Prologue
I MIGHT BE WRONG by Radiohead plays among the broken glass and bones, comingling with the splintered timber and reddened mud, between bodily fluids and debris.
Of the expressions I’ve collected across different times, stranger danger resonated most. I attribute this to my position with CODA and how my experiences have blistered my perceptual awareness, not to mention thoroughly realigning what I’d previously assumed was a tolerant pain threshold. It doesn’t take many times getting killed for a person to offer closer attention to their surroundings, lest they find themselves experiencing still another non-voluntary regeneration.
The sensation of death is too intimate, and the umbrage with which I receive it is more significant than the discomfort its painful aspects effectuate. Most folks don’t realise that when we are killed in an especially violent way, it is too intense to experience physically. Our bodies, neurologically, are not equipped to process so many synaptic signals being shot off all at once.
I wouldn’t pick up stranger danger until I was deposited in the eighties—funny enough, not the eighties to which my original timeline was most proximate. When you acquire these phrases, it’s much easier learning them than it is to remain diligent that they not slip out in the wrong room. Depending on one’s locale, geographically or temporally, a person might have some explaining to do if they go around spitting words with which the nineteen-eighties had acquainted them. Point being, stranger danger was the most appropriate descriptor that night for my friends in Hibernia.
No matter when or where they were, they never looked specific, but that was also what made them stand out. If you were to see me, you’d observe coarse hair, missing teeth, and an absent right earlobe. These folks had no distinguishing features, other than poorly disguising themselves as human. The comic strips where little kids stack themselves three for one, under a street-flasher coat to try and get into the cinema? I’d buy that before I was convinced by my friends’ costumes.
The folks at CODA aren’t very generous about explaining things thoroughly, even to those of us intimately engaged in their time travel program. More specifically, at CODA, the process is called spatial reconstitution. The specifications given to someone like me are only need-to-know rules that we’re urged to abide. I’d assume the poor dolt doing the travelling would need to know a bit more than they thought I did, but that’s why I’m not in management. That’s why they picked some miscreant Coloradan. Enough sand for the job, but too dull to ask important questions. Somebody at CODA must have grown up watching cowboy movies with their father and, when it came to selecting a lab rat, raised his hand to suggest an Ike Clanton sort-of-fucker.
I never met the real Ike, but I often debated whether I preferred what Grant Withers did with the fella in the John Ford film or if I favoured Stephen Lang in the version Kurt Russell lowkey directed. I enjoyed westerns, whether in cinemas or living rooms. But I was always amused by the near complete inaccuracies. If I ever get out of this alive, I’ve daydreamed over using my terminal bonus to produce my own, authentic western film.
I have reason to believe it’d do poorly at the box office. Most folks don’t appreciate authenticity.
What I Learned
Alien by Bush plays an accompaniment to my insecurity about being thought of as a redneck among the suits at CODA.
I can take inanimates with me but not people or animals. Plants come across, but end up withered. Plants are important, particularly to my mission, to my friends. If I die, instead of returning to CODA, I am reconstituted at my home base: Hibernia, Colorado, 1876.
Unlike when I travel deliberately, if I die, none of the things I collected along that particular visit end up coming home with me. Among a swath of the times I spent here and there, I encountered and learned to play video games. Let me tell you: they’d be a hit with the folks at home. I know a handful of shitkickers in Hibernia who would likely set new high scores on games like Duck Hunt. Point being, in one of the games I played, when I died, my loot landed on the ground to be cannibalised by other players. I wondered, each of the times our friends put an end to me, if my possessions were similarly left behind to be plundered.
They aren’t actually my friends. Alien wasn’t really a word I knew until CODA took me to their offices in 2076 and told me too much insane shit for one meeting’s worth of headspace. The word has never felt comfortable in my mouth. So I just call them my friends.
I have put a lot of effort, where time travel is concerned, into piecing together what I could through popular culture. Movies and science fiction novels present interesting theories about the physics, the plausibility of the idea. Even after intimately engaging with it enough times that I’ve stopped bothering to tally, I’ve decided humans don’t and won’t understand time travel, even after achieving it. The scientists at CODA have always seemed to just sort of guess at it and hope for the best. Like Hollywood folks with the Old West. It’s one of those ungodly things I suppose people don’t care to admit they understand a lot less about than they actually do. Far as I’m concerned, it’s because maybe we aren’t supposed to understand it.
After explicating the specifics of the position, CODA explained to me that I could accept the terms or become a smudge.
I will add, by way of doing more than bitching, that I have been consistently pleased by the amount of extra time my position affords me. I’ve collectively spent years studying, learning, trying to understand my friends. But whenever I return to Hibernia, not one day has passed. I’m the same age and nobody knows I was gone. A handful of times, Clara or Frog have noted that I’d been difficult to track down for an hour or so. I’ve guessed at it before, nights when I couldn’t sleep. Between all my slipping around, I’ve probably put in twelve or so extra years, and without the mileage.
A detail I’ve been grateful for is that injuries, fatal ones especially, don’t translate. I suppose it’s to my advantage. I already look unready for prom night. Across my mishaps, I’ve incurred:
spilt guts, eight times. One time with bare feet, the damp warmth of which felt especially off-putting;
head somehow exploded, four times. CODA always wants to know how they do this and interrogates me about every little detail. They care less about the experience of having my head blown up and more about trying to figure out how my friends perform their little party trick;
every one of my limbs torn clean off, in some combination of one or more, thirteen times;
head sliced in half, twenty-one times. They like that one and will use whatever object is readily available to execute it;
only once, thankfully, they pushed all ten of my fingers down into my hands before killing me. Boy, was that one unpleasant, especially because of how strong they are: the small bones attached to the fingers all just got jammed up and out of the skin on my forearms.
And that’s just a rough list. Luckily, they’ve never fucked with my fun parts. I have the impression their setup is totally different and they don’t even know what fun parts are or why we would abhor their violation.
My friends, for their part, are nearly impossible to injure, but their injuries aren’t erased by their spatial reconstitution the way mine are. So, if I can land a clean shot, I can spot the weaker ones later (or earlier, depending), and do further damage to them with greater ease.
Botany
The Royal We by Silversun Pickups plays. I have eaten more plants, out of curiosity, than I’d care to admit. I’ve fallen quite ill from some of them. Once or twice, I died and had to lie to CODA that my friends had poisoned me.
Even though the plants always came back ruined like the ones in E.T., I still brought them all over the place with me. It became clear, early on, that my friends’ whole MO was the dogged pursuit of something plant-based.
I spent a lot of my bonus lifetime studying plants, flowers in particular. I learned the things my friends weren’t looking for each of the times I attempted to present the incorrect plant and, for my failure, was tattered or lit a fire or god knows what.
I often distracted myself by adding entries to a handwritten list of favourite plants, based solely on their names, many of which tickled me: whip-poor-will; lady slipper; narcissus; juniper; bougainvillea; prickly-pear; nasturtium; geranium; plumeria; chrysanthemum; dandelion; jacaranda; corsage; boutonnière; wallflower; jacob’s ladder; cockscomb; mother-in-law’s tongue; widow’s tears; witch’s moss.
I would never describe the hours, days, weeks, months that I spent in libraries, public and private (CODA has campus ID and logins for just about every major university), as wasted time. That said, I definitely allowed myself to dawdle in the aisles. There were other distractions, but, as far as I saw it, they were worthwhile opportunities for enrichment that, were I ever confronted by a superior, I could justify as necessary to my mission. Why not know as much as possible when it’s clear you know fuck-all about your enemy?
For example, one of the entertaining bits I came across related back to my home. I learned that the word saloon is originally derived from the Middle French word for salon—a large hall, basically. If one digs far enough, they can discover the route the etymology traced, eventually leading to saloon, from Germanic to Old English, and so on. Though, that’s the less interesting detail. Roots of the word aside: essentially, in its attempt to evoke the fancier qualities associated with French culture, the Old West mistranslated the French salon to saloon. Another reminder that folks from my time aren’t especially gifted where intellect’s concerned.
Materialism
Life on Mars? by David Bowie plays as I perform a mental inventory of the trunk I stole in Missouri and brought to Colorado years before my enlistment with CODA.
As for the things I brought home: keeping my cache of treasure stashed away was easy enough. Clara always allowed me my privacy and never seemed interested in knowing what I kept locked in the trunk at the foot of the bed she and I shared.
Travelling with any paraphernalia was expressly forbidden, but I was not a greedy person. Still, once I realised I could pull it off, I started collecting a little less prudently. My favourite souvenir is an iPod, which I’d have no means of explaining in Hibernia. Hell, I’ve hardly the vocabulary to make sense of it to myself. I do know that I have to remind myself to charge it before coming home, otherwise, there ain’t shit to do with it when I’m here and have the idle time for music.
The Morning After
The Beginning Is The End Is The Beginning by The Smashing Pumpkins plays as I elucidate the unexpected and unfortunate aftermath of my friends’ arrival.
I’ll never forget the periwinkle blossoms of light blemishing the storm’s ephemera. The moon had hardly quit its post by the time patches of Hibernia’s roads revealed themselves to the first chapter of my homely town’s final episode. I had managed to destroy another locale, this time the place I called home, the earliest hitching post with which I’d managed to acquaint my friends.
Despite the town’s namesake, the landscape wasn’t characterised by abundance, but winter was distinguishable in the wings. Last night’s visitors had hastened the cold’s foothold.
One knows their tribe. Not a matter of other tribes being one thing or the other. But, with a patch of folks this small, when it’s miles before anyone else is meant to be passing through, one takes note of the features that coalesce into an unfamiliar face.
When I awoke that morning, Clara Clowton—my wife—was snoring through the third act of her dreams. The locals, not so secretly, called her Clow Pie. I found this amusing, specifically because she better resembled a sow.
Despite her resemblance to an ungulate, she was a warm companion in bed, mean-spirited in a fight, and could get the upper hand over most men in arm-wrestling. I’ve also never eaten better stew, no matter how thinly our means were stretched. Clara could make a decent meal out of coyote scat and scrub brush.
From the horsehair mattress, I grasped after the scraps of rest I could salvage. I’d been stirring for hours, worried over the scene Frog McGettigan and I had abandoned the night before. I imagined Frog would be molesting our threshold before long.
Clara rolling over to face me with sodden slumber’s hot exhalation was enough to motivate my exit from our shared blanket.
Shimmying my long-John’d legs into overalls, I heard Frog’s characteristic assault at the door. Before I’d hooked either bib strap, I shuffled to let him inside.
Nobody stood before my open door, but I observed, before turning back inside, a withered petal suspended atop the mud connecting the base of my stairs with the footpath to town.
Upon real Frog’s arrival, I did not mention the knock I’d hoped I’d imagined. A sky of spoiled milk informed our mud-sucking steps from my little camp back to town.
Frog did not speak, retracing his boot prints ahead of mine.
After I’d returned from the saloon in the predawn blackness, before easing herself onto me, Clara had made note of our town’s fresh guests. Fresh, not in the sense of fumbling with skirts or having had one-too-many. Fresh, as in: ought to be stating a reason for passing through, before some of the less social folks take issue.
‘Odd sort,’ she’d said, implying more with her tone than words, snorting through phlegmy nostrils while fumbling with my attempted rigidity.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Those folks.’ She nodded at the window that pointed toward our estimation of a town, patiently grasping, tugging, directing.
I shifted to place my palms, hands down, below my hips. ‘No denying it.’ Kicking the blanket fully from the bed, I added, ‘But how do you mean? Further than what we said before?’
‘It’s eating at me.’
‘I can tell.’
‘They ain’t folks. Not like us.’
I, of course, knew more precisely than she realised, what she meant and was again turgid enough to fake it through the sort of dry encounter we all know follows a night of boozing.
Once Clara won the race, she wasn’t long for sleep. I’d stuttered around the inside of our cabin a few hours more, finishing any dregs I could unearth.
Even with all the bonus years I’ve added on, I have had that much less sleep for them. I don’t sleep anymore. Not much, anyway.
That night, when I eventually pretended sleep, I could hear screams out there, so few hundreds of yards away. I couldn’t tell, really, if they were issued by people or animals, but I assumed it was both. Whatever crashing explosions emitted from the distance weren’t lightning. But when they struck, the front half of our cabin was lit as if by midday sunlight.
I’d thought about wandering back on my own, unarmed. Frog had been insistent when we quit the saloon that we both get rest and head back with an actual plan the next morning.
Monday Morning, Hibernia
Hazy Shade of Winter by The Bangles plays while I take count of everyone I knew before CODA, excepting Frog and Clara, slaughtered in the streets. Bits of used-to-be-folks slowly buried by flakes of snow. Ashes of missed appointments and forgotten obligations.
In town, the importance of the minor bit of sleep I’d managed was clear.
The main street was festooned with remains. Milt Roebuck was no more than a sopped rag draped over the saloon’s left door. Frog pushed aside the right swinging door and stepped past Milt.
Inside the saloon, Randolph Boyers was still sort of seated at the piano where he’d been when I left the night before. Those too-few hours earlier, he’d been performing an underwhelming rendition of something gaudy but folksy. Everyone else wasn’t more than loose parts spread around pools of blood, viscous like melted wax where they’d started to coagulate. Where the integrity of the building had been compromised, the splintered lumber had frozen into hoarfrost quills.
Frog craned his neck around to search for the spittoon that normally adjoined the tack piano. Someone had kicked the brass cuspidor toward the opposite side of the bar, its oyster-adorned molasses still wet on the floorboards. Frog spat without a target and made his way back out through the swinging door, adding, ‘Said something felt off.’
‘I didn’t argue you that.’ It was always hard not to just explain the situation to these folks who, over time, I grew to view as being simple and slow-minded as they actually were. I resented that I ended up judging all of them the more I educated myself.
Frog hauled up his britches by absent belt-loops. I sidestepped scraps of Cora, Ames Carson’s nine-year-old, gussied up as if for a ball. The young girl was clutching a small bouquet of flowers against her chest. A smattering of flakes loitered here and there. I could see moisture on the petals.
I was almost all the way around what was left of her before I felt compelled to stop. I’d known this girl. I’d known her father since childhood. She was clutching the ruined nosegay so tightly it seemed as though she may have assumed it would save her in the end. She’d been praying.
I found my steps cemented, as I stared into the reddish black hole of a once-was face. The wound was accented with fibrous grey clumps. The way she was presented was meant for me to see. They wanted me to know they were here for me. She’d been put in her Sunday best, given a bouquet, taken from her home, and placed in the street for me to notice.
Frog stopped in the middle of the road and looked left, then right, judging more busted up storefronts. We made it a bit further before Frog paused again, this time out front of Wade Tefton’s, eying the pine-box accented storefront. The fresh-cut wood offered insufficient perfume to mask the foul, bodily stank that’d garnished Hibernia’s overnight dusting of snow.
Frog pivoted on his heels to ascend the steps to Wade’s shop. His back rose and fell in a protracted breath. After pausing a beat, he made his way back to the road and we continued, wordlessly. As we passed it, he kicked at the remaining bottom half of a man whose identity might have been difficult to discern.
For the first time since arriving at my residence, Frog turned to look at me. ‘You did see that? Last night?’ I made a face that Frog misinterpreted, so he added, ‘Before I said we oughta leave out.’
Getting Close
Thunderstruck by AC/DC plays as I consider the implications of the reality that the goddamn aliens are here in Hibernia. I’d been busy watching westerns and fetishizing plants. I ought to have seen this coming.
The night prior, even though most of us knew the colder weather was in store, none of the residents of our modest Colorado stopover had planned for any sort of storm, electrical or otherwise.
After surveying what there was to see and finding no assailants to blame, we agreed to head home. On the way back through town, we passed Cora Carson again. Her remains were undisturbed, her hands in the same position, clenched at her sternum.
The gnarled fingers grasped at nothing.
As I made my way back to the cabin, I began noticing them, here and there. I knew from the first petal on the ground, obscured by the slightest snow, where they came from and where they were headed. With each petal added, larger and larger groupings, the further along, my pace quickened, until I was nearly sprinting through the last several yards of slush to the front of my cabin, where Cora’s plucked nosegay was carefully set on my porch.
Pushing the door open with my shoulder, pistol drawn, I called to Clara. As her name was about to leave my mouth a second time, I turned the corner to see what they’d done to my wife where I’d left her in our bed.
I ought to have known.
Standing slack-jawed and limp-limbed before my dead spouse, I snapped myself back into my present situation, remembering I was likely not alone. I brushed my fingertip up and down the trigger of my pistol while looking over the rest of the cabin. Finding the inside clear, I stepped into the yard, edging along the walls until I’d traced the full perimeter of the dwelling.
No tracks. Just the deflowered bouquet and a dead wife.
Back inside, I discovered news that left me further distressed. The locked trunk in which I kept my equipment from CODA had been busted into, as if someone much stronger than I had pulled the lid until the lock halved.
My time travel equipment and CODA transmitters were gone. No means to get out of here or talk to CODA. It was just me back here in Hibernia in 1876. Nothing but a pistol and an ugly mug.
I was less worried about my life, about Clara’s, about Frog, who it occurred to me they might actively be killing. What was most immediately pressing was the realisation that, depending on how I played this, it might be curtains for a bunch of other folks in different times and places soon.
John the Baptist
Heads Will Roll by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs plays. All these years of trying to deal with my friends, this is the first time I’ve ever felt what I would describe as dread.
It was always about the flowers. No matter where or when I came across my friends, the thing I couldn’t wrap my head around—the motivation that guided them—was their interest in flowers. Despite all their efforts, CODA never could assess the best way to engage with my friends. The idea was to understand what it was about flowers that they needed or, more specifically, what quality the plants possessed.
What we did always know was that it never had anything to do with actual resources, at least not usable in the sense that our society had invented a word to define them. No, it had to do with aesthetics.
For my friends, it has never been about oil or coal or food or livestock or crops or money. It was never labour or wealth or power. It was never about a holy land or a right to its soil. It was flowers, petals, leaves, sepals, stamens, carpels, peduncles, corollas, filaments, ovaries, pollen.
In too many timelines, I was sent off to barter a deal where we might give them whatever specific varietals they were after. But before we knew it, we accidentally offered them time travel instead. Now my friends could go looking for the flowers themselves, in between all the folks they murdered.
The flower hang-up is an ultimate irony because, at least as far as we could observe, my friends are incapable of the ability to smell. One of the ones CODA managed to capture and butcher displayed nothing even similar to olfactory organs. Over time, I came to think of my friends as exquisite corpses: primate mandibles without slots for teeth, embedded in chimeric jellyfish with countless anemone eyes flowering from their estimation of a body. They had this creepy way of floating around aimlessly, like you’d imagine heartbroken spirits in Gothic novels. You can see why stolen wardrobes and plastic masks didn’t help them blend in much.
Grateful Rest
Eternal Flame by The Bangles plays while my friends murder me, again. There is always a moment, when consciousness departs, that mirrors the regret directly following onanism.
Crossing the shit-laden mud and increasingly snow-covered yard, I could see that they already had Frog naked. It was an odd habit of theirs. They never did anything investigative or bizarre with our bodies, like filmmakers worry over. In theatres, I laughed out loud—after all I’d been through—while watching Fire in the Sky. Regardless of why they stripped us, I assumed they’d learned this routine from real scenes in human history rather than fictions.
I’d sort of imagined, at points, people would become better. Or, maybe it was blind hope. I was excited to see all that humans could be capable of, once I knew I’d be travelling through time. Seeing other folks and their cultures. Wouldn’t that be neat?
It isn’t. We aren’t neat. It’s all horror for eternity, and most of what people call advancements do little to actually change anything. Least of all for the better.
There is one culture. It’s ugly and barbaric, across time and social mores. If you’re reading these notes, I’d like to claim that I’m not a part of it. But aren’t we all a goddamned part of it? Each of us is no better than my friends. From what I’ve seen, at least they’re advantaged over people by not being deliberately evil. They’re just cruel like nature, like animals in a documentary. It’s a utilitarian nastiness. Humans intend for it to mean something when they hurt one another.
How much can one person really claim to calibrate their moral compass? I imagine my friends saw this for what it is. Either way, they knew damn well why I’d returned to town: a futile attempt to save Frog. In addition to being nude, he already had a headstall thrown over his face, the bit pulled taught into his open mouth, crowding his tongue up the back of his throat. The shanks were drawing plasma from the raw compromises already present on his cheeks.
‘Look,’ I started, holding up Cora’s headless nosegay. ‘I can help you find what you—’ three of them moved forward with the seamlessness of mucus, so I lifted my free hand in front of me. I was surprised they stopped.
They were giving me a chance to state my position. Maybe my friends understood me better than my cynicism had afforded them.
But my friends aren’t notorious for patience. The one that had been holding the reins connected to Frog’s bit pulled it back through his mouth, bisecting his head as a hot knife through butter. The top half of his cleanly sliced melon rolled on the ground, gathering turds and snowy dirt in its sparse hair before settling near my feet.
‘Listen, I have been trying to’—again holding the beheaded bouquet in front of my chop-topped friend— ‘help you find what you need, but if you don’t want to work with me’—I repositioned my feet and brushed my chest, starting over with renewed confidence. ‘It seems like you might be looking for a specific’—I diverted, again sidewinding, this time to avoid where cottage cheese had started sliding from the top half of Frog’s skull.
I wasn’t allowed a chance to finish. I trailed off, realizing my abusive relationship with my friends was about to come to its consistent and inevitable end.
It was always fascinating to observe their dexterity, fingerless hands deftly enveloping coveted objects or dismembered body parts. Something kicked the hindside of my knees, immediately putting me down with my hands in the mud, the stems fallen somewhere out of sight. One of the others had already picked up Frog’s half a head and was bringing it, crown-forward, to my face. They’d done this one to me before.
Epilogue
Waiting for a Star to Fall by Boy Meets Girl plays. I’m alive, somewhere that isn’t Hibernia. I shouldn’t be alive. My friends have quite the sense of humour.
I am standing outside of what should have been a secret, secure meeting point. It’s 2076, and I’m nude in front of the ruins of a building, still aflame. No longer Colorado snow but embers falling around me, stinging my skin before extinguishing themselves.
My iPod is in my hand, the buds already in my ears.
I realise the building is CODA.
My friends improved on our time travel. They figured out how to bring people.
There is too much else they must already know, enough that it’s terrifying to guess at. Who knows what they’ve got set up for me, but I’m never one to turn down an invitation. Haven’t a damned thing to lose, now.
I suppose my first goal ought to be acquiring clothes.
I press play on my iPod. When I hear the song that starts up, I smile. Whether they’d taught themselves irony and were smart-asses enough to choose it for me, or if it was just chance that this was the song fate picked to backdrop the moment, it got a chuckle out of me. Anyhow, what’s life without appreciating the fleeting amusements it offers up among its leavings?
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