Due Time

“I’ve never seen the road like this. So quiet, so empty,” Dennis says to his lone passenger.

The passenger, a tall gentleman in a fur coat, has a rugged face, salt and pepper hair; a man the ladies might refer to as distinguished. He carries a cane and a hat but uses neither except as props for his hands. He sits in the exact middle of the back of the limo, no seat belt.

Dennis, a middle-aged man who will never in his life be called distinguished, is not just making small talk with his passenger. He’s truly, honestly astounded at the quiet of the Belt Parkway.

It’s three in the morning, an hour after a blizzard finished dumping eighteen inches of snow on the tristate area. The limousine is the only car on the road, en route from Kennedy airport, where the passenger had been waiting for a flight to Miami and the driver just happened to be waiting out the storm\.

“I need a ride to Montauk.” The man stood over Dennis, impatient. Dennis was for a moment insulted that this fur-coated man just assumed he was a driver, but then realized he had fallenl asleep on a hard-backed chair with a small cardboard sign reading “Charles Weston” clutched in his hand. Charles Weston’s flight was canceled.

Dennis laughed at the man’s demand. “The roads aren’t even plowed yet. And Montauk is going to be about four or five hours at the least in this weather. Possibly more. You should get a hotel.”

The gentleman in fur said, “I require a ride to Montauk. I will pay you a thousand dollars in cash. I will also assure you a safe ride with little snow underfoot.”

Dennis’s only thought was that the man was drunk. But then the man took out a wad of cash, fanned it out in front of him, and said, “One thousand dollars, up front. And I’m not kidding about the safe ride part. You just can’t ask any questions about how that happens. You take the cash, ask no questions. I’ll give you another five hundred and a safe journey home if you don’t ask.”

Because it was 3 a.m., in the moments after a blinding snowstorm, and this night was already a loss, Dennis said he’d drive the man to Montauk and not ask any questions. Sure. Why not?

Now Dennis and his passenger are on the Belt Parkway, which has indeed not been plowed. That doesn’t matter because the snow is disappearing ahead of the limousine. As Dennis drives, the snow melts away, as if an unseen hand is pouring steaming water on it. Eighteen inches of packed powder just disappears ten feet in front of the car as they drive. Dennis not only does not question this, but doesn’t even want to know the how or why of it. There is a man in his back seat who has a lot of cash on hand and the ability to melt snow, and Dennis does not want to know how this is happening.

“The moments after a snowstorm are New York at its prettiest,” the man says. Dennis is about to agree when the passenger continues his thought. “You should have been there in the 1800s, in Manhattan. It would take your breath away. So beautiful.” He sighs wistfully, a man lost in what seems to be his favorite memory.

Dennis asks, even though he knows he shouldn’t, because he is not going to let this one go.

“In the 1800s, sir? Been there? Do you mean you have seen pictures? I’m sure they were beautiful.”

“Let me ask you this, Dennis,” the man says. Dennis does not recall exchanging that part of pleasantries with his passenger, the part where you introduce yourself. “Are you a reader?”

“Yes, I read. I like spy novels, Stephen King, biographies of presidents.”

“All good stuff, Dennis. All good.” The passenger shakes himself out of his fur coat. Underneath, he’s wearing an expensive black overcoat. The man likes to keep warm, Dennis thinks.

“Have you ever read books about time travel?”

“Can’t say I have.”

“Fascinating. I read one about a man who discovers he can time travel through self-hypnosis. He goes back to New York, 1882, and the landscape he described in the aftermath of a snowstorm just like this one made me want to go there.”

“So you did?” Dennis is intrigued enough to encourage the conversation. Besides, a trip this long needs at least small talk. This was big talk. Big talk is good for the soul, good for a long drive.

“Indeed. I taught myself to time travel. But I went to 1884 instead.”

“Why?”

“Because some things I wanted to see didn’t exist in 1882. And I discovered there was a lot of snow in New York in February 1884.”

“So was it everything you expected it to be?”

“It was. It was stunningly beautiful. I stood for hours in the snow just staring at the scenery. I went back in time and that’s all I did. Stare. Sometimes, Dennis, you come upon things in this world which are beyond words or comprehension.”

Like driving a time-traveling man who can melt snow with his mind to Montauk at 3 a.m., Dennis thought.

“So you just think about the year, just use your brain like using the Force or something and you’re there, in another year?”

“It’s about time and space, Dennis. Have you ever visited an historical site? Have you ever stood where Paul Revere once stood or touched a wall that Edgar Allan Poe once touched? Have you ever looked at the trees in your backyard and wondered who was here before you, when those trees were just saplings?”

Dennis doesn’t answer, thinking an answer is not required. The passenger goes on.

“It’s a feeling that’s hard to describe, to feel the coming together of time and space, of histories, of past and present.

“Take a look at this roadway. It used to be a forest. Who’s to say it’s not still forest, with each moment in time living on top of the other, each unaware that they ever stopped or started existing? Maybe time piles on top of itself and never really disappears.”

They drive in silence for a mile or so, and just when Dennis is feeling sleepy, the man picks up his would-be lecture.

“If you try hard enough, if you are open to the ideas and tuned into the past, you can feel it when your feet touch upon a stone walk that existed in the 1800s. You can feel the existence of the thousands of other feet that walked there before you. If you put your mind in the 1800s, you can sense the people like ghosts. Except they aren’t ghosts. They are the past, living in tangent with the future and the present.

“Who is to say, Dennis, that February 15, 1884, 1900, or 1776, does not still linger here? Perhaps reaching those dates from 2025 seems a scientific impossibility, but that doesn’t mean those years are not here, unfolding right on top of us, unseen. The past and its energy is soaked up in everything it touches. So those stone walkways, the tree in your yard, the dirt under your feet, the sign on an ancient building, the artifacts in a museum; they are all what binds us to the past. They make it possible to believe that, if parts of the past remain, then the past as a whole must also remain, surviving off the energy its remnants hold.”

They’re about a half an hour into the ride and Dennis is now wide awake, his mind alive with the possibility of time travel. “So you’re telling me—”

“I’m telling you, Dennis, that a man, if he puts his mind to it, can walk out of 2025 and into 1884, maybe not in a physical way where he can alter things or interact, but as an invisible presence, observing, just as the past is an invisible presence to us right now. Perhaps all it takes is an open mind and a willingness to see that the past is still very much in the present, Dennis.”

“I don’t even know what to say,” Dennis says, just to say something. His head is swimming with possibilities and ideas. His passenger has opened a part of his mind he didn’t know existed. Time travel. Time travel by sheer will. He wants to stop the car right there to try it out. He doesn’t even know precisely where they are. They are on the Southern State Parkway, and it’s just a blur of snow-dusted trees, with nothing but white ahead and white behind. All he knows is that he has this urge to stop somewhere and will himself into another time.

“Let’s do that, Dennis.”

“Do what?”

“Pull over. Time travel together.”

“I don’t even know where we are, sir.”

“Does it matter? Everywhere used to be somewhere else.”

Dennis sees a sign ahead, a green monstrosity swaying in the wind, the snow blown off it just enough so he can tell where they are, exit 26. His childhood stomping grounds.

“I wouldn’t want to go back too far,” Dennis says. “Just the 1970s. See things the way they used to be before the suburbs became so urban.”

“Ahhh, the idyllic days of youth. I could have predicted that’s where you would go, Dennis.”

“Well, I’m a predictable sort of guy.” He sighs, a bit disappointed in himself. He has an unnerving need to impress his passenger, and he feels like he just failed a final exam.

“Let’s just get you to Montauk. I’ll try the time travel thing later.”

Dennis’s eyes are getting tired, and they are not even halfway to Montauk. What he really wants is to get off the next exit, head to his Aunt Elisa’s house, and sleep until the snow disappears. But he knows his passenger is not going to let that happen, even if enticed with an offer of a warm guest room at Aunt Elisa’s.

“Just keep driving, Dennis. You’ll be fine.”

He imagined a few miles back that the time-traveling, super-powered man in the fur coat was reading his thoughts, but he dismissed it as just a figment of his tired, overtaxed brain. But now he’s sure. And he needs to know how everything he has witnessed on this night could possibly have happened.

“Who are you?” Dennis blurts it out, his tiredness and the craziness of the conversation in the limo colliding in his head to force what might be a train wreck of an ending to this night. Dennis immediately tries to take back his words, but they hang there, dead weight sucking up all the air in the limousine. He forces a deep breath in an effort to get some air in his lungs.

“Who am I.” The passenger states this as if pondering the question to the meaning of life. “I told you, no questions, Dennis.”

“You told me not to ask about the safe journey. And I haven’t.”

They drive in silence, the snow flying out of their way, the wheels of the limo crunching slushy asphalt instead of nearly two feet of powder.

“Okay, sir. Okay.” Dennis says as a way of dismissing the conversation and letting go of the weight between.

“I no longer want to go to Montauk, Dennis.”

Visions of hundred dollar bills flying out of the limousine dance in Dennis’s head. He blew it. He blew it.

“No, no. Not your fault. Not at all. I’m just. . .tired, Dennis. I don’t want to attend to the business I have in Montauk. I don’t want to attend to my business at all anymore. I do believe time travel has ruined me. Discovering all that pure beauty, all the things I have never bore witness to, even though I could have. . .I can do anything, Dennis. Go anywhere. Be anything, anyone. But I stayed where I was because it was comfortable. Power is comfort. Full and total control, my friend. I thought that was the absolute comfort. Ruling not people’s lives, but their afterlives? My God — and I say that without irony — what a job, right?”

Dennis has no idea what his passenger is talking about, and when he has the inclination to put two and two together, the equation that comes up in his head is too far-fetched to believe.

Then again. Melting snow. Mind reading. Time traveling by will.

“I want to go back to 1884, Dennis. Or any other year. I want to go back and stay in another time, mingle, become one with the people of the time. I want to escape from the here and now, from the ever after, from the prison I’ve made for myself in my own world.”

Dennis used to be a bartender back in the day. He knows the tone of the depressed and hopeless, and this man with the fur coat and magical powers is spitting out every keyword, every tone needed to send the signal that he is about to give up.

“What can I do for you, sir?”

“Let me ask you, Dennis. If we got out at exit 26 and I showed you how to travel back to that time before urban sprawl, what would you do? Would you just gawk at it, wallow in the fact that all you could do was see it, remember it, relive it in your mind only, or would you find a way to immerse yourself in it, stay there forever?”

“That world isn’t mine anymore, sir. I’d just want to look and remember. Probably get depressed at what happened to the neighborhood. But at least I’d be glad to get to see it in all its glory again.”

Flurries start to swirl around the car. Dennis worries that the storm is picking up where it left off, a sputtered conversation between sky and ground.

“But that’s the thing about the past.” The man makes no mind of the new falling snow. “Someone who was your age now in the 1970s probably thought the place was in ruins and the 1950s were its glory days. And someone twenty years from now will think your neighborhood the way it stands today is perfection. We always want what we used to have. Or never knew we had. I had all this, Dennis. I had the world. I had everything, in every time, in every era. And I never enjoyed any of it as much as I enjoyed sending people into fiery pits for eternity. The thing is, I don’t even enjoy that anymore.”

Dennis’s brain does that thing it does when something is too much to comprehend. It shuts down the thought process, switches to something else entirely, something mundane, simple.

“Why don’t we go get a drink, sir?”

“Splendid idea, Dennis.”

Dennis knows there isn’t a bar open at this hour, especially in this weather, but he also knows that, if his passenger wants a stiff drink in a warm bar, he’ll be getting a stiff drink in a warm bar within minutes.

###

“This building has been here since the 1700s, Dennis.”

They are sitting at a wooden bar, its top coated with some kind of hardened plastic etched with the names of bored patrons who wanted to leave their legacy on the bartop of a local pub. Marty was here. Angie loves Kenny. Rangers suck.

That they find the bar open is not a miracle, it is just something else Dennis’s passenger conjures for them, along with a tired-looking bartender and a sullen young man playing soft rock on a piano.

“1700s, Dennis. This place was around then.”

“They say George Washington slept here.”

“Love the architecture. Must be beautiful in the snow in, say, 1783.”

“Must be.”

The man drums his fingers on the bar top, lost in thought. Dennis sips his whiskey, not quite sure how he has ended up in this place on this night. He won’t be able to tell anyone about the events of the evening, but he’s okay with that. Some things should be kept between friends.

Friends? Dennis laughs to himself.

The man stops drumming, glances up at Dennis.

“Sharing a warm drink on a cold evening while I’m having an existential crisis? Friend, indeed.”

He lifts his glass to Dennis’s. Dennis raises his own glass. They clink, make silent salutations, drink.

“So, George Washington slept here?”

“That’s what they say, sir.”

“I hope it snowed that year.”

Dennis’s passenger stands, slips into his fur coat, grabs his cane and hat. He puts fifteen hundred dollars in front of Dennis.

“Safe journey,” he says.

“You too, sir.”

Dennis watches as his passenger walks out the door, into the snow, into 1783.

“Godspeed,” he whispers, without irony.