The Time Traveler's Wife Read online

The Time Traveler’s Wife

  A short story by

  C.SeanMcGee

  The Time Traveler’s Wife

  Copyright© Cian Sean McGee

  CSM Publishing

  ‘TheFreeArtCollection’

  Araraquara, Brazil 2015

  Second Edition

  All rights reserved. No sneaky business. No unauthorized anything.

  All artwork and layout by c.seanmcgee

  Author Foto: CarlaRaiter

  Editing by AnnaVanti

  Woman Photo: Victor Tongdee

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  This short story was inspired by the song:

  ‘Every Day is Exactly the Same’ by Nine Inch Nails

  …written under the influence of:

  Book of Souls: Folio A by Secret Chiefs 3

  For keli, nenagh and tomás

  1.61803398874989484820458683436563811772030917980576286213544862270526046281890.......

  “You ever driven all night, really tired. You know, so tired that even if were to crash, you probably wouldn’t even feel a thing anyway? And then you get home or wherever the hell you’re going and you take the keys out of the ignition and you think to yourself, ‘how the fuck did I get here?’ You can’t remember a bit of the journey. You were asleep or dreaming the whole time or something. You don’t know if you leaned into any of the turns and you can’t be sure or not if you ran over an animal or a mother pushing a pram across the street. The only thing you know is that you’re pretty sure this is where you’re supposed to be; home or work or the supermarket. You just, can’t remember for the life of you, how you got here. You ever felt that?”

  “Sure. I try not to drive tired, on account of it being so dangerous, but yeah” Stefan said, sipping his Mocha, “I once drove through the night when I was in university with some friends you know, back in the days where you’re reckless and living like there’s no tomorrow. So anyway, we….”

  “I feel that way about my life,” John said, twisting his cup back and forth, his cold and untouched coffee spilling in a single line down over his index finger and onto the table.

  Stefan was waving at a group of guys who had just piled off a coach and were slapping each other’s backs and high fiving one another as they joked out loud about celebrities they’d love to fuck and how they’d do it to them. None of them seemed to notice, but that didn’t matter to Stefan. He kept waving anyway as if they had as if it was just their way and he made a strange gesture with his fingers to no one in particular as if he were asking for two of something.

  “So who would you fuck?” he asked, turning back to John.

  “I don’t know man. Whoever.”

  “No, seriously. Let’s say you could fuck whoever you wanted and you could fuck them whatever way you wanted and they weren’t you know, gonna make you feel dirty about it or nothing. Who would you fuck? How would you do it?”

  John and Stefan sat on the steps to the office building. Neither of them were in the way of passing workers but Stefan’s lingering stare and twitching ear grasped the lapels of busied and personal discourse, silently begging, like the basketball player nobody wants, to be picked to give his opinion, to share his thoughts and to laugh as heartily as he saw the other guys doing.

  “I can’t remember a single choice I ever made,” said John, now shaking the cup so that the cold coffee stormed like a raging sea. “I mean, I know who I am and I know what I do. I know what I have to do and for what I have to do, up to know, I know exactly what I’ve done and what I’ve still yet to do. And I know when it’s gonna be done. I just don’t know how the fuck I came to this point. I don’t know if I decided all of this or if it just settled around me while I was sleeping or something.”

  “I’d fuck Jennifer Connelly. She has this natural beauty you know. Seductive and shapely but natural at the same time. Not many women have that. Like she could be your neighbor or teaching your kid in school and yet at the same time, she has this super sexy side with massive tits and you just know she’d make you cum in a second. Yeah, I’d definitely fuck Jennifer Connelly. I don’t think I’d want to do anything nasty, though. Probably just hold her or something. Spoon maybe.”

  “I think I’m suicidal, but I’m not sure.”

  “But if I did have to have nasty sex. I don’t know. Oprah maybe. Early nineties Oprah though. Frizzy hair, sugar on her fingers. No, wait, Ricki Lake. She was fucking hot, even when she was chubby. Can I bang two?” Stefan asked, looking to John with genuine concern rasping his brow.

  John was staring at his reflection on the tips of his shoes. He always kept them at such a shine and his pants; they were never wrinkled and were ironed just right, so the pleats stuck out like the fold in his favorite novel. His shirt was a little big for him, but he tucked the length of it into his pants and lightly tugged on it so the fold hanged in a cool and professional manner over his buckle.

  And his tie, it was the only one he had ever bought. It cost him nearly a hundred dollars at the time. It was silk, and the color and pattern made it look like someone had spilled extravagant art down his neck and along his chest. Its color was faded now and its texture was coarse; its fibers splitting into ugly tufts, looking less like a piece of art and more like a shitty sketch, etched on the back of a soiled napkin.

  “We live and we die,” said John.

  “If I could fuck them both, I’d probably fuck Ricki Lake in the ass and I’d lay Oprah on Ricki Lake’s back like a table cloth and I’d just eat that early nineties pussy,” Stefan said, blowing raspberries into his hand as he mocked his ravenous sexual appetite. “And I’d have to have Donahue commentating. He could be in the back, jerking off and talking about how big my cock is. But I don’t know” he said, perplexed. “I don’t if I’d cum in Ricki Lake’s asshole or on Oprah’s tits or if I’d try and shoot on their faces you know. That would be hot.”

  “I think maybe I’m depressed,” said John.

  “God. Lighten up It’s called ‘Who Would You Fuck?’ Not ‘How to be a Kill Joy’. What’s gotten into you anyway? You’re normally a lot more chipper than this. You’re so…”

  “Choose your next words carefully,” John thought, imagining himself taking Stefan by a clump of his hair and beating his face against the rounded edge of the red bricked stairs.

  “The opposite of full of life,” he said, between sips of his Mocha, not noticing the twitch and tremor in John’s eye as he stared at the different groups of guys and gals coming off of buses and coaches and piling out of cars. “Today’s gonna be a good day, I can tell. I can feel it.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “We’re gonna get our bonuses. Just in time too. Have you seen the cost of sliced pepperoni? Its daylight robbery I’m telling you. That and the cost of socks, which the kids just tear holes through every second they get. You’ll see, when you and Tracy decide to stop kidding around of course. You’ll see what I mean. Have you talked about it much? I mean, does she want kids?”

  “I don’t know,” said John.

  “What about you? One, two, four?” Stefan scoffed.

  “I don’t care.”

  “But I tell you, John,” Stefan said, hardly listening, “if the bonus comes through… You know… Everything kind of evens out and…”

  “Stays exactly the same” John said, spilling his cold coffee to the floor, watching the black liquid trickle over the edge of the step and cascade onto the bowing weed below.

  “Exactly. If it aint broke…”

  Both men picked themselves up and made their way into the foyer and then crowded by the elevator with Stefan pricking his ears
to the tune of the current theme. Although they mostly worked on separate floors, the suited workers were always engaged in such delicate debate as if they had scholarly or juvenile ties, going from political polemic to that shit hot new song from Nine Inch Nails, the house remix, not the original, and why wearing white speedos was no longer gay.

  “So what did you guys get up to on the weekend?”

  He was talking to John, but Stefan’s voice and attention traveled around the elevator carrying into the creeps of whispered conversations, trying to make its presence pertinent.

  “Nothing really,” said John.

  He tried to think, not for the sake of Stefan but for his own curiosity. What had he done? Had he really done nothing or was this just something he had become accustomed to saying?

  On Friday, he and Tracy watched a movie. They hadn’t seen it before, but everyone was raving about it. It was a copy of a copy of a copy and he couldn’t remember if he enjoyed it or not, or if he had seen the original. The actors were all famous though so at worst; it would have been comfortable to be around people he knew even if, in the movie, nothing much happened.

  “Yeah us too. You know. Once you get kids everything really gets set in stone. It’s like finding your north as if one day some guy comes up to you and hands you a compass and then everything makes sense. You have your direction. Up at seven,, take the kids to practice, back for lunch. Mow the lawn. Eat. Get into trimming the hedges. Oh, I