The Time Traveler's Wife Page 7
And even before he lifted his hand to the door, he could feel a pain starting to swell inside his thoughts. Like the other pain, it wasn’t anything that he could bandage or put pressure on. It wasn’t the kind of pain that he could find. It wasn’t in his bones and it wasn’t in his skin or in his nerves. It was inside his thoughts and it was sharp and stabbing.
“You alright,” John’s Nipple asked.
“Let’s just do this” replied John, the pain now searing as he lifted his hand and knocked on the door.
His heart beat fast.
His stomach sank.
He could hear the sounds of footsteps and he tried to imagine the Dracula that he had had in his mind since he was a boy; a savage beast of monolithic proportion with nails like jagged and rusted razor wire and arms as wide as a jumbo’s wingspread. He could feel now as he did then, calling the memory into his conscious mind.
The air tasted the same.
His nerves were identical.
That same wave of fright pooled at that same point in his legs.
“Who is it?” cursed an old man’s voice behind the brown oak door.
“Get ready to run” John’s Nipple shouted.
“I said, who is it?” the voice spoke again.
John stayed still. He thought about running now, but he couldn’t. He had to wait until Dracula was out in the open. And then, when the monster’s long and pointed fingers were near his grasp, only then could he run. John stayed completely still, watching the door and griping the railing.
The handle creaked as it turned.
“Run” John’s Nipple shouted.
“Not yet” John shouted.
The door swung open.
“Who is it? Who are you?” the voice shouted. “Who’s there? Who is it?”
And then everything became small and insignificant once more. The steps became miniscule and the gaps between them passable. And Dracula, he was nothing more than a crooked old man, hunched over his cane and shaking his angered index finger at what he thought was an intruder, merely a lock of his own hair that the wind was blowing against and tickling his nose.
He didn’t at all seem scary. How the hell did he think this little man was such a gargantuan monster?
“What was I thinking?” he said, walking back down the steps with his nipple and ignoring the old man’s desperate plight to shake off his tickling intruder.
“I guess when you’re smaller….” John’s Nipple said.
And then the pain shot straight into his thoughts and t felt as if someone had poked a skewer through his ear and into his imagination and they, whoever they were, were twisting and turning the skewer until the memory wrapped into a tight spaghetti like bind and then they pulled the skewer out, taking the memory with it. John screamed as the pain shot through his mind as fiber after fiber was pulled from his subconscious as the memory was uprooted.
“What’s happening?” he screamed.
“Don’t fight it?” John’s Nipple said. “Let it go.”
John screamed once and then fell to the floor panting. It felt like someone had ripped every hair out of his head in one foul swoop. He clutched his hand to his head and his hair was there, but there was no relief.
“What the fuck was that?” John said, gasping for air.
“We should get home.”
John and his nipple walked towards the bus stop and waited in the late afternoon sun for the bus to come. John looked back at the street and at the house which for his whole life, had been a cornerstone in his identity, a story he always talked about with Tracy, whenever he talked about their childhood and how his was, in his thoughts, so magic and fanciful.
“It’s just a fucking house,” he said.
“It always was” John’s Nipple replied.
“No. In my head, it was so much more. I thought it was so much more. But it was just a fucking house. And Dracula, he was just some hunched-over, blind man.”
John tried to think about the house and Dracula as he would any other day, remembering how he, along with scores of other boys, crept up the stairs and when nearing the door, ran screaming and sprinting down the street in a flock of chaos and swirling arms. He used to be able to remember this moment like a scene in his favorite movie, one that he liked to imagine over and over again. He used to be able to remember it, but not anymore. And as he sat on the edge of the bench, he tried to call that vision of himself as a young man but all he could see what the image of a rickety old weather board house and a feeble old blind man, striking at his swishing fringe.
“It’s gone,” John said. “The memory. It’s gone.”
“Good riddance,” John’s Nipple said. “I hated that memory anyway. We can make better ones ourselves. How ya feeling?”
“Strange.”
“Good or bad strange?”
“Changed,” John said.
“Was it what you were looking for?”
“It’s not the feeling that I thought would be here. It wasn’t what I wanted to feel.”
“We can look somewhere else,” John’s Nipple said. “What did you want to feel?”
“I’m not sure,” said John.
“Hey look, here comes the bus. We should get back home.”
“You’re right,” John said. “You’re always right.”
“I’m your nipple. It’s my job to be right” it said proudly.
Increment IV – licks, grooves, sweeps and tasty fills
When John arrived home, his car was in the driveway and Tracy was busy inside readying the table with pretty placemats and colored cups and plates that matched her spacey demeanor. He paid no mind to the car or as to how it got there for, like most things in his life, there is where it always was. He opened the door and as he walked through, he stopped in the doorway for a second and peered over his shoulder, back out onto the street where people and cars, constantly pressed for time, pushed and prodded their way through and around one another, beeping and shouting and waving their pointed hands in the hair as if they were shooing mammoth mosquitos.
Then he looked back into his cramped house, the same strip of dull paint peeling off the walls, the same torn sofa they had bought when they first moved in together, still pushed into the same cobwebbed corner of the living room, the same piece of shit analog TV they’d had all these years that only picked up static and late night evangelism, and the small TV sitting on top that was half the size and black and white, but still, it somehow managed to suffice.
He looked back over his shoulder again and everything outside was dull and grey and forward thinking. Everything was future driven. He pressed his foot out of the doorframe and onto the concrete in his driveway and instantly, he thought about work, but not what he had done merely, tomorrow and for every day that would follow, what he had still yet to do. He thought about bills he had to pay, about movies he wanted to see and about the places of which he would never be able to afford to travel.
He thought about projects he would deliver, milk that he would produce, people that he would have to speak to, the invitations they would give him and the excuses he would use. He thought about the weather. Not the way it was with the sun setting off the divide, but about tomorrow, how it will be and whether he should water the garden bed in the morning before going to work, or tonight, when everyone finally goes home.
Every thought was future driven.
He pulled his foot inside, onto the doorway and then every thought ceased. And then, when he pressed his foot onto the stained and faded wooden living room floor, the first thing he heard was Tracy’s voice saying, “How was your day?”
He looked over his shoulder at the future buzzing about outside and then he r
eturned to see the woman he loved, and he lost himself entirely at the faint lines under her eyes, which etched, like the warm and bumpy grooves in an old record, a passage of time that they had unraveled and shared together. Some of the lines were cavernous and wounded apologies while others were infinitesimal fissures of avowing forgiveness and swallowed pride, in her soft caramel skin.
“So… How was your day?” she asked again, in the past.
Everything about her was the past; the way that she spoke, the way that she dressed (with her shuffling bare feet invisible under her long red gypsy skirt) and how she smiled, for she was always looking as if she was relieved that he was home, as if every moment was one of pained and delectable yearning.
He looked behind again and he saw the future and then he looked back and embraced the past.
“What happened?” she asked.
“This door,” John said. “It’s a portal, a worm hole. Outside, everything is tomorrow and me, my thoughts and my mind, they are busy shaping a future, visualizing it in my mind’s eye, and applying it to this canvas of the present. But it’s the future. And the result of that future” he said, with a look of shock, “the job well done, it will only ever be known to me in in the past.”
“I didn’t understand,” she said.
“I don’t see what’s so difficult,” said John’s Nipple.
“Everything outside this doorway is the future and everything inside is the past. You are my history.”
“I thought you said I was your future?”
“So this door…” he said, caressing the wooden frame like an artist, their