It occurred to me that the notebook didn’t mention any finishing work on the metal. No metal rasp to soften the edges and joists, no steel wool to smooth out the welding lines. My dad was never about appearances. It didn’t interest him. He always said that appearances hide the truth behind them. In everything. I never understood this until much later. Whenever we spoke about our book, my dad would give me one or two items from his philosophy about time. Like the Traveler in the book, he would speak with great conviction, sucking on his pipe once in a while to give me time to think about what he had just told me.
"It only appears," he would begin, "that we are bound to three dimensions and that the fourth—time itself—is a given and cannot be changed. I don’t accept that. I don’t believe that. And neither should you."
I loved listening to him too much to interrupt him, even though I understood but a small portion of what he told me back then.
"Time travel is a constant. We are always traveling through time. Right now, at this very moment, we are traveling through time. Otherwise we would be frozen in that very instant and no longer exist. We can only be here if we move through time. Who says that we cannot accelerate the speed of travel? And if one object moves forward in time and the rest doesn’t, the object will disappear. Just like if you and I would have a race, and you, because you are much faster than me, would move ahead and eventually be gone from my field of vision. You would not occupy the same moment with me anymore."
I moved the belt sander and band saw all the way to the wall next to the door. Both machines were heavy and it took me a long time, sitting on the floor and pushing them, inch by inch, with my feet. I cleared the area of all the leftover piping and metal pieces and moved them toward the wall as well. Then I swept one more time. I used a piece of charcoal from the forge and drew a square with four equal parts inside. One was dedicated to the centrifugal rotor, one to the battery compartment and controls, the third to the chassis, and the fourth to the rest—the seat, the display, and other miscellaneous parts. For the next three hours, I arranged what I found in the shop and applied it to the sections. I thought we had more than we actually did but at the end of the night, I had a list with tools and items I needed to get.
After school the next day I went to the hardware store. Paul McGuiness, the owner, knew me from the countless times I had accompanied my father and, later on, was sent on errands to get parts for the shop.
"How are you doing, kiddo?" he asked.
"I’m okay," I replied. “I think.”
Paul had cried at my dad’s funeral. He had known him since they went to school together forty years ago.
"What you got?" Paul finally asked me.
I gave him the list with items. He looked it over.
"You sure this is right?" he said. "What’s this gonna be after it’s done?"
I hesitated. He looked at me for a while over his reading glasses. Then he wordlessly got up and began to collect the material.
"I actually just wanted to see how much it all costs," I said. "I don’t have the money right now."
"Your dad had store credit," he replied as he added up the items at the register. The amount came out to $134.45. "It was a bit more than what this comes to so I’m adding a few packs of WL-20 welding rod. I think you might need them."
"Thank you," I said.
"How are you gonna get the stuff home?"
I hadn’t thought about it. It didn’t even occur to me. I had some space in my backpack but that wasn’t nearly enough.
"Wait here a moment," Paul said.
When he came back a few minutes later, he was wearing his jacket and held his car keys in his hand. "I’ll drive you. There are a few eight-foot, one-inch pipes outside as well."
We left the store. He turned the sign to closed and locked the door. I helped him load the piping onto the truck and we drove off.
"Are you doing okay in school?" he asked.
"Yes."
"You were always a good student. Your dad told me. He said that one day you’d be an engineer and build large and beautiful things. But for that you’ll have to stay a good student. I know these are tough times and if you can’t stand it at home or somethin', you’re always welcome to do your homework in the store."
"Thanks," I replied. I smiled at him briefly. He was wiping his face the whole ride to my house. I didn’t say anything, didn’t know what to say. When we got there, we unloaded the parts and leaned everything along the outside wall of the barn. When he left and drove past the house, my stepmother talked to him for a few minutes. Then he drove off. My stepmom waved to me. I waved back. She disappeared into the house.
3
When we had dinner that night, my stepmother asked me if I wanted to earn some extra money doing minor chores at Mr. McGuiness’s store. He could use a hand. My eyes must have lit up at that moment because my stepmom smiled at me for the first time in a while. I’m sure she didn’t know what to do with me other than to tell me not to set the shop on fire when using the welding equipment. I’m sure she was glad I would have some supervision in the afternoons.
I started at Paul’s store a few days later. We agreed on minimum wage. I thought it was more than fair. I wasn’t officially old enough to work but he said he’d give me cash every week. I had a few more costly items on my list, including the battery, the magnets, and the 50 Amp wire. Paul told me that he could help me with the wire and the connectors and would give them to me at wholesale.
From then on, every day after school, I walked straight to Paul’s store. I was able to do most of my homework during homeroom and worked from three to six in the afternoon. Afterward, I went home, ate, and went straight out to the shop. During that time, around the beginning of December, I began to build the chassis. The galvanized pipes needed to be cut to length and welded together according to the drawings. It was difficult without a second person there but I made a contraption with a few sandbags from outside to hold the pipes in place while I welded them together. I made good progress and after a week, I was mostly done.
Then I realized something: Were I to leave the machine in this part of the shop—and assuming that I’d successfully travel back in time—I would end up right on top of the belt sander. There was no place in the shop where I could position the machine without creating chaos the moment I landed. I would have to move it to a place where it wouldn’t bother anybody. Behind the barn, and accessible through a door, there was a storage area. It was freezing cold in there but there was enough space to fit the machine without having to disturb anything. I decided to build the individual components in the main shop and put everything together next door. But the chassis was already bigger than the relatively narrow door. I’d have to go outside through the double doors and around back to the sliding door of the storage area.
The other problem was the weight of the individual parts. The rotor, once the magnets were attached, would probably be really heavy. The same for the chassis. I needed something to help move the components. I found a palette that seemed mostly intact, and a rusty, beat-up shopping cart in one corner of the storage room. I took the wheels off and mounted them onto the palette. The wheels were rusty but sufficient.