Faces in Time (4 page)

He makes the device flip forward to tomorrow’s paper. Tomorrow has suddenly become a relative term. The front page is of little use, containing only national news of the upcoming presidential election.

He makes the device turn pages to the local Riverview section. There is a picture of a woman wearing a ridiculous hat handing a teacher a present. The caption below it reads, “Mildred Sinclair, chairwoman of St. Christopher’s PTA, hands 20-year service award to drama club director Edna Hoover.”

“That’s it!” he shouts aloud to the car.

With his free left hand, he smacks the steering wheel. He looks at the time on his device and the darkness of the sky, deciphering if the digital numbers are in synch with the world he’s gone back to.

“Gonna be close!” he exclaims as he slams the car into gear, tosses the device atop the t-shirt and paper where his copilot would sit, and turns the Chevelle around rapidly. Sending dirt floating up in the air into a gritty haze around the tree and spattering specks on his rear fender, his glowing taillights are a bouncing blur.

He pulls his car into St. Christopher’s parking lot, the third school of the evening. It is the only one of the three that he did not attend. He has, however, been to St. Christopher before to see its plays.

For the first time in his life, he parks his car in a handicapped space. Despite his current urgency, he has to convince himself that it’s alright because the play must be nearly over and it’s not likely anyone will show up to use the spot.

He walks along the side of the gym breathing in the childhood smell of the exhaust of industrial air condition units. The warm, synthetic breeze reminds him of awkward dys waiting in the long lunch line that would extend outside of his own school’s cafeteria. That uneasiness reminds him of why he’s here, and he quickens his step.

He had been in this gymnasium in his youth for several different plays. It is a standard rectangular school gym with a deep stage that is cut into one of the long walls, making a performance on it look like the audience is watching a video screen mounted flush against a wall.

The stage itself is spacious and professional enough with curtains, lighting, and proper sound equipment, but two basketball goals are raised above the stage, which can draw the audience’s attention away from the play.

Despite the folding chairs for the audience, the bouncy acoustics, and the painted markings of the basketball court on the floor, St. Christopher plays have been the envy of every school in the area, leaving many to wonder how the school gets so many students who can sing year after year.

Without much thought, he finds his way inside, pays for a ticket, and nods his head as he is told there are only a few minutes left of the play.

He opens the door, which allows a slant of light to fall upon the darkened audience. Immediately, he sees that hat. It sits on the seat closest to the doors in the first row. The woman next to the ostentatious headpiece appears to be the woman from the newspaper photo. The door shuts behind him quickly pulling the light back out with it.

By the splashy level of the children’s overdone singing, he knows this must be the finale of a play that he has never seen.

He steps close to the front row. All eyes are firmly lined up to the stage with the intensity of believing their momentary undivided attention will produce a successful life for their children as opposed to years of sound parenting. The thunderous applause does seem to hold some power over reality as it echoes and bounces in the gym. He is to the far left of anyone’s view.

The stage lights grow brighter as the children strain to hold the climactic final note. Following the cues of the vocal intensity, the increased illumination on the performers as they turn to face the crowd; the audience of family, faculty, and neighbors rises to its feet with more robust applause. They are all consumed with the stage.

The hat remains sitting on the chair next to its socialite owner.

He can feel the heat sizzle in his fingers as he reaches for it. He takes a quick scan over the audience to his right. He may as well be invisible.

His fingers grasp the brim and smoothly pull it off the chair, and as he turns away from the newly empty seat and the crowd to walk back toward the doors, he hugs the flamboyant hat tightly to the right side of his chest.

The applause continues to pound out of their proud hands, creating a pulse like a drum roll that arouses both his adrenaline and his nerves.

The room, despite the brightened stage illumination, is dim, devoid of any house lights. His eyes scan the darkened shapes along the wall, and there it is in its dark blue spray-painted majesty between the two sets of double exit doors. It’s too perfect; it even has a lid. For the first time in his life, he feels the power of a trashcan.

The ludicrousness of it makes him want to smile, but his frantic neurology only allows a quick twitch at the corners of his mouth. To be able to test his ability to change past events and to get rid of the evidence of his crime so easily grants him an unusual appreciation for the cylinder nearly filled with plastic cups, stale popcorn, and play programs from the night before that are mostly rolled into tight little tubes and crudely constructed airplanes.

The lid fumbles out of his nervous left hand and falls to the gym floor. The hat’s rim bounces off the curved walls of the trashcan, wobbling to a stop on top of the refuse.

The lights flip on suddenly, and he jerks his right hand away from the garbage grotto. Bending quickly he grabs the lid.

Approaching footsteps pound on his eardrums, and his heart beats as fast as the overly-generous clapping hands. Two of the hands aren’t clapping, and one lands on his left shoulder.

He drops the lid atop the trashcan and turns quickly to see who has grabbed him.

“Are you alright, pal?” asks a tall, slim man in a gray suit that hangs off his wiry frame.

Chester’s mouth and tongue commit one false start before saying, “No, no, thought I was gonna vomit. Where’s the bathroom in this place anyway?”

The man’s head bobs in verification, “Yeah, I thought you’as sick by the way you’er staring so hard in there like you lost your whole life or a ring or something. Sick or you had lost something—I knew it had to be one o’ the two.”

Chester leans forward and puffs his cheeks out as if regurgitation were imminent.

The man

Chester lets out an interrupting, “Than— ,” and puffs his cheeks again. If only some of the actors on the TV shows that he wrote for would have been so convincing.

The man in the suit takes a step back from Chester’s swollen cheeks, and then watches Chester as he makes his way toward the bathroom.

As he steps toward the hallway opening beside the front of the stage, the clapping is finally starting to subside itself. He can hear adolescent feet clomping across the wooden platform; the children must be finishing with their curtain calls. He looks over his shoulder back at the trashcan that he hopes will prove his fate can be changed.

The tall suit has left, must have wanted to beat the traffic.

Chester
can see the woman in the front row glance with wide eyes at the seat to her left. She looks under her chair and then stands to look around the floor of the immediate area. Lastly, her gaze rises higher at about hand level, and she scours over the crowd.

Some groups of people make their way to the stage, and others quickly walk toward the front of the gym area that is serving as the lobby and file into two lines, one through each of the double exit doors.

The hatless woman’s appearance begins to tear at his chest as it no longer looks on with anger, but it quakes with violation. He suddenly feels horrible for taking it from her. He thought it would be a very harmless method of testing his ability to change the future. If the picture in the paper tomorrow comes out without the hat being in it, he’s proved his theory. No one would be physically hurt, nothing of much monetary value would be stolen, and he wouldn’t have revealed some type of a secret that would draw attention to himself and be dangerous to others.

There are not many subtle ways to distinctly change the future, be able to prove you’ve done so, and cause such minute harm; yet, he still feels guilty.

He sees a woman with red hair walking toward the trashcan from the left line of exiting people. The crimson reminds him of the one he’s come back to be with—the one whose future he wants to change for the better. She walks with a drink in a paper cup topped with a plastic lid and a straw. He watches her lift up the garbage can lid on the left side, place her drink underneath, and drop the lid back down. Unknown to her as she walks away, the top of the drink gets caught between the rim of the trashcan and the lid pressing down on it from above. There it rests.

The lid pops off the drink, the watery soda and tiny melting pieces of ice fall to the floor and run in a puddle on the left side of the garbage can. His heart rate rises.
Surely someone will see the mess. Someone will clean the mess. Maybe they’ll see the hat.

He raises his hand to bite his nails, but he keeps it from touching his face, not wanting to fall back into that old habit again. It seems inappropriate to do so on his return to the past. If things are going to be better, they have to be different. Either his inhibiting apprehension will fade away, or in the least he’ll have to deal with it differently if he wants a happier life.

Two children run in and out of the streams of people that lead to the two main exit doors of the gym through the lobby and into the parking lot. He wants to reach out; he wants to scream for their parents to stifle them, that they’re bound to hurt someone, possibly even someone who is not present in the building. The beaming adult faces are too preoccupied to notice the sticky brown puddle that has spattered onto the floor with its miniscule icebergs melting away into the carbonated sea.

The older brother chases the younger again through the left human stream. Before they can reach the right stream, the youngest one’s feet slide from underneath him, his hands go up in the air, and his torso falls toward the sticky, soda-soaked wooden floor. His feet slide into the garbage can sending the lid screeching across the floor into the second stream of people, and the contents of the trashcan spill onto the planks.

Chester
knows it before he can even see it. The hat. The hat is going to make its way back to the old lady.

All of his efforts might be useless.

His fears become hot, making him feel as if the searing walls of hell are forming all around him, filling his nose with the pungency of sulfur. An elbow to the back of his right rib cage interrupts his thoughts.

“Excuse us, just trying to take out the trash,” says the cheerful voice of a young parent volunteer.

“Yes, pardon us,” adds a deeper voice from around the other side of the trashcan.

Chester flattens himself against the wall, and they sidestep their way past him and into the main area of the gym.

As soon as they move out of his way, he can see the socialite woman bending down daintily in her heels and brushing away at the brim of her hat. He can also see a man yanking his son with damp pants hshly by the arm into the lobby and a woman following close behind shaking her head at his younger brother, whom she pushes ahead of her by the shoulder.