Awake Page 24

  “You're going to 'take care' of me, are you?” he said. “What are you going to do? Transport me off to some barren world where no one will see me again?”

  “No, that's more along the lines of what you would do,” I replied. “I can think of a better way to deal with you.”

  For the first time he actually looked worried; he was trying to hold on to his tough-guy posturing.

  “Do your worst,” he finally said. “You're not going to get away with it.”

  “Sure I am,” I said. “That's the thing, I am going to get away with it. When I'm done with you, you're not going to remember this, any way.”

  Panic at that.

  I touched Thomas' shoulder and looked into his eyes. “I'm going back through your memories, Jeff, and I'm removing all instances of me from them. You want me dead? I'll never have existed to you.”

  His mouth dropped open.

  I closed my eyes, merging with his thoughts. “Back to the beginning, to when we first met. We've never met. We never served together in the military.” I searched his thoughts and pulled up the image of a man, close to my age, who was a portal jumper; he had been one of the individuals I freed from that endless death portal. “This man was the one you knew, the one you served with,” I said, projecting the image of that man into Thomas' memories. “He's the one you've been chasing all of these years. You found him, captured him, and dealt with him.”

  Thomas nodded. “Yes, he's no longer a threat.”

  As I did this I could actually see in my own mind the memories Thomas had from 20 years ago, every thought and instance where I had been the subject of those thoughts, now replaced with a different person.

  I came across his memories of our being shot down during the war, before he sent someone back in time to deal with it. I decided to leave those memories alone; at least his anger would still be targeted at the man I had replaced myself with in his own thoughts and memories.

  I was taking my time, because I had to be thorough; if I left any trace of me in his mind, none of this would hold in the long run.

  “Have we got it all, Jeff? Any other traces of me in your mind?”

  He said nothing. I searched through his mind, seeking out any hidden areas where thoughts of me remained. I couldn't find anything.

  Satisfied, I said, “The next step is you are going back to your office. You'll write up the shoot-out in the parking garage as the final step in taking down the fugitive James Meadows. You will close out the case file. You will talk to your government to tell them all portal jumping fugitives have been captured and that the program be disbanded. You will request early retirement. If you are not granted early retirement you will tender your resignation.”

  “Yes, of course,” Thomas said. “I'm ready to retire. Ready to collect my pension and go fishing.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Good plan. You will no longer have any knowledge of parallel worlds, or universes. Just your own world and universe as it's always been.”

  He nodded.

  “If any of your former agents seek you out to talk about me, you'll associate that in your mind with James Meadows. You can say he's been neutralized. If anyone presents you with photographs or video footage of me, you'll see James Meadows. If you view security camera footage of me you'll see James Meadows. If there are sound recordings you'll hear the voice of James Meadows. Any document you read with my name will read as James Meadows. There is no Charles Matheson; he never existed. Top-secret projects involving time travel and the...removal of my family will register in your mind as projects to remove James Meadows' family.”

  “Of course,” Thomas said.

  I thought I had everything taken care of. No, not everything. Those guards who had shot up Thomas' car. All the guards and agents who had ever dealt with me whose memories I hadn't already wiped. I focused and sent out my thoughts to their minds and replaced images of me with images of James Meadows. That he had been captured. That he had been cremated. Even though there wasn't a body, in their minds they'd think there had been one.

  I obviously couldn't cover every contingency, but I thought I had done enough.

  “I'm sending you back now. Back to the parking garage. You'll debrief the guards. Everyone will be thinking the body in the car had been hauled away to be cremated. After you speak to your guards you'll proceed with everything else we talked about.”

  Thomas nodded.

  “Goodbye, Jeff,” I said.

  I sent him away, and returned to my own world.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Once home, I headed to my bedroom and collapsed onto my bed; I was exhausted. I slept for about 18 hours.

  As the days passed I started to relax; I kept thinking someone would pop into my life from Thomas' world, but nothing happened.

  At least, not for a few weeks.

  I was able to get back into my old routine, which involved a lot of time in my garden and taking a lot of walks. I was sleeping well, no more insomnia.

  I even found the time to take a trip; I wasn't sure I was at a point where I could actually relax without having to look over my shoulder. I headed to Sin City and the neon lights of Las Vegas. Holed up in a nice hotel room and lost a good chunk of money gambling (and won a little bit as well). It never even occurred to me to use my abilities to my advantage; I was feeling like a normal person.

  On occasion of course I didn't feel particularly normal, and memories of everything that had happened to me kept returning.

  I was finding the one thing that pained me the most was actually being a witness to the events that led up to Melissa dying in that car crash.

  I suppose I could have purged those memories from my mind, but did ordinary people have that ability? To just take memories and erase them from existence? I guess denial was a way of doing that, although the memories inevitably returned.

  No, I'd deal with these things the way everyone else did.

  The pain of those memories was going to be difficult to deal with. I could travel around the world and find pleasurable things to do, but in the end that would be a distraction.

  In those low moments I thought of Melissa, and wondered what things would have been like had she not died. I knew it was a pointless exercise; people dealing with grief often played out “what if” fantasies.

  I had thought I had said my goodbyes to her, that I had come to grips with everything that had happened, but apparently there was still parts of her living in my mind.

  Maybe that was the best way to remember her: not to mourn her loss, but to cherish the memories I had of us together.

  Easy to say, hard to do.

  * * *

  At home one thing I wasn't used to was receiving visitors.

  I had been sitting down to a bad movie on television when my doorbell rang.

  Surprised, I got up to answer it. Of course I could have easily found out who it was by just thinking about it, but I had been working hard at just being normal and hadn't used my abilities since I had seen Jeff Thomas.

  Opening the door, I wasn't terribly surprised to see Lynne standing there. I was more surprised to see that she looked nervous.

  “Hi Lynne,” I said. “What brings you to these parts? You're not here to take me in, are you?”

  “Hi Charles. No, nothing like that. I just wanted to talk to you.”

  “Come on in,” I said. She entered, and I pointed to the couch. “Have a seat. I was just about to watch a movie, but it looks pretty bad so I think I'm better off not watching it. Can I get you something to drink?”

  “Do you have anything stronger than a soda or coffee?”

  “I think so,” I said, heading into the kitchen. I rummaged in the refrigerator and found a couple of beers. I returned to the living room and handed Lynne a bottle. “How about this? Nothing fancy. I'm not much of a drinker.”

  She took the bottle and nodded. “It's fine.” She took a sip. “Tastes like the kind of beer I drink back home.”

  I sat down next to her. “Yea
h? I'm not much of a drinker. I have a beer every couple of weeks, if that. This had just happened to be on sale.”

  “It's good,” she said. She put the bottle down on the coffee table. “Do you have a coaster for this?”

  “Don't worry about it,” I said. “So, to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”

  “You did quite the number on Thomas,” she said.

  I sighed. “It was necessary, Lynne. I wanted my life back. I didn't hurt him.”

  “No, that's not what I meant,” Lynne replied. She grabbed her bottle of beer and took a drink. “A few months ago I went in to talk to him about you. He seems to think you're someone named James Meadows.”

  “He's a portal jumper, someone I pulled out from Thomas' memories. Seemed like he'd be a good replacement for me.”

  “Anyway, when I'd mention you he'd bring up this Meadows person, and say that Meadows had been captured and 'terminated.' He even showed me picture of what he said was a cremated body. Your body. Or the body of James Meadows. It was just a pile of ashes. But if it isn't you, whose body is it?”

  I had no answer to that. “I suppose he may have just found that picture and in his mind he thought it was me.”

  “The thing is, I had a file with pictures of you in it, and when I showed it to him, he just nodded and said, 'Yes, that's Meadows. He's dead.'”

  “He doesn't know a Charles Matheson, Lynne. In his mind the person he was hunting, the person he served with is named James Meadows.”

  “Do you know that, in his office, Thomas had a picture of the two of you?”

  “Really? I had no idea. That's a surprise.”

  “It's not really on display, just something he had on his desk. The two of you in flight gear. But Charles, here's the thing: the government has records of you, from your military service. Pictures. Your fingerprints. What if someone pointed out the person in the security footage and the person in those government files are the same person?”

  I shrugged. “So what? How would they find me? Who would be looking?”

  “When I mentioned to Jeff that there was a parallel world, and that you lived there, he laughed at me, said I was crazy.”

  “It is a pretty crazy idea,” I replied. “So what ended up happening to him?”

  “After he brought 'you' in, he testified to the government, let them know all the portal jumpers had been captured. He requested early retirement, and they gave it to him. The division was closed. Thomas took his money and bought a house on the coast. He spends his free time fishing, from what I heard.”

  “Good, that sounds like the perfect way to enjoy retirement. What are you up to now that the division has been closed?”

  “They want to transfer me to a different department. Covert agency. I told them yes but requested a sabbatical.” She shrugged. “They let me take six months, paid. I've been spending most of that time thinking. Thinking about you, thinking about everything I had done with Thomas. Thinking about all the bad things I had done. Thinking I need to bring some good out of all of it. I'm not going to blame Thomas and say he...forced me to do those things. And now I'm going back to doing covert work. I don't know how to do anything else.”

  “I don't know what to say, Lynne. I hope you'll use your conscience this time.”

  She looked at me, with tears in her eyes. “How can you ever forgive me for what I've done to you? How can I ever even hope to make amends?”

  That caught me off guard. “It says a lot that you can recognize that what you did was wrong. But you took away from me things that are irreplaceable. I don't know how I could ever forgive that, Lynne.”

  She nodded, trying to compose herself. “What if...what if she had never died, Charles? Do you ever think about that?”

  “All the time,” I said, taking a drink from my bottle of beer. “So much so that I have to make an effort and not think about it. Fantasies of my going back to save her. But even if I did, who's to say she'd want me back? We were separated when she died. Bringing her back wouldn't change the fact that our marriage had failed.”

  “But wouldn't you want that opportunity? The opportunity to see if things could be made right?”

  “Of course I would, but in the real world, that doesn't happen. When someone dies, there is no second chance. They're gone. I have to let her go, Lynne. It doesn't help me to hold onto her like I have been.”

  She nodded. “I understand. Your powers...do you still use them?”

  “I haven't been, not since I last saw Thomas. I'm trying to lead an ordinary life. I work in my garden. I'm toying with the idea of learning how to play a musical instrument. Maybe even go out and try to find a job. I don't have to work, but it might be nice to just go out and do something for eight hours a day, like everyone else does. Come home at night and have a beer and watch TV.”

  “That sounds nice,” Lynne said. She was almost done with her beer.

  “Do you want another?” I asked.

  She smiled. “I don't know, I don't want to get all drunk and weepy on you. Are you going to have another?”

  “I guess I could. Ordinary people have a couple of beers, right?”

  “Right,” she agreed. I headed to the kitchen and returned with two more beers.

  “Are you sleeping again?” Lynne asked after taking a sip of her beer.

  Had I told her about the insomnia that had plagued my life for so long? I couldn't recall. “For the most part. On occasion I have restless nights. I don't think I'm ever going to be the kind of person who just closes their eyes and sleeps for eight hours straight. But things are a lot better than they were.”

  “Did you ever figure out how it was you first found those portals to my world?”

  I put my beer down. “How do you know these things, Lynne? I don't remember talking to you about them.”

  She smiled. “You have. Or I guess it's more accurate to say, you will.”

  “Time travel?”

  Nodding, Lynne said, “Yes. When I was first tying to learn how to do it – this was when Thomas first started chasing you – I ended up going forward in time, and not back. I found you, ten years from now. We had a chat.”

  “Did you now?” I was floored by this. “What did my future self tell you?”

  “Oh, just what I've already said,” Lynne replied, but I could see in her eyes she wasn't telling me the complete truth. “But he...you...solved the mystery about how it was you stumbled upon those portals.”

  “I put them there, didn't I? In the future I went back in time, to now, and opened the portals. Right?”

  “Yes,” she said. “You did.”

  “But why?” I asked. “It doesn't make any sense.”

  “Since when did time travel ever make any sense? He...you...didn't explain it to me. You just said it had to be done.”

  “This future version of me would have knowledge of everything that had happened...and what's going to happen. I didn't tell you anything?”

  “No, you were pretty adamant about not destroying the timeline.”

  “But I thought it was okay that you could tell me about those portals that lead me to your world.”

  “Apparently,” Lynne said. “It'll all make sense in the next ten years, I guess. But you've already suspected that a future version of you opened those portals. So part of you already has a connection to the future.”

  I laughed. “This is giving me a headache. Whatever. I'll deal with it all in ten years. What normal, ordinary person has to contemplate time travel? Or portals that open to parallel worlds? The only thing I want to deal with are weeds and finding a hobby.”

  “Sounds like a plan to me,” Lynne said. “Don't worry, Charles, I'm not going to tell anyone about you. Even if I did, who would believe me?”

  “Your government knows about the portal jumpers and what they can do.”

  “Maybe they do, but the man with the most knowledge about it no longer thinks there are things like parallel worlds. And he thinks all of the portal jumpers have been d
ealt with.”

  “And what about the agents like you? And me?”

  “You wiped the memories of all the others, Charles. None of them even know they have this power. I'm the only one left.”

  “I only suggested they forget me, I never planted anything about their abilities.”

  “Whatever you did left them with no knowledge of their powers.”

  “And now I have to trust that you aren't going to start this ball rolling again. I don't want to have to wipe your memories, Lynne.”

  “You don't have to do that, Charles. You probably aren't able to trust me, but you have my word. Who would believe me, anyway?”

  I sighed. “I guess you're right, Lynne. I will have to trust you. Nothing has happened yet, so I'll just hope things continue this way.”

  “Nothing bad is going to happen, Charles. You can live the rest of your life. Work in your garden, take up the ukelele, whatever you want. Find a girlfriend, have some kids.”

  I laughed. “I don't think I'm ready for a girlfriend or children at this point. One day at a time. Not sure about the ukelele. Why, do I play it in the future?”

  “I can't say, Charles. Maybe you do. Maybe you play something else. Ever think of taking up the piano?”

  “The piano? I've thought about it. Not sure my fingers are nimble enough for it.”

  Lynne stood. “You'll figure it all out, Charles. I think I'd better get back to my world. I'll leave you in peace.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “That's all I want. Peace.”

  She smiled. “You're going to get it. That, and more.”

  I smiled back. “You think? I like the sound of that. I haven't felt peaceful in ages. Maybe a little lonely.”

  “You'll find someone,” she replied. “I know it.”

  “Have you ever thought of moving here?” I asked, kind of half-joking.

  “Actually, I have,” Lynne replied. “I like my world, I like my life there.” She stood up. “I'm not going to say this is my final goodbye, but I sort of hope it is. I want you have to have a good life, here.”