Pullback

  Jane sipped her milkshake and crunched down some fries. Burt was all lit up.

  “No, you can’t go back on your own timeline.” Burt continued. “When you go back, you’re actually in an alternate timeline that’s the same. I don’t know, my dad says going back in time creates an alternate timeline each time.”

   “The universe keeps expanding.” Jane said.

   “No. That’s something else. These are infinite realities, and you can never go back to the same alternate realty twice.”

   “So, how come you don’t stay there?”

   “Oh, there’s a pullback. It can vary how long, but there’s always a pullback. You can feel it creep up inside you. Like, it feels like a pulling like in your chest. Like, in the back of your head. Then your back here.”

  “How do you know you’re here?” Jane teased. She unwrapped her hamburger and bit in.

   “Don’t. It’s not the same when you’re in your alternate time. You feel an edginess.”

   “You’ve done this?”

   “Yeah, my dad’s got a Corridor.”

   “Your dad owns a Corridor? Your dad? How rich are you?”

    “Not that rich. He got it after my mother died. Insurance money. But I’m working to get my own and the prices are going to go down.”

    “Oh, you want your own because you don’t want your dad to know where you go in his Corridor? Oh, Burt, you’re naughty. Did you go back to our first time?”

   “Stop it. It’s not about that. You can go back and learn from your mistakes, try different things.”

    “You are naughty!”

   “Would you listen, please?”

   “No. You sound like my English teacher. I’m fine with here with you. I don’t want to mess with that stuff. Burt, you better eat, if you want to do anything else before I have to get home to my parents.”

   Burt was a bit pouty and, as it was, they finished eating and he drove her home without romance.

   They graduated the following year, and Jane was impressed Burt had brought his grades up enough to qualify for the same university as her. She was sure she was going to break up with him after High School, but he turned things around. By the end of the first year of university they were getting married. This surprised Jane as she always thought she would wait until she got her degree before considering marriage. She was too young for children, too, but they came along so quickly. She dropped from university determined to return some day.

   Every day Burt impressed her more and more. He was thoughtful and anticipated everything she ever wanted from marriage and family. Always ahead of the game Burt was. This is why it was so hard for Jane to understand why she started becoming depressed and anxious as they approached their seventh anniversary of marriage. Jane felt herself sinking into darkness daily. She began to doubt Burt’s fidelity. She began to think he was talking to her as if she were someone else. Sometimes Burt would talk about things they did together that Jane couldn’t remember doing at all.

   “Sometimes I don’t think I am who you think I am.” Jane said in a low voice one evening after the kids were put to bed.

   “What?” Burt turned on her.

   “You’re different. It’s not me, it’s you.”

   “How? Tell me how I’m different. Jane, if you have a problem share it with me, and we can work it out together. But that’s not what you’ve been doing. You take anything that goes wrong, anything I say, and you go off in your head and start spinning it around until you can find some way to blame me for why you don’t feel good. Now, I have already made a lot of changes to make things work between us, and I’m willing to make more, but you have to tell me what it is you need. I’m not a mind reader. You know, I’m not going anywhere, I’m here.”

   “What about your Corridor?”

   “What about the Corridor? If I go anywhere in the Corridor, I’m back a moment later. A split second. You step in, you step out in the same moment. What? Are you trying to say I’m out all night? I’m here all night. With you. With them.” Burt pointed upstairs to their sleeping kids.

   “You’re here, but you’re still thinking about that. And your next trip. Do you know how many times you go down that hallway in a day? In a day?”

   “Alright, alright. There are things I need to learn about my business on an ongoing basis. Things in alternate timelines that I use to polish up what I do here, so we can live as good as we do. We live good, don’t we?”

   “What else do you polish up?” 

   “Jane, I can’t talk to you. I’m trying.” Burt sat himself down in front of his computer and started watching news updates. Jane could see that Burt’s concentrated silent focus meant that he would not talk, or respond to anything else she had to say tonight. It was the same pouting he used to do before they married. It was coming back the more her anxiety had taken her over. The pouting that had gone away when she had once considered breaking up with him. But he had turned that around. He had found all the right things to say to her. To convince her. He had learned somehow and emerged a mature man. A thoughtful man. An assured man. Someone who fixed his mistakes almost before they even happened.

   Jane went up to her desk in their bedroom and began to look on her computer for instructions on how to use a Corridor. After Burt had crawled into their cold bed that night, she slipped downstairs. She started his Corridor, and stepped into it.

  She found herself on her own front lawn in the middle of the night. She looked behind her but the Corridor was gone. She could only see the outlines of her neighbors’ houses. She looked ahead to her house and into her dining room window. She saw herself sitting in her dining room. She crouched to hide herself. From herself? From her neighbors? She shouldn’t be here. She shouldn’t be doing this.

   Looking in her dining room window she saw herself. Her other self. Her alternate timeline self sorting through medications on the table. Her self in the house looked heavy and wrinkled, not like the twenty-seven year old she still was. How could this be? You’re not supposed to be able to go into the future with the Corridor, only a version of your own past. What past could she look so much older in? What had aged her other self this way?

   The other self took some pills and washed them down with alcohol. Her other self took off a bathrobe to reveal an evening dress. Her self looked up the stairs and listened as if fearful of being caught, and then proceeded down the hall to the Corridor. It was almost the exact way Jane had acted before she stepped into the Corridor.    

   Jane looked again to see if the neighbors were watching. Her other self returned, only a blink of an eye had passed. Her other put the robe back on. The other self drank some more, then shut off the light and went up to bed. Jane was lost on what to do now in this alternative place. She had programmed herself plenty of time to look around, but now she didn’t want it. She had seen too much already.

   What do you do when you are in another place and your place is already taken? What would happen is she was found by other self? By Burt? She felt her anxiety rushing in. Here in this alternate place. Where she didn’t belong. The blackness started pulling her down. What if she was not Jane? What if she was an alternative created by Burt’s travels in the Corridor. To test. To learn from. To discard. What if she wasn’t her original? What if that older woman were her, and she was the past?

   She ran to the backyard and picked a far corner of the privacy fence to crouch down and hide herself in the dark. She waited hours for the pullback. The cold crept in.

    The pullback brought her to the Corridor again, and she stepped out. She sat at her dining table and shook. Though still the middle of the night she turned on all the downstairs lights and rushed to the bathroom to see herself in the mirror. To prove to herself she was herself. To see her younger face unchanged.

   Jane never went near the Corridor again. Her sleep cycling was out of whack for weeks afterwards. It had been one night in the Corridor but only a moment had passed when she had returned. How did Burt deal with that? It didn’t matter, she was too frightened to talk about the Corridor with him again, let alone tell him what she had done.

   Three years later, on the road to mental health recovery, Jane could not shake the feeling that Burt was still being unfaithful. She forced him through a separation agreement, but he seemed to turn himself around again, and they did not get a divorce. Burt had become even more considerate and attentive. Burt changed from being a problem fixer to a listener. He had amazed her again.

   They might have been alright together but then Burt suffered his car accident. It should have never had happened, but all self driving cars still experienced a percentage of a percentage of a percentage failure rate.

   Part of ending their previous separation agreement included Jane having some financial independence, as well as insurance, and some living will provision should either of them ever need the other to be a health care representative for the sake of the children and managing the family.

   “His hip is broken on the left side.“ Dr. Gold explained. “We’ve had to induce a coma for the head trauma, but were expecting him to come back from that when the swelling is down. We’ve also discovered he has prostrate cancer, but it’s treatable.”

   “He’s too young for that.” Jane argued.

   “Oh, you can be young. But in his case, that’s not the case.”

   “I’m sorry?”

   “Has Burt ever used a Corridor?”        

   “Yes, but they’re safe. They’ve been proven safe. I’ve used our Corridor. Once. But it’s safe.”

   “It is. It is.” Dr. Gold thought for a moment. “Let’s go back to your husband’s bedside again.”

   They walked quietly through the hospital halls. Jane felt that creepy feeling you get when the pullback is about to happen. But it wasn’t the pullback this time. It was something else. Something else she didn’t want to see.

    When they got to Burt’s room he was still lying there with tubes and monitors attached to him. Dr. Gold pulled back Burt’s blanket. Jane looked at her husband’s naked body under bright light for the first time in years. Burt had scars along his right ankle. There was a knot of thick callous of flesh higher up the shin bone. There was what looked like a skin graft on his left leg near his hip. Above the skin graft was bandages binding the hip itself.

   “Is that all….?” Jane asked.

   “No, those are old wounds. High School Football?”

   “No, he never played any sports in High School.”

   Jane’s eyes went up further finding small scars around Burt’s abdomen.

   “Gall bladder removal.” Dr. Gold explained. “It showed up in the x-rays. The large pock marks along the left arm are the type of scars you get from being thrown, or sliding off a motorcycle on a gravel road. But with the balancers in motorcycles in the last decade I don’t see how that could have happened.”

   “He hasn’t been in any accidents before. He’s never been operated on. Burt’s never sick. He has never been sick.”

   “You have never seen him sick.”

   “How could he hide it?”

   “In the Corridor. Were finding people hiding illnesses, and accidents from their employers, from their spouses in the Corridor. They seek treatment elsewhere where they won’t be seen to be weak. Partatock Industrial was sued last year for providing their employees with a Corridor and encouraging them to seek medical treatments in alternative timelines to minimize their reported workplace accident records.”

   Jane looked stunned.

   “Let me get Dr. Morris to talk to you.”

   Jane’s appointment with Dr. Morris was several months later, but Burt’s recovery was equally slow going.  “Do you know that excessive Corridor use is an addiction?” Dr. Morris began.

   Jane shook her head, almost in tears from the start.

   “It becomes a replacement for this life. An escape from the here and now. Once a person gets over their initial fear of alternative timelines, they become a place where one feels less invested in. Just as real as here, but short of death or deadly illness, the person knows the alternative timeline is not permanent for them.” Dr. Morris continued. “Your husband is thirty-one years old according to his birth record, but the Corridor institute does provide us some information by law. Your husband has collectively spent a little over seventeen years in his alternate timelines using his Corridor.”

   “Seventeen years?”

   “Yes. Your husband is now forty-eight years old. Changes in age can be so gradual that one learns to hide them by covering up, by making excuses. Have you ever seen any media on Corridor Addiction?”

    Jane shook her head. “I don’t like any of that. Anything about Corridors, using Corridors, trouble with Corridors, I stay away from. It’s always been Burt’s thing. It upsets me when he talks about it.”

   “Dr. Gold says you have anxiety and depression?”

   “Had.”

   “Then you know it doesn’t go away. It’s not uncommon with people who spouse’s spend excessive time in the Corridor. You see, many times the spouse will be looking to interact with a person’s alternate in another timeline. These interactions can be experimental to try out conversations, or arguments, or physical involvements that they would normally never attempt in the here and now. The memories of these experiments can linger in the mind and make it difficult for the Corridor addict to continue truthfully with the spouse they have here.

   “In other words, these experiences create extra baggage that one has never experienced with their spouse. Only experienced in the Corridor. It can’t help but muddy relationships. Some people suffer anxiety and depression because they don’t understand why they are no longer in sync with their partner, but it’s not their fault.”

   Dr. Morris continued on for some time. She promised to send Jane more detailed information on Corridor Addiction. Groups Burt could join when he recovered. Therapy Jane could seek out to cope, both for Burt’s horrific accident, and for dealing with a family member who suffers from Corridor Addiction.

   Later that day Jane was at home wondering if she should get a divorce.

   She wondered if the she should have the Corridor permanently deactivated and removed from their home. She considered teaching herself the Corridor programming and going to an alternate timeline and confronting Burt before his accident. Not that that would change anything, but it might give her some understanding, some satisfaction in confronting the Burt who was.

   In the end, her four-year old son and six-year old daughter asked her if daddy was going to be alright and Jane hugged them close. She hugged them too close. To convince herself that they, and she, were real.