• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1122 0

out with Katie when the storm arrived. She’d just unloaded a guy who, a few weeks earlier, had looked like the one she’d spend her life with. But he’d proven to be too wrapped up in himself. Good-looking, kind to animals, bright future. Still, his conversation was limited to his own interests, to himself, and she’d given up. So they’d sat in Lenny Pound’s, and Dave had listened, assuring her everything would be okay, and she was lucky to have found out before she’d become emotionally involved (which, of course, was not at all the reality). The thunder had rumbled through the night, and eventually he’d taken her to her apartment. He saw that she didn’t want him to stay, so he’d suggested dinner the following evening, gone home, and turned on the late news. But a few minutes later, a lightning bolt knocked out the power.

He switched on a battery-powered lamp, picked up the Inquirer, and was still on the front page when the lights came back on.

Life was good, and getting better. The stacks of essays that lined the walls of his room would, by January, be gone. He would no longer have to worry about getting up in the morning. He would have no boss. And he saw no reason why he wouldn’t become wealthy. Overnight. He’d begun looking around for a new home. Something a bit more plush. He’d lost interest in the cabin-on-a-mountaintop plan. Maybe because his options were opening up. Maybe because he no longer felt an inclination to hide from the world. However that might be, he sat with the paper folded in his lap, thinking about Katie, wondering how he’d explain his new financial status to his family, and feeling fortunate. Everything—almost everything—was breaking his way.

The storm dwindled to a light sprinkle and an occasional rumble. He went out to the kitchen, got a piece of chocolate cake, and switched on the computer. A news roundup was reporting a six-car pileup on I-95. In Connecticut, a young man officially designated as retarded would be competing for the state chess championship, and another bank robbery had happened in South Philadelphia.

Then it was on to sports and weather. The Eagles’ new all-pro tight end had fallen down a flight of stairs and broken an ankle. A front was moving in from somewhere. Another storm.

Last time he’d had chocolate cake, he’d been sitting across the table from Sandy.

She would linger, he knew, a long time.

Against his better judgment, he tapped her name into the computer.

Her doctoral thesis was available. And some commentaries. He looked at them, but they were written for mathematicians, not for a love-struck time traveler.

Her three kids had also been successful. One had become a professional baseball player, though he’d never made it to the big leagues. Dave found a picture of him in a college uniform. Looks like me, he decided. Ah, that it could have been so.

Her husband had been a graduate of Wesleyan University. That would have been around 1928. On a whim, he called up the list of graduates for that year, but found no David Collins.

There was also none in 1927 or 1929.

Odd. He found himself hoping that maybe there was something not quite legitimate about Collins. Something that would cause Sandy to wish, somehow, she had been able to hold on to him. It was a selfish reaction, and pointed to a weakness in his character. But there it was.

In fact, he stayed with the search and discovered that Collins had graduated several years later. At the age of twenty-six. He’d started school late because he liked sailing. He owned a boat, and had made a part-time career taking tourists out to sea near his home on St Simons Island, Georgia. For a time, he said, he was content with sailing and thought about passing on college altogether. Ultimately, after the war, David Collins had become a dentist.

He sighed and shut the system down.

He always read for a while before going to sleep. Back in the old days, before Shel had shown up with his converters, it had been mostly novels, and maybe a few political books. But now he found himself reading Voltaire and Lamb and biographies of Galileo