March of Time

It happened with little fanfare. A small spark and hissing sound followed by a pop, a small waft of smoke and an involuntary blink of the eye. When John opened his eyes again, he found himself in an unfamiliar place. He blinked again, this time of his own volition. When he opened his eyes again, he found that he remained in the unfamiliar place. He smiled. It had worked.

Beneath him, white and black tile, beside him a polished white tub. It was difficult for him to consider his surroundings as anything other than “classic” or “vintage,” despite knowing that they were, in his current moment at least, quite modern. In front of him was a small mirror. His blue eyes stared back at him. John sighed and looked his clothing up and down. Hopefully not too strange for this era. A brown suede jacket and black slacks. The jacket and pants were probably fine. He hoped that his black dress shoes were as well. He sighed again. There were over 2000 people on board and none of them would recognize him, so hopefully they would pass him by with little attention to his shoes.

John shook his head and forced himself not to consider the implications of what he was about to do or what had just been done. He didn’t have much time. His automatic relay would return him to his apartment in January of 2020 in just an hour.

Quietly, he moved out of the bathroom, through the unoccupied second class bedroom and into the carpeted hallway beyond. The rumbling of the ship’s engine provided an eerie, ambient hum as he navigated the long, dim hallway. Around him, hushed whispers from some of the cabins and above louder voices of the passengers that had so far refused to retire for the evening, though most of the ship’s passengers were already in their bunks preparing for bed, if they were not asleep already. Little did they know the terrible fate that was about to befall them. That is, unless John could stop it.

He had studied the layout of HMS Titanic extensively in anticipation of this trip. He had poured over maps and memorized floor plans; he had studied photographs, blueprints and eyewitness accounts. Before he had travelled here, he would have said that he could walk the halls and rooms of the vessel with his eyes closed.

Despite this preparation he found himself anxious, moving slowly and second guessing himself with every turn. After what felt like hours had passed, he reached his destination: the white door leading to the deck of the ship. As he laid his hand on the door handle that would lead him into the bitterly cold evening, he removed his golden pocket watch.

It had been given to him by his father, who had gotten it from his own father. John’s grandfather had been gifted the watch by his mother, who had saved it when her husband had died suddenly, leaving the family alone and destitute. Never without the watch, It was the only piece of John’s current outfit that was genuinely of the era in which he found himself.

It was already 11:15. He had only a few minutes. Snapping the watch shut after watching a few seconds tick by, he braced himself, pulled his jacket tightly around him and stepped into the cold air. The sea around him was eerily calm and the night was dark. Again, drawing on those memorized floor plans and maps he made his way towards the front of the ship.

When he reached his destination, he again checked the watch. 11:25. Plenty of time before the ship hit the iceberg and succumbed to the icy sea. Plenty of time before families would be cruelly torn apart. Plenty of time before children would be orphaned and wives widowed. Plenty of time before John’s great-grandmother, at this moment 3 months pregnant, would be left alone to raise her child all alone on the unforgiving streets of a foreign country.

John shook his head and banished the thoughts of his family, knowing that he needed to focus. Now was not the time to get caught up in ancestral melodrama. He could still avert the coming catastrophe, if only Frederick Fleet and Reginald Lee would listen to him. He grimaced and began climbing the ladder to the crow’s nest. The near freezing temperatures caused his hands pain, then numbness.

As he neared the top, he heard muffled voices carrying across the still night air. Unmistakable British accents. John shouted: “Fleet! Lee!”

“Do you hear that?” The voice was distant. John climbed a little bit further.

“Fleet! Lee!” He called again. “You have to listen to me!” John found himself feeling foolish. He had dreamed for so long of this moment yet somehow put no time or effort into thinking about what he might say when he finally made it here. Perhaps he never truly believed it would happen.

“Fleet! Lee!” He called again, his voice dry and hoarse. “There’s an iceberg, you have to get them to stop the ship or turn or something!”

A pause and the muttered voices exchanged some words between them. “Who’s there?” One of them finally called out.

“It doesn’t matter!” John was frantic, his breathing rapid and his heart thundering in his bony chest. They had only a few minutes. “Just sound the alarm! The ship’s going to hit an iceberg!”

Finally, a face appeared at the top of the ladder. John instantly recognized the face from the old photos that he had poured over. Frederick Fleet, sailor and lookout aboard the Titanic. “Who the hell are you? You can’t be up here!” Fleet’s faces twisted in confusion. “Get back down, right now!”

John groaned. He started to feel light headed and heard that faint hissing sound. Soon, he would return to his own time. “Fine, I’ll go! Just sound the alarm! Trust me, you have to sound the alarm!”

With that, another spark, pop and involuntary blink. When John opened his eyes, he found himself back in his small, one bedroom apartment. For a moment, he did nothing. Another small waft of smoke rose around him and into the air.

He had been the first person to travel through time. The magnitude of this fact was strangely cursory to him. Instead, his obsession found him trying to figure out the best way to determine if he had succeeded. Briefly, he considered calling a relative, perhaps his Uncle Michael, the last surviving of his father’s siblings and asking about family history. Surely if John had managed to make a drastic change, he would be able to figure it out from his elderly uncle quickly.

But it was late and this was easy. He simply pulled out his phone and googled Titanic. His heart sank. At first a few black and white images and then those famous blue-tinted photos of the wreck standing silently at the bottom of the sea, a monument to the thousands who had died that cold April night. A silent gravestone to John’s great-grandfather.

He had failed. But he did not despair and he was not broken.

He had been prepared for this. John had not even been certain that time travel would work at all, let alone thought that he would be able to stop the sinking of the ship so easily. Of course Frederick Fleet and Reginal Lee hadn't listened to him. He was a raving lunatic, a stranger who had crawled up the ladder screaming at them in the dead of night.

But he now knew that he could indeed travel back in time and return as scheduled. Now he could come up with more realistic strategies to prevent the fateful sinking of that ship and the subsequent death of his great grandfather. Given enough time, he could now assure that the tragedy and loneliness that had befallen his family could be prevented. Granted enough time, he could erase the past and all the scars that came with it.

*

John tried again immediately. This time, he gave himself a little more time aboard that ill-fated behemoth. He arrived in that same small bathroom at 9:20 PM. The atmosphere aboard the ship was different now. It was still lively with passengers from aristocratic upper class men and women sipping wine to raucous would-be migrants from western Ireland downing what seemed like gallons of whiskey.

Men and women laughed, talked and played games. To them, this was just another night on their journey towards America. To them, the world was full of optimism and hopes of longevity. To them, this was the beginning of a brighter future. And somewhere not far, were John’s great grandparents, perhaps also laughing and almost certainly brimming with the optimism that he saw all around him.

While fascinating and jovial, John had ignored the festivities. Just as he had done before he did his best to avoid other people and spoke to no one until he had found Reginal Lee, just before he was scheduled to begin his shift in the Crow’s Nest at 10:00 PM.

Doing his best to remain calm, cool and collected he had tried to explain the danger awaiting the ship on this particular night. Lee had looked at him like he was a crazy drunkard and gently explained “Of course I’ll keep an eye out for icebergs. That’s my job.”

The man had then put a warm hand on John’s thin shoulder, looked him dead in the eye and assured him that everything was fine. Fleet then advised him to return to his cabin and get some rest. “Maybe best to lay off the drinking tomorrow too.” The sailor advised.

John felt his shoulders slump beneath Fleet’s warm, caring hand. “Please, you have to listen-” Tears began to form in his eyes.

Fleet nodded and kept his hand on John’s shoulder. “Hey, it’s alright. I promise, we’ll be up there tonight and keep an eye out. You’ll be safe.”

Dejected, John had slumped away and wandered the halls of the ship, vainly searching for Reginal Lee in the hopes that he might have better luck. When that hissing sound signaled the end of his journey into the past, he still had not found him.

When John returned he found that he had again failed to stop the sinking of the doomed vessel.

Undeterred, John tried twelve more times to warn Frederick Fleet, Reginald Lee or both of the dangers. He went further and further back in time now giving himself days, even weeks in the year 1912. He watched the sunrise from the bow of the ship and talked to an elderly woman from Bristol about her grandson, a mechanic who had bought second class tickets for them to start a new life with her sister and nephew in Boston. He had helped a little girl find her doll, finally locating it beneath one of the pool tables in a game room. The little girl had smiled, wiped her tears on the sleeve of her pink dress and hugged him. But no matter how long he spent aboard the ship, no matter what he tried, he still failed.

He had even approached Frederick Fleet in a Liverpool Bar months before Titanic was set to sail and bought him gin. Fleet had thanked John for the drink and humoured him in his ravings. But he always failed to rescue the ship from its fate.

In total, he had now spent three months in the year 1912, though just a few hours had passed in 2020.

*

It was then, after that twelfth try, after he returned from the night in the raucous Liverpool pub, that John took pause and reevaluated. Of course, he had anticipated some difficulties and obstacles, but this was more than he imagined. Surely, changing the past could not be so difficult.

So he had sat, nursing nausea and headache from the gin and looked through old family photos. He remembered his grandfather showing him the pictures. He remembered his grandfather giving the pocket watch to his father. He remembered tears in the eyes of the old man as he spoke of never knowing his father, of the difficulties that had befallen him and his mother, of being robbed of a family.

He looked at the three old black and white photos that were the only vestiges of his great-grandfather, a man whose absence loomed large over his family. One was taken the day he and his new wife had bought their tickets aboard Titanic in 1912, hoping to start a new life in America. Did they even know when that photo was taken that she was already preganant with John’s grandfather? Their youthful eyes were full of hope and vigor, apparent even in the grainy, faded photos of the era.

Another photo was taken on their wedding day. The couple, standing in front of a small stone church, wore nicer clothes in this one and were surrounded by three men and three women whose identities had been lost to the sands of time. Everyone smiled broadly.

The final photograph was taken before the two had been married. In it, John’s great grandfather was no more than twenty and smiling, certain that the world was his. He leaned against a stone wall, one hand in his pocket, another around the waist of John’s great-grandmother. The man had a cockeyed smile on his round face, his dark hair concealed beneath a flat cap.

These three photos and that golden pocket watch were all that he had of his family. As he lay down, nursing that hangover he had gained with Frederick Fleet, John remembered the pained look in his grandfather’s eye as he spoke of his childhood, raised alone by a single mother. The cursed ship had stolen their opportunity at a normal life. From them, it had sunk the dreams of a large family, of wealth and comfort into the icy waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

From that, John remembered one evening spent with his own father, who spoke gently about how he had never known his grandfather. Together, John and his father had sipped Jameson and mused about what kind of man he might have been, of the particularities of their Irish ancestry.

They spoke in hushed whispers and sorrowful defiance of what their family might have been if only they had had the opportunity. To this ill fated man, had all of their proud ancestors staked their hopes and dreams? If only this man could start his new life in the world across the seas then perhaps their family might be able to escape the wretched misfortune bequeathed upon them.

But it was all useless. With that vessel, the hopes and dreams of their entire family had vanished forever. John spent the rest of the night staring at seconds tick by on that golden pocket watch, time marching ceaselessly on, before finally drifting off into a dreamless sleep.

*

The next day, feeling rejuvenated after a night’s rest, John tried six more times to stop the sinking of Titanic. At first, he again tried to warn Fleet and Lee to no avail. Then, after he had slowly eaten his lunch and sipped an afternoon coffee, he had tried to warn Captain John Smith of the iceberg. The captain had looked him over with kindly blue eyes, but had that same look reserved for the sad village drunk that Fleet had looked upon him with.

Six tries and another day passed, along with another four months spent in 1912. And still that vessel occupied its space at the bottom of the ocean.

John sighed as he looked at himself in the mirror. Although only a weekend had passed in 2020, he marveled at his own greying hair and wrinkling skin. Neglecting hygiene, his beard was unkempt and thick, his hair long and wild.

John hung his head, unable to continue to look at himself in the mirror. The weights of his failures were heavy. His inability to stop his family's misfortune, to change the past, despite his best efforts and travails, made him feel increasingly desperate, increasingly alone and increasingly helpless.

*

It had taken several weeks in 2020 time (and a total of another year and a half spent in 1912) for John to become truly desperate. He now knew the halls and rooms of Titanic as well as he knew his own 2 bedroom apartment in Milwaukee. He felt like he had spoken to the likes of John Smith, Frederick Fleet, Regional Lee and William Murdoch thousands of times and that he knew them as well as he knew his own family.

He had drinks with Fleet. He had dinner with Smith and enjoyed a cigarette and tea with Lee. He had even managed to have dinner with Murdoch’s family, thinking that if he had befriended these men over the course of months then perhaps they would be more likely to listen to them.

But none of them had listened. No matter what he tried, he could not reach them. And always, Titanic still sank.

So one evening, he brought a loaded pistol with him back to 1912. John did not relish the prospect of this task. Rather, he viewed it as what must be done to save his family’s legacy, to spare them their fate. Only through taking another’s life could he assure that his great grandmother would grow old with the only man she had ever loved.

Only through murder could he make sure that his own grandfather would know his father and that the man’s siblings would be born. This way, John’s father would have a grandfather and John could connect with his past. It was unpleasant and unsavory but it was what must be done. From his vantage in the future, he knew that Captain John Smith would die aboard the vessel when it sank, so either way the man was doomed. It was just a matter of how he died and whether John’s family died with him.

But as he had lined up the sight of his pistol against Captain Smith the afternoon before Titanic would have its accident, the gun misfired. Several more squeezes of the trigger also yielded no results. When he returned to 2020 a moment later, John found that the firing pin was broken.

Now, the stress of it all began to break him. He had lost count of the number of times he had returned to 1912. He had likewise long ago stopped counting the days, weeks, months and years spent replaying the same few months over and over again. And yet he still had nothing to show for it except deep bags under his eyes, wrinkles across his once smooth skin and the frayed, greying hairs of age.

*

The night after he had attempted to murder Captain Smith, John had spent the night on Titanic. Despite the amount of time he had now spent on the ship, he had done little in the way of slowing down. Always, he had been frantic and desperate. Now, he sipped from a flask on the deck as the icy waves lapped at the metal hull and the bitter cold wind cut through him.

He wanted to cry, but found tears would not come. He had been ready to take an innocent man’s life. Although he had been conditioned to believe killing another was wrong, and found the prospect revolting he had truly thought that striking down such a figure would surely result in the vessel stopping, slowing or changing course. He had been certain that taking such drastic action could salvage the past. But he had failed even here.

The night was cold and dark and the black waves taunted him, mocking him in his hopeless quest. After finishing his whiskey, he had drunkenly passed out on one of the many sofas scattered across the magnificent ship’s game rooms, the golden pocket watch clutched tightly in right hand.

When he awoke, he was again all alone in his Milwaukee apartment. Only then did he finally weep.

*

The next morning he had spent a long time staring at the watch. The second hand ticked by without remorse and he thought of his family, of all that he did not know. He swallowed and shut the watch, now understanding what must be done.

The next three weeks constituted the longest amount of time that he had spent in 2020 since his quest began. Apart from a few trips to the hardware store, he holed himself up in the apartment and worked.

The device he finally constructed was rudimentary and primitive. But he was confident that it would work. And with it snuggled deeply against his breast, shielded from the elements by his own body and clothes like a child, he set his coordinates for Belfast and several years earlier than usual.

When he arrived, he recognized the immense hull immediately. Seeing the massive vessel with which he had become so acquainted in such a state left him feeling unsettled, as if he were seeing his own skeleton or the childhood of his parents. Something that was not altogether forbidden but somehow he was not supposed to set his eyes upon.

But John had quickly shaken himself of this notion and moved. The night was dark and quiet and the shipyard deserted. He had planted his bomb and quickly made his exit.

His heart sank when the device failed to explode. As he heard that small pop and hiss, the unfinished frame of Titanic remained undamaged. He stared as the ship looked back at him stoically mocking him like an Olympian god belittling the attempts of a mere mortal.

When he returned to 2020, he sighed. Of course the bomb didn’t work. He wasn’t a terrorist or anarchist. He had dedicated his life to quantum physics and the laws of space-time. Of course he could not build a functioning bomb.

Again he had failed.

*

Now, time began to pass him with remarkable speed. More attempts on the life of Captain Smith, along with William Murdoch and the two men of the Crow’s Nest were met with no success. More attempts at bombing the vessel, both before it had been completed and after it had put out to sea likewise failed. Nothing worked.

And it left John feeling only more and more hopeless. Every time he returned to 2020, he would again look at those three photographs and the golden pocket watch and imagine a world where his great grandfather had survived.

He allowed himself a sad smile as he imagined his father growing up with his grandfather in his life. He imagined his grandfather with the brothers and sisters he had always wanted. He imagined his great grandmother being spared the cruelties of raising a child as a single mother in 1912 America.

The images brought a smile to his face, and tears to his eyes. His grandfather had a brother and two sisters. The oldest, he had kept a watchful eye over his siblings. Knowing that he was firmly in the realm of fantasy, John gave them names and imagined their personalities. His brother Sam was headstrong and loved baseball. The older of his two sisters Margaret was a tomboy and loved to paint. The youngest child Colleen had a kind sense of humour and played piano.

John’s own father had grown up knowing these aunts and uncles and playing with his grandfather and his cousins in the suburban lawn that Titanic had stolen from the family. It was all happy memories and warm familial love. They all knew each other, watched out for each other and lived in comfort and safety. They knew about their family history and were familiar with the trials and travails of their Irish ancestors. Maybe John’s great grandfather had even spoken the native language and taught it to his children and grandchildren. There were family dinners and Christmas gifts, turkey on Thanksgiving and Sunday afternoons at the park.

But it was a world that had never existed, despite all of the effort John had put forth. The tears now dried, John again set his device for that fateful night in 1912. One final time, he heard that pop and hiss and saw that small spark.

*

Back aboard Titanic, he looked into that small bathroom mirror again, John found his own face unrecognizable. He had aged so considerably. His hair was now grey and wild instead of youthfully blond. His smooth skin was tired, worn and wrinkled and his facial hair long and unkempt. It was at this moment that John realized something so important: although he had jumped across the decades so many times, the aging process had not stopped. To his body, decades had passed even though it had been but one short month in 2020.

As he had so frantically tried to stop the inevitable, John’s body had continued to suffer from the inexorable march of time. And all for naught. He had lost years, decades of his life repeatedly trying to change his past, desperate to change what could not possibly be changed.

And with that fixation on changing the past, with the desperation and obsession of making something different happen he had mortgaged his own present and future. Instead of embracing it, and learning from it, he had denied it and fought it for what had become his entire life.

He had never married or fathered children. Through his unyielding, stubborn quest to stop the inevitable, he had missed out on knowing his siblings, his aunts and uncles. He had forgotten his friends and acquaintances and missed all the small happy moments that make life worth living. Birthday parties and lunches, after work drinks and chats with neighbors were all gone. Friends, family and life itself had all been sacrificed in the name of the impossible.

Now an old man, broken and bitter he understood. No matter how one tried, nothing could change what had already happened. No amount of wishing, of revisionism, of struggle or fighting could change that simple fact. What has already happened has already happened. The past was the past.

He sighed and hung his head, now pining for the past that he had never had. He had missed out on so much in his desperation to fight the inevitable. Quietly, he sat on this black and white tile floor and looked at his great grandfather’s pocket watch.

In 10 short minutes, the Titanic would strike that iceberg. Less than 3 hours later, it would disappear beneath the icy waves of the Atlantic forever. John buried his head in his tired, cracked hands. He wanted to cry and to sob but was simply too tired. He knew now that no amount of crying or fighting could possibly stop the inevitable. The Titanic would sink and his great grandfather would die.

And this time, with it would perish his own hopes of any present or future. He had been looking for meaning in all of the wrong places for so long. Only now did he wish that he had simply learned the truth, took from it what he could and put it towards building a better, more hopeful future. In his desperation to achieve the impossible, he had given his own life to Titanic to take along with his great-grandfather.

He sighed again and shut the watch, slipping it back into the pocket of that now tattered brown suede jacket. Before the night was out, he would be dead, along with his great grandfather and 1503 other people.