Chapter 6 Adam “The Passenger”
Adam
“The Passenger”
Jules looks so beautiful perched on the armchair, with soft pink light slanting in through the shed window gently illuminating that triangle of pale russet freckles on her right cheek, while accentuating the fine detail of those sweet wrinkles at the corners of her eyes that make her look like she’s perpetually on the brink of a smile.
Of course, the fact that her eyes are currently glazed over like she’s a member of the undead does rather ruin the effect. Giving her much more of an Exorcist vibe.
I check her pulse for the umpteenth time as the final song on this Memorex 60 cassette—Soul II Soul’s “Keep On Movin’ ”—comes to an end.
Will it have worked? Will she have gone back?
As the tape stops with a click, her eyes start to clear and she groans, disoriented, gawping around.
“Jesus Christ, Adam,” she squeals, launching herself at me and throwing her arms around my neck and squeezing me tight. “It’s bloody true.”
I feel sick with relief. I’m not mad. It really does work.
“I actually went back in bloody time.” She laughs, staring into my eyes, her forehead pressed to mine.
“I know.” My heart is pounding, buzzing that she’s experienced this too.
“I actually went back in bloody time and you’re absolutely bloody right about bloody everything.”
“I know.” And the only thing I know more than this is how much I’d pay to have her last sentence printed on a T-shirt that I could brandish for the rest of my life.
Spinning away from me, she grabs for a bottle of water and starts glugging it down.
Turning my back to her, I hit “Eject” on the Sony.
When I take out her tape, I see it’s already got that same warped, half-melted look as the first one I played and I bet it’ll unspool just the same if I try playing it again.
“Looks like you can only use them once, like it’s some kind of rule,” I say out loud. But a rule made by who? Made by what? Even just the thought of this sends a shiver down my spine.
Existential as fuck.
“It’s just so crazy, Adam. So weird,” she says from where she’s still standing behind me. “How did I look when I was gone?”
“Like a zombie.”
“And you just stayed here? Didn’t get dragged down into any screaming whirlwinds yourself?”
“Nope, like it only works for whoever plays the tape.”
Another rule.
“It really did feel just like you said it would,” she hurries on, pacing behind me now, as I examine the machine to see if there is anything obviously weird about it.
“Like I was visiting my own head, or younger head, whatever. Like a ride. And this is all totally incredible, right?” She’s rubbing her brow.
“Because I really did feel like I was actually there. In the Zap, with you and Darius and Ngozi. Then outside at the Troubs’s gig—remember?
When I gave you that exact tape, on the very first night we kissed. ”
Twisting me round, she goes to kiss me right here right now. Only then her grin falters and she’s pulling back, cocking her head like she’s never seen me before.
“What?” I ask.
“Your beard…”
“What beard?” I say. I might have camped out in the shed last night, but I shaved yesterday morning just the same as I do every morning. Quickly checking the mirror, I see a light dusting of stubble, a day’s growth, nothing more.
“You used to have one,” she blurts out, incredulously pawing my face.
“Well, yeah.” I think back to the gig she was just telling me about, to when I did sport some sort of bum-fluffy, lazy-arsed affair. “But that was more than thirty years ago,” I point out.
“No, an hour ago,” she says, not blinking. “You had a beard an hour ago, Adam. Right here in this shed. You had a full-blown beard before I stuck that tape in and pressed ‘Play.’ Just like you’ve had one ever since you were a student.”
What’s she talking about? “You’re joking,” I say.
“Do I bloody look like I’m joking?”
No, no she does not.
“But how does that even make sen—” I start to say.
Only suddenly I see where she’s going with this.
It’s like her tattoo, isn’t it? The way I made it vanish by going back in time and telling her she’d regret it.
And her then not remembering she’d ever had one because she’d never got one.
Even weirder, I also now have these odd “new” memories of her never having had a tattoo as well, sitting right here alongside my old memories of her always having had one.
Like somehow in my mind both histories now exist at once.
“Oh God, Jules,” I say, “what did you do?”
“Nothing, I didn’t do anything,” she tells me. “But I might have said something,” she admits. “Back on the beach after the Zap, I might have got her—the younger me—to just kind of hint to the younger you that…”
“That what?”
She throws her hands out. “That I don’t like stubble or beards, that I never have, that they’ve always given me the ick!
” Turning to the corkboard, she plucks off one of the old photos of me in my mid-twenties.
“And see,” she gasps, “it’s gone from here too.
You’re clean-shaven. And here, and here,” she says, quickly pointing out several more snaps of me in the following decades.
“My God,” I say, a crazy possibility dawning on me as I snatch up a page of my research that I printed out earlier.
“Listen, this is a quote from this cutting-edge dude—a theoretical physicist or something—Barak Shoshany. See, here in this BBC article, he says, ‘If time travel to the past is possible, it really should be possible to change things—but doing so will create an alternate timeline. Instead of creating a universe-breaking paradox, you would create a second universe with a different history.’ ”
“Fuck,” says Jules.
“Fuck indeed.”
“And you think that’s what we might have done? Created a new—”
“Maybe even twice,” I say, staring back at the Sony.
“Because what if this isn’t just a time machine, Jules?
What if it’s a multiverse machine? What if both times we traveled back and changed something, we caused whole new parallel universes to be created, just like this Barak Shoshany says?
Ones almost identical to our old ones, but not quite. ”
I feel my mouth drying out. Because, seriously, this whole concept is so insane that I feel like I’m squeezing my brain with both hands.
“Like you created one where I didn’t have a tattoo,” she says.
“Right. And only I remembered the previous universe where you did, because when I traveled back into the new future timeline I’d created, I somehow brought my memories of that previous universe with me, even as my consciousness blended into this new me.”
“And I then created another new universe—this one we’re in now—where you don’t have a beard?”
“Exactly. And only you remember the previous universe where I did. Because in this universe I’ve never had one since I shaved it off after we went to the Zap that night.”
“But everything else that happened between me telling you I didn’t like beards and now is the same as in the previous universes? Like us going to Darius’s party and having that fight and you then discovering this machine?”
“Correct. Unless…” Another mind-blowing thought occurs to me.
“What?”
“Unless we have changed something else,” I say.
“By accident. Something that neither of us has noticed yet. Oh, Christ.” I feel sick.
“What about the kids?” I look across at the Back to the Future DVD I watched this morning as part of my research, and picture that iconic scene where Marty McFly and his siblings start fading out of existence on the Polaroid clipped to his guitar.
“What if we said or did something in the past that’s changed or even erased who they are? ”
“Nelly,” Jules says, panic in her voice. “Our daughter’s name is Nelly.”
“Born on October 2, 2000,” I chip in.
“And named after Nelly Furtado, who released her first single, ‘I’m Like a Bird,’ the month before.”
“And Liam,” I add. “Our son.”
“Who was born April 20, 2003—”
“And named after Liam Gallagher, who released ‘Songbird’ in February that year, the first Oasis single he’d written on his own.”
Thank God, we both nod rapidly in agreement. Meaning these tally. We both have these same memories of them.
“But what if we’ve changed something else about them because of something else we said or did back then, something that made us then raise them in some other way?”
I quickly scrabble for the key and fumble it into the shed lock.
“I’ll check Liam,” I shout, racing up the garden path.
“I’ll do Nelly,” yells Jules, racing up behind.
Dashing past the open dining room doorway inside the house, I glimpse our daughter pacing, talking on the phone. Everything about her fits with my memories of her.
I thunder up the stairs into Liam’s room.
“What the hell?” he snaps, from where he’s sitting on his bed in his underwear, strumming a Fender Duff, the same bass he told me Max would be lending him, with Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger” chugging out of his speaker. Meaning so far so good, yeah? Who he is feels completely right too.
“Haven’t you heard of knocking?” he demands.
Resentment. Entitlement. Tick, tick. All pure, unadulterated Liam.
Even the injuries on his left hand look the same.
Making him definitely my Liam, right? Only…
shit. Jules created this timeline, didn’t she?
This same new timeline on which I’ve never had a beard and have no memory of ever having had one, even though on my original timeline, I apparently did.
So how the hell would I know if this Liam is the identical Liam from the last timeline that Jules left?
I wouldn’t. Only Jules would notice any changes that have taken place between her traveling back in time just now to 1993 and then coming back to here.
I dash downstairs and nearly run flat into Jules on her way up and explain all this. She then checks out Nelly in the dining room again, before running back upstairs to check on Liam too.