EVERYWHEN

I met Annie McDougall on a Sunday in 1988. I forget the month and what I was wearing. I recall that it was raining, that Loretta was with me but to my great shame I have forgotten her face. I have forgotten a lot of things since that Sunday. You forget more than you ever knew when you travel like we do. Annie agrees with me. She says it’s a symptom of time sickness and looks sad and drawn under the starlight or the candlelight, or the flickering fluorescents of whatever when we inhabit at the moment of reminiscence. She thinks that she had a husband once, and maybe a child, perhaps a boy, but names and voices and the colours of hair and eyes are lost. She has been travelling for a lot longer than I have.

 

I do recall that Loretta and I were driving on a mountain road, coming home from a winery visit. I remember that because whatever when Annie and I end up in, there is always wine, from roughly fermented berries that straighten the chest hair to the fine rolling lavender edged ambrosia usually found around the eighteenth century close to the Loire. The wine we bought for ourselves that day was probably somewhere in between. There were bottles rolling on the floor of the car in the back seat and Loretta was reaching down to settle them  - was she wearing yellow was her hair gold or red or brown was she laughing - when we saw the van and then Annie.

 

The van - I think it was blue, covered with swirls of faded colour and spiked here and there with peace signs - was pulled to the verge awkwardly, dangerously, listing across a narrow ditch  - or was it green - toward a bank of ferns. We were driving. Speed and a slick road excused us from having to decide to stop and investigate, although I imagine that I recall Loretta peering backward through the rain and exclaiming that she thought there was someone in the drivers seat.

 

I do remember that. “I think there’s someone in the van. Should we stop?”  Breathless. Surprised. I remember that I kept driving. I remember the thud swish of the wipers. I don’t remember my sister’s name. I said to Annie shortly afterwards that the van looked like something from the sixties. She smiled sideways and crinkled her nose - or her fingers. “It was from the sixties. Someplace called Washington, I think. I hope that nice man who came through with it survived.”

 

I almost hit Annie as she scuttled out of the rain. Sometimes I wish I had, although that can depend on when we are. Some whens are quite pleasant.

 

She looked like a nightmare drawn from a pioneer diorama, long brown - blue green black? -  skirt, flapping shawl, wild hair, sodden wide brimmed hat, bent over a long slim parcel wrapped in something colourful as she crossed the highway in front of us. Her face in the rain was a pale smear as she turned toward the car eyes wide and frozen as we skidded past, finally shredding to a stop some way further down the hill. Loretta was probably pale and swearing and I think that the car smelt of red wine.

 

I got out of the car into the rain and stalked back toward Annie, reaching for her - although I cannot recall if I knew her name then I suppose I did not - what on earth are you doing woman - as she dropped her parcel and siezed her Lightning Rod from its wrappings. She originally comes from a time with swords and tends to flail her Rod about quite alarmingly. I suppose I must have been terrified - scrambling across the road back to the car fingers sliding on the white paint of the dividing line knees stinging on the slick tarmac or still in pale surprise as she squinted up into the dark clouds and planted her long metal rod in the middle of the road.

I cannot remember - truthfully, I cannot because sometimes we play the game of what we can recall and lie and this is not one of those times - what happened when the lightning struck.  There is always a wave and you can get caught in it like a fast tide or a whirlwind. I don’t remember what it felt like, the tearing, the shifting I don’t think I want to. I left with Annie. Loretta, the car, the wine that nice man from Washington and his van, everything and everywhen I knew stayed behind me.

 

My ears rang for a very long time.

 

I have been travelling with Annie for more time than I can think of.  I have my own Lightning Rod now and can travel on my own if I choose to - there is a small community of travellers and I was bequeathed my own long slim needle by a fellow named Gaetano Polici who contracted the plague in the mid sixteenth century in Ireland. I continue to travel with her. I discovered very quickly that no amount of cajoling and threats can bend the quirk of quantum theory that causes us to be able to use the violence of lightning to jump in time from when to where and on again. No amount of pleading or planning can make it so that you can go home again. Once you have left your when, your own home when, deliberately or otherwise, you are gone and cannot reappear, even for a second.

Annie stays with me or I stay with her. I can’t remember which is true. We jump together, share the task of following the Lightning, planting the rod, shooing away onlookers. We don’t want any more men in vans slipping through.

I cannot imagine anywhen without her now. She has not abandoned the long skirts of her youth but she has allowed me to give her a long woollen coat that I found near a battlefield in the Somme, folded neatly by a tree or a fence or a house as if awaiting its owners return - and a new pair of sandals now and then. Sentimentality can be a symptom of time sickness, she says gruffly and smiles sideways, stroking the big bronze buttons on the coat. She often makes pronouncements like that. She has been travelling for a lot longer than I have.

Reviews

[Truman S. Booth]

Wow. I love this story. It has its fair share of grammar and syntax issues, but for some reason they did not distract me as most problems do. In fact, I found them fitting to the story, as if they were intentional--part of the narrator's mixed up mind.

I love how much is left to my imagination. Movies could be made about this little story, very good movies. I'm very impressed--this is a very unorthodox time-travel tale, and I believe it must be one of my favorites. Thank you for posting. It was refreshingly disturbing and befuddlingly delightful.