There is beauty in fundamental things, and nothing is more fundamental than destruction. I could watch a forest burn, or a field, or a house, for hours.
I can still smell the smoke. It’s taken residence in my nasal passages, and I can’t get it out. I liked setting fires when I was little, and then I stopped. But I would have these gaps where I couldn’t remember what I did. I hope I didn’t hurt anybody.
Your ABC’s. It’s one of the first things you learn. I learned mine walking this street with my mother and looking at the large wooden letters mounted on the houses. The houses on Alphabet Row have letters instead of numbers, twenty-six houses, one for each letter, thanks to Raymond Queneau, the rich fellow who owned the land and built all these houses. At the end of the street, he constructed the library bearing his name, QUENEAU in huge stone letters beneath the spired roof. It’s a grand Gothic building full of surprises. The descender at the end of the Q hangs like a dragon’s tail over the front entrance.
My mom is the head librarian. Our house was on the corner across the street. Grandad willed this ruin to Mom, and she tried to fix it up, but she never had much money. Grandad was obsessed with all things Egyptian and remade his house using chicken wire, plaster, and paint to resemble an ancient tomb. The result was like a decaying movie set. Over the front door hung a painting of the sun with wings. Just under the roof were depictions of beetles. Hieroglyphs were crudely scratched into the exterior walls and much of the interior. Everything was crumbling. Mom worried somebody would report us and the house would be condemned. They would have done us a favor.
Every day when I was little my mom would walk me down the street and we would say the letters together and she’d ask me for words starting with those letters. A is for Apple, but also Arnold, which is my name, although everybody calls me Arnie. B is for Ball, or Bat, C is for Cat, or Can, or Crash, and on and on through Z (zebra, zoo, zoom). She said sometimes if you find the right word you can learn something important about yourself. A lot of those letters are gone now, due to vandalism or the owners taking them down, which is a real shame.
I got to know those houses, but Mom never let me get too close. I wasn’t allowed to trick or treat on our street, or to fundraise for scouts, or even step onto anyone’s lawn. When I asked her why, all she would say was “Because I said so.” I discovered she wasn’t the only parent with that rule.
I have, or had, three close friends. Carl, Doug, and Roger, each outcasts in our own way, so maybe our friendship was destined. But destiny is something I hate to think about.
We had our own dark versions of the alphabet, producing new variations as we tried to top each other. A is for Asshole, B is for Butchered, C is for Clown. Maybe “clown” doesn’t seem all that dark, but you never met the lady who lived at #C Alphabet Row. D is for Dracula. G is for Ghoul. E is for Eviscerate. Carl taught us that word.
We filled our time playing with Roger’s Atari, reading comic books and other cool stuff at Queneau’s Library, and riding our bikes around the neighborhood looking for clues. We considered ourselves sage detectives. But we were just being snoops. Terrible things happened in the neighborhood, most without our knowledge.
“Hey you guys!” Roger rolled into the library reading room like somebody shot him. At fourteen he was a stumbling disaster, always in a stained T-shirt, constantly screwing up. I wonder if he might have grown out of that if he’d had enough time. His hip caught a library cart and an avalanche of books spread across the floor. Roger had little impulse control. I could relate.
“Oh my God!” he shouted dramatically and fell to his knees on the books, crushing and tearing pages. An elderly librarian peeked in, sighed, and went away, probably to tell my mom. I pulled him off the damaged books, and Carl and Doug did what they could to fix things. I felt bad for Roger, who sat like a pile of dirty laundry, tears in his eyes.
Doug fiddled with one of the cart’s wheels, trying to straighten a bent piece. He was our mechanic. A little cranky, but there were reasons. He didn’t talk much about his home life, but everybody saw the bruises.
“Your mom’s going to kick us out again,” Carl said. “Could you get us into the basement? There are some books I’d like to look at.”
Carl was some kind of genius. Everybody thought so. He wanted to be an astrophysicist someday. He could have been anything, really. He was that smart. I was never sure what I wanted to be. Maybe a reporter, an author, something to do with words. Now I know that’s never going to happen.
We accessed the lower levels via an ancient, rickety elevator. I knew the security code from past visits with my mom. I’d seen the first basement, but Mom said there were at least three more below. At least. She worked there—didn’t she know exactly?
The first basement was a mix of rare books, battered editions, odd items such as phone books going back to the Forties, old maps, newspapers and magazines, and a lot of what Mom called ephemera. They let researchers study the collection, but much wasn’t even catalogued. Mom said most of the staff wouldn’t even go down there.
Sudden movement disturbed one of the distant stacks. Some books shifted and stuff fell. I hoped it wasn’t rats. I hate rats. And one thing I’ve discovered—wherever, or whenever you go, there’s going to be rats.
Carl gave us each a small but powerful flashlight from the backpack he always carried. We split up to explore. Roger had the notion he’d find some valuable old comic books. I knew there was nothing that exciting but didn’t want to discourage him. Doug was interested in anything mechanical, so he went right for the collection of Popular Mechanics. I liked going where others rarely went, so I just browsed.
The center of the vast room was filled with tightly spaced metal shelving, labeled Fiction, Physics, Mechanics, Crime, etc., although the jumbled contents weren’t easily classified. It was a sore point for Mom, but they didn’t have the staff to organize it. I kept thinking how fast it might all go up with a well-placed match.
Carl waded into the shelves labeled Metaphysics. He had a notebook and a tape recorder. I wasn’t even sure what Metaphysics was.
It was hot and stuffy, with little ventilation. My burn scar started bothering me, as if it wanted me to know it was still there. It’s why I wear turtlenecks all the time. I tried not to scratch it. The warped skin is sensitive, and sometimes it bleeds. It looks like a giant bite mark across my chest with a narrow tongue running up my neck and licking my jaw, the part the turtleneck can’t hide.
I heard footsteps and watched a short figure in a heavy overcoat and stocking cap cross between the stacks at the end of the row. Whoever it was, he must have been boiling inside that getup. Something seemed so familiar about his size, his posture, and the way he walked.
I took off after him, but by the time I reached the end of the row he was gone. I listened but heard nothing. I heard footsteps again and saw motion through the next row. I ran around the end and straight into Carl, who yelped. I laughed. I’d never heard him yelp before.
“Jesus, Arnie, you scared me. I need to get home. Let’s grab Doug and Roger and go.”
“Sure. But . . . could you come over to my house after dinner? There’s something from Grandad’s old collection I want to show you.”
I always wanted to impress Carl, and I thought at last I had something to amaze even him.
An hour after dinner and Carl still hadn’t shown up. It made me angrier than it deserved, but that’s me. I have a problem with anger. If I did half the things I imagined, or dreamed, I’d be in jail. I’ve never hit anyone, ever, but I’ve done other things. I take meds for it. Some days they work better than others. Sometimes the only way I can release the tension is to do something bad. But mostly I do bad things to my own stuff.
I could hear Mom and her latest boyfriend arguing downstairs, so I was thinking it was a good thing Carl didn’t come. There was a knock on my door. Carl was standing there red-faced with embarrassment. I pulled him inside.
“Sorry for the drama.”
“S’okay. You have something to show me?”
I revealed the four large metal disks I discovered among my grandfather’s stuff in the attic. He examined them.
“More or less identical. Looks like a mix of copper and some gold maybe, a little silver. Each side bears a large central figure, with writing and designs covering the background. Egyptian. Thoth and Khonsu, I believe, both moon gods. You’ve heard of the Game of the Moon?”
I shook my head, embarrassed. Given my grandad’s Egyptian interests, I should have known.
“Khonsu, the measurer of time, wanted to know the secrets in the shadows where his light didn’t touch. He envied Thoth, who knew your thoughts before they reached your lips. They played a game, each wagering a part of his power. Thoth won a piece of Khonsu’s light and placed it in his crown and Khonsu could no longer show his full light. That’s why the moon grows brighter and larger, and then it dims until it finally goes dark.” He put the disks back on my desk. “They’re in excellent condition. You should donate them to a museum. They might credit you on the exhibit. Wouldn’t that be great?”
“There’s more to it than that. I was trying to make one spin on its edge, like a top, you know? When suddenly it wasn’t there. I thought it fell off my desk. I couldn’t find it anywhere. Here, watch this.”
I was nervous. What if I couldn’t repeat the effect? The first two times the disk wobbled and fell over, but I got it spinning again. The disk disappeared. I was so pleased when Carl gasped. Two minutes later the disk reappeared.
Carl picked it up and examined it thoughtfully. “Try spinning it harder.” I did, and the disk spun for a longer time, disappeared, and didn’t reappear for another ten minutes. Carl smiled. “You know what they sometimes call Khonsu? The traveler. As in time traveler. I think this disk is travelling through time. Let’s try something.”
Carl took a large glass jar off my shelves. It used to contain popcorn. This time when I spun the disk he put the jar over it and after a few seconds both disk and jar disappeared and reappeared minutes later. “Do you still have frogs in your backyard?”
“You’re not going to hurt them are you?”
He grinned. “Of course not. Bring me one.”
This time after covering the spinning disk Carl plopped a frog down on top of the jar. The frog sat impassively, then the frog, jar, and disk all disappeared. When they reappeared, the frog looked pissed.
“No effect on the frog it seems,” Carl announced, “although we can’t say what’s going on psychologically with this guy. You know, the weird thing is, I don’t think the earth’s rotation is affecting this.”
“That’s the weird thing?”
“Do you mind if I borrow this disk, medallion, or whatever it is, and play with it at home? And don’t tell the other guys yet. We don’t want to jump the gun here.”
“Do whatever you like. But don’t lose it.”
I woke up in the middle of the night with a light shining in my face. It was Carl holding one of his little flashlights, grinning. He had a weird contraption hanging around his waist: an old outdoor light fixture with the disk inside and some electronics and batteries mounted on top. “Greetings from the future!” he said.
I sat up. “That didn’t take long.”
“It’s been three weeks. If you spin the disk clockwise, you go forward in time, but counterclockwise takes you back. Now that I’ve got the kinks worked out I can build a more compact version for all four bikes. Think about what you want to do with our new toy, and I’ll see you in, oh, about three weeks.” Carl pressed a button, the disk started spinning, and he disappeared.
Three weeks later Carl came to my house with the same contraption. “If it worked, you’ve already seen this, right?”
“Um . . . right.”
“The top and bottom clamps make it spin and introduce a slight wobble if we want to offset the destination location. There are dials on top for offset and the plus/minus switch indicates time forwards or backwards. You ready?” Before I could answer Carl disappeared and came back within an eyeblink. “I just visited you in the middle of the night, three weeks ago. Boy, did you look surprised!”
Carl couldn’t assure us it would be safe. But we all understood that didn’t we?
Doug and Carl had the devices mounted on all four bikes in no time. Doug wasn’t satisfied. “I wish we could make them a little more aerodynamic.”
Carl shook his head. “Aerodynamics are irrelevant to time travel. You’re in one time and place, then you’re in another. The lanterns give them a Victorian look, like in the movie The Time Machine?”
“Never saw it,” Doug said distractedly, busy with some last-minute bolt tightening. “I hope none come apart in transit.”
Roger jumped around like he had to pee. “Does it use antimatter?”
Carl gazed at him a moment, sighed, and said “No.”
I felt increasingly anxious. I trusted Carl knew what he was doing. He was a genius, right? But still, he was just a kid. “Carl, how do we evaluate these?”
“We can leave anytime. It’s up to you guys.”
Doug frowned. “Anytime is better than now.”
Carl gathered us around his bike. “If you look through the aperture you can see how much time it’s set for in years, days, hours, and minutes. The three little dials underneath control that, plus the distance offset. The plus/minus switch toggles between future and past. The green switch triggers the device. Then there’s the red switch which returns you to wherever you started from. I think we should all have the same settings, so no one goes to a time alone. That should be a rule.”
Roger was the only one who seemed super excited by the possibilities. “If we set it for eight years from now we can drink alcohol!” Doug snickered.
“Well, that’s ambiguous,” Carl said.
“What does that mean?”
“The world will have moved on, but I think we’ll still look fourteen years old. Maybe we’ll be twenty-two psychologically, but I don’t know for sure. It’s a conundrum. Roger, that means it’s a difficult problem to solve. Let’s set it for twenty-one days ahead this first time.”
Anxiety was making me fluttery, but I made the setting anyway, and helped Roger, whose sausage fingers fumbled with the small dials. The four of us pointed our bikes toward a clump of trees at the far edge of the park. When Carl gave the word we started peddling hard toward those trees. When he shouted “Now!” we all flipped the bright green switch.
I expected an instantaneous transition, but instead I was overwhelmed by this unpleasant vertigo, and a premonition the world was about to explode. I was so angry I started shouting. Then I was hanging upside down, and something had me by the foot shaking me so hard I thought my internal organs were going to fall out of my mouth. When my head cleared we were under those trees, our bike tires inches deep in a carpet of yellow and red leaves. It had been almost Fall when we started. Now we were well into the season. Dark clouds crowded the sky, and I could see distant lightning flashes. The other guys were laughing, gone goofy from the thrill. I, on the other hand, struggled not to throw up.
“Let’s do it again!” Roger shouted. “But for years ahead this time! Make it a hundred!”
Thankfully, Carl nixed the idea. “It’s late. I don’t think we’re ready to time travel in the dark. And a century? Do you realize how much things change over a century? Use some sense.”
Carl restricted us to short trips at first: a month ahead, two months, then a year, a few years. He had stringent rules for our journeys: we couldn’t touch anything, or interact with anyone, and we had to remain as inconspicuous as possible, which Roger violated all the time. He was too excitable. “Hey, you guys, look at that!” Heads would turn, and Carl would try to get us back to our own time while minimizing disruptions. Carl was concerned about disturbing the timeline, and creating “multiverses,” which the rest of us couldn’t fully appreciate. I mean, how do you worry about something you can’t see or imagine?
But Carl still planned the trips and carried them out, lead us forward and even backwards in time. Most of these voyages made me ill, sometimes violently so. I asked the others how they felt. Doug said he did get a little queasy once or twice. Roger didn’t seem to understand what I was talking about. Carl, on the other hand, became quite concerned, and asked me detailed questions, even suggesting I might stay at home and rest while they adventured whenever. That’s when I shut up about it. I didn’t want to be left behind. I was also worried about my friends. I wanted to be there for them if they got into trouble.
Despite the illness, I enjoyed our “backwards” trips the most. We all did. Returning to a particularly fine summer’s day. Or re-seeing a movie in the same theater we first experienced it. We just had to be careful not to run into our former selves. Carl had a sixth sense for that sort of thing.
I always arrived later than the others. Sometimes by as much as a half-hour. I know I went somewhere during that time, did some things, saw some things, but I couldn’t remember the details. Carl wasn’t too concerned. He called it an “anomalous result.”
The most interesting part of our trips was watching my neighborhood of Alphabet Row, and how much it transformed over the years, observing the evolving architecture, seeing patterns repeat themselves, witnessing people move in and out of these houses, some going to better, spiffier neighborhoods, and others leaving in an ambulance or hearse.
We weren’t allowed to alter anything, at least not according to the rules Carl laid down for us. We were sworn to follow his directions precisely so we would have similar, safe, and repeatable experiences. But anomalous results did occur.
On an early trip I heard a baby crying. Not a hungry cry, or a wet diaper cry (I knew about these things from visits with my cousins), but a full-throated howl of pain and desolation. A cry no one else heard. “How can you not hear?” I asked. “It’s a suffering baby, a baby that needs our help.”
“Sorry, Arnie. I don’t hear a thing,” Doug said, and the others agreed.
Yet no matter how far forward or how far back we travelled, I heard the screaming baby at every stop.
Then there were the ones who chased after our bikes, like the lady with all the makeup, the “clown” lady. It looked as if she’d been waiting for us, but how could she know we were coming?
Once we ran into an old hound, too old and feeble to keep up, but somehow it still managed, and took a bite from one of Roger’s sneakers.
Other times it was ghosts in various stages of decay. Or maybe their not-quite-thereness was an artifact due to time travel. And once a vine wriggled out from under a house’s foundation and tried to bring Doug’s bike down. A last-minute maneuver prevented a crash. Another time we had to avoid a flood of rats covering the entire street.
For Carl, it was an “insect” swarm pouring off a lawn and sending out insect soldiers to attack his back wheel. I was riding behind him, and I saw them eating the asphalt right from under him.
But for me it was always the people who triggered the worst terror. The drunk Santa Claus who tried to grab my handlebars. The naked human who ran on all fours like an animal—it got so close to me, and I swear it had these long teeth hanging down in front like a rat’s.
We, and our bikes, were a dream, or a nightmare, the entire neighborhood was having.
Travelling back and forth through time we were able to identify the problem houses, the ones which were shrinking, or growing, or changing more frequently than the normal passage of time should allow. The bad houses and the ones even worse.
Doug had never been good about following rules. Sometimes he brought things back from our trips: a weathervane, an antique tricycle, and once a flashlight emitting a thick, gray light. More than once he took trips on his own.
He couldn’t accept that he wasn’t supposed to do anything even if he saw a threat. He got some spray paint and tagged the doors of a few of those bad houses, an X, a V, or a K, signs which he hoped might warn folks there was a problem inside. We tried to stop him. But Doug managed to mark these houses anyway.
Carl was livid. He said Doug had no idea what kind of mischief he may have caused. But Carl himself wasn’t averse to pushing limits. He decided our next trip would be twelve years ahead. He said he wanted to see how the neighborhood evolved. I think he hoped to get a glimpse of us—especially himself—as adults.
He made us start near my house. He said it would be safe—my mom wasn’t home. I didn’t want to see my house twelve years into the future. I suppose I could have refused, but would it have made any difference in the end?
The side effects were worse than before, with shifting visions of fire and destruction, perspectives turned sideways and inside out, library walls crumbling, and my mother’s upset—I heard her wailing. I arrived in the front yard much later than the others, fell off my bike, and had to struggle to my feet.
The others didn’t even notice me. They were staring at my house. It was dark with no moon, and difficult to see. No one was at home. All the lights were out.
I realized parts of the house were missing, pieces scattered around the lawn. Black streaks reached from the first floor to the roofline. Gaping mouths full of sooty debris and broken timbers had eaten the downstairs where the living room used to be, and most of the second story, including my room, were gone. Police tape stretched across the emptiness. A “Keep Out” sign was propped up by the front steps.
Doug turned his head and looked at me. “Dude, your house. You . . . ” He stopped. I didn’t understand the expression on his face.
Carl and Roger turned around and let their bikes go, letting them crash together. What were they thinking? If they damaged the equipment they might be stuck in this time.
“Arnie, your abdomen. And your legs!” Carl sounded genuinely concerned. I looked down. Most of my belly was gone. I could see right through it into dangling intestines and a few gleaming ribs. I had no legs at all.
What we are and what we’ll be. Carl was always saying that, like it was all that mattered. I never understood what my friend meant, but as time moves on—racing ahead, doubling back—I can feel myself getting closer.
Carl tried to fix things, because that’s what Carl does. First he tried to determine what actually occurred. Twelve years on from my fourteenth year my house burned/will burn, severely scarring my mother and killing me. The cause will remain officially undetermined, but I will always wonder if it’s because of something I did. Maybe I got angry and did something foolish.
I’m destined never to know. I’ve waited over twenty years, physically here and not-here, and the event still hasn’t been part of my lived experience—I’m never there as the flames consume my world—but it did happen. I did die. My mother is still disfigured. Sometimes at night I wander through Queneau’s Library in my current, undefinable shape, and I see her inside her office, a 3D-printed plastic compression mask strapped to her head to cover her severe facial burns, so she can still work more-or-less in peace without people’s stares and pity.
When you journey forward past the point of your own death the universe runs out of rules. You’re not exactly a ghost, but you’re not completely real either. Oh, you think like you’re real. You certainly suffer like it.
Carl felt responsible. I love him for that, but it’s not untrue. He took Roger and Doug on trip after trip, forward and back, trying to find a solution, until Doug quit, or at least disappeared, went somewhere and somewhen on his own. No one has heard from him since.
Roger, on the other hand—I still hope he’s okay somehow. On his final trip his bike came through, but he wasn’t on it. There was blood on the seat, and smeared across the handlebars, and bits of flesh snagged on some sharp edges. The time apparatus was shattered, the disk gone, with one of Roger’s fingers stuck inside.
It’s just me and Carl now, and I’m not much company. He travels up and down the timestream trying to find our lost friends and some way to reverse my condition. He stopped talking about becoming an astrophysicist a long time ago.
That was him in the Queneau basement, the figure in the wool cap and heavy coat. He spends a lot of time researching. His body isn’t good at regulating temperature anymore. Another anomalous result, I suppose, of too much time travel.
I feel I got everything I deserved. I too travel the timeline, sticking to this neighborhood where I have lived all my life. Like a tide, time spreads across the neighborhood, and every time it recedes it takes some things away, and leaves others behind, but the overall effect is a diminishment, a slow devour of everything I’ve ever known.
I still say the letters almost every day. A is for the Anomalies. E is for Endless. D is for Destiny, but also Despair. C is for Consequences, and Cruel, and the terrible Cost. And P, I think P is for Pyromania.
