R. A. Lafferty Pastiche - Scenes from a time, long gone.

[Note: This is a pastiche of R. A. Lafferty's story, The Six Fingers of Time. The original story can be downloaded through Project Gutenberg.)

Alarm clock flew across the room, hitting the opposite wall with a crunch. Half a droplet sat perched at the end of the faucet, the rest of the water clogged somewhere in the pipe. The man sat frozen on the bench outside his apartment. A work day went by without a soul showing up at the office…

“Good morning, Mr. Jacobsen.” Charlie jerked his head up. His secretary was standing in the doorway, a file folder in her hands and a smile on her face. “Having a quick morning nap?”

He blinked and looked around his office. Yes, it was morning – the clock said 8:30, sunlight was coming in through the window, the sound of people arriving softly trickled into the room through the open door. Charlie sat up straight in his chair, feeling slightly self-conscious and silly. “Yes, good morning, Jean. I guess I must have drifted off when I first gotten in this morning. Had the strangest dream, though. Though I did a full day’s work already…”

Jean placed her file in front of him and swept up the large stack of papers sitting on the edge of his desk. “Goodness! It sure looks like you did a day’s work already! How late were in you in the office, sir? If I had known you were going to be staying much longer last night, I wouldn’t have left so early.”

Charlie frowned. “I didn’t stay here late last night. I don’t know how I could have finished all those briefs.”

Jean tilted her head. “Did you come back in the middle of the night? You might have sleep walked yourself all the way to work.” She started flipping through the pages.

Charlie shook his head slightly. “I’ve never had that problem in the past…” He fell silent, thinking to himself. Had he sleep walked over? It had certainly felt like he was the only person alive this morning – perhaps it had all been a dream?

“Well, you certainly were awake when you were writing this – not even you have this neat of handwriting when you are asleep, sir.” Jean turned towards the door before looking back at him. “Sir, taking care of these will take me all day. Why don’t you take the day off and see a doctor? You do look a little pale.”

Charlie felt pale. “I think you are right, Jean. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He waited before she left the room before attempting to stand.

Time had almost come to a standstill this morning, but it seemed to be rushing by now.

Dr. Emerson poked her head into the room before stepping in and shutting the door. “Hullo, Charlie. Didn’t think I would be seeing you until at least another month. What’s the matter?”

With slow, stilted speech, he tried to explain what happened this morning as best as he could, for all that he was not sure what had happened himself. Dr. Emerson sat quietly across the room, listening to what he was telling her without saying a word or moving a muscle.

Once he had finished, she sighed. “Well, Charlie, I can’t say that I know of anything that is wrong with you. You’re certainly too young to be losing your memory. My best guess would be that you had some kind of waking dream, brought on by stress from work.” She clicked her tongue softly. “This does remind me of an odd case I once saw, years ago… Charlie, would you mind coming in once a month or so, just for a check-up?”

He had left the doctor’s appointment feeling strangely mollified. His feelings of self-satisfaction followed him through the day… So when he found himself seated next to a stranger who could refill his drink without seeming to move, he did nothing more than nod and turn towards him.

Charlie opened his eyes and looked around. He felt like now, for the first time, he was fully alive, while the rest of the world stood still in awe around him. Whatever the reason, everything did stand still. The faucet in front of him still had a long stream of water coming from it, but when he ran his hand through the column, the water stayed parted. With a small giggle, he wondered if this was how Moses had parted the Red Sea.

Turning away from the sink, he noticed his small dog growling at a chew toy, frozen in place mid-yip. Charlie picked him up and placed him in front of the mirror in the hallway, something that always made the dog fright. Standing back from his handiwork, he closed his eyes and counted down to zero as he had been taught. The barking dog, startled to be no long barking at a chew toy and instead had another dog growling back at him, let out a high pitched squeak of surprise before turning and tearing his way back to the kitchen, continuously barking as nails rapidly clicked against the floor. Charlie stood there and laughed and laughed before closing his eyes one more, counting up like he had done not that long ago, grabbing his coat and heading out the door.

While it seemed to Charlie that about a minute had passed during that whole change, to his dog and the rest of the world, scarcely a second had flown by. He had never felt so pleased in his entire life.

Once Charlie spent some time in his own world, he found that he much preferred it and could barely stand to be moving at the same pace as the rest of humanity. He quickly learned that he always needed to keep moving, for he would blink in and out of a person’s vision if he stood in front of them for too long, but he always learned that people would rarely ever blame him for suddenly appearing, but instead call it a trick of the light.

Now that he could complete an entire day’s work and sleep all night long in less than an hour, he found himself with a lot of time on his hands. One thing that caught his attention (which was so difficult now that he was living a whole order of magnitude faster than the rest of the world) was his secretary. He had always seen Jean as slightly stuffy and more maternal than he was interested in, but he found that he was quite fascinated with her now. While he was “on the phone in my office – please don’t disturb me until I’m done, Jean,” he would follow her around, whispering words in her ears and tugging on her curls in such a manner that he was sure the rather matronly woman had not experienced since she was a teenager. The only time she ever mentioned it to him, he could only bring himself to say “perhaps you have a secret admirer of a ghost. Now, can you please bring me the Clarke files?” before he couldn’t contain himself anymore and burst out laughing in glee (she had, fortunately, already left the room at that point, saving face). Soon enough, Charlie found that his secretary was the only thing intriguing enough to keep him at work, bored with a job he once used to love.

Not only had he lost interest with his work, he found himself losing interest in all things that tied him to the real world. Once an enthusiast of weekly trivia nights with some of his friends and coworkers, he now began to dread Wednesday nights, where he would trapped for an entire hour (and real world hour at that!) without being able to move and do what he want. At first, his recalcitrance had barely been noticed, but once his friends started commenting that he looked tired (which was ridiculous, of course – he had never been getting more sleep in his life) and that the lines framing his eyes started looking deeper, he was grateful for an excuse to bow out. As far as Charlie could tell as well, his friends were glad as well.

Charlie sat on his couch, flipping the pages of the large textbook balanced on his knee as he absent-mindedly petting the frozen dog sleeping on the couch next to him. The librarian had raised her eyebrow at him today as he stood, impatient from waiting for her to finish scanning his books (“Didn’t you check out a stack this big yesterday?”), but, after all, he needed something to pass the long nights. During the day, he could wander the city, but after dark, he was confined to his house. At first, he had been anxious about having to stay within his house for what were literally days at a time, but he had eventually grown accustomed to the long nights and had taken to self-education. History and literature were easily conquerable, for all those subjects required was free time and the diligence to use it properly, but mathematics and linguistics had evaded him, no matter how many nights he spent pouring over textbooks.

With a sigh, Charlie stood up, stretching. He padded into the kitchen and looked into the pot sitting on the stovetop. It was, as always, a little hard for him to tell, but it certainly looked as if the pasta he had started yesterday had finally boiled for tonight’s dinner. Busying himself with laying out dishware, he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the darkened kitchen window. He was right – his hair was definitely thinning on top. Look at what a bit of air resistance will do, he thought to himself, chuckling.

Dr. Emerson looked down at her charts and then back at her patient. “Well, Charlie, you certainly are in fine physical health, though your reflexes have certainly slowed down some since the last time I saw you. How are you feeling?”

Charlie shrugged. “My attention has been drifting recently, but that’s hardly anything.”

Despite the lingering feeling of doubt, Dr. Emerson shook her head. “Alright then. I declare you to be in a full bill of health. Same time next month?”

“Of course.” Charlie slowly got out of his chair and began putting on his coat. Dr. Emerson frowned. “Are you joints stiff or giving you pain?”

“Mmm?” Charlie looked up. “No, not in particular. Nothing that I’ve noticed, anyway.”

Dr. Emerson watched her patient walk out of the room, moving much slower than a man his age should be.

Charlie hovered around the edges of the kitchen, following the old woman around. He had started finding Jean childish and immature, but his neighbour Evelyn soon caught his eye. He could not remember why he had once thought of her as ancient and senile, for he now saw her as elegant and wise. He had even rejoined the world to knock on her door, and she had invited him in for tea. They chatted over Earl Grey and biscuits and he found himself quite admiring her. When she excused herself to make a fresh pot of tea, he followed her, watching her slowly move about the kitchen. He watched her for hours, and, just as she was turning around, teapot in hand, he lightly touched her hair before dashing back to his seat. As her rejoined her world, he heard her saying softly “Tom?” before shuffling into the next room.

He smiled at her as she sat back down. Evelyn smiled as well, and poured him a new cup of tea. As he lifted the cup to his lips, she asked “Tell me, Mr. Jacobsen – do you believe in ghosts?”

It wasn’t until later that evening that he realized that his time next door was the longest time he had spent with the rest of the world since before he could create his own. As he thought about this, absent-mindedly scratching the statue of his dog behind the ears, he found it difficult to remember exactly how long ago that had been. Charlie felt tired and alone, but could not bring himself to rejoin the world he had left, not with this one still available to him.

He slowly crossed his room, knowing that if anyone was there, they would have surely been able to see him. Despite this knowledge, he could not bring himself to move any faster. These days, he felt tired and weak, unwilling to do more than sit and read. Charlie had lost his appetite, and his bone ached, especially in the cold of the evening. I must be getting ill, he thought, though he had not been able to measure a fever.

Finally reaching his bed, Charlie sat and slowly bent down towards his feet, taking off his slippers. He lay back on the bed. Perhaps, he wondered, perhaps I just need a really long rest. I’ll be sure to feel better once I sleep.

He was right, in a way, for all he really did need was a long, long rest.

Dr. Emerson looked at the pathology report she held in her hands. According to the coroner’s notes, there had nothing wrong with the body except for heart failure. The heart itself was clean, and seemed to have given out from simply old age. Looking at the body lying on the table in front of her, it was clearly one of a 90 year old man.

She looked back down at the medical file. Despite what his body appeared to be, Charlie Jacobsen’s birth date was less than forty years prior.

Night Drive

‘I’m going out west,’ she said, ‘I’m going back home.’ She had signed the note with her initials and sealed it without a kiss, and he knew that he shouldn’t have been surprised, but he was. She was beautiful and flighty and lived to drive him crazy and make his heart ache. He loved her more than he knew what to do sometimes and he knew that, in her own way, she loved him as well.

He waited for a few days, and, when he hadn’t heard anything from her, he gave her a call. She was completely swamped with moving, she said, laughing at her own ineptitude and disorganized nature. She had misplaced her phone in a box of towels, unable to locate it until he called. He smiled and chided her for her forgetfulness and said what she wanted to hear. As he placed the phone back on the table, he blinked and inhaled, smelling the lingering traces of her perfume that had steeped into his furniture and rooms and life, after so many years. It smelled of tea and roses and it made his head spin, just as it always had. It was surreal, a small voice said. He felt as if he could only just close his eyes and she would be standing right there again when he opened them.

She was, truth be told, a West Coast child at heart, with her sunglasses and sandals and little coloured dresses. The fact that she had stayed with him in his cold, grey home so long was a miracle, really. Or perhaps it was a testament to her childlike spontaneity, driven by sudden and wild enthusiasm and never any planning. After all, her sole reliance was in her ability to keep moving. After all, she had traveled the country on a whim.

In the years he had known her, she acted like a migratory bird – school and life on one coast, home and family on the other. While it only took six hours for her to fly home, the prospect of sitting still in a long box while someone else whisked her away made her screech. Instead, each summer began with the long and tedious process of filling the car with music, bottles, and blankets and setting off across the country. She would drive sporadically, veering north to visit an old girlfriend and cutting south to avoid an ex-lover. She had her favourite roads, of course, having driven them “a hundred times, I feel, darling.” Once, before school and work and life had gotten in the way, she made the trek at least twice a year, and could still, if she tried, make the trip in less than two days. (When she first told him this, he shut his eyes and tried not to think of her wrapped around a tree in the middle of nowhere. He had never been much of a fast driver himself.) He had started coming with her, three years’ past, and had even driven a leg or two, something, she swore, she had never let anyone else do, not even her mother. Guess you’re special, she said, tossing her hair as she did when she was teasing him (which was often), and smiling.

Once she had left, life was simpler for him. Without her whirlwinding around him, he slowly fell into a routine of normalcy. His buddies at work had slapped him on the back when he finally told them and told him it was a crying shame, letting a looker like that go. He nodded and someone made a joke, and while he laughed, his mind wasn’t in the pub across from the office, but across the country, standing next to her on rocky beach.

It wasn’t until the fall came (‘What was that sound?’ she had asked, the first time they had parked under an oak tree and the wind came along. ‘Acorns falling,’ he had replied, and she giggled as the car was bombarded by a second wind) that he finally realized that he had, as he always dreaded, lost something special within himself when he had lost her. He had woken in the middle of the night, shaken from a dream filled with laughter, the crashing of waves, and her eyes lit by streetlights. Not fully certain if he was still dreaming, he crawled out of bed and into his car, driving until he reached the coast. He spent the night sitting on the beach and watching the sand, sea, and sky until the sun finally rose. It was something she would have done.

Before he could come to his senses, he was packed and on the road. The states slipped by without a notice – coast turned into valley, east bleed into mid-west, trees and hills changed to grass and plains.

Driving through the middle of Nebraska, sometime before midnight, a small rest stop caught his eye. He pulled over. As soon as the headlights were off, he looked up at the night sky. Stars, the brightest he had seen in years, stretched out over him. For this first time in almost a year, he felt like he had finally woken from the half-sleep he had fallen into once she had left his life. He looked around the empty space around him, recalling from the edge of his memory how, almost two years ago at this point, they had stopped in an almost identical lot. (She had pulled out her packet of kreteks and stuck her tongue out at him when he made a face at her. As much as he hated cigarette smoke, he still associated the soft smell of cloves with the sight of her, standing outside in the middle of the night, puffing away.) The mid-fall chill crept on to his skin as he sat on the hood of his car. Turning away from the sky and the stars, he reached for his thermos (of tea, which he had never drunk before she came into his life, really) and made one silent wish on the stars above before bundling up back into the car and heading westwards.

The first sign of mountains off in the distance raised his spirits (his hope, his heart as small voice whispered) – he could never really understand why she loved the huge open ranges of the middle states or how she could drive for miles and miles without getting bored (or perhaps he was just happy that he was one step closer to the coast). Once he reached the mountains, Wyoming seemed to flow into Utah, then Nevada, then California, Rockies into Sierra Nevada into Central Valley, mile after mile.

When she had first left, she had written to him sporadically, telling him about her new house, new job, new life. He had written back dutifully (though he had nothing new to say), and had taken to starting writing letters even when he hasn’t heard from her, though he could never bring himself to send them. On the last day of his trek, he pulled out her final letter, received a month before. At the bottom, next to her large scrawl of a name, she had written a small postscript – ‘I’ve got a spare room ever since my old roomie hooked back up with her ex – I’d certainly love the company. You know the address if you ever feel like it. J’ At every stop light and gas station, he would read those few sentences again. He hoped that the offer still stood.

As he pulled off the highway for the final time, visions of her crept into his mind. He saw her as he navigated the streets; she was standing on the corners he drove past. He found her house (‘It’s the only red one on the block! I love it. I’m planning on planting a garden since the last renters left it in such a mess…’) and blinked several times, for he couldn’t quite believe that it was indeed her in her front lawn. He stepped out of the car and slowly started walking towards her. She turned at the sound of the door shutting and waved when she saw him – long hair, light dress, bare feet in the warm California fall. Before he could realize what had happened, she had thrown her arms around him. He looked down at the smiling woman in his arms (he felt like she hadn’t changed a bit, despite the new colour in her hair and the different glasses she had on) and felt the days, months, years slip away from since he last saw her. He could only think one thing. “I love you more after all this time.”