Of Time and the Dreamer

Chapter One: The Tree that was Like a Woman

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The first time Tyler saw what he thought was the girl, it was in his own time, his own world.

But it wasn’t her that first time. It was only a skinny, naked, white birch tree half-hidden in the mist on New Year’s Eve. The second time he spotted the image, it wasn’t in his own world. Nor was it a ghostly birch tree. It was the girl – lost, bewildered, wondering what she was doing here in a replication of the country and city where and when she had been a student all those years before.

Now she, like he, was a time traveler, but she didn’t know why. She certainly didn’t know how.

Nor did he know why or how – even though he was the one who first entered the mind corridor. He was also the guinea pig, and, on this third trip, he was no longer alone.

The girl, Lalitha, was here, trapped because of his timeline – not her own.

Then there were the others – all mind tripping to this time and place because of him.

As confused as she was, she could, at least, be grateful for being mentally transplanted. After all, she had, because of Tyler’s own journey back to the place and time where they had met, been rescued from death at the hands of her violent husband in Malaysia.

As Tyler stood in the cold night air of southern Illinois, staring at the naked birch tree, he thought about his first journey – the beginning stages of the experimentations – the practice trips. After all, that was how it all had started.

*

Chapter Two: The First Trip

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Tyler Grant locked the telescope in on Polaris just above the northern horizon; then he swung the six-inch reflector overhead to find the line of the ecliptic. He leaned down to squint through the finder-scope, turning the dial and moving the scope until Jupiter slid close to the intersection of the crosshairs.

Harold Duncan nodded his approval. That's good, Tyler. He turned to the other students and resumed his lecture. Remember, when using the clock drive, you first have to sight on Polaris, then lock it in. He paused. Why is that?

Because all the stars revolve around Polaris, said a male voice.

It was a humid night. Tyler wiped the back of his wrist across his forehead and huffed away the moisture on his lip. The heavens, at least, were clear. One of the few advantages of summer school was that the weather allowed Harold to hold more night sessions, giving students more time to work with the telescope and to use the cardboard star guides. Since the science building lacked air-conditioning units, night sessions were preferable.

Right. Harold looked at the boy who had spoken. The stars, though, only seem to revolve around Polaris. It's the earth that's moving—rotating fifteen degrees per hour.

Thirteen students, counting Tyler, huddled together: a large class for the six-week summer version of Astronomy 201. They were positioned in the middle of the broad expanse of campus between the gymnasium and the science building, the extension cords for the motor clock drive reaching all the way to the window of the biology lab.

They all look so young. Do I look as young as they do?

Tyler studied the extension cord to be certain that none of the links had been pulled loose to break the connection. He mentally followed the cord all the way to the building, through the open window, and into the classroom where they had plugged it in. Estra Gudrun’s slender form stood in the pale glow of the fluorescent lights, crouched over the lab table ordinarily used for science classes, teaching Experimental Psychology to a handful of night students.

This summer session is the last course she’ll teach for McNair College, he thought. Tonight, is her final class.

When was it? Fall of 1970, right after the start of the first class I took from her, when she told me that she was pregnant. Her husband was completing his tour-of-duty at the nearby Air Force base; then they would move to Atlanta so he could study at Emory University.

Harold balanced and tightened the weights, but he allowed the telescope to move freely to follow Jupiter along the ecliptic. He picked the strongest lens from the cardboard box and fitted the Barlow lens into place to double the magnification. Okay. Now. He nodded to Tyler. If my student assistant has Jupiter correctly in the finder-scope, we should be able to see it clearly.

I have it here, Tyler thought.

Tyler lowered his eye to the lens and reached for the focus knob. Jupiter sharpened to a bright disk with faintly colored bands. The four white specks near it were four of its thirteen moons. He stood up, nodded, and stepped back from the lens.

Okay, said Harold. One of you take a look.

A girl in tight shorts handed her cardboard star guide to a friend and leaned over the front of the telescope.

Look right through there. Don't put your eye too close or you won't ... there. Okay.

Yeah, she gushed. Wow!

The white zones you see are clouds of ammonia ice-crystals—. A drop of sweat struck the front of Harold's shirt. —the belts that look brownish-orange are made up of ammonia hydra-sulfide crystals. Jupiter's more like a star than a planet—a liquid star—and near the core, the temperature is six times hotter than the surface of the sun.

The girl retreated to the semi-circle of students half-hidden in the dark. Wait till you see that.

A basketball player stepped up and bent his lanky form to squint into the lens. Hey, he said in a hoarse voice. "It looks like a dirty volleyball.

Co-ool, man!"

The faint buzz told them that the clock drive was still working.

Tyler’s gaze again followed the extension cord, which reached from the telescope’s clock drive to the science building. The windows were dark now.

She must‘ve dismissed them early.

The student parking lot was dark when Tyler reached his car, and he didn't see the orange envelope lodged under the windshield wiper until he had lowered himself into the bucket seat. Cursing, grunting, he hauled himself to a standing position and freed the object.

He heard a dull clunk. A girl retrieved a can of Coke from the soda machine in front of the Quonset hut gymnasium; the loud clunk echoed across the near-empty, gravel-covered parking lot. A male student wearing a letter jacket leaned against the inside of the telephone shelter, bathed in a bluish-white light. In the other direction, students stood on the stone steps of Crandall Hall, talking quietly.

Tyler’s name had been written in ballpoint ink on the lower right-hand corner. He recognized the tiny scrawl of a woman's hand. Using the edge of his ignition key, he made an incision lengthwise along the 4 x 6-inch envelope. Inside was a matching card, folded once, with Letters from Estra written in script between two orange butterflies.

That’s right. I remember now. She did write me a note. This is the night before her visit at my trailer, the last time I will see her until I am hired in Atlanta.

He closed the car door and turned the switch for the headlights until the overhead light flicked back on. He unfolded the card.

***

Chapter Three: Love in an Indifferent Universe

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Tyler’s sandals stomped down the tall grass that needed mowing. He rounded the south end of the mobile home, past the bedroom windows, and saw the tan Fiat parked on the opposite side of the street.

His heart thudded. He hurried around to the front door.

She stood on the porch with the rotting framework, wearing the short red dress she had worn once or twice to class. Balancing the infant in her arms, she knocked on the metal door.

Hello.

There you are. Her complexion looked as if she had been shoved under some ultra-violet light. The smile appeared both genuine and nervous.

He gestured toward her car. Park in the driveway if you want to. He walked around the tall, untrimmed hedges that someone had planted next to the flimsy porch platform and climbed the woozy wooden steps. Any trouble finding this place?

No. I used to have a girlfriend who lived in this neighborhood. She shifted her stance and thrust Olin toward him.

How's Olin doing today? He took the infant from her.

During one of his visits to the base apartment, she had told him how vulnerable she had felt right after Olin's birth. Lying in the maternity ward hospital bed, she had felt that she and her infant son were alone in an indifferent universe.

It is an indifferent universe, according to Thomas Hardy. God created it and moved on.

Estra parked her Fiat next to his Cougar in the rocky driveway.

Tyler watched her thighs as she maneuvered her way out from under the steering wheel.

I wish I could sit like that, she had told him one day in her basement office. He had told her about the girl in their psychology class who wore a mini-skirt and sat with her legs slightly spread.

Whoa, he had thought at the time. Did Estra really say that?

What kind of barbecue pit is that? she asked as she approached the porch steps.

Tyler pivoted toward her, still clutching her son. Hibachi.

The small Hibachi was poised on the cut-off stump of a tree. One afternoon, he had found the stump on the edge of the highway and decided that it might be useful. Piled next to the stump were sticks and twigs that he picked up out of the yard, usually after a heavy wind. He burned those in the Hibachi along with charcoal briquettes—and sometimes instead of them if he had enough to make a small fire.

Estra looked at Tyler as he held Olin.

Oh. Oh. Holding Olin’s head straight, Tyler returned him to his mother and opened the door.

Tyler remembered a letter that she had written to him from Georgia. Every word seemed to come back to him.

Why can I remember so much that was all those years ago? Is it because of the hypnosis or the reliving of the experience in this alternate world? I can see every word, every punctuation mark, and every smudge.

Tyler handed Estra a glass of iced tea as she sat on the sofa. Olin was wrapped up next to her, watching the white cat pace back and forth along the bookshelves.

You keep this place very neat, she said. Her sentence seemed to hang in mid-air as if she were adding to herself, 'for a man.' She looked at the stereo unit against the west wall of the tip-out, at the low shelves of paperback books, at the room divider shelves of hardbound books, and at the desk where the typewriter sat. You're very organized.

Not enough.

Just like before, I am hoping she won’t smell the cat urine that has dried on the carpet in the far corner. Those very thoughts are in my mind again. I am reliving every thought. Every breath. I know what I am going to say before I say it. I know what she is going to say.

More than I am. She took a drink.

She will ask if I’m writing a novel.

Are you still working on a novel?

No. He looked at her long, soft hair; he wanted to weave his fingers through it.

Why not? she asked.

School work, for one thing. He sat across from her, next to the old cedar chest that supported the television set.

She will say something about seeing where I work.

I wanted to see the place where you worked.

I only do my writing at that desk when it's cool. Sometimes I take the non-electric typewriter and my writing materials out to the park.

I liked the novel you were working on. Don't be discouraged just because of what I said about your women characters. She lifted her slender legs up onto the sofa.

You made fun of it.

I’m sorry. I’m not an English instructor. She gazed at the cardboard-framed, eight-by-ten color photograph of his old 1965 Triumph TR-4. It was the car he had traded in for the 1969 Cougar because it started burning too much oil and the twin carburetors continually needed adjustment. Two dark-haired girls in short skirts were posed next to the car.

Who are the models?

One is Angie. The other is Francine.

One is a girlfriend?

The shorter one. Former.

The photograph sat next to the top row of books on the room divider.

Anyway, you may not be an English instructor, but your area is psychology. You know about people, about why they act the way they do.

Estra bobbed her head. Don’t worry about me, Tyler. Just write what you feel.

Yeah. My fantasy life, as you called it.

Estra shrugged. That doesn't matter. She slightly raised one knee.

The look in her eyes—a deeper look that he had never seen before—caused him to look away from her.

Her legs, still stretched out on the couch, took on the deep yellow glow of the later afternoon sun through the curtained window.

Tyler looked for the love theme from Women in Love. During that first fall in a literature class, he had written a short paper about the film version of the D. H. Lawrence novel. Even though it hadn’t written it for Estra, he had thought about her as he wrote it.

*

Tyler walked Estra to her Fiat.

She put Olin onto the passenger seat, closed the door, and walked around to the driver's side.

He opened the door for her.

I wonder if it's possible for someone to care for two people at the same time, she said. She positioned herself under the steering wheel, pulling her long brown hair away from her neck.

I used to tell myself that I hated jealous people—that it was wrong to be jealous. He squatted down on his haunches and placed his hand on her doorsill. But I think maybe I'm envious of Nathan. Is that wrong?

Estra shook her head. I think my feelings for you ... are kind of spiritual. You'll always have a place in my heart. She rested her hand on his. It was only the second time that she had ever touched him; the first time had been a gentle grip on his upper arm when he had arrived late at her base apartment because of a conference with Harold Duncan. They had never even kissed.

He watched her as she backed the Fiat out of the driveway, and when she pulled into the street, he walked across the corner of the yard to the intersection. He felt foolish as he stood in the center of the street, but he wanted to watch her car until he could see it no more.

Kids wove around him on bicycles, shouting at him.

*

That evening Tyler called Estra at the base. He couldn't stop shaking as he stood holding the phone.

I don't mean to demean our relationship. He leaned against the nightstand where the phone was located. But I just wanted to say . . . that I'm in love with you. I'm sorry.

She was in the laundry room. Why are you sorry?

I don't know.  He could hear others in the background. She wasn't alone in the laundry room. I just didn't want to take a chance that I would ruin anything.

Well, I wrote you another note, Tyler. Maybe my own feelings will cause you to retreat.

He thought about her last statement long after she hung up.

*

Craig is looking into my eyes, waiting for the injection he just gave me that will reel me back to 1996 to take effect. But I am back. I just don’t want to let go of the past. Not yet. It’s like a dream that the dreamer wishes would continue for a while.

But this trip has been more than a dream, and I haven’t been asleep.

I see Craig talking to me. I see Rhonda, the nurse. I see Willy, the technician, monitoring the dial readouts and EEG graphs. But I’m not ready to verify it all yet. I’m not ready to let them celebrate. Selfishly, I want to hold on to what happened just a little longer.

Estra called me at my trailer several days before Christmas of 1971.

Tyler, her voice in the receiver said. Nathan received the flowers. What am I supposed to tell him? That was pretty childish.

Tyler lay across the bed, staring at the squares in the floor tile. He knew every inch of that section of the linoleum floor, and every mark on the cheap wall-paneling. On one evening when she called, he had stared up at the moon. Now the sky was dark.

Why did I have to sign Love, Tyler? What the hell was I thinking?

He ran his forefinger along the phone receiver as she spoke. He thought of the soft hair that he had never touched. Just tell him it's that crazy Grant, he said. He already thinks I'm a joke.

I won't tell him that. But it was a boyish thing to do, Tyler. This is real life. In real life, we have to pay for things we do.

I'm sorry.

We've got to end it, Tyler. Don't write to me anymore.

His stomach heaved forward. Estra ....

You've got a wife, Tyler.

Just tell me you don't love me.

Silence. All those miles away, the invisible link. He thought about the cord connecting the telescope to the power outlet in the science building.

He wanted to cry. He wanted to let it all come pouring out, but it wouldn't. Tell me ....

Thank you for the flowers. She hung up.

The link was broken.

Something hung up the phone for him, whatever it was that controlled his physical actions at that moment. A cave existed where his stomach used to be.

*

Craig’s invisible face watched Tyler from beyond his closed eyelids as he wriggled up through the layers of the induced trance like a fish being reeled to the surface of a lake. When Tyler half-unsealed his eyelids, he saw Craig’s eyes studying him from the safety of his Seven Point Junction office: a gaze that revealed that he had known all along what Tyler was only realizing after this re-enactment of the experience, that the heights are only followed by the depths. The mountaineer, once he reaches the summit, has nowhere to go but down.

He’s awake, Craig told the nurse who stood at the edge of Tyler’s vision.

I was never asleep, Tyler sputtered. I was there.

***

Chapter Four: The Second Trip

You were a student here?

The student wore a T-shirt with an iron-on decal of an arrow pointing upward. The lettering consisted of two words: ONE WAY.

Tyler nodded at him. I got my undergraduate degree here.

The other students in the basic writing clinic looked up. The student tutor, grading a posttest, which accompanied a workbook on punctuation that a student had just completed, beamed at him. Really?

That's right, Tyler told her.

I am here! Back at McNair again.

The tutor was Rachel Thomas. The boy with the arrow on his chest was Leon Beneke, the informal leader of a student Bible studies group and a student in Tyler’s 3:00 Journalism 112 class. Tyler and Rachel had worked together on the first creative writing magazine that McNair College had printed since he was an undergraduate there; she was better at speaking, with a soft glow, about her experience of being born again than at collecting articles and short stories from the students.

Even though Tyler was only listed as the advisor of the student publication, he had resurrected the old cover he had used in ’72 and updated it by changing the date to ’82. In short, he had done most of the work. Leon was a C+ student who often argued with him in the classroom. Now he was here to inquire about his final grade for the semester. Tyler hadn't totaled all of his grades yet, but he told the young man that he might get a B- for the course.

Praise the Lord, he said.

You say 'Praise the Lord' for everything, Leon. Tyler rested his elbows on the open gradebook and pressed his hands together under his chin. Someone told me that you said 'Praise the Lord' when they served hot dogs in the cafeteria. I mean, c'mon, micro-waved hot dogs?

Leon's cheeks darkened to a raspberry shade.

Am I creating this, he had asked himself the first time he had become conscious that he was in his younger body at McNair College, and occupying what I have created? Or just watching someone who just happens to look a lot like me, right down to the worn-down heels of my shoes?

Rachel's eyes looked glassy. She blinked twice; then she forced a smile. Was this a writing center when you were here then, Mr. Grant?

Tyler shook his head and looked down at the desk.

Mister. That’s right. This is 1982. I wasn’t a PhD currently.

The desk was little more than a varnished table with a small center drawer and shelves on one end. Tutors put their books on the shelves and kept copies of their work schedule on the corner, so the desk wasn't really his. Like the booths with the portable cassette recorders, the collections of tapes, the workbooks on remedial English, and the paperback textbooks on the teaching of remedial English skills, the desk was the property of the McNair Educational Development Center.

We used to have classrooms down here, he told her. And faculty offices. Estra Gudrun, my psychology teacher, had her office here.

*

Video games. Tyler sat on the white bench donated to McNair College by the class of 1923. They cut back on instructors while they bought video games for the student center.

What about the writing clinic? Harold asked him. You can still work down there.

They don't need me to help those students with the remedial stuff that they should've learned in high school. Let Ms. Pac Man grade the papers.

A woman with silver-frosted hair clicked her Instamatic at the tree blossoms on the front campus.

They're always trying new programs to develop this and to develop that: experimental stuff which means they can hire new administrators and get rid of traditional programs. Students learn techno-jargon but can't write a goddamn sentence.

Even with the black briefcase leaning against the rough bark of a tree trunk and his tapered short-sleeved white shirt, Harold Duncan, even in 1982, looked more like a mature student than a physics instructor. That's why they need you here.

Tyler shook his head. Administrators don't care about that. They're too busy patting themselves on the back in the alumni bulletins.

Small school. Large university. That’s what comes with the package, Tyler.

Like committees, and committees on committees. You were on ... one particular committee ... that I remember....

I was on a lot. Which are you referring to?

Tyler had first encountered Harold as a member of a faculty committee for student publications, a committee formed to review applicants for the position of editor of the student newspaper.

"Why don’t you apply for the position since you worked for