A Stitch in Time

[Mlle Bienvenu]

Object
It was green.

Well, not the whole thing, of course. Don’t be stupid. Naturally the whole thing wasn’t green. Most of it was white. But that’s beside the point; the part you noticed was green and that’s what matters.

The odd thing about it was that my uncle had black eyes, so why he wanted a green glass eye was beyond my comprehension. I was only a lad, but still! It seemed that even the grown-ups didn’t understand it any better than I. Nonetheless, he remained as avuncular as ever, oblivious, I suppose, to the sniggers he received from his saner relatives. Or maybe he just couldn’t see their pointing and staring out of his one good eye.

My brother, on the other hand, thought there was nothing in the world more fascinating than that glass eye. (“Can I hold it?”) My brother has always been a bit off, if you ask me. Every time our uncle would visit, he would beg the man to tell him the story about how he’d lost his eye. Mother (God rest her soul) would protest, but he’d always wave her away saying, “Nonsense, Marta! The boy’s got an inquiring mind!” Honestly, I have no idea how Mother (God rest her soul) and Uncle could possibly be related.


The story was always different (I’m not sure if my brother ever noticed); he’d lost it while he was on a campaign in India, or in the Sudan, or held hostage by savages, or it got pecked out by ravens, or eaten by a pack of wolves, or it was the price he’d paid to a voodoo master to save his life from being possessed by evil spirits. The more impossible the story, the more rapt my brother’s attentions. He’d sit still and listen while my uncle’s bottle-green glass eye would loll about in his head, not following where his real eye looked. It just stared straight ahead.

He delighted in popping the false eye out of his head, then discreetly placing it in the bottom of his teacup and asking for a cuppa. When Mother (God rest her soul) went to pour the tea, she’d let out a small cry and practically drop the teapot brimming with scalding hot tea. (And usually managing to pour a great deal of hot tea on my uncle’s trousers) He’d just chortle, his jowls shaking, and pat his trousers with his handkerchief saying things like, “That’s a good sport Marta old gal! Hardly felt a thing!”. Mother (God rest her soul) never knew whether to be angry with him for frightening her, or sorry for spilling the tea all over his trousers. With that, he’d pluck the false eye from the cup, dry it off with his handkerchief and pop it back in his head, still chortling, while scowls, grimaces and rather shocked and embarrassed expressions ran around the table, except for one wide grin belonging (not surprisingly) to my brother.

[Mlle Bienvenu]

Awakening
When the Great War broke out in Germany, I was called away to France to serve king and country. I could tell you some interesting war stories that can curl hair, but I won’t because we’d be getting off track. Some other time perhaps. The point I am trying to make is that this was the next time I saw my uncle. There he was, standing true as life, not 20 meters down the line of the trench. It was rather surprising actually, he looked almost exactly the same as when I had seen him as a child. But I didn’t have much time to think about it, because a fresh wave of Germans were advancing towards our trench and the gunman had been hit by shrapnel and I was to take his place manning the machine gun.

I woke up some time later, quite disoriented.

“Ah! You’re awake, I see.” Said an overly jovial voice that seemed vaguely familiar to me.

“Where am I?”

“You’re in hospital, you had gotten quite a nasty wound to the head. It was lucky I got there when I did. If I hadn’t you surely would have bled to death.”

“Oh.” I said dully. I was still rather disoriented and my head seemed too bandaged up to be able to see the stranger.

I can’t tell you how long I stayed there. The days blended together between blindingly painful headaches and blissful unconsciousness. But eventually the headaches began to subside and the days seemed more coherent and orderly.

“I think it’s time we took those bandages off.” Said the nurse, or doctor, or whoever it was that had been caring for me these past days, weeks, months. Carefully, the bandages were removed. The first thing I noticed was that I couldn’t possibly be in hospital. The room was alien to me. There were all manner of curious objects. It looked more like a very comfortable workroom than the antiseptic air of a hospital.

The next thing I noticed was that I couldn’t see out of my other eye.

“I – my eye.” I said dumbly, in shock.

“I know.” He sighed soberly, “A bit of shrapnel shattered the cornea, nothing we could do. I’m sorry”

I finally looked upon the person who had been caring for me these past days. It was the last person I expected.

“Uncle!” I stammered, “What are you doing here!”

He chuckled softly, but there was no mirth in it, “If I told you now. You wouldn’t believe me anyway. Heh! I wouldn’t believe me!” He guffawed loudly as if he found this very amusing. I did not see the joke, “Do you need anything before I leave?”

“No. I want to be alone.”
“I thought you might.” He left.

What were the chances of all this occurring? They must have been astronomical. Meeting Uncle in the middle of nowhere, saving me from bleeding out, me loosing the very same eye that my uncle had lost. It was all very strange.

I don’t know if he sensed my dis-ease with the situation, or just felt I needed some time to sort through the shock of loosing half my vision. But he hardly talked to me at all. He slunk about the house, avoiding me at every turn. (I had discovered I was, in fact, in a large old manor house. ) I had taken to long walks through the endless sets of corridors, poking my head inside rooms, climbing staircases, thumbing through bookcases. That was how I stumbled across the strangest room of all.

This room had a completely different feel than the other rooms. The floor was carpeted with a soft springy latch hook design from wall to wall, instead of the usual wooden floor and Persian carpets. An oddly shaped couch lined the entire corner of one wall and a strange panel hung on the wall, where a moving picture was displaying, although I couldn’t find where the projector was. I was transfixed by the images. They were in brilliant color and the images were so crisp, I could have sworn I was looking out of a window. It must have taken a master filmographer to color the frames with such fine detail.

“Tom!” I turned abruptly. Uncle stood in the doorway with a bewildered expression on his face. He mopped his brow with his handkerchief, “What are you doing in here?” He pulled a small box from a low table in front of the couch, pressing a button, the projector turned off.

“I was. . . walking. Can I see that?” I took the black box full of buttons from my uncle, who didn’t protest. He muttered to himself, “Well, I should have known you would come here. Smart boy like you. Yes, knew it was a matter of time.”

I wasn’t listening. I was staring at the box in amazement. There were no wires. Just buttons. Could it possibly work through some sort of wireless communication? A marconi invention perhaps? And where was he hiding the projector?

“Can I have that back please?,” I handed him the device, “Thank you. Ah, I think you’d better sit down.”

He ran his fingers through his thinning hair, “Have you noticed anything odd about me?” He began carefully. I snorted. What hadn’t I noticed odd about him? “Yes, well I see your point. I must seem very odd to you. Do you know what I do for a living?”

“History, don’t you teach history?”

“Yes. Well, yes…that’s true.” He mopped his brow again and muttered to himself, pacing back and forth, “Did you know my name is Thomas too?”

“Yes. Mother said I was named after you.”

“Yes… okay yes.” He continued his pacing in silence, “Are you familiar with the theories of Mr. Einstein?” He continued pacing.

“The Austrian? I’ve heard of him, but I don’t follow that sort of thing.”

“How about Olinto de Pretto?”

“No. I’ve never heard of him. I told you I don’t follow that crowd..”

“You will, my boy, you will…”he chortled although his face held no mirth.

I gave him a funny look, “Uncle, what the devil are you driving at?” He was certainly acting odd, odder than usual, even. And it was beginning to give me a headache.

“Well it’s difficult to explain, you see, especially when you don’t know anything about Einstein’s theories. You will, of course, the thing is, I don’t remember this happening this way…” He once again fell to pacing and muttering to himself.

Time
Place
People
Event

[Mlle Bienvenu]

Object Introduces the character of his uncle, his brother and his mother

Awakening – finds out his uncle is actually himself in the future, His brother is also himself, but he doesn’t know it yet…

Time – he learns how time travel works. Engages in dubious time travel practices, (ie everything your not supposed to do to the timeline. Ethics be damned) Gets rich off of foreknowledge of events. (races and things) Devises new theories of history, is

Place – travels to his house when he was a child, creates his 'brother' copy.

People – He looks at the three incarnations of himself, finally realizing that the whole business is unnatural

Event - Everything comes full circle when he realizes he has to allow himself to back to that fatefull day in WWI and allow himself to die.

Mother (Marta)- outside influence

Tom (Uncle)- Id

Tom (Narrator)- Superego

Tom (Brother)- Ego

[Mlle Bienvenu]

Time

My Uncle was a time-traveler. Not only that, he was me, from the future, or I was him. I was still much too confused to ponder on the hows and wherefores of time travel. And then, there was still the fact that my uncle could simply be mad.

I spent the next week or so avoiding him. Whether he was avoiding me as well, I couldn’t guess. It would take a little more than a fancy new projection device to make me think time-travel was possible. I spent significant amounts of time in the strangely decorated room examining the odd devices (which, by the way, didn’t convince me of the existence of time-travel one iota) While I was yet again examining the device he called a DVD player (what the letters stood for I don’t remember nor do I particularly care), he came walking in the room with a resolute expression on his face.

“Now see here Tom, I know this is all very strange and sudden for you, but I’m determined to win your confidence. Would you like to see my time vessel”

I said nothing, but followed him out of the room. I was led down to the basement of the house into another strange room that was even more oddly decorated, for it was chock full of blinking and strangely humming inventions.

“Now, those over there, are my prototypes, they work, of course but aren’t as accurate as this one.” He grinned widely, like a child showing off a new toy and pulled back a curtain partitioning off part of the basement.

Inside was a sphere large enough to accommodate at least five people inside it (I assumed it was hollow, which I found out later it was) along the was what I assumed to be a control panel.

Uncle reached into his pocket and pulled out what looked like a large coat button. He put it down on the floor and stared at it for a minute or so (I thought he was mad) but then another button appeared by it’s side and he picked both buttons up and handed one to me. “Temporal copying,” He chortled, “ Amazing isn’t it?”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

“The first time around, I put the button on the floor, waited five minutes or so, then picked up the button, put it in the time sphere and sent it back a few minutes, which made it appear here again…hence, two buttons at the same time. It’s really the same button, amazing no?”

“Then why doesn’t it disappear now that you aren’t sending the button back in time.”

He gave me a perplexed look and cocked his head to one side, “I haven’t quite figured that out yet. Can’t know everything about timetravel, wouldn’t be very fun, now would it?”

“Fun? Do you realize the damage you can do with this sort of technology?”
“Oh posh, Don’t you believe what Jules Verne and H. G. Wells wrote about time-travel, it’s fiction, that is. This is real, not the same thing. They don’t know what they’re talking about because they haven’t done it, have they? As far as I know, this is the only time-sphere in the world.”

[Mlle Bienvenu]

People

I am Tom. I have learned of my true history and have judged it appalling. Am I really that … machiavellian? Or Careless? Or malevolent? It didn’t bother me that I was dashing the natural order of things to bits? By the look of my avuncular self, apparently I had no qualms against it.

Brother Tom
I too, am Tom. I grew up a part of this amazing experiment. My life is inextricably linked to it. It’s amazing isn’t it? How different the same person can be? I never get over how different my ‘brother’ and I are, and my uncle. How we are conditioned from birth to different roles which shape our very personalities. I grew up the youngest, my brother, the eldest, and my uncle grew up an only child. Look at our differences. The versatility of the human spirit!

Uncle Tom:
I am Tom, the first to commit acts of time travel in the name of humanity (but mostly my humanity.)How did this arise? It all started when I met Marta. She is the mastermind behind it. Neither of my young Tom’s know of Marta like I know her (yes, she is still alive. I’m not sure she can die, really.) She is the one who gave me the machine, or the idea of the machine. My muse.

[Mlle Bienvenu]

Place

“There’s nowhere in time you’d wish to go? Nowhere at all?”

“Well…I…er…”

Uncle taught me how to use the sphere. I was still rather nervous about it, but it seemed like I was the only one. He didn’t think it strange to pop off to the future to find out about the results of a horse race, or just to see what the weather will be like tomorrow. Or to go into the past to investigate a historical question he’d been wondering about.

And then, there was that nagging thing at the back of my mind. Something I’d always wanted to do…I wanted to see my mother alive again. She had died of consumption the year I entered into the armed forces, and the memory was still fresh in my mind, If I could only see her again….

“I know there’s somewhere you’d like to go…or someone you’d like to see again eh?” My uncle got a twinkle in his eye and nodded at me in approval.

“Mum…I would like to see mum again, just this once.”

“Good man!” He laughed and clapped me on the back.

“I think we’ll both go, since it’s your first time and all. Now, the buttons here send you back home, that is, here. They are tracing devices, don’t loose yours.” I nodded, I couldn’t believe I was doing this.

I set the dial. My hands were shaking and I jumped a the great unknown machinery whirred to life.

I suddenly felt as though I was being torn apart and melted back together again…I would have screamed but I don’t believe I had a mouth, and wondered how it was I was thinking at all.

It was rather dark when I arrived in my old childhood house. I went straight to my mum’s room, for I had set it for my birthday the year she had died. I remembered I had wanted to tell her something, It had been nagging me for ages and now I would be able to lay it to rest. I would tell her.

I walked into the bedroom but was very surprised to see it filled with people, my mother, my father, a midwife… My mother was lying on the bed while the midwife hovered over her…I looked at my mum, who didn’t notice me, she was too busy birthing. I was at a birth, and then, I realized. It was my birth. What the hell had gone wrong?

I checked the dial which was on the button my uncle had given, it indeed said my birthday. I must have hit the control panel while the machine whirred to life.

Somehow I had missed the birth while I was pondering what had happened, the next thing I knew, I was being handed a screaming infant me… I was still holding the button at the time. I took the baby, from someone I recognized as my aunt (she must have thought I was Uncle.) but as I tried to get a handle on the squalling infant, I pressed the button.

Then next thing I knew, both me and my infant self were in the sphere. Panicking I looked at my uncle for guidance. He only looked at me quizzically.

“Give me the child.” He said smirking in an odd sort of way.

“What will happen now?” I said in a high voice.

“Not to worry, we’ll just bring the child back, come along.”

We entered the time sphere and I felt the ripping and melting sensation again. We were back at my mum’s at the time of my birth. But I could see myself holding the child, my uncle went over to my other self and quickly took the child from me and handed both babies to mother, who chortled over her newborn boys. Twins, she said.

I was dumbfounded. As was the midwife, who, for the life of her, couldn’t remember delivering two babies. Uncle talked to them ( I couldn’t hear what he said) and he seemed satified with the work he’d done. We left.

My brother was me.

[Mlle Bienvenu]

People

Finding out my uncle was me, wasn’t as big a shock as finding out my brother was me. All my life I had grown up with him…how had he turned out so different from myself? For that matter, why was my uncle so unlike my self. I considered.

My Uncle: grew up an only child, without an uncle Tom, presumably. Would being an only child affect him that much?

My Brother: Grew up with a sibling, as did I. But what made us so different? He didn’t seem disturbed by his uncle’s unscrupulous time-traveling, as I did. I asked him about it during breakfast the next day.

Did you know, you were me?

“Yes.”

“But how….?”

“Uncle told me, when I was younger…you know, the story about the glass eye…” He talked about it as if he was discussing something he’d read in the morning paper.

“Why didn’t you…you didn’t tell me…”

“Well I tried to once, but you told me to bugger off…after that, I figured it didn’t matter anyway…you’d never believe me.”

[Mlle Bienvenu]

Event

The battlefield is just as I had remembered it. Only this time, I didn't have the thrill of the battle's adrenaline raging through my veins. I feel oddly separate, strangely cold to the flying mortar and all the blood and mud. I think I know why. I don't belong here. I am a temporal aberration.

I crouch in the shadows near the gunman who was manning the machine gun the first time. I tried to recall his name, but for some reason, the name escapes me.

The gunman has fallen, and I watch as my other self, my original self takes his place, he didn't notice me in the shadows. I never noticed my self in the shadows, but whether it was because I really wasn't there until now, or the rush of battle dulled my senses, I couldn't be sure. Who knows how time operates? I know I didn't when I went on to inheret my time vessel, and I still don't know now.

I watche myself fall, my original self, the blood gushing from the shrapnel wound in my head. And then, something happens that I should have forseen, my so called uncle arrives, like he did the first time. How did he escape death the first time? None of my other selves were there to save him, I suddenly think. Maybe my mother? But there isn't time for that now, he is going to save me, and by so doing, convey a death sentence to the world.

I pull out my pistol, aim, but suddenly there is a flash of light to my uncle's side, at first I think it is an exploding shell, but it is my brother. I watch as he advances on my uncle, preventing him from getting at my bleeding-self in the mud. I feel light headed, I wonder if that is an effect of the surrounding or if it was death coming to claime me at last. I walk shakily out of the shadows, towards the other three, one holding the other at bay while the third lays in mangled in the mud.

"I-I knew what you were doing, I had to come." My brother self says.

"What are you playing at, dammit! Unhand me! I'm trying to save your lives you ungrateful- I saved your life!"

"The only life you are trying to save is your own. You should exist any more than I."

"Or I." I give my brother self a questioning look.

"I've always thought of you as my brother. " The look on his face is desparate to portray something, is it reconciliation? Is it love? I am not sure if my face has a similar look but my uncle's face was desparate as well, although an entirely different kind of desperate.

I look to where my uncle-self is looking, he stares at my dying-self, his younger-self. I look too, and so does my brother.

I can hardly imagine what will happen. When my other self dies, will I die too? Will 'Uncle' and my brother die as well? It is impossible to guess what the outcome will be. No one in the history of mankind had ever so wantonly tampered with time, (I hope to God no one with do it again) I wish I could leave some sort of account of my piteous misadventures behind me. But would anyone believe me if I did?