Time Travellers Anonymous

Written by Anakin McFly

He slips again into a fuzz of consciousness, grey wisps of memory taking on brief substance and giving form to another room from another time. The distant voices lose their echoes and separate themselves into words; and he sees the blackboard take shape and sudden solidity before him, and struggles to clear his mind and make sense of the figure that moves before it in anxious excitement.

"the future... and the past...”

Fragments of chalk break off into dust with each enthusiastic swipe of the piece against the board. He remembers the hand that guides it; the disarrayed clothes, the untamed wild mane of white hair and the eyes wide with the exhilaration of scientific explanation.

"...prior to this point of time, somewhere in the past, the timeline skewed into this tangent, creating an alternate 1985."

Each phrase duly illustrated with the swish of white on black, the mechanics of time travel laid out in scribbled simple diagrams that his young mind could at that point not bother to comprehend, too fixated on other matters of more pressing importance to care about how it worked, just wanting to know how to fix it, youthful impatience getting in the way; and now the words have little more meaning to him apart from the voice that gives rise to each syllable, a voice that he thought he would never hear again;

"Doc?"

The scientist turns, unseeing, trapped in a route of action established long ago.

"Alternate to you, me, and Einstein. But reality to everyone else.”

"Doc..."

But then something changes, and he sees warm recognition in the other's face, for the first time looking – actually looking – directly at him instead of where his teenage incarnation would have stood, and Doc's voice takes on a tone of calm curiosity.

"Marty?"

"Doc... where am I?" He tries to move, but he can't seem to locate his body, can't seem to expand his world beyond the small rectangle of dim light that now frames the older man's face.

The voice is quiet. "Don't fight it, Marty. It's too late."

"What happened... what's too late..."

"I'm sorry, Marty."

He would be crying if he could, perhaps from the sheer mental effort it takes for him to cling on to the scene, desperation driving him to keep that small rectangular window open, that fragment of intelligible past there...

"If it's an apology you want, I'm only glad to give it," Doc says, his words carrying no trace of hostility. Just sadness, perhaps, and regret. It is hard to tell.

He hears low thunder in the distance. For a brief moment he feels the chill of the rainy night that he knows lies beyond, enveloping the small garage in a mist of cold darkness; and then it is gone.

"Are you real?" he whispers.

Doc gives no reply. "I'm sorry, Marty," he says. "I genuinely am."

The scene starts to fade; he lunges out, desperately, clutching, clawing at the disappearing garage as the blackboard and Doc and the rain outside merge into an amorphous mass and slip away-

"Doc!"

-and then he's sinking again back down into the darkness, flailing formless limbs as he descends once more into the mental chaos of half-remembered lives and overwritten histories.

#

A circle of stone stools arranged neatly in the centre of the room, the ragged mass of tired faces and weary bodies positioned numbly on them in the stagnant quiet. The walls go all around.

"Hi," he rasps, his voice faint to his own ears. "My name is Martin McFly, and I am – I was – a time traveller."

He sees the sympathetic looks from the rest of the group as it rouses itself into temporary life and speaks as one: "Hi, Martin."

"...Well, actually..." he looks downwards, lets out a short breath, then looks back up at them with a weak grin. "...Actually people call me Marty."

*

The afternoon crowd milling by the lake, him joining them with the casual, almost-cocky jaunt of a teenager just freed from school, trying to hide his insecurities behind flimsy curtains of bravado.

"What if I send in the tape and they don't like it? I mean, what if they say I'm no good? What if they say, 'Get out of here kid, you got no future'?"

Dreams already shattered in advance in the inevitable destinies his mind concocts; the definite failures, the futures of obscurity in some office job somewhere, cooped up in rows of identical cubicles far away from the cries of electric guitars and drumbeats to the tune of cheering crowds...

"I mean, I just don't think I can take that kind of rejection.”

Paranoia is a powerful driving force; he remembers the many trips to the future he sneaked on the time train to make sure that everything would be okay, that he would realise his dream; the panic that always came when he saw a future that was not all right, and how he tried, over and over again, to figure out what went wrong along the way and how he could fix it; he remembers that one, perfect time when he had made it perfect and he had stood among the screaming, worshipping teenage mob and joined them in their ecstasy as on the stage his future self grinned between shouted lyrics and sent waves of delight rippling through the crowd with every dramatic strum on his guitar; thinking that, for a moment, the rock star's eyes had alighted on his face a little longer than it should have, and thinking he saw a flicker of recognition, but then he had merged beneath the coloured strobe lights and pounding music into yet another of the teenage crowd who were yelling his name, their eyes bright and shining with awe and illegal drug consumption; he too caught up in the spirit of the moment, a strange secret pride coursing through him. Good music; there had been good music, the yet-to-be-composed melodies at once so foreign and so familiar to him; and then feeling, unbidden, a starstruck thrill when at the end of the show Marty McFly himself hopped off the stage into the clamouring, pressing crowd of fans and signed barely-legible autographs on scraps of paper and clothing and prized Pinheads albums; and he too in the frenzy had got an autograph, and he wondered if the other had noticed who he was.

rock on!
- Marty McFly

But then that future, too, changed, and he had watched as the autograph he held from another reality had faded away into nothingness. And he had wanted to give up trying to fix it, but he could not.

#

A woman sitting on his left in the circle flickers out of existence as he introduces himself; the others gaze briefly at the spot where she had been, but then the memory of her soon vanishes, leaving nothing more than a niggling feeling that something was missing, a feeling quickly lost in many more of the same. Another materialises to take her place – an old man bent with the strain of unattained perfection, clutching fervently to an unusually shiny gold watch strapped around his left wrist.

"I guess I overdid it," he continues, quietly, a nervous edge to his voice that reminds him of a father he once had. "I don't... I don't know who I am any more. I have all these memories and I can't remember which are real. I can't even remember what it was like in the beginning, before... before I started."

His gaze wanders from the attentive group to the whiteboard standing on the opposite side of the circle from him, a small-sized affair on wheels. Pointers written out neatly in marker, and beneath the T.T.A. heading, a quote from some unknown person wiser than he:

"I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection.
Excellence, I can reach for; perfection is God's business."

That strive for perfection; that firm belief that time travel could make everything right, could result in their own private utopia as long as they planned everything properly and did it enough times; that was what had ruined them all.

"I... I guess that's all I have to say for now." He lowers himself back onto his seat. People nod in empathetic understanding. A teenage boy on his right flickers briefly as a time ripple envelops him, and becomes the teenage girl on his right. Insubstantial personal histories; tampered with one too many times, still changing, still trying to catch up with the traveller.

He buries his head in his hands as the group leader starts speaking, her calm, even tones washing over him, and once more he feels the pull of slow mental disintegration and he's back again somewhere with Doc, crouched by the train tracks beneath the night sky, talking by the glow of their lanterns.

"Marty... the future isn't written. It can be changed; you know that! Anyone can make their future whatever they want it to be.”

"Yeah, yeah, we can, but maybe we shouldn't," he pleads, preaching belatedly to himself because he's not too sure that the Doc is really there. The latter notion frees something in him; long pent-up words suddenly spill out: "It's not your fault, Doc, it's mine. I was... too greedy, I thought I could make things better if I tried hard enough, but I couldn't, the future keeps changing..."

Doc regards him with a sombre intensity in his brown eyes, listening to him like the mentor he had once been so long ago. "Marty, you can't let this one little thing determine your entire destiny," he says. "You have to live your life according to what you believe is right... in your heart."

"But I don't know, Doc. I don't know what's right. I can't... I can't just leave it like it is. I've seen the future and it's horrible. But I can't even get it back to what it used to be. I don't know how; I can't-"

"If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything," the scientist says.

He grits his teeth in frustration, angry tears forming in his eyes. "That doesn't help, Doc. Not now, okay? Not anymore. Everything's ruined. My whole life is screwed up, my whole history... half the time I don't even know if I still exist."

A shaky breath. "And it's my fault. Not yours, Doc. You just built the time machines. I used them. So many times... too many times."

"You have to learn to let go."

The group leader was still speaking. ”You have to come to terms with the fact that there will never be a completely perfect future. You have to learn to be content with your lot. Stop fighting it. Just let yourself go along with the flow of time like everybody else does. The future will come when its time comes, and you will deal with those problems as they come. There will always be problems. They are a part of life, and you can't try to change that."

The thick red curtains turn a dark navy. He does not know why there are even curtains in this place; there aren't any windows.

"But I know that for some of you it is too late. Your histories have become too fragmented. Perhaps your very existence itself is hanging on a thread. Hopefully the rest of us will be motivated to stop before it gets to that point."

From attempts at rock stardom to just trying to maintain a decent, comfortable life, and then to the struggle to just have a normal future, an ordinary future in which everyone was alive and happy without the spectre of tombstones erected too early to haunt him in his dreams...

"I'm sorry," he whispers, his eyes still shut behind his hands. He doesn't know to whom the apology is directed; to Doc, perhaps, for how he misused his invention and ignored countless heeds against the altering of time; or to Jennifer and his kids for neglecting them in his perpetual pursuit of utopia, not realising until it was too late that this neglect and this obsession were precisely the factors contributing to the increasingly negative futures he saw; or to that too-familiar rock star who once gave him an autograph and now was never to be; or to that kid by the pond with his girlfriend who once dreamed of fame and fortune and dared to risk rejection.

"I'm sorry," he says, rocking slightly on his seat, not seeing the looks of compassion that some of the group members send his way. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

#