Shoes

“Okay,” Carter told himself, his hands outstretched, palms out, “do not freak out.”

“Easy for you to say,” Carter said. He backed away a few steps from the figure standing near him on the path. The figure with his face.

***

Carter had woken to the sound of the rain tapering off to a few stray spatters on the windowpane of his apartment. He had been glad of the sound. Foul weather meant that he would have the hiking trail all to himself that morning. He didn’t mind walking the path in the drizzle and the mud. It was the solitude he craved.

He had driven across town, parked in the lot by the public park – deserted, just as he had hoped it would be – and strode out onto the mile-long walking trail through the trees with a light heart.

Carter didn’t consider himself a hermit or a misanthrope or anything like that. He could function perfectly well in society. He just felt more clear-headed and more at ease when he was on his own.

The air had been damp, like freshly washed sheets hung on the line to dry. There had been a loamy smell rising from the hard-packed sandy clay of the trail, one that he always found pleasant. It had been a long week at work for him, and he was glad for the peace and quiet of both the weekend and this place in particular at this particular time.

His good feelings hadn’t lasted long, though, as he hadn’t walked very far when another pedestrian appeared around the bend in the distance, moving towards him.

Carter had fetched a sigh. At least it was only one person and not a group, and at least they were going in the opposite direction. That meant the obligatory head nod upon passing, perhaps even a grunted “’Morning,” as he went by, and that would be the end of their interactions. He would continue on with the hopes that the interloper he would be passing would be the only one he would encounter that morning.

As the other had drawn closer, Carter had noted with some bemusement that he was dressed in almost the same manner as he himself – jeans and a zip-up maroon hooded sweatshirt. The other man had his hood up and his head down, so Carter had not been able to tell anything about his face.

The other difference, a more pronounced one, was the man’s footwear. Carter was wearing his beaten-to-comfort walking sneakers. The other hiker was wearing Converse low-tops, black, fairly new-looking. Retro-stylish, but not exactly conducive to walking on slippery, uneven ground.

Want to be careful there, Carter had thought. You’d feel pretty silly if a poor choice of shoes lands you on your ass after a misstep out here.

The other man had his hands stuck into the pockets of his hoodie, but as he neared Carter, he had removed them. Carter’s attention had ratcheted up a notch at this. The other man had been empty-handed, but he still hadn’t liked it.

Carter had quickened his pace a bit, intending to simply blow by the other man, not acknowledge him in any way. He had nearly done it, too, when the other had slowed his pace and spoken.

“Hey…” he had said, sounding uncertain. “Uh, Carter.”

Carter had slowed himself and looked at the man involuntarily. The voice had sounded familiar, the way you sounded when you listened to yourself on voicemail or an answering machine.

The other man had pulled up to a complete stop and reached up to take down his hood. Carter had goggled at the sight.

The other man had been him.

***

“Okay,” the other Carter said, his hands outstretched, palms out, “do not freak out.”

“Easy for you to say,” Carter said. He backed away a few steps from the figure standing near him on the path. The figure with his face.

Except for being slightly disheveled and damp, presumably from being out in the rain, the other man was an exact copy of Carter himself. Well, except for the shoes. Those were different. But Carter had other issues that demanded his attention than the man’s footwear.

“What the hell?” Carter demanded reasonably. “Who are you?”

“Again,” said the other, “don’t freak out. I’m you.”

Despite the other’s admonitions, Carter could in fact feel himself freaking out.

“Crap,” he announced. “I’m me. You’re you, whoever you are. But how is it that you look like me?”

“I am you,” the other insisted. “I can prove it. You want to see some ID?” He reached into his pocket and Carter tensed. The other saw this and withdrew his hand. “Okay, okay…I can see this is making you skittish, and that’s understandable. No more sudden moves on my part.”

Inspiration suddenly struck Carter. “All right,” he said, shrewdly, he thought, “if you’re me, then what did I have for breakfast this morning?”

The other Carter smiled humorlessly. “You skipped breakfast so that you could get out here before anyone else showed up. You’re not a people person. Of course, neither am I.”

“Lucky guess,” Carter said, without much conviction.

“You want more?” asked the other. “Fine. Not only did you skip breakfast, you thought about stopping to pick up a coffee on the way here, but the drive-through line was too long. You figured that the longer you waited, to greater the chance you’d meet up with other people on this trail. But you’re planning on treating yourself to a large with an extra shot of espresso on the way home.” He stuck his hands back in the pockets of his hoodie and raised both his shoulders and his eyebrows. “Convinced?”

“This is too weird,” Carter said weakly.

“You’re telling me,” said the other. “Or rather, you’re telling yourself.”

“Where,” queried Carter, “did you come from? You didn’t drive my car here.”

“Actually, I did. It’s just a question of when. I was here earlier today. Actually, now, or a couple of minutes before now, if you want to be really precise.”

“Oh, I want some precision here,” said Carter. “And I don’t get what you’re saying.”

“I’m saying,” said the other, “that I’m from the future. Your future.”

Carter blinked. “You’re from the future,” he parroted back. “You came back in time? From where? I mean, from when?”

The other sighed. “I know this is hard for you to accept, but I swear, it’s true. I travelled back in time exactly two hours and twenty-one minutes from your future to seven-fifteen this morning.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Carter said. “I was asleep then, but I think I would have woken up if another me had materialized out of thin air in my bedroom!”

“That’s because I travelled in time, but not space,” said the other. “It’s just like H.G. Wells’s story, ‘The Time Machine’. Time travel is possible, apparently, but it’s a stationary process. I’m guessing that wherever you go back in time from, you arrive in the exact same spot in the past. I’m just glad it didn’t happen to me in a moving car. Or worse, in an airplane.”

“Which begs the question…how did you travel back this bizarrely specific length of time?”

The other raised a foot and pointed at it. “These,” he said simply.

“You walked back in time?”

The other Carter rolled his eyes. “No, I didn’t walk back in time. I mean the shoes. The shoes sent me back to earlier this morning.”

“I’m going to need some more information here.”

“I know. But listen, because I only have time –” The other broke off and chuckled briefly, then continued. “I only have time to tell you this once.”

Carter stuck his own hands into the pockets of his own hoodie, realized how absurd it made the two of them look and removed them again.

“After you – I – went walking this morning, just now,” said the other, “instead of going to the coffee shop on the way back, you decide to do some shopping before the crowds come out. Your goal is to be home and behind closed doors by noon. On your way to the grocery store, you drive by a thrift store on Hargett Street and there’s no one parked out front. You figure it won’t take long to take a quick look and check the place out. Sure enough, you’re the only customer. The only thing you end up buying, though, is this pair of shoes.”

“Not to sound snobbish or anything,” said Carter, “but I don’t think I’d buy a pair of shoes that someone else had worn. They could have died in them, for all I know.”

“I know you know that,” the other replied. “You almost didn’t buy them, but then you changed your mind when you saw that they were practically new and only five bucks.”

“That’s a good deal,” Carter said.

“Preaching to the choir, my friend.”

“So…you put on the shoes and, what, they transported you back in time, what was it again?”

“Two hours and twenty-one minutes.”

“Yes, two hours and twenty-one minutes. Is that what happened?”

The other rubbed a hand across his head, rumpling his already messy hair. “I think that’s what happened. At least, it’s all I can come up with. I – you – bought the shoes and sat down on a bench outside the thrift shop. You hadn’t wanted to try them on in the store, you would have felt weird about it –”

“Unlike now,” Carter interjected.

The other ignored him and continued. “—but once you were outside, you were curious as to how well they fit, so you slipped them on. You tied the laces and stood up to walk around in them a bit, and the next thing you know, the sun’s just coming up. You thought you had a brain episode or something. All of the lights in all of the shops were out. The sign on the thrift shop had been flipped over to ‘closed’. And your car was gone.”

“Someone steals my car?” Carter said, aghast.

“No,” said the other, a little exasperated. “I was two hours and twenty-one minutes in the past. Your car was back where it had started the day, in the parking lot outside your apartment building.”

“So what are they?” asked Carter, looking at the other’s feet. “Magic shoes? Time machines?”

“I don’t know,” said the other. “There’s nothing mechanical about them. Believe me, I checked. From the look of them, they’re just an ordinary pair of shoes.”

“What happens if you take them off?”

“I don’t know,” the other Carter said again, more uneasily this time. “I’ve been afraid to do that.”

“What for?”

“Because I don’t know what’ll happen. I’m not a scientist. I don’t know how this works, what the rules are!”

“So you’re just going to live in them for the rest of your life? That’s going to get pretty gross after a while.”

“I have other, more pressing things to deal with.”

“Like what?”

“Like getting you to buy the shoes, for one thing.”

“But I did buy them…or, I do buy them. At least, according to you, I do.”

The other Carter shook his head impatiently. “I bought them, sure, and if today had been going on as it had for me originally, you would be buying them again at the exact same time.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“The problem is that by being here, I’m changing things.”

“I don’t get it. What could you have screwed up so badly in only two hours?”

“No,” said the other, “you don’t get it. You don’t have to actively do anything to change the past. You change things just by existing when you’re not supposed to.”

“How?”

“Well, by breathing, for one thing. You inhale, you take in germs from the air around you and your body fights them, kills them off before they can make you sick.”

“So?”

“So, say there’s a particular germ that was supposed to infect a particular person in a particular place at a particular time. You killed off the germ that was supposed to do that.”

“So what? Sounds like a service to me.”

The other groaned and clutched his head. “Well, what if that germ was supposed to make sick the person who would otherwise have caused a four-car smashup on the highway a couple of days from now? If the person is laid up in bed with the flu, they can’t very well be out causing mayhem, can they?”

Understanding dawned in Carter’s face. “So what have you changed so far?”

“That’s just it!” the other exploded. “I don’t know! It’s impossible to see all the changes that have resulted in my being here. Some are probably so minor, they’ll never be of consequence, but the big ones –” He trailed off.

“What?”

“I know of one big difference between this time the first time around for me and this time now.”

“Which is?”

“Which is that it’s supposed to still be raining.”

***

“How,” said Carter as he drove over the bridge and into the town’s business district, “can your being here affect the weather? The cold thing, I can buy, but the weather’s a huge bundle of phenomenons. Surely, one person alone can’t –”

“File it under ‘I don’t know’ like so many other things,” said the other Carter from the passenger seat. “And I don’t know why you didn’t let me drive. You’re still weirded-out by this and apt to get us into an accident.”

Carter looked at him. The other looked back blandly.

“I’m just saying,” said the other. “I know this vehicle as well as you do. And you know I’d drive carefully.”

“Never mind who’s doing the chauffeuring. We’ll get there when we get there. Why don’t you tell me what you think will happen if I don’t buy the shoes like in the original script? That’s what you’re so worried about, right?”

The other Carter was quiet for a moment. Then, he said, “I’m just guessing here, but if you don’t buy the shoes as planned, then you can’t travel back in time. You have to put the shoes on at the exact time I did originally. If you put them on too soon, you’d travel back before I did and there’d be three of us in the past, the original, you and me. Then the two of us would have to convince that timeline’s original you to put on the shoes.”

“What happens if I put them on after you originally did?”

“Then I won’t have travelled back from that particular point in time to begin with. It’ll be the same as if you don’t put them on at all.”

“And what would happen then?” Carter pressed.

The other Carter was silent for another block. “I’m guessing,” he said at last, “that I would just blip out of existence. I would be negated, and there would either be only the original you in the past that becomes the current you in the present, or, if you put on the shoes later, two yous in the past, but it’ll be a later past than the one I went back to.”

Carter considered. “This is giving me a headache.”

“Think how I must feel.”

“So this is a self-preservation thing for you?”

“You bet. Do you know how hard it was to get to you? I don’t mean to find you, I knew exactly where you’d be, but I had to walk to get there.”

“Walk?”

“More like jog. I had to move like I had a purpose.”

“I understand why you couldn’t just drive, but couldn’t you have taken a cab? I mean, I know I have money on me now, so I would have had it then, too.”

“Doesn’t matter. I couldn’t risk taking a cab that might otherwise have had a major impact on someone or something else in this timeline. The least harm I figured I would do would be to hoof it.”

“So what happens if –”

“When.”

“When I put them on? What happens to you? What happens to me?”

“I believe,” said the other Carter, “that we’ll essentially switch places. You’ll go back in time two hours and twenty-one minutes and become the me of this timeline. I’ll stay here and become the present you to continue this timeline after you go back.”

“So that means I’ll have to do what you did and get to you – me – to make sure I – he – goes and puts on the shoes.”

“Correct.”

“Sounds like an endless loop to me.”

The other shrugged. “Basically, it will be.”

“That’s going to suck for the present me.”

“Not really. Each new present you will only have to go through the cycle once.” He paused. “If you get it right, that is.”

Carter frowned. “And if I don’t get it right, I’m dead.”

“Yeah, but you will get it right, because you’ll go back knowing what to do, unlike me, who had to figure it out as I went along. With that knowledge, you’ll be able to move more quickly and surely, so you’ll have a greater chance of success than I’m having.”

“But if I don’t follow the script, I’ll be erased out of existence.” Carter huffed. “No pressure.”

“That’ll only happen if you put on the shoes and go back,” the other conceded in a strangely reluctant tone. “If you don’t, then I’m the one that ends, not you. You would just continue on as the present you of this timeline, and all this will have been just a weird exchange with yourself, with no time travel involved. So it’s my butt that’s on the line here, not yours.”

“So essentially, your life is in my hands.”

“More like your feet,” the other Carter replied ruefully.

“Again, no pressure.”

“Look, I’m telling you, it’ll be a cake walk. Yes, hiking from point A to point B is going to be a pain in the ass, but isn’t that a small price to pay for the adventure of a lifetime?”

“Don’t forget, also the possibility of inadvertently wreaking havoc on a global scale,” said Carter. “And dying. That one’s a pretty serious outcome.”

The other Carter held up his hands. “I’ve said all I can say to convince you. Like you said, it’s your choice whether I live or die. Do what you want, but just consider what you’d want me to do if our positions were reversed.”

Carter smiled, but it was a slightly bitter expression.

“Ah,” he said, “but you already know what I’d want you – me – to do, don’t you?”

At first the other Carter said nothing. Then he pointed. “We’re here.”

***

“Aren’t you coming?” asked Carter as he unsnapped his seat belt.

“Can’t,” said the other. “If the cashier sees the two of us together, she’ll balk, and there goes the ballgame. Can’t take any chances on holdups in the chain of events. The clock is running down at this point.”

“But wouldn’t she just think we’re – I don’t know, twins?”

“Can’t take any chances on holdups in the chain of events. Nothing can keep you from putting on those shoes in exactly –” The other Carter checked his watch. “Ten minutes and forty-three seconds. Now get moving.” He paused, then added, “Please.”

He sounded so desperate that Carter felt a little guilty about his own hesitations. To know the exact time of your own impending death, if only a possibility, must be terrifying.

“I’ll beet you on the bench outside the store,” said the other as Carter exited the car. “Then I’ll coach you through the last few details.”

With that, the other Carter walked over to the aforementioned bench and seated himself, head down and hood back up. Carter thought about telling him not to worry, then just decided to get a move on. The clock, as the other had said, was ticking.

As he’d been told, he was the only customer at this early hour. The bell over the door dinged as he went in, the cashier wished him a good morning, then went back to her newspaper. All was right and normal, in her world at least.

Carter browsed over the odds and ends on the various shelves, not out of interest, but because he was supposed to. With a low but steadily rising sense of anxiety, he turned to the racks of shoes.

There they were, on the second shelf from the top, a pair of practically new black Converse sneakers. He reached out and took them down from the shelf. Up close, they looked perfectly normal. Carter found that he had to resist the urge to thoroughly inspect them, try to divine their secret. Time was short.

He carried the shoes to the front counter and set them down beside the register. The cashier looked up from her paper and smiled at him.

“Good choice,” she said as she rung him up. “Can’t go wrong with the classics.”

“Out of curiosity,” Carter said, “How long have they been up for sale?”

The cashier looked uncertain. “They were here when I got here this morning. At least, I think they were. It’s hard to tell, the way stuff around here comes and goes.”

Carter nodded. “Got it. Thanks. Have a good one.” He hooked his fingers into the shoes. Time to do the deed, take the ride, he supposed.

Something in one of the shoes tickled at his fingertip. Cradling the shoes in the crook of his arm, he fished around in the one with the mystery prize and came up with a crumpled scrap of paper.

“Looks like you got a fortune shoe,” said the cashier.

Carter barely heard her. He had a bad feeling about this.

He carefully smoothed out the paper and read what was printed on it, three words, written in very familiar handwriting. He looked through the glass front door. He could just make out the bench outside, where the hunched figure sat, waiting.

“Don’t trust him,” the message on the paper read.