My Time Share on a Time Travel Machine: Episode 1

It’s the narrator’s first turn at the time machine she and her siblings’ purchase. She goes and meets with her last incarnation in Civil War-era America.

The time came in my sixties that I finally saved up enough to buy a time travel machine in cahoots with my brothers and sister. We had to go in on it together. My eldest brother proposed it first, but when I finally got some wealth, I seconded it. The others joined in from there.

All of us were born before the turn of the century, in the 1990s. In my twenties, long ago, but even then, I suspected that I had been alive in the eighteen hundreds: from the 1870s or so right through the jazz age. I believe I then reincarnated into the 90s into this lifetime— after some kind of longer slumber in Sheol, the sleeping place of souls.

So my first stop on my first turn with our time machine was to visit me from a prior incarnation. I wanted to compare souls.

She would probably look just like me, or else, I would look like a very slender tall man in the 1800s, I believe. Why? Because when I was very little indeed, maybe 4 or 6, I used to dream that I was such a man. I suppose it would have been 1999 or so. I dreamt as a small child that I walked rolling hills, or into caves with glittering amethysts, as this tall, slender man.

(Later in my 20s, I was he again in dreams, but in Native American dwellings. In those dreams, I/he took notes like a secretary or a historian might).

When I met her in 1870, oh my and how! She was in America by then but fresh off from France. She had learned English at home and polished it right up to fluency through her marriage to an American.

When we met, she believed she was having a dream, or a faint, or a vision. But we had a good chat nonetheless. I believe it did her — my —our soul a great deal of comfort.

“You mean,” I asked her in the dark of the candlelight, “that you moved across the ocean to see a new country?”

“Yes.”

“And you did it without thinking of ever being able to get back.”

“Well, I knew it would be expensive and dangerous. And that the passage takes months. But I was younger then. I felt… immortal!” She giggled and smoothed her dress. We have similar hands, but she did not look my twin. This gave me much to think about.

“I do know now that I may never see home again,” she said. Her voice was a forced kind of casual, and revealed so much strength of character. “But my family and children are here, and I do love jazz, and all the open space.”

America did use to be known for its open space. Even in my youth and childhood, there were states that you could drive across for hours and hours without seeing much but highway. America’s spacious skies were only more true in her time.

Also — she loves jazz! This supported my theory about the jazz age being the end of my last life! What do you want to bet she (Civil War time me) stuck around past whatever hell the pre-anesthesia age had in store, just for some good jazz bars in New Orleans to bloom in all their brass?

But I was more impressed by all she had braved in her life. “It’s astounding. You’re so much bolder and tougher than me.”

“But you travel too?”

“Well. I suppose you’re right, that a life choice like yours, just to travel, is the exact sort of thing I would do.”

“Well, it was for love.”

“All my travels are, and have been, as well.”

She grinned. Maybe every single trip I had taken had not been for the love of a man, and maybe her little jaunt to the States hadn’t been only for a man.

Some of my moves were for the love of a man. But many were just for the love of travel itself.

I believe that in her times, we had to have both acting together — love of a man and of travel itself — in order to do it. Travel was just so much more costly then. You needed double-power motivation.

“And…” she said tentatively. She looked eager, excited, thrilled, but scared to say what she had to say.

“What?” I inquired eagerly.

“You can travel across the world in hours?”

Proving my point! In every age, I are born travelers.

“Well, yes! I’ve been doing it since I was in my teens, by jet plane. When they still burned jet fuel even!” Ah, the early 2000's…

“You can travel all around the world, and still get back to talk to family again, in one lifetime, often?” Her hands clenches the fabric of her prairie skirt. Resentment? Hope? Her life was not so lucky, but her next one might be if I said yes.

I took a long, heady pause. “My dear, my self. My soul. In my lifetime — in your next one, except maybe a middle one that we apparently don’t speak about or recall if it happened — you can travel fast, that fast —see new places, and see familiar faces, pingpong pingpong !— ”

I wondered if ping pong had been invented yet. She understood by context clues, though, if not. “But the whole time, in my life, we can also talk with family,” I said. “In the middle of every trip! Even if they’re not physically with you! Yes, the whole time, through — ” I waved my hand around. When was the lightbulb invented? The telegraph? I couldn’t remember.

“Through — electricity?” There was a spark in her eye now.

“Yes.” I felt like it was simplest to leave it there for our purposes.

She smiled. “Nathaniel said it would happen!”

She had pride in this Nathaniel. His joy was hers: his bizarre visions were her religion. That much was clear to me. Why? Because I know the feeling. Seeing my heart’s secrets in her face — this is where the uncanny began for me.

“Nathaniel believed it first. Electricity making communication without time passing will be possible, across any distance. I cannot wait to tell him he’s right!”

There was suddenly nothing more to say for the breath of a moment. We smiled. The smiles seemed to nest within each other and grow and radiate as we came to understand that of course we both knew Nathaniel. That we fall in love with him again and again. He is forever believing in the future. In her time, he believes in electricity and in its possibilities on a visionary level, ahead of everybody else — in my time, in things better saved for a letter chapter.

But she and we and I, we came to understand in our smiles and sudden quiet that our love for him is always filled with faith in the future he sees. His faith in the future is the mirror image of the faith she and I have got in our pasts.

Our faith in our past is what brought me back to her first, after all.

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- Savanna Rain Uland