1/3/11
When I See the Sea Once More
“Dad, how did you and mom meet?” I had told this story a hundred times, but never to my daughter. Never to the one person who was literally shaped by the actual events. The question comes as a bit of a non-sequitor, but is actually consistent with her randomness—and her eagerness to soak up information.
It catches me off guard mostly because it breaks the heavy silence and the oppressive, ever-present darkness, where we had been straining to listen for any sound. If I could actually see her face, it would be bright and open and her eyes would be clear. As it is, and times being what they were, my daughter’s voice sounds filtered and vaguely mechanical in the dark and it’s hard not to laugh at her youthful bluntness.
I catch my breath, and I try to tell the story and be as honest as I can.
“Well, girlie… Your mom and I met at a party, actually—through a mutual friend. We didn’t even exchange numbers the first time we met.”
Her quizzical grunt of “Huh?” reminds me that it was not just a different time, but a different age then.
“Phone numbers,” I say. “Telephones?” I sigh and shake my head. “Nevermind… She was just a friend of a friend at that point. Then a few months later we met again when that same mutual friend moved to New York City.”
“That New York?”
“Yeah, well, it was a different time. It wasn’t like it is now. You have to understand, there were a lot of things happening all at once. We didn’t know that they would all connect like that. Hindsight is 20/20 – but when you’re living through it, you don’t really see the patterns.”
I stop the story to take another listen. All quiet. Just the wind in the dark.
“This was in 2009. Right about the time the first reports started coming in. We had no idea what was going on, you see. They were calling it ‘Swine Flu’ of all things. We didn’t know. There were a lot of scary things going on. Even though we had just elected a new president, the country—and most of the world—was going through a huge economic crisis. A lot of people watched their savings vanish.”
Telling the story again, it seemed so distant, as if it had all happened to someone else. And it was a lifetime ago, after all.
“Around that time, your grandfather, my dad, got sick, and had to go to the hospital. He was fine, the doctors said, and sent him home after a few days.”
I pause, not sure how much detail to tell. Best to have it out and be done with it, I reasoned.
“He must have picked up something from the hospital, or it must have been more serious than they thought, because a few days later he collapsed at work and never got back up again. We didn’t know how it was spread—or even what it really was, you see?
“And then the other shoe dropped—they turned on the Collider. The Large Hadron Collider was this experiment in Europe that particle physicists had designed to study molecular and quantum reactions at high speeds. Sounds very mundane, I know, but as you can see around you, the effects were… intense.”
I take another listen to the winds outside, intent on being aware of my surroundings. We couldn’t afford to be surprised again.
“A lot of people protested the LHC, both here and in France and across old Europe, saying that it was mucking about with God and the beginning of the universe and all that, and some people even believed it would cause a new ‘Big Bang’ and scribble over the universe as we knew it. The scientists had a good laugh about that and turned it on anyway. We all thought they were crazy, of course, the religious fanatics. And they were wrong, technically—it’s important to remember that. It wasn’t God that came out of that vortex, but only ourselves.
“After repelling the first ‘invasion force’ (as they were calling it then), the government started asking for volunteers. I had been in the military. I had language training. Add to that, I was still fairly fit and had a lot of the right qualifications. It was a long process, but in the end, I climbed into that little pod along with a team that covered as many of the wide variety of skills that the egg-heads thought we’d need.
“We didn’t know that we’d end up in a different place—a different universe, possibly, but not a different time. It was too much for a lot of them to handle at first, and these were some pretty stony individuals. Marines and Navy SEALs and the like. What we only came to understand later was that the government didn’t really think they could stop it at all, whatever it was. They just did whatever the United States always did and threw bodies at the problem.
“It was an ordeal—one for another night—but eventually we managed to meet with the scientists and authorities from that other dimension. Once we managed to help them understand that we weren’t their enemy and that we had lots of technology to share, the travel back and forth between our two worlds became common. As one of the original crew—we weren’t called ‘chrononauts’ till much later—I was given a pretty wide berth and allowed a fair bit of leeway when it came to travel itineraries.
“This was just supposed to be a fun getaway, sweetie, a vacation. Your mother and I never intended to stay here, of course; it was just a diversion from the insanity of that era.”
A screech outside was audible at the edge of our range of hearing. But their ears were sharper than ours. They’d be able to hear us soon, even whispering.
But this was important. I lowered my voice once again as I continued my story. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. We’re still working on a way to get back, but with the gate closed at the other end, there’s only so much we can do from here.” That was an assumption on our part. A hope, actually. We hoped the gate was only closed; that it wasn’t destroyed or utterly beyond repair or that a million other disasters hadn’t occurred. We hoped that they were working on getting us back as it wasn’t likely we’d do a damn thing other than live out the rest of our days here.
“Dad” she hisses, “I think I hear one of them. They’re getting closer.”
She’s right, of course. Her hearing is far better than mine and she’s attuned to the noises here. She didn’t have a lifetime of rock concerts and blaring car alarms and city life to deafen her ears.
Now a thundering tremor can be felt, rhythmically pounding, in time with the gargantuan legs moving forward and transporting the creature’s massive bulk across the terrain.
“Daddy?” She’s barely whispering now, knowing that any sound could give us away.
I reply in a hushed tone, “What is it?”
”Would you do it differently? If you had it to do over, I mean. Would you do anything differently?”
I think back over our time here… It had been maddening… the realization of our solitude – even losing her mother… But she asks the question and she is the answer. Her life made everything worth it. This beautiful girl with my eyes and her mother’s nose, and a smile that in another world would have sent a thousand young boys swooning… Now she stood there with white knuckles holding on to an improvised spear. I smile, but in the dark, the smile is only for me. “I wouldn’t change a thing, sweetie.”
The hush falls over us both as the large pack of pterodactyls screech past the mouth of our cave. “Not a single thing.”
END
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