disbelief that this was happening, that I had become involved in his seedy secret little society.
 

It was the man in black who smiled at me, almost warmly — or at least as warmly as that bastard could manage — and he opened his mouth to speak. But before he could, it was the man in purple who spoke up.
 

“You have to believe me!” he spluttered, sitting up in the bed, although it looked like the sudden movement caused him considerable pain. The dark eyeliner around his eyes looked garish and cartoonish in the blue tinged light of the hospital room.
 

The man in black placed his hand on the patient’s shoulder and gently got him to lie back down. “She does believe you,” he said in a low reassuring tone. “That’s why we’ve got her here.”

I scrunched my face up - I was there because I’d fought to come with them. I’d thrown myself in front of a car for crying out loud.

“This is ridiculous,” I heard Martin mutter, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the man in the bed. He looked like a frightened cat. A ridiculous, feathered, sequinned, frightened cat in a purple jumpsuit. The whiteness of his eyes was exaggerated by the black eyeliner that surrounded them, but the terror in them was real.
 

I sat down and he looked at me, pleadingly. “Please, you have to believe what I am saying.”

I nodded, feeling the heat of disapproval emanating from Martin behind me.
 

Slight relief flickered across his eyes. “It’s like I have told these guys,” he said, shooting a look of distrust in Martin’s direction. “I was just walking down the street, minding my own business, not hurting anyone!” He gulped and swallowed. “When next thing I knew there was a giant cracking sound, thunder or something, and then I was...somewhere else. Some weird, trippy version of where I came from. I was stunned, in shock, and then I couldn’t breathe. Then I wake up in this place.” He stuck his hand out to point around the hospital room. “Where the hell am I?” At the last part his voice and breathing became ragged and he had to lie back down on his bed.
 

I glanced up at the other two, unsure of exactly I was supposed to say. But as I looked back at our time traveller, I was determined to sound reassuring. After all – I believed everything that he was saying with a conviction that came deep from within my gut.
 

“It’s okay,” I whispered. “I believe you.”

In the background I could practically feel Martin rolling his eyes.
 

“Good because these two clowns don’t.” His voice was still scratchy, his breathing laboured.
 

Martin began pacing, and he pulled his phone out of his pocket. I realised that it must be past 3pm by that stage. No wonder he was getting agitated. Even with the current distraction I was able to appreciate the gravity of Martin Anderson cancelling a class. Or even worse, just being a complete no show. I wondered what his students back at the university were doing, whether they were still sitting in the classroom waiting for him to show up, or whether they’d decided it was their collective lucky day — a cancelled class — and taken off for beers at the uni bar.
 

I turned away from him, wondering why, why on Earth it was so important for him to be right at this point of time, why he couldn’t even entertain the idea that this guy had travelled through time. At the very least he could have shown some compassion towards the poor guy. Not that showing compassion was Martin’s strong point.
 

I wondered if we should call the nurse back in, considering the state of the patient’s breathing. “Do you need your oxygen mask back on?” I asked. “I can get someone in here for you...”

He shook his head frantically. “No, I can’t talk with that on.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t be talking right now.”

He shook his head. “Where am I?” he repeated, his voice low and raspy.
 

“Sydney. RPA Hospital,” I said.
 

“This is not Sydney,” he managed to whisper. “Not like I know it. Not like it was yesterday.”