The Time Traveler's Almanac (130 page)

The next morning, the harbourfront was packed with students, strangers and friends who came to see us off. Most of them expected the whole thing to be a publicity stunt. I saw Rebecca, Philip, and Harry Connon, but there was no sign of Will. Was it too hard for him to see me off?

It had been Will who convinced the Coast Guard to return the
Gwennan Gorn
to us temporarily. High-prowed, she creaked as we set foot aboard her. The sound was strangely reassuring. This ship had survived many journeys and the test of countless years. She would serve us well.

What would the world be like, seventy-five years from now? Would Newfoundland be exactly the same as now, as though no time had passed? I didn’t know. All I knew was that the Will I loved would not be there, waiting for me.

I distracted myself from that thought, focusing on our preparations. We loaded food and other supplies onto the ship, within the roofed enclosure built into the center. We checked and double-checked the manifest, and we swept the ship and crew with a metal detector, looking for forgotten iron. The last crew might have been lost because of a nail. I didn’t want to make the same mistake.

When we were fit to launch, I stood at the head of the boat with a hand on Madoc’s shoulder. “Fellow travelers!” I shouted. “I trust you’ve said your goodbyes. We might go into the storm and go no further than today. We might meet with disaster. Worst of all, we sail into uncertainty. But throughout history, haven’t there always been men and women with adventurous souls, who have left behind loved ones to find new horizons? In the future, men will build ships to the stars. They will choose to do as we do today, to leave behind everything we love to explore the unknown.”

I paused and met the eyes of my shipmates. “It’s a frightening prospect, I know. But I know if I never took this chance, I will regret it for the rest of my life. I hope you all feel the same. Let’s
make
history!”

My crew cheered.

The snow began to fall, and the wind picked up. Sheila’s Brush was on its way.

Upon Madoc’s signal, the crew began to row. The
Gwennan Gorn
glided through the harbour waters past the ice floes. I looked for Will and spied him pushing through the cheering crowd, an old man following behind. It was the gentleman Will and I had met on the beach at Avalon.

Will waved from the docks, wearing civilian clothes. “Kate! Wait!” He leapt onto the ice floes, the pans, between the docks and the ship.

“Stop rowing!” I cried.

Will leapt from pan to pan, ignoring the danger. He clambered into the boat, took off his watch, and dropped it in the water. “My last piece of iron.”

I embraced him. “What made you change your mind?” I asked.

“Madoc convinced me,” Will said.

I looked at Madoc. Had he learned enough English from me to talk to Will? Or had he been a fraud, all this time?

Will saw my confusion. “No, not him. The man we met at Avalon? Madoc Monteith. Our son.”

It took a while for it to sink in. “How?”

He showed me the golden pendant he wore beneath his clothes. The stone was identical to the one he gave me, striations and all, but old and worn. My hand flew to my neck. Mine was still there!

“They did find another way back. Remember I told you about Paddy’s Broom, the other storm that comes around the same time as Sheila’s Brush? Our son came back through that gate, and gave me this as proof. It’s the certainty I need. Let’s face the future together, come-what-may.”

I understood.

Madoc hollered. Ahead, a rainbow halo appeared in the whiteness of snow and fog. The gate!

There was no turning back. Into the storm and into the future.

“Come-what-may,” I said, and kissed Will.

TERMINÓS

Dean Francis Alfar

Dean Francis Alfar is a Filipino playwright, novelist, and writer of speculative fiction. His plays have been performed in venues across the country, while his articles and fiction have been published both in his native Philippines and abroad in
Strange Horizons, Rabid Transit, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror,
and the Exotic Gothic series. His latest short-story collection is
How to Traverse Terra Incognita
(2012). “Terminós” was first published in
Rabid Transit: Menagerie,
edited by Christopher Barzak, Alan DeNiro, and Kristin Livdahl, in 2005.

Mr. Henares thinks about time

From the moment he opened his eyes in the morning to the instant before he fell asleep alone at night, Mr. Henares thought only about time.

He reflected about how time slowed down when he was engaged in an unpleasant activity, such as dyeing his thinning grey hair over the broken antique basin installed by his son-in-law Alvaro in his blue-tiled bathroom; and how time went faster during the rare instances when he felt happy, such as when his brace of grandchildren came for the cold weather holidays, their hypnotic music invariably loud and invigorating.

Mr. Henares recalled days when time did not move at all: waking up one morning convinced that it was the exact same day as the day before, watching the red display of his tableside clock blinking fruitlessly. The experience of the twin miércoles was to be repeated thrice more, adding jueves, viernes and sábado to his list of repeating days. He endured the repeated conversations and graceless routines, read the same stories in the newspapers and watched the same interviews on television.

Once, when he was a much younger man, Mr. Henares went back in time. The incident caught him completely unaware – he realized he was walking backwards and thinking thoughts in reverse. This unfortunate event flustered him so much that when it was suddenly over, he broke down in tears and resolved never to travel back in time if he could help it.

One morning Mr. Henares thought about the future, methodically spooning sweetsop into his mouth and spitting out the seeds into a cup. He sat at the breakfast alcove of his house that adjoined his little shop and squinted at the sun outside the windows.

“The future is always happening,” he said to the empty kitchen. “If it is always happening, then it is, in fact, the present; and any instances of the future having occurred are, in fact, the past.”

Mr. Henares stood up, wiped sweetsop juice from his chin, washed his hands, crossed the connecting corridor and went about opening his shop for the day.

Mr. Henares makes some sales

His first visitors were a trio of young men, all sporting nose rings and dressed in last year’s affectation of jeans and tulle.

“Vueño arao, Mr. Henares,” the thinnest one said, removing his Pepsi-blue hat as he entered the shop.

“Good morning,” Mr. Henares replied. “What can I do for you gentlemen?”

“We would like to sell,” the stoutest one replied, wiping beads of perspiration from his forehead with a swipe of a ruffled sleeve. “We’ve been waiting for you to open.”

“Ah,” the old merchant said, “And what do you have for me?”

“We have time to kill,” the tallest one told him, offering his hands, palms up. He looked at Mr. Henares with half-lidded eyes.

Mr. Henares shook his head. “You understand, of course, that rates have really gone down. With the new teatros and entretenimientos, people are finding things to occupy themselves with.”

“Certainly, Mr. Henares,” the stoutest one replied. “We will take what you will offer. You are the fairest merchant in all of Ciudad Manila.”

Mr. Henares brought out his tools, brass and glass and wood, and extracted the precise amount of time each young man wanted to sell. They waited patiently as he labeled each vial, heads tilted to the mellow bossa nova tracks that emanated from a pair of speakers from behind the counter. When he had finished putting everything away, he gave them their payment, wrapped in blue encaje.

The three young men opened the package then and there, much to the discomfort of Mr. Henares. The tallest one took out the Planet Hollywood shot glass and read aloud what was written around the logo, as his two companions unabashedly held hands and closed their eyes.

Silence is foolish if we are wise, but wise if we are foolish

By early evening, Mr. Henares had completed four more transactions.

A young mother, fresh from the provinces, who sold all her memories of childhood: Mr. Henares’s payment was etched on a Flores bandalore, the inscription set deep in the yo-yo’s polished wooden rim.

A drop hollows out a stone

A pair of lovers, who entered his store and left it hand-in-hand, traded in five separate occasions of romance: when they first knew they were in love, when they first kissed, when they first made love, when they first reconciled, and when they decided to stay together for as long as they could, despite all inconvenience, difficulty or portent. Mr. Henares gave them, in exchange, words written on yellowed Badtz Maru stationery, sweat and ink staining the image of the little black Japanese penguin.

Night follows day

A bored widow was next, bartering away two years of future solitude. “I’m certain someone will want that,” she said wryly, “I certainly don’t.” Mr. Henares gave her a polished citrine carved into the form of a tiny fluted flower with even smaller engraved words.

We do not care of what we have, but we cry when it is lost

The widow sniffed, “True, true,” and asked if she could purchase some romance. Mr. Henares offered her the vials he obtained from the lovers earlier. She took two and stepped out into the humidity.

The fourth customer was a proud-looking soldier, the buttons on his dress uniform shiny and golden. “My maternal grandaunt told me that I would lose my right arm in war across the sea. If it must be so, then I’d like to sell the time of actual loss and recovery.”

Mr. Henares studied the man’s resigned face and offered him, in exchange for his future pain, words woven in sawali.

An empty barrel makes the greatest sound

Mr. Henares prepares for bed

As he closed the shop, he reflected on how time’s ebb and flow meant different things to different people. He once had a customer, a dark-skinned young man from Cabarroquis, who protested against his good fortune in the game of love.

“Everyone I meet wants me,” the dark-eyed man sighed in Mr. Henares’s bed. “Everyone wants to devour me. I never have time for myself. I am certain that even you will soon speak to me of love.”

Mr. Henares had not really been listening to him then, but was instead enraptured by the young man’s skin, marveling at the game of hide-and-seek the candlelight and shadows played upon it. It was only much later when he remembered the words the man spoke.

As he prepared his frugal dinner of salted fish and boiled aubergine, Mr. Henares thought about how some people believed in time as a panacea for all hurt, all pain, all woes.

A pair of sisters, veiled and somber, once asked him if he had thirty years of uninterrupted time for sale. He sadly told them he did not, that no one had ever sold him a block of personal time greater than a handful of years. But inwardly, he cringed at the notion that there were people who believed in a blessed future, guaranteed happiness by imbibing his vials or selling their sorrow, whether past or yet-to-come.

He felt too old to believe in what he sold.

Before going to bed in the house that adjoined his shop, Mr. Henares checked on his trading stock, arranging various items containing words, phrases and maxims. Behind a shelf, almost hidden from his eyesight, he found a faded adarna plume etched with

Vision is the art of seeing things invisible

and a handkerchief embroidered with

What we see depends on what we look for

That night, as he stripped his clothes and slipped into bed, Mr. Henares thought about how time, whether bought or sold or unsold, robbed everyone of everything in the end. He chuckled at himself, surprised by his cynical perspective, scratched at a sore spot on his spotted arms, and went to sleep, thinking about time.

Miguel Lopez Vicente’s drought

Three days later, on the eve of his thirty-second natal day, the storyteller Miguel Lopez Vicente came to terms with the fact that he had nothing more to write. His body of work, unmatched in terms of scope and volume, was testament to his genius, read, devoured and performed in various venues all over Hinirang. In years past, he tilled the soil of his homeland and harvested the loves and hopes of its people, transmuting their mundane lives into great dramas of passion. He listened to the tales of sailors, merchants and ambassadors to foreign lands and improved upon what he heard, spinning marvels from the barest descriptions and epics from whispered rumors. But with each year that passed, his ideas dwindled and diminished, leaving a profound void in the center of his heart. He found himself staring at virgin pages, his quill sapped by the ennui of waiting.

“There is nothing left,” he said to his reflection in the mirror. “I don’t want to grow old.”

He recalled the first time he knew he would be a writer, how the sight of farmers during rice-planting season triggered a sudden rapture in him. But the matter of age and the ravages of time had been weighing heavily on his head for the past few months. When he passed the halfway mark of a healthy man’s lifespan the year prior, he did it in a wine-induced stupor, drinking in an effort to obliterate the fact that he had written only one wondrous play the previous year.

This year, he thought about doing something else, to ward off the thoughts of another year ending, a fruitless year of utter desolation – perhaps by losing himself in the arms of some unknown young man, but decided against it. A young man’s embrace would repeat a story he already knew (no doubt the boy’s arms would be strong; his skin perfect and tight; his eyes round; his life exactly the same as every other young man that Miguel had known), a futile exercise. And so Miguel simply resolved to determine his own story’s ending.

Miguel Lopez Vicente selects an ending

The afternoon of the next day, Miguel walked to the Encanto lu Caminata to the shop of Mr. Henares. The shop was empty of people when he arrived, but filled to the rafters with all manner of jars, pots and woven baskets; vials, censers and tsino incense stick holders; beads, feathers, and boxes and bowls of various sizes, shapes and colors. A peculiar scent permeated the room, swirling slowly around a large storm lantern on the counter – the mingled smells of an eclipse, stolen kisses, and newly-opened luggage fresh from an airplane’s belly.