Time Lords

"We do not heal the past by dwelling there; we heal the past by living fully in the present." - Marianne Williamson

*

When they were kids, they played Time Lords.

Their mother gave them a giant cardboard box, and they hauled it up the grassy hill behind their house together. They flipped the box on its side so that the open mouth was like a door, and one of them would step inside.

“I’m going to ancient Egypt!” Adam said. He made some noises that meant buttons had been pressed, then a buzzing that they both knew meant the time machine was on its way.

When he stepped out again, he pretended to do a double-take at the pyramids in the distance. His brother Sam was now a pharaoh, facing down the stranger in his court. He sat on an imaginary throne, surveying the strange modern man in his territory.

“Seize him!” he cried, but Adam was prepared for this. He pulled out his modern weapon and pointed it at the pharaoh’s chest.

“Not so fast,” he said. “Say hello to the future.”

—

When they were nine, Adam got a new bike. He rode it around the block on his birthday with his friends before they went inside for cake. Sam was inside, but he was silent; he was usually silent these days. Their mother had referred him to a psychiatrist because of some drawings he’d done in school.

After his friends left, Adam asked Sam what he was doing for his birthday. They were four months apart- what his father had laughingly told them was called ‘Irish twins’.

“You know, I was a mistake,” Sam told him out of the blue, after not responding to any of Adam’s other excited ramblings.

“That’s not true,” he laughed.

Sam was unsmiling. “Yes, it is. That’s why they like you and they don’t like me.”

Adam thought this was unfair. Their parents didn’t dislike Sam- they were only worried about him. He’d heard them talking before. About the drawings, about how Sam didn’t have any friends and didn’t care to make them, about how he never really played like most kids their age.

“Want to take turns riding my bike?”

Sam was reading a book; his cake sat untouched. He shook his head.

“Bikes are stupid.”

Adam thought. “What about Time Lords?”

Sam’s dark eyes flickered. He looked up. “Okay,” he said.

What had followed was a game where Sam and Adam, adventurers extraordinaire, had run around in their backyard, finding ‘wormholes’ and jumping through them to the past and the future, acting out the drama of what they found there, screaming and laughing until their stomachs hurt.

—

When they were twelve, the neighbor’s cat went missing. Adam saw the posters hung up along his street, pinned to telephone poles.

Sam usually just went right to his room after school, so it was a surprise when he touched Adam on the elbow one day, smiling a bit of the old conspiratorial smile they used to share.

“Want to see something cool?” he asked.

Adam nodded, but when Sam began to lead him into the woods behind their house, he started feeling weird about this.

“What is it, a time machine?” he joked. The old game they’d played as kids was long dead, but Sam still displayed a fixation for time travel.

His brother didn’t answer, only led him deeper into the woods than Adam had ever gone before. He finally stopped in front of an old white cooler, turned on its side, flecked with rust.

“Look at this,” he said, crouching by the cooler. Adam didn’t want to go, but he followed his slightly younger brother over.

Seconds before he peered in, he knew what he would see, but it didn’t prepare him for the shock, or the feeling of his stomach turning over.

Snowball, the missing cat, was lying on her side, eyes bulging. There were scratch marks all over the inside of the cooler and a smell was beginning to emanate from it.

“Sam,” Adam said, panicked. “Sam, why would you do this?”

“I thought it was cool.”

“That’s not cool, it’s sick.”

Sam’s bright eyes grew flat again. He snapped the lid of the cooler closed, locking the outside latch again.

“It’s our secret,” he said. “You can’t tell anyone. Promise?”

Their father asked Adam that night over dinner what was wrong. “You’re being awfully silent,” he said. Sam continued to eat his meal, but his eyes strayed over to Adam, watching.

“It’s nothing,” he said.

—

When they were fifteen, Sam spent all of his time in his room with the door locked. He had medication he was supposed to be taking, but Adam knew he wasn’t; he’d heard Sam rattle the pills out of their cage and flush them down the toilet when he thought no one was there.

Sam rarely went to school, and when he did, he was often in trouble for something or other. One day he was suspended for threatening to stab another kid with the utility knife he carried everywhere. Adam came home and found his father with his head in his hands at the kitchen table.

He knew his parents were at the end of their rope. He’d heard them talking at night about Sam, about how it was getting harder to discipline him, how nothing worked. His mother sometimes cried; she told his father she was afraid of Sam sometimes. Occasionally they would ask Adam about him, knowing that the boys used to share a bond.

“He doesn’t talk to me either,” Adam told them, but he’d dutifully tried to engage with Sam on several occasions, asking him if he was going to sports games or talking about the latest gossip at school.

The effort was usually futile. Sam only scratched words in the battered notebook he carried, lost to the outside world. He never told Adam what he was writing, but one time Adam found his notebook unattended and open on the couch. He’d stole closer and been confronted with what looked like to him, a load of nonsense. Something about it made him nervous though; he wondered if Sam was going insane.

“Go tell your brother it’s time for church,” Adam’s mother said a couple of days after the news of Sam’s suspension.

“I don’t think he’s going to come,” Adam said, but he obediently went to his brother’s door, which was open a crack.

“Sam?”

When he got no response, he pushed the door in.

It had been a while since Adam had seen his brother’s room. The first thing that met his eyes was Sam’s dresser. It looked like it had been through a war: deep chunks had been gouged out of it. Sam was sitting cross-legged on the floor, one arm turned upwards in his lap, his sleeve pulled up. His other hand held a knife, which he was pressing to his skin. Adam watched as he pulled it across his flesh, drawing a small red line.

“Sam!” he said again. He didn’t think his brother would respond, but then Sam looked up and slowly turned his head, focusing his flat eyes on Adam.

He smiled.

—

When they were eighteen, Adam came home from a party in the early hours of the morning. He let himself inside the silent house and trekked over to the couch, where he’d been sleeping more often.

Adam was so tired he almost fell onto the box sitting there, but he caught himself in time, taking it and sitting on the couch with it, a crease appearing between his eyebrows.

The parcel looked like a shoebox wrapped in brown paper. On the top, his name was scrawled in messy writing.

He thought at first, stupidly, of colleges. He should be getting acceptances- and rejections- right about now. But what kind of college sent mysterious boxes without addresses? Adam began to tear into the paper carefully, like he was holding a bomb. When he’d freed the box of its brown paper, he looked inside.

It wasn’t a bomb- but it wasn’t much better. Adam’s stomach dropped. What the fuck does he mean by this? he thought, for there was no doubt anymore in his mind who left the package. He stared down at the gun like it was a snake poised to strike, then took the folded note from beneath it, and read:

A sudden bang reverberated through the house, and at first, Adam turned to the box at his side, confused even as the dread started to spill through him. The second bang followed closely thereafter, and then a scream. Mom.

Taking the gun in one fluid motion, Adam ran for the stairs. His sleepless state and the unreality of the situation made him feel like he was dreaming. But when he crested the stairs and sprinted to his parents’ room, the sight within let him know in no uncertain terms that this was no dream.

It was a waking nightmare.

Adam’s father was sitting propped up by the headboard; his hair was matted on one side, brains painting the wall behind him.

Adam’s mother went to scream again but choked, pressing herself up against the wall on the floor by their bed. She was clutching her abdomen, where a dark stain was spreading beneath her nightgown. Her eyes met Adam’s, briefly, desperate, but he couldn’t be sure she was even seeing him through her fear.

Sam stood in front of her, cocking the luger down at her head.

“Oh, you’re sorry now, are you?” he said, bearing down on her.

“Sam!” Adam yelled, and Sam turned to him, smirking.

“If you know what’s good for you, perfect brother of mine, you’ll stay out of the way.”

Adam watched the surprise register on his brother’s face as he leveled his own weapon at his chest. Sam raised one eyebrow, almost impressed, then laughed.

“You won’t,” he said, turning to face their mother again, aiming in one rapid motion.

The blast was so loud that at first all Adam registered was his ears ringing. Then he watched as Sam’s body fell backwards in a slow arc down to the floor at his feet. His dark eyes looked up at Adam, expressionless as in life.

His mother let out a cry. “Oh, Adam!”

There was a new hole in the wall right next to her head, and Adam realized what must have happened: they’d both pulled the trigger at the same time. The force of his bullet entering Sam’s back, right where his heart should be, must have caused his brother’s aim to flinch, but it was a close thing- too close.

—

In the months to come, Adam’s mother made a full recovery. The killings were ruled an attempted murder-suicide, Adam only an unlucky witness. He knew he’d have been in more trouble if they’d found the other gun, but along with the vestiges of the brown paper box, it seemed to have completely disappeared.

In the days after, Adam wrestled with his anger and his grief. In those immediate days, he dreamed another world. A world where he’d heard the gunshots and ran up the stairs unarmed. A world where, after finishing their mother, Sam had turned to him and shot him too. The world that sometimes Sam and his mother both guiltily wished for in the aftermath; the version of events that surely would have happened had he not found the strange brown box with its cryptic note.

He dreamed that other world, and then he imagined the monster that would walk out of that house alive. The brother he’d grown up with but no longer knew, behind bars, standing in the half-light, falling backwards through time.

*

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