(With apologies to American geography and culture)
I stand and watch the storm, a powerful thing I may not fight. It may not be true that lightning never strikes in the same place twice but, supposing for the moment that it were true, then surely once lightning has struck, the safest thing to do is stay put. Lightning can certainly strike close, a habit it shares with fate.
I was born and raised in a small town in the Midwest of the U.S. of A., where or when aren't important here. What matters, to me at any rate, is that I was one of those kids who really lived their spring years. For me as a nine-year-old boy the world was poured full of magic, it burst through the cinemas shining screens, fell as rain on my head and gusted on zephyrs of air carried across the flat land from the desert. Washed daily by the sun in magic baths of golden light, with the ground thump-jumping up to tread my sneakers soles.
At night I would hear the tap-ta-tap of Blind Pugh's cane in the gentle rapping of the porch seat against the balustrades and shiver, delighted in fear. A sponge, I waited for the world to soak through my skin and fill me with it's wonders, until fizzing blood took me on my toes to surf a tide of energy that scooped me up and ran my body, whooping and yelling before the deserts' breath, only my shadow a tether to tie me to the ground.
Running to break gravity's jealous embrace I would be joined somewhere along the track by my pace-setters, those partners in life's marathon who flew in from scooping the sun out of the brook or fishing the sky for clouds with brightly coloured kites. We moved almost as the legs of one great creature called youth, first one then the other pumping in and out until some unseen finishing tape snapped behind us and watery legs shook us to earth, gasping air to fuel our fiery lungs.
After an afternoon spent racing for new horizons, exploring the strange new worlds our minds mapped out, we often passed time as our batteries recharged by examining the puzzling, contradictory and frequently unfair behaviour of the grown-ups who ruled our lives. Inevitably though, a pause would come in the waterfall of words as our thoughts, like north-swinging compass needles turned home to the historian.
Eventually, one of us would, with studied nonchalance, voice to the pack the thought that lurked in the depths of all our minds, there to be seized upon with mannerly decorum, chewed and devoured.
`We could, if you're really bored, go and see the old man, you know, the historian.'
The Historian. Had he been younger, still bustling health more ready to spit cares to the wind and dare the world's rebuke than meekly submit to the tribulations of frail third age, then probably the ritual of feigned reluctance would have never been created. Things being as they were though, it just would not do to be obviously eager to go and listen to an old man spin tales about the past. We all loved to go, for he had a way with language that conveyed his enthusiasm and made it your own, when he was in mid-flow the air seemed heavy with a living history. Despite this we all knew what `street-cred' was even so long before the term had been coined, and so carefully disguised our eagerness.
Still and all, eager is what we were and so, shedding hay and plucking burrs from our clothes we went, accompanied by the slapping of tennis shoes on sidewalks. Weary bodies carried us to where our restive minds could slip free the traces and escape to explore other summers through other peoples eyes.
In our endeavours to not seem enthusiastic we would jostle to form a queue behind each other, almost trying to stand behind ourselves as we came to the boundary between the order of town and the jungle beyond. Here a simple picket palisade, paint peeling in the afternoon sun marked the perimeter of a forgotten outpost of some primeval forest left behind for us to love and explore.
Dark creeper vines swallowed trees whole amongst the close-growing bushes where hid cracked and crazily-paved tracks that we intrepid explorers could pursue through hedge-stacks arranged in no order to our own fabulous El Dorado, the forbidden city. By which I mean that in braving these native trails one could, with a little effort arrive sweat-drenched at the house and home of Mr Mobius, our very own much cherished cartographer of time's deep and mysterious channels.
Inside, amidst the cluttering scrap souvenirs of a voyagers' life waited a welcome in the form of fifty, sixty, seventy physical years rising up in an impressive slender crane that was Mr Mobius. Dripping words he escorted us to beanbags, chairs and boy-large patches of floor set into what he called the physical memory of his house, what my Mom called junk. Tucked safely into our nests, pigeons each in a hole we bore the casual chattered inquiries into the health of ourselves and uncounted relatives with as much impatient good grace as listless youth can muster.
"Here you are again, such fine lads come to waste another golden day of glittering opportunity offered you by the outside world here inside this dust-drowned tomb wherein I live. I ought to chase you out to try your hands as pirates, cops and robbers." his voice was a fine mellow mixture of accents, flying as he once said, between cities he had lived in and left, taking with him only the local rhythms of speech lock-sealed in his larynx.
"Or I should sell you as slaves to a smiling stranger, anything to better use the afternoon than sitting in this fallen house, frittering away the coins of your youth by listening to my nostalgic rambles."
"Oh no." we chorused,
"Oh, no!" then the clamouring began.
"Tell us of Harold, the tragic betrayer. Hacked into pieces by William's men for want of a sense of honour." or,
"Gettysburg, Lincoln fine and tall..." or maybe,
"Leonardo, the mad inventor-artist, cracking jokes for the Mona Lisa."
"Tell us of..." clamouring,
"Tell us," and again
"Tell..."
For that was the secret we were sworn to keep, Mobius was an historian who, growing tired of the endless debate, the constant searching out from soggy manuscripts, decided to run and build, build and travel, travel and see for himself the what's and who's of history's fabric. There followed a protraction of years uncountable spent shuttling the warp and woof woven by the Fates, those three mad old Greeks charged with embroidering the world.
"Originally it looked as though my destiny lay with the physical sciences, a natural genius at loosening the tangled theoretical knots that my colleagues found so perplexing I was offered little choice by my parents or tutors as to the career-path to follow. For a few years I did attempt to comply with their plans, but my heart just slumped in my chest whenever I tried to apply my talents to the tortuous issues of relativistic physics. For you see history was my love, my grand passion in life and nothing else could long lodge in my skull. Eventually everyone gave me up as a bad job and I found myself free at last to pursue my dream.
"Imagine then my shock, the undignified horror with which I greeted the premise handed out by the universities that history was the study of dry words literally penned between the pages of mouldy books. Or that answers were to be found in the study of long dead bones, as if the dead have any stories to tell that we would wish to hear!
"To me you see history was a study of people living in another time, with a marked emphasis on living; my own interests had no place in the orderly red-brick, institutionalised world of academia. Disappointed I took to travelling to give my ambitions a rest while thinking over my next course of action.
"In southern Spain the idea came to me that would revolutionise my life and allow me to fulfil my frustrated hopes. Moping around my hotel during a particularly vicious rainstorm one day I overheard one of the other guests, a tiresome bore as I recall, try far too hard to make a joke out of that old quote about the past being a foreign country. The irritation factor involved kept his failed humour at the back of my mind until later on I happened upon a copy of H G Well's `The Time Machine' in the foyer. I was positively galvanised. The manager eventually had to call a doctor to administer a sedative to try and prevent me from walking into the walls and doors.
"Somewhat recovered from the initial shock of the idea I still found it hard to stomach, that something so obvious had never before occurred to me. If you are in New York in the winter and have a yen for Sumatra in summer, do you stand moaning and wringing your hands in lament? Or do you rush to the travel agencies and book yourself transportation to that sun-blessed place? Of course you make a pilgrimage to the saintly travel agent, who whispers seductively of trade winds and promises tropical paradises by the bushel.
"If, I thought to myself, all it takes to cross the oceans of the world to visit strange and faraway places is a well-constructed vessel, then surely a craft could be constructed to sail me over the stranger seas of time.
"Where though to find such a useful, wonderful machine? In my head of course: was I not a certified genius at untangling the intangible? So there I was, for the first time in my life taking a real interest in the physical laws of this world. My parents were delighted, certain that at last their gadfly son had grown up, was set upon claiming his place among the great. For three years I studied at anything that seemed useful, often as not guided more by my instinct than by any conventional wisdom, until I had designed my masterpiece of science fiction, trapping on paper that which waited only for me to gather materials, sculpt the body and breathe in life.
"Once I had the idea set before me and had begun tentatively to give it shape, the vessel drew itself together almost without help from these unaccomplished hands." he had told us, holding up those liver-patterned paws for us to see.
"Device devised, shaped and hammered into being I was in a fever, with all history to sample and no clear idea where to start. Should it be Caesar cloaked in imperial majesty, laurels resting on his forehead and he in turn on them; or perhaps Arthur, that misrepresented warlord, desperately trying to circle the wagons of civilised Roman Albion against the savage Saxon hordes come to loot the grave of an empire. These and other enticements crowded into and confused my mind, no sooner decided on one, than another popped up tempting me with eager artlessness. On and on, Yin and Yang with a thousand other brothers, the possible uses to which I could put my machine circled round me, each offered avenue too good to resist until I knew I could pass a lifetime following them. And so I did.
"Random settings flew me to new/old events and non-events, the last being often more interesting than the first, for the tomes wherein History, capital-H is recorded deal with the grand affairs of Kings and Princes; whereas history lower-case is overflowing with men and women and the brief sweet lives they must build for themselves."
"Kings, popes, battles and dates; these, the stuff of written history are not all history is. Behind all the great events that stand out from the page of records have always been men and women, going about their lives as best they can; some good, some bad, some helping others - others helping themselves. It seemed to me to be a grave affront to these human beings, that they should be regarded only as a backdrop against which the prominent peaks of antiquity could be set. They, after all, had hopes and emotions, they knew joy and lowering despair, they are the actors of the world's play and should not be listed `also appearing' when it is they, more than statesmen, who have shaped the rude clay and given us the world we know.
"But who were they, these long gone creators of the now? How did they cope with the restrictions, social and physical that each era places upon its commonalty? In the shadow of dictators I wanted to meet philanthropists, in the great and enlightened civilisations I fancied to know the misery of beggars; behind the great men great women bided in obscurity, I longed to meet and greet them all by name. Amidst living and dying, sickness and health I desired to stride, filling my ears with the bellowing laughter and crying laments of those forgotten of History.
"And having seen and stored, collated and indexed the experiences of common uncommon people from ten, twenty, thirty thousand separate slices of time; after lunching with Lords and Ladies, sharing supper with their serfs, what? What next to do with my own depleting store of days? The question seemed impossible to answer: if I had gone to other historians at the oh, so fine universities, telling them all I had seen and done while they were locked in their libraries, would they have welcomed me? Would they greet me, crying out `Mobius old fellow, delightful to see you, sit for scones and tell how you've accomplished the unachievable'? Would they even recognise me, see in this mummified old man's husk the young firebrand they once knew? No! No, no, and for the last time, no! I would have been laughed at, scorn pouring upon this thinning hair as they jeered the crazy man off to the asylum.
"Therefore I had a problem for, as I hope you will discover, travelling brings many changes, one of which is that upon returning you find the sights and sounds stored in memory bubbling up, wanting to gush forth from the tongue like water from a fountain. A verbal slide-show hovers in the dark of your mind and your mouth, a projector, shines it lambent into the ears of those around you. It is an urge almost primal in intensity, yet it is only as you see the lights dim and blink out behind the glazed eyes of your listeners that you realise you are doing it.
"What then, was I to do? With a storm of sights, scenes, smells, sounds and tastes leapfrogging each other, frantic to be let out, whom could I tell who would not think me mad? The answer was came easily: visit any small town like this one anywhere in the country and you will find someone like me, an elderly man or woman just passing time between pension and perishing by sitting on porch steps and talking, talking. Talking the chickens awake and the cows to sleep. Why not, I thought, be one of them? What better disguise could there be than that of an old man yarning on about the old days and how things used to be. As long as I always kept to comparatively recent history the flat minds of the adults would screen my ramblings out, while the more uneven landscape of the child-mind could serve to share my wonder at other, older eras. It was my hope you see to carry over something of those souls I had met on my voyages, to somehow connect a shadow of their lives with the bright-flaring lives of the now. In this manner perhaps they would not be entirely forgotten and today's people could truly learn from the mistakes of those long past.
So he told us, so we believed; or at least I did, the others if they remember, if after all these years they know, may speak for themselves. Did we ever see the fabulous, nebulous, could never be possible, miracle of rare device? Not then. Later though I was shown what may or may not have been IT, but that was after some difficult times and some hard decisions, of which I shall now tell you before the thread is lost.
For you see, our parents found out, and parents worry. It is, I now realise, a defining characteristic. Then though, I didn't understand at all just why my world was cascading down in shards about me.
Although we all swore solemnly never to tell, not ever to breathe so much as a hint of our informants secret, in the end it was too big, too exciting to keep. Possibly the cat was first heard mewing inside its bag a year before when Tommy Durange, he of the lazy eye and high-speed stutter, challenged his teacher about the Second World War. More precisely he was questioning the assertion held out by Mr Kruger that the Allies had been on a holy mission to stop Hitler and save the Jews.
Tommy had always been a poor student, although of late his grades in History had been climbing. Perhaps it was this new success that led him to point out that although refugees had been spreading the word since the beginning of the war, they were not believed until much later when evidence of the concentration camps was uncovered.
Mr Kruger, a rabid patriot who always led the festivities on the Fourth of July, was proud of his part in the war and denied angrily that any such thing was the case. The discussion escalated towards argument when Tommy stammered out that Britain was happy to let other countries fall to the Germans, until their own sovereignty was endangered; and indeed America wanted no part of the affair until Pearl Harbours' safe haven was violated. To this day I maintain that Mr Kruger actually started to froth at the mouth, and things would have gone very badly indeed for Tommy if the principal hadn't looked in to see "what was lifting the ceiling".
As it was, we didn't see Tommy for three days, apparently his mother had practically to beg the school to allow him back, so infuriated was Mr Kruger; in the meantime he was kept at home under strict supervision. I may be wrong in calling Tommy a blabbermouth but he had to explain himself somehow and it was shortly after that the rumours first started to go around about Mr Mobius. Hell, under the kind of pressure his mom could apply I would have talked myself.
As I say it was not long after that I would hear rumours. Mr Mobius was supposed variously to be a werewolf (by other kids), an eccentric old fool (my aunt), or a paedophile (I overheard Alec Grange at the general store whisper this in a greasy murmur to Mrs Perrer). The last worried me not a jot, if only because I was only nine and in those days nine-years weren't considered sufficient to be introduced to that kind of word. Looking back it is probably just as well that I didn't ask my parents what it meant - what a scene that would have been!
Still, from the greasy way Mr "just call me Alec" Grange had spoken it was clear that my mentor was being accused of something unpleasant, which upset me for half of a day before I was distracted by the antics of a racoon family down by the creek.
Wagging tongues changed little for a long time. Grass grew, birds flew in the sky so blue. And our little group continued our visits to the travel guide of Chronos who, if he noticed the looks being darted at him as he fluttered sporadically from his house to the shops and back, said nothing.
And so things remained the same as the year metamorphosed from vibrant summer to stone-washed autumn, through chrysalis winter and thrusting spring, to spread wide once more the wings of summer.
It was a mere pair of weeks before the long good-time train of summer vacation slammed to a halt, destination reached; everybody off, school is announced. As usual the gang of great minds were installed in the shade of a pine-tree parasol, watching the heat of the day bake from the ground in shimmery mirage mirrors, knowing that in all the world, all was well and fine.
Until Arnie Hough began the ritual of feigned reluctance with a question.
"Have you ever thought, have you ever wondered, about smoking? Not why people do it, I mean who on Earth decided to gather some tobacco leaves, roll and mummify them in dry leaf, put it to their lips and light it?"
There was a pin-drop pause as we all considered this, rolled it around inside our heads and finally confessed to drawing a blank.
"Boy, Arnie," said Graham Thorpe, tallest of us all and winner every year of the back-lot steeplechase.
"You've really got a question there, question and a half in fact. When you stop and think about it, it just ain't natural. No sir, not natural at all. Imagine them old Indians sitting around one day, kinda bored like, outside their tepees, all of a sudden one of them breaks off from telling the story about the buffalo who got away or whatever, looks kinda funny and slow at the bushes and thinks to himself, `I wonder...'. No sir, I just don't see it, don't see it at all."
"Do you think," I paused to make sure they were all listening
"Do you think that Mr Mobius would know? After all, he's been everywhere, done everything and met everyone. Anybody knows, it's gotta be him."
Normally there would then have followed a brief bit of wrangling over whether or not the question was worth giving up the afternoon's entertainment to answer before electing to get up and plunge away into the jungle.
That day though the established procedure was broken in no uncertain fashion by Alex Chapman.
"Aw, what does that crazy ol' man know anyway?" he caught our startled looks and shifted uneasily, from cheek to cheek on his butt.
"Says he's got hisself a time machine, which just ain't possible. Says he's been up and down the history rollercoaster in it; I say he's just a weird old guy likes telling tall tales, making himself feel good by selling lies to kids."
Time - interrupted, outside of it yet aware of its passing the rest of us flicked looks across and at each others gaping faces before we all finally settled our stunned gazes on Alex. What my own face had shown I have no idea, but the features of the others registered puzzlement, confusion and, here and there a hint of unpleasant glee. My mind was still rocking when the impact of his words hit home. In effect Alex had just called us all gullible idiots and accused the revered Mr Mobius of being a filthy liar!
"You're full of shit! He has too got a time machine." the words were hanging hot in the still air before I realised it was me who had spoken.
"I'm full of shit? You're the numbnuts who believes everything anyone cares to tell you. Remember that time Billy and Chet told you their house had a secret passage to the Town Hall? Two weeks you ran errands, gave them comic books and candy, anything to get them to let you see it. Remember how you were so mad when you found out that you didn't speak to them for a month? Mr Mobius is just the same, only he's older and tells a story better. If he's got a time machine, which my dad says is impossible, how come none of us ever seen it huh? Because he's lying, that's why!"
There was much more along these lines and in the end we were pulled apart by Arnie and Chet, spitting curses and crying both. That day we never did get to the house in the jungle. It turned out that Alex's mom had joined the amateur dramatic society run by Mrs Perrer, which incurable old gossip had been delighted to whisper all she had heard about Mobius. The upshot was that panicky Mrs Chapman had had an argument with Alex that neither had really won, nonetheless he was forbidden to have any more to do with Mobius.
Gradually the other parents heard the latest news and one by one the little group dropped away until I was the only one to go and see him.
One night I overheard my parents talking and understood that soon I would also be circumscribed from attending lectures on the history of Man, so with a heavy heart I went one more time to say goodbye.
Inside the messy house Mobius listened as I complained about the unfairness of it all. Then told me that he had been getting some rather obvious threats and was leaving anyway. Before he went, he said, there was something he wanted me to see, being as I was the most interested of his `pupils'. I followed him to the garage where a large and grubby dust sheet bulked large in the gloom. Warning me to be ready for a surprise he whisked the sheet off in a storm of dust to reveal the most peculiar thing I have seen even to this day. Flying steel buttresses supported a central cage that, in shape, resembled nothing so much as one of those plastic balls you can buy these days to exercise your hamster. All around was a complicated threadbare tapestry of wires, connecting the cage to a gossamer mesh suspended wing-like from the buttress structure. As the sun fell on a disc of darkly polished plastic that rose as a halo from behind the top of the machine, pastel shades began to flicker up and down the copper skeleton of the cage, dancing to the electric song from deep within the base.
It was, of course, the time machine.
Mobius talked lovingly of his time-treader, his causality car for a while before explaining that he wished an heir to use the machine after he was dead. He thought that as I was so fascinated by history I may wish to accompany him and inherit the wonderful device. He also spoke of the debate that had raged within him over the ethics of time travel, the possibility of interrupting the continuum; of how he had decided at last that he could not do damage to history else he would not have been born to invent the machine. Whatever changes he may make had already been made, by himself long before he was born.
The offer was everything a Buck Rogers wannabe could dream of, to travel tourist through all creation, exploring strange new worlds and countries that were the same world and countries all at once. I was scared shitless, mumbled something a bout not wanting to upset my parents and asked if I could go away and think it over. He looked at me and nodded with a strange smile on his face, saying that I could still join him if I was back before dusk, as that was when the machine was set to leave.
I walked a lot that afternoon, torn between my fear and my lust for all those exotic story-book places. How could I go rashly into the unknown at the tender age of almost ten; how could I not go and regret it at the ancient age of forty? That day the trees were lusher than ever before, both darker in colour and lighter than usual. The sky was huge, the sun was warm on air alive with insect noises. I kept telling myself that of course I would go, I just needed a few more moments thought to make sure I was not rushing ahead blind. Somehow the sun fell from the sky and I walked home the long way round to avoid his house. I never went to see it again, especially avoiding it when I heard that Mobius had vanished.
The following years have been devoted to a study of the history of humanity, with an emphasis on the ordinary people and how they lived. Do I regret? Yes. Am I sorry to be here? No. I have a wife who makes the world more beautiful just by breathing and a son who was nine years old last month. Roger is the joy of my life, a bright and smiling lad filled to the brim each morning with questions that I try to answer by night. I love him and see in him echoes of myself, for all that he takes after his mother in his looks.
Sometimes I worry about him, looking around the world there is much that distresses me even in this small Kentish village where we moved when Susan's job brought her to London. It is a nice place, pretty and pleasant of character, yet it has its share of shadow. The night before last the landlord at the Crown of Feathers was warning me that he had seen Roger playing in the yard of a man who was locally suspected of liking to spend far too much time with small boys.
Yes sometimes I worry. Roger came home late today, and when I asked him where he had been his face lit up
"Daddy" he has his mothers English manners too
"I'll bet I know something you don't".
"I don't bet Roger, especially when I'm likely to lose. What is it?"
"I'll bet you don't know how the Indians got the idea of smoking."
And so I sit watching a bright storm from a dark room and I think of lightning, and of fate, and worry.
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