Faces in Time (2 page)

One discriminates one’s company shrewdly in youth, lightly in adulthood, and with broad abandon in age. In youth, one expects the most interesting and perfectly uniform friends. By old age, one brightens just at the sight of another born within the same decade who might remember the same song, movie, or event—one who might hold some knowledge on how to defeat their ticking nemesis or, in the least, help one better enjoy life’s slow, automated ride.

The joy and contentment of the latter expand inside him, threatening to burst his very being. It’s the next dimension past the perfect dream. It’s a meta-awareness: a pinching yourself and verifying that all the wonderfully unbelievable things around you are real.

Scaling an emotional peak not often reached by man, he is aware that he’s found his way back into the most crucial
period of his life. He stands in the field of his youth, twenty years before he left his room, two decades before his love’s face was pilfered.  But this time, he has brought a lifetime of knowledge and piercing regret to do things differently.

The fields of dimension in his mind morph, shifted in red and blue, as only the imagination, an artificial computerized generation, or a blast through time can, into a field of green grass and two thick oak trees with a stagnant, tadpole-filled, rainwater pond between them.

The only sound in his ears is a faint metallic jingling.

A chain-link fence encloses the field from the sidewalk and the street, its diamond-shaped holes dividing the surrounding world into tiny tiles. He remembers as a child running past the fence and watching the world distort and move through the chain-link holes, as if he were warping the scales of reality along with those of his vision, while the buildings, houses, and surroundings slid from one fence tile to the next and smeared with the speed of his sprint. Perhaps we could all still manipulate our surroundings if we never grew taller than the fence that makes us question what is real. Regardless, most of his time here was directed toward different activities.

The field is one of the few places on earth where he has felt peace. Being such a meager spot, he is unsure if he’s proud or humbled by it. His joy in it is immense, pure, and nothing material, but it’s just a grassy lot to most—just a place waiting to have something built on it. And, eventually something is built on it: a large housing complex that covers the entire field all the way to the canal that runs behind it. He had liked it better when it was nothing but an open plot for children’s games, just as it is now. A building should be a fulfillment of a childhood dream, not something that replaces one.

The field was also the first place where he found a use for his storytelling except as an escape. For most of his life, his tales were a personal substitute for the living he wished he could do, and later on they would become his living. But, in the schoolyard it made him popular with the female third-graders, which was an astounding development for him.

With a small cypress tree behind him and the fence just behind the tree, the girls would sit around him in a semi-circle, little uniformed skirts draped on the ground around them mimicking the shape of flowers. They would listen to him tell his stories with the reverence of a crowd peering through time to watch Michelangelo paint
The Last Judgment
.

He learned quickly that if he put the girls’ names in the story, their little cheeks would blush and their smiles would reflect more light in the grassy field. They would act out roles in his tales, following a hand-written script or ad-libbing a situation that he would make up as they went along.

Usually he was the only boy, forcing him to perform every male role, but he didn’t mind at all having the chance to interact with so many of the girls. Occasionally a boy would come and sit near them, and Chester would be sure to include him in the story, pairing him with a girl that he knew the boy had a crush on.

Sometimes the boys would ask him to play their game, which was an amalgamation of football and soccer mostly, with flurries of pro wrestling and bare-knuckled boxing. The only rule was that the goals were the opposing ends of the field and a team scored a point by touching the soccer ball against the chain link fence. This could be done by kicking the ball into the fence or by holding it in one’s hands and tapping it into the fence. Either method could be done repeatedly, and the team would continue to score points until their opponent got the ball back from them in any number of ways, most involving tackling, shoving, or punching.

It has long been a wonder in his life how the teachers never paid any attention to their spirited game, despite the class’s accumulated injuries of two head wounds that required stitches, a broken forearm, countless busted knees and elbows, several bloody noses, and a sprained ankle.

However, he was always thrilled to play, although it usually only occurred when the boys had uneven teams. He didn’t decline an opportunity to play a game instead of imagining doing so, but the offers did not come until that year. The year before he would often be alone beneath the giant oaks, watching the tadpoles and creating stories of what their society might be like, so he was happy to tell his stories and play rough sports the following year.

He could’ve lived his whole life in the third grade; the years to follow weren’t as kind.

The thrill of youth and open possibilities energizes him like a soul opiate. He thinks of shimmering red hair lit by emerald-green eyes. The sound of her voice is the breeze in his paradise, his reason for demanding a second chance at his life. He knows she won’t be ready for him for a few days, but her image won’t leave his mind until then.

Despite the ecstasy of arriving in his field of youth, he knows he can’t linger. He has to test out exactly what he is allowed to accomplish in this reality. Is he trapped as an observer, forced to watch himself waste away his life a second time, unable to change a single thing?

Torturous.

If this theory is true, it would preserve a constant reality by keeping him from changing the future. It would prevent the possibility of a time paradox, such as going back in time and killing one’s parents before one was born. It would force Chester to relive his disappointments again, and while it would maintain a consistent and secure future, it would turn the joy he currently feels into a living hell.

His life was sad enough the first time around. The thought of having to watch it all happen again terrifies him like a prisoner of war who has been recaptured and knows what agonies await him. Reliving it all without any hope of good things since he already knows how his story will end, the fear of it freezes.

Then he remembers her face.

Returning to him in a rush is all of the energy and thrill of having made it back to the field where he has long wanted to be. Adrenaline rushes alongside of the fear, and he is pulsing to act. He knows he must get some answers, and unlike anything he has encountered in his former experiences, he feels the power to seek them relentlessly.

The air in his nostrils hasn’t felt or smelled this way since the third grade. It smells like springtime, and it gives him hope. But, he knows from his first go-round that hope alone will leave one unfulfilled. Belief plus the will to act is the strength of faith. He is flooded with both.

Shaking his head, he turns from the field to the blacktop parking lot between it and the first school building. A shining object is illuminated majestically on the sea of asphalt. But as most of us are, his eyes are not prepared to look something majestic head-on, especially not without warning. Since it is the lone object in the parking lot, he assumes it is the late afternoon, possibly even the weekend. He squints his eyes and makes out a familiar shape in the luminescence.

It’s beautiful, and it scares the hell out of him.

A car. One he did not own in this year to which he has travelled back. It looks to be his 1969 Chevelle Super Sport that he bought from an original owner when he was twenty-seven, some five years later than the time in which he’s returned.

It’s Fathom Blue Metallic with a black top and stripes; the car itself, much less one with the exact color scheme, is not likely to pop up randomly. It must be his car.

When he was wrapped in a white jacket in a padded room, his mother sold the car to a college student who came all the way down from Colorado to purchase it. When Chester was released, he tracked the new owner down to buy it back, but at that point it was rusted from salted snow roads, and the interior was destroyed from the new owner placing his skis inside the car.

It was one of the few times that Chester nearly lost his temper with a stranger. Usually, he was meek when he was angry, but this violation almost turned him to harsh words.

The worst part of it was the young man, by then having graduated and working as a financial analyst, demanded that he receive ten thousand dollars for the car, despite its physical damage and that it was twice what he had paid Chester’s mother for it.

Chester
opened his mouth to protest or at least to negotiate, but instead he took out his checkbook from his pocket along with the pen that he had brought with him.

In front of him now, the blue automotive icon shines in its factory condition. As he approaches, he can see the original interior. When he restored the car following the ski incident, he had taken every effort to obtain the factory materials, but he couldn’t find an exact match for the interior. His car came with the deluxe upholstery, and the reproduction market only offered the standard cloth in various colors, many of which were a shade off the original, leaving him to settle for second best.

Now his smile cracks as he scans over the original, long-lost, unworn deluxe seat covers that welcomed his lonely limbs far more often than any woman he knew. If not for a tiny scratch on the rear quarter panel and some dents in the bumper, it would be perfect, nearly just as it was before his mind broke.

He reaches in his pocket and feels the electronic wonder that he has brought with him. It was in the pocket of his slacks before he left and should certainly still be there now, but he is relieved to confirm it. Since the car is here without explanation and shouldn’t be, he worried the electronic device would not be with him even though it should be.

Losing the device would be the most dangerous thing he could imagine.

The keys are on the ground in front of the driver’s door. It is his old key ring, complete with the script Chevelle logo key fob. Picking it up and holding it in front of his face with one hand, he pushes the back of his other hand through their shiny, dangling parts—a familiar jagged touch.

Pushing the key into the door, he hears that metallic click that disappeared from vehicles somewhere in the nineties. He pulls the key out carefully to not scratch the paint. Pushing in the button on the door handle, the heavy door comes unlatched.

He slides onto the seat, and the smell, the wonderful smell of the vintage interior fills his nostrils. It’s a comfort in the flames of his anxiety.

The car shouldn’t be here, yet now he sits in it. Burning and racing, his mind tries to think of what else he might find here that simply should not be, things beyond science and reason. Most specifically, he worries that something will keep him from reaching her. If the car is here, and it shouldn’t be; thenmaybe Rhonda should be here and isn’t, or at least maybe she won’t be where he thought he’d find her. And even if she is, maybe he won’t be allowed to interact with her, which wouldn’t be any different than the first time around.