Middlemist

Before you died, I brought you flowers.

We stole away before sunrise. The wheelchair didn’t fit in the trunk, so I carried you to the passenger seat. Even your frail frame nearly wasted my strength. Our aged love would never wane, but my hands shook as I keyed the ignition.

The orderly watched us leave. She could have stopped us, but she knew better.

You did not ask where we were going. I stayed silent, reserving my energy for the drive. The road to the cliffs bore pits and scars from generations of rubber tires. Ahead, a long line of identical black sedans kept us waiting. I didn’t mind, and you didn’t notice.

My plan had blossomed in two phases. The first occurred in a greenhouse in London, years ago, before your decline. Your brother Herbert, the mad one, had invited us to visit. We couldn’t say no a fifth time. As consolation for his company, he brought us to the Chiswick House, the home of the world’s rarest flowers.

Among its lesser peers sat the middlemist. Cascading red petals drew your attention and swallowed it whole. You sat enraptured, knowing that only two specimens remained in the world – and that they would be the last.

“I want one,” you said.

I laughed. You weren’t joking.

It was an impossible dream, but you thrived in the whitespace between possible and insane. So I nodded, smiled, and promised to pick up a copy when we returned home.

You didn’t think it was funny. You never forgot that flower, even when you forgot everything else.

Years passed. I tried.

Short of breaking into a greenhouse in London or New Zealand, I could not find a middlemist. The flowers had been plentiful in the eighteenth century, growing like wonderful weeds in the Chinese wilderness long before some Englishman assigned his name to it. My research yielded only disappointment and a fraught, nervous attempt to bribe a gardener over the Internet. After a tense email discussion, he agreed to send a clipping. I sent the two thousand pounds and never heard from him again.

You thought little of it, I’m sure. Your attention sprouted like wheatgrass, cropping up in a thousand nooks of obscure knowledge and fascinations. You devoured Roman burial rites, the joys of the Ethiopian Enkutatash, the history of the Siberian fawn lily, and shared them with me in equal measure. Each obsession overtook the next with religious fervor, yet I could think only of the middlemist.

As the world moved on, we remained. We cared little for new technologies, virtual realities, or artificial intelligences. When the metaverse crashed, we shrugged. When A.I. toppled overseas governments, we made passing remarks over the kitchen table at breakfast. History sped forward without us, leaving us in a bubble of our own making, trapped in time.

When we finally retired, we found more of the same. You had more time to enjoy your garden, to nurture whatever exotic plant you’d had smuggled into the country. I thought you were filling the void left by the middlemist, but I never asked. Passersby who peeked over the fence would find clumps of pseudacorus and petunias that had been genetically engineered to produce vivid purples and golds. Not all of the flowers were pretty, but they were all yours.

I bought you a Nepalese orchid for our fiftieth anniversary. We sat in the garden, watching the petals splayed out in a frozen explosion of color, and you smiled at me. There was hurt behind your eyes. You never spoke of it, but I knew, I knew that you wanted only the middlemist.

Still, I never asked.

Then, entirely by accident, came the second phase of my plan.

Herbert called. He’d evaporated from our lives over the years, disappearing into harebrained research projects and government contracts. He invited us to visit him in London, and we acquiesced, knowing it would be the last time we had to see him.

We went for a drink, Herbert and I. You were exhausted from our trip to Queen Mary’s Rose Gardens. You had wanted to visit Chiswick House, but the greenhouse had long been shut down, the middlemist lost to a fire. So in a dark corner of the pub, over pints of disgusting fabricated ale, Herbert shared his mad, raving, fantastical truths with me.

He’d built a time machine. He’d traveled across the world, across history, enjoying the fruits of his lifelong labor. The physics were beyond me, and Herbert’s wide-eyed enthusiasm unnerved me, but I humored him. At his prompting, I took off my left shoe to find a newspaper clipping from 1835 and an American euro-dollar coin from 2089 inside.

“I want you to have it,” he said. “I want you to take my sister wherever she wants to go.”

He died two months later. That same day, a small, plastic-wrapped package arrived at our door. I opened it while you were in the shower.

Part 1 of 255, it said.

I told you it was junk mail. More parcels arrived every day for the better part of a year. I assembled them in our garage while you mourned the death of your brother and the passing of your memories. I wasted my strength in our garage, assembling Herbert’s contraption piece by painstaking piece while your mind withered away in the living room. By the time I finished, you needed round-the-clock care.

When I dropped you off at the facility, you smiled at me again. I cherished the hurt in your eyes, because I felt the same way. You kissed me, and I said I’d see you tomorrow, and I would. Eventually.

The machine was simple. You stepped onto the platform, tapped in coordinates and temporal data, and waited for it to whisk you away. Herbert’s genius had built in a fail-safe: after an hour, the machine would whisk you right back to the present. I spent my first hour scouring hillsides in ancient China for the middlemist with no luck. But the machine worked.

Every time I used the machine, it cost thirty seconds of real time. Temporal displacement, Herbert had called it in the manual I skimmed. I could spare thirty seconds.

From my research, I had discovered one place where the middlemist would be accessible with complete certainty. So I set my coordinates and traveled back to London in the year 1804. There, in a tiny garden plot on the outskirts of the city, I found him.

“John Middlemist?” I asked, lifting my hand in greeting.

The man looked up, saw me, and groaned. His face sported a black eye.

“You again,” he said. “Go ahead.”

He pointed to the garden, where a single red flower sat newly potted in fresh soil. Not daring to question my luck, I nodded my thanks, grabbed the pot, and returned to the present.

Two miles from the facility where you slept sat an empty pasture, long abandoned by the farmer who’d once lived there. I drove our old black sedan to the field and planted the middlemist in the dark.

As I returned to my car, another black sedan pulled up behind. The driver got out and, without looking at me, retrieved a flowerpot that had been belted into the backseat. He straightened up, then saw me.

“This is as strange as I thought it would be,” he said. He stepped forward, into the headlights, and I saw his face.

“You’re me,” I said.

He nodded, then clapped me on the shoulder as he passed. “Get a move on,” he said. “Daylight’s coming.”

Utterly befuddled, I stared past him at the line of headlights approaching the spot. Behind me, the other me planted a second middlemist in the soil.

Of course. Why would I stop with a single flower in a depressing field? I could not rest until this pasture was covered in the things. That was what you deserved.

I returned to the time machine and keyed in the coordinates, setting the time for five minutes before my previous journey. I arrived at the garden in 1804 to find John standing at the entrance. Impossibly, the middlemist still sat in its pot.

“How many times will you return?” he asked.

“Just one more,” I guessed. “How many times have I come?”

John rolled his eyes and stepped aside.

I thought nothing of paradoxes. If I retrieved the flower from one moment in history, how could it have been present in the future? The astounding possibilities of branching time streams and divergent realities meant nothing to me. I was just here for the flowers.

With the second middlemist, I returned to the pasture, noticing the line of cars following in my wake. When I arrived, another version of me knelt in the dirt in front of the first middlemist. I pulled up behind his sedan and got out as he watched.

“This is as strange as I thought it would be,” I said, stepping forward into the headlights.

“You’re me,” he said, dumbfounded.

I took a good look at myself. I had grown old.

“Get a move on,” I said, clapping him on the shoulder. “Daylight’s coming.”

I repeated the process more times than I could count. Every time I traveled to the past, John Middlemist was waiting. Every time, his frown grew more pronounced, and I realized that his anger had blossomed at the beginning of this journey. How many times had I stolen his flower from him?

Twenty-seven times, as it turned out. On my final, initial journey, John wasn’t waiting outside the garden. I knocked on his door in the misty hours of the London morning.

“Who’s there?” came the voice from inside.

“Flower delivery,” I said.

He opened the door. “You don’t have flowers.”

“They’re not for you.” I walked away, toward the back of the house where the garden sat. Before he could stop me, I unlatched the fence with practiced hands and grabbed the middlemist in its pot.

“Stop that!” John yelled. He reached for the flower, leading me to do the only thing that made sense in the flow of time and destiny. I punched him in the face.

As he reeled backward, stunned, I hurried away. “You’ll understand later!” I called back to him.

When I joined the long line of cars heading for the pasture, only one car came up behind me. In the dim light of dawn, I could make out two silhouettes in the front seats. I knew this was the last flower I would ever plant.

We stole away before sunrise. The wheelchair didn’t fit in the trunk, so I carried you to the passenger seat. Even your frail frame nearly wasted my strength. Our aged love would never wane, but my hands shook as I keyed the ignition. The moment had finally come.

You never noticed the other cars. If you had, you might have questioned why they all bore the same scuffs in the black paint, the same crack in the upper left corner of the rear windshield. I would have smiled, patting your hand and telling you to rest, because we were almost there.

When we arrived, I lifted you from the car and placed you by the flowers. The joy in your eyes was worth the ache in my limbs. We sat there, holding each other and smiling in the sunrise, until you turned and kissed my cheek.

“I want one,” you whispered.

I plucked a middlemist from the edge of the circle and placed it in your fragile fingers. You inhaled the scent, eyes closed, face flushed with happiness. You died happy, sitting in the soil, and I buried you next to your twenty-seven flowers.