Time Hates a Change

Women and children screaming. Men shouting. Guns shooting. The world below has gone to absolute hell in a hand basket. I can’t believe the city I know and love could come to this. There’s a fire at the market down the street, Mr. Wang’s store in another life. I think it’s called Beezer’s Deluxe Wares now. Somewhere downtown, the mayor’s corpse dangles from a street light. Angry mob did him in a few hours ago.

There appear to be shooting stars zipping through the night sky, but that’s all wishful thinking. Truth is, they’re rockets. Missiles. Death from above. The United States has been sending volley after volley at our neighbor to the north, once called Canada. Now it’s the North American Republic of Korea. What the hell did we do?

“Denton?” The voice is like morning bird song crashing through a nightmare. I turn to look at its owner, whose wide concerned eyes are so vibrant and alive I have to remind myself it isn’t a dream. She’s really here, she really spoke, she’s really alive. My heart, my love. My Mary

She speaks again. “Denton, what’s wrong?” The question is so ridiculous that I nearly laugh in her face. That would be cruel, though, wouldn’t it? She doesn’t understand. This has been her world, her life, for nearly twenty-five years. Quarter of a century.

I sigh and shake my head as she comes and folds her arms around my neck. The kiss we share is almost enough to make me forget. To make me lose all the guilt and anger. Almost.

“I can’t…” I start, and she cuts me off.

“Denton, don’t you dare.” Her voice is soft, yet commanding. “You’ve been acting weird ever since you came home from work on Monday. If you don’t tell me what’s going on, so help me…”

I put my hands on either side of her face, and she quiets. Looking into her eyes, I feel myself transported to the first time we met thirty years ago. I was a bartender at a small dive in Boston. She was a student at UMass. When she walked into the bar, I knew I wanted to date her. When she smiled, I knew I wanted to marry her. When she laughed, I knew I wanted to grow old together with her.

There are few people in this world that I am willing to share the truth with. Nobody would understand what I am about to say to her, and frankly it pains me to share this with her, but she deserves the truth. No matter how much it’s going to hurt.

“Okay,” I say, “this is going to sound pretty crazy, but here it goes. Do you remember back in ’01 when the FBI prevented a terrorist plot to attack the World Trade Center?”

Her brows furrow, clearly not expecting some weird history lesson. “No, I don’t.”

A small smile tugs at one corner of my mouth. Small victories, I guess.

“Well, they did,” I explain, “it was supposed to occur on September 11th of that year. It never happened.”

“Well, that’s all well and good,” Mary says, “but that didn’t stop someone from bombing Grand Central Station.”

I nod. “Yeah. Time hates a change.”

“What?”

“That attack on the Twin Towers was supposed to happen,” I say. “It did happen, actually, in another life. Then, a few months ago an old college buddy of mine came to me. He had invented a Time Machine. He wanted to go back and stop the attack on September 11th, and I eagerly joined him on that trip.”

“Why?” Mary asks, and now it’s the corner of her mouth quirking up in a small smile. She doesn’t believe me, and I can’t say that I blame her. I mean, a Time Machine? Really?

I’m still holding the sides of her face, and I let my hands drop away from her cheeks as I turn to look out at the burning city before me.

“We went back and did what we had to do to convince the FBI that there really was a plot to attack the towers. They really didn’t want to believe us, but eventually we convinced them. We had too much information about the impending attack for them not to believe us.” I snort, “They accused us of being a part of the plot. We managed to escape confinement by the skin of our teeth, and took the Time Machine to September 11th, 2001. At 8:45 a.m we stood on a rooftop a few miles away from the World Trade Center. At 8:46, there was no plane colliding with the North Tower, when it was supposed to happen. At 9:03, there was no plane colliding with the South Tower, when it was supposed to happen. We had done it.”

I feel the emotion starting to bubble up, and I manage to stomp it back into place as a woman’s scream in the distance is cut off abruptly by a gunshot.

I continue, “So, we came back to the present. Twenty-five years later. We expected a very different world than the one we had left, but nothing could have prepared us for…” I gesture out at the city.

“What do you mean?” Mary asks softly, and there’s a note in her voice that tells me she’s actually starting to believe me.

“Time, it would seem, hates to be changed,” I tell her again. “When we came home and found the world in shambles like this, we did our research. You mentioned the attack on Grand Central, and the aftermath of that…” I shake my head. “We stopped the World Trade Center from falling. We saved the 2,977 people who were supposed to die that day. Those in the planes and towers in New York, and those who fought back against their hijackers elsewhere. We saved those people… and in exchange, we brought about the deaths of nearly a million people.”

When al-Qaeda’s plot was thwarted, Osama bin Laden planned a new attack. On November 9th, 2001, a group of men entered Grand Central Station and boarded trains bound for multiple locations in the city. They detonated their bombs across the New York subway system, as well as in Grand Central itself. The explosions caused trains to derail, causing massive structural damage to the tunnels. No one is quite sure how this next bit happened. Experts called it impossible. There was a gas leak in one of the substations, and when the explosion hit that gas leak, it caused the gas in the pipes to ignite. This caused explosions to rock the city of Manhattan.

The United States reacted far more aggressively than it had for 9/11. They quite literally went nuclear. The Middle East is now a heap of radioactive ash. This kicked off a quarter century of violence and skirmishes between many nations. North Korea invaded Canada in 2012. London was leveled by Russia. Societies collapsed. The United States is far from united, and the cities are now forced to fend for themselves.

“So you’re saying that because the Twin Towers didn’t get attacked that the whole world went to hell?” Mary asks incredulously.

I turn to her, shaking my head. “No. I’m saying because we messed with Time, Time messed with us tenfold.”

“You’re acting like Time is some living breathing thing.”

I shrug. “As far as we’ve been able to make out, our timeline exists as a single entity. Some theories talk about alternate timelines, but that hasn’t been our experience. When we go back and change something, it ripples across the existing timeline and creates waves, and then tsunamis. You ever see that Ashton Kutcher movie, the Butterfly Effect? Maybe not, that may not have been made if it was after 2001. My buddy there, the one who invented the Time Machine, he jumped forward to ten years from now, hoping that maybe we get our act together and work through this.” I shake my head. “It’s even worse.”

“So what now?” Mary asks. “You guys go back and stop yourselves from stopping the attack?”

“No ‘you guys’ about it,” I tell her. “He’s already gone to change it.”

“What?” Mary asks. “Why didn’t you go with him?”

I take a moment before answering. This isn’t an easy thing to talk about. “Remember when you went to visit your folks in California back in ’01? You flew out of Dulles…” I see her think for a moment, and then her eyes widen. “The reason I was so quick to join in this crazy scheme to begin with was because on September 11th, 2001, I lost the love of my life. A mere two years after we were married.” I walk to her and wrap my arms around her waist. “The burden of time travel is the memories of the timelines we create and recreate. If I went back with him… I would remember this timeline. I would remember you being alive and I would have to undo that. It would be like killing you myself.”

Mary looks up at me, and the fear in her eyes sends a pang of guilt and pity through me. She says, “So what’s going to happen?”

“If he succeeds,” I say, “the ripple effect will wash across the timeline, correcting it. The Twin Towers will be attacked. American Airlines Flight 77 will be hijacked, and the plane will go down before it ever reaches the Pentagon and you—” I choke back a sob. “You’ll die on the plane.”

“And you won’t remember any of this,” Mary whispers, closing here eyes.

“None of it,” I agree.

She collapses into my chest, and I feel her sobs crashing against me. We both lower to the rooftop. I look up, and see a strange rippling across the sky. It looks almost like the Northern Lights. Steadily, the acrid smell of burning buildings lessens, the sounds of violence all around me quiet and are replaced with normal traffic sounds.

I look down at Mary, and she up at me. Tears streak her cheeks, as we come together for one last kiss, I realize I can see through her. She’s fading from my arms, the pressure of her lips on mine lessening despite the kiss never breaking. Soon, I am on the rooftop by myself, and the pain in my chest aches worse than any I’ve ever had to endure. Yet, even that begins to fade, and I feel relief as I realize that the memories of the past few months of my life are slowly fading away. I look at my hands, which are also fading. In the newly created timeline, I have no reason to be on this rooftop. I’ll wake up somewhere else. Miserable and grieving for my long lost love, still. A drunken mess of a man. This world will keep spinning, and there will be happiness for many. For me, though, my world had collapsed and ended on that ill-fated fall morning twenty-five years ago.