Memory is a politician, Mrs. Haven, as every historian knows: a manipulative, pandering appeaser. Firsthand witness though I am, inaccuracies are creeping into this account. It’s likely, for example, that my father took me to the movies a handful of times at the most — I can’t remember more than one such trip, in fact, no matter how I try. But that solitary memory, from my last year of grade school, is vivid and well-lit and sharply in focus, as traumatic recollections tend to be.
The movie in question was Event Horizon, the third installment of the blockbuster Timestrider franchise. Orson had a knee-jerk aversion to Hollywood sci-fi, and a particular loathing for time-travel films; but my mother and I had joined forces this time, and we broke his resistance together. The “Kraut”—as Orson had taken to calling her — did it because my father had been in a nasty mood all week, and his bitching was driving her crazy; I did it because I needed a ride. It’s hard to say why Orson gave in, Mrs. Haven, but I do have a guess. He sensed an opportunity to rant.
Ranting was Orson’s preferred form of recreation for the whole of the eighties, and the Buick was his venue of choice. The satisfaction he took in watching his victim writhe in slack-jawed desperation, unable to escape without bodily harm, was the most compelling evidence I’d found (at that admittedly tender age) for the existence of natural evil. “Current events” set him off most dependably, but he could work up a respectable head of steam on virtually any topic: I once heard him hold forth, to one of the Kraut’s acquaintances from the Cheektowaga PTA, on the perils of middle-aged motherhood.
“The kids just don’t come out right,” he’d confided to Judy O’Shea. “If you don’t believe it, Judy, take a look at me.”
“Well, Mr. Tolliver, I must say — I mean, I don’t necessarily think—”
“The ideal time for conception, biologically speaking, is between twelve and fourteen years of age. That’s when the womb is at its most resilient. And please don’t even ask about the sperm.”
On this particular ride, as I might have expected, Orson had his crosshairs trained on Hollywood, and he dug in before we’d even cleared the driveway. “What’s pathetic to me, Waldy, is the wish-fulfillment quality of it all. Never mind the fact that navigating the timestream, hither and thither, is as easy in these flicks as passing gas; the medium has its conventions, I appreciate that. But ninety-nine percent of time-travel movies take it for granted that you can change whatever you want about the present — never mind the future — just by diddling a little with the past. It’s obvious that physics means zilch to these jerk-offs, and logic seems to count for even less. The past is the past, son. It’s done with. You keep that in mind.”
“I don’t know, Orson. I saw Timestrider Two last year, and I thought the whole Uncertainty Drive thing was pretty boss.”
“They’ve gotten to you, haven’t they,” Orson said, scrutinizing me closely. “They’ve injected their parasitic spores into your brain.”
“Keep your eyes on the road, Orson.”
“ROWWWGGGHHHHRRR,” said my father, rolling his eyes back and baring his teeth. By the time we pulled up at the Mohawk 6 Multiplex we were debating the pros and cons of an NCAA team spending its off-season on planets with stronger gravitational fields, like Saturn or Venus. A good rant never failed to cheer him up.
* * *
The first third of Timestrider III: Event Horizon passed without incident. Though Orson was sporting the fluorescent orange hunter’s cap he put on whenever he was trying to keep a low profile — his “helm of invisibility,” he called it — I occasionally managed to forget he was there. An anxious, goosenecked loner from the suburbs, three weeks shy of thirteen, I was in the demographic sweet spot for the franchise, and I loved every pulsing, booming, logic-flouting minute. The rows in front of us had been commandeered by the Timestrider faithfuclass="underline" sixteen-year-old fanboys in frosted jeans and Iron Maiden T-shirts, already on their seventh or eighth viewing, mouthing along with the dialogue like grandmas in church. With the notable exception of a pustule-necked orangutan who could barely squeeze himself into his seat, they looked as spindly and insecure as I was. Whenever the Timestrider pulled out his cryophoton blade — which was every fifteen seconds or so — they gave one another sweaty-palmed highfives. I was beholding my personal future, Mrs. Haven, and I’m not ashamed to say I liked the look of it.
The fanboys bugged the bejeezus out of Orson — the redheaded bruiser especially — but he made a concerted effort to keep calm. He seemed to be enjoying the spectacle: the battle for the icebound insurgent stronghold on Cxax, for instance, actually made him lean forward, and Marduk the Minuteman’s hourglass-shaped starcruiser earned a grudging grunt of approbation. “Interesting aproach to ballistics,” he muttered. “No egregious anomalies yet.”
From my father, Mrs. Haven, this was high praise indeed. He confined himself to scoffing during the swordfights — they were pretty hokey, I have to admit — and covering his eyes when the Timestrider and Countess Synkronia kissed. I did the same thing, being twelve, but I remember wondering at his prudishness. I was about to ask him about it, in fact, when he jerked his head back in a kind of spasm and shouted something filthy at the screen.
“Orson! What the hell are you—”
“Did you hear that?” he stammered. “Did you hear that, Waldy? Am I fucking dreaming?”
“Would you please sit down, Orson? You’re embarrassing—”
“Shut up and listen!”
Reluctantly, stiffly, he let me pull him down into his seat. The Horizoners glared back at us for as long as they could stand to, which thankfully wasn’t more than a few seconds. Orson’s eyes were open wider than I’d ever seen them, and his mouth was moving in a toothless, senile way. That reminded me of something — something I’d just recently thought of, or seen — but it wasn’t until I turned back toward the screen that it hit me.
He was moving his lips, Mrs. Haven, exactly like the fanboys in front of us. He was reciting each line of dialogue a beat before it happened.
The Timestrider’s krono-kruiser had just marooned him on Cxax in the primordial past, when the surface of the planet was still a bubbling swamp, and he was trying to raise his ship out of the muck. A Cxaxian mystic — a hairless gray koala in a rumpled-looking kilt — was trying to convince him not to bother. The kruiser, according to the koala, was entirely unnecessary.
“Have you not understood?” whispered my father.
“Have you not understood?” said the koala, twitching its animatronic ears. “You travel through time all your life: into the future at the rate at which you age, and into the past each time that you remember.”
The Timestrider expressed impatience with the koala’s plan of action. The Horizoners slurped their Mountain Dews in bliss.
“There is only the brain, after all,” said my father.
“There is only the brain,” the koala intoned. “But the brain, after all, is enough. Your consciousness is all the time machine you need.”
“ROWWWGGGHHHHRRR,” said Orson, propelling his stocky body toward the screen. The fanboy whose seat he was clambering over let out a shriek and pitched sideways, spilling his drink into the orangutan’s lap; the orangutan let out a roar that drowned out my father and the movie and everything else and practically ripped his seat out of the floor. Orson was a row and a half past him by then, balancing on someone’s armrest, but the giant had no trouble catching up. A saucerlike object spun lazily across the screen, and I recognized it, after a stupefied instant, as the orange hunter’s cap. By the time the lights came on, the giant had my father pinned to the floor between rows five and six — which was exactly where the EMTs found him, sixteen and a half minutes later, staring up at the ceiling like a corpse.