Summer Time Travels

It's a Sunday in December 2018. In Sydney, it's a glorious early summer's day. The cloudless sky is vast and blue and bright. The afternoon air carries the scent of an early bushfire season, that unmistakable, menthol smell of burnt eucalypt.

'Your popsicle's melting,' my brother Adrian says.

'Huh?' We don't call them popsicles in Australia. It's one of those affectations Adrian's picked up since moving to the US. Like the way he pronounces 'r' like an American. Calls thongs flip flops. Seems disappointed when Christmas lunch ends with a siesta under a ceiling fan, rather than whisky by a crackling fire. He only comes to visit at Christmas now. Too busy with research. And he’s always... a little different. Older, wiser. More creases across his forehead, hair starting to grey at the temples. 

I look at my ice block, my popsicle, and it has indeed started to drip, leaving sticky, lemonade flavoured rivulets over my fingers. 

'Mummy! Your POP-SIC-LE is melting!' cries my daughter Lucy. She repeats this a million times or more, squealing and running around the backyard in her swimsuit. She is almost three and has a thing for repeating things a million times or more. It means she's happy. After the year we've had, that's all I want.

She's running under the sprinkler as it sprays a thin shower of water in lazy circles around the garden. She sparkles in the sunlight. I wish she had someone to play with - a brother, a sister or a dog. We'd been planning it, my husband Zack and I, the big Number Two. Whispering about it late at night. I wish we hadn't waited so long.

'Really, Angela, it's melting. You're gonna get it all over-' Adrian says. 

It seems only a moment ago I was in the kitchen putting a fourth ice block back in the freezer. We only need three now. It's been six months since the accident. For a moment, it really hurts. Zack loved days like today, when the afternoon seemed to stretch for days. Funny how grief speeds up, slows down, time. It was only a moment ago I started eating this ice block. Now it's dissolved into a wet, sticky mess on the back deck. 

Adrian, Lucy and I have spent the day in the back garden under the trees having a tea party, a sausage sizzle and soaking up the sun. My shoulders are burnt. The straps of my singlet will leave white lines on my skin. Lucy's nose is a little red, and no doubt within a few years she’ll be covered with freckles, just like her dad. Adrian sits in the shade. He's always been clever like that. It's a beautiful afternoon. A perfect day. A promising start to a long summer. I am smiling.

After I put Lucy to bed, Adrian calls me into the living room to talk.

'What's wrong,’ I ask.

He struggles for a moment. 'I've done something quite serious. I think it may affect you.'

I try to imagine him being in trouble with a loan shark or the government for unpaid taxes.  

He paces, grimacing. 'Okay, just, please suspend your disbelief.'

'Sure, Adrian.'

'I invented... a time machine. That'd be the layman's term for it. And I have a client who is about to start using it.'

I laugh at him. His face tells me he's not joking, so I apologise and stay quiet. Suspend your disbelief, Angela. Suspend it. 

'My clients aren't government. They're not private enterprise. They’re like… an organisation. Anyway, they're going to start using my technology to fix things. Future things. Like, solving world problems.'

'Okay,' I say, because honestly, I have no idea how to react to this. It's not entirely unlikely. Adrian is a genius. He works at a university in theoretical physics or pure mathematics. He has no reason to invent something like this or lie to me. I've never seen him so pale and anxious. He looks so much older right now.

'I'm waiting for the punch line, I am really waiting for it, Adrian.'

'There is no punch line.'

'Okay, so where's your DeLorean?'

He smiles and shakes his head.

'How many times have I asked you that question?'

Surprise on his face now. 

'Every time,' he admits.

There's an episode of The Simpsons, a Halloween special, where Homer goes back in time to the age of the dinosaurs. He's instructed not to change anything., but he accidentally steps on a plant. When he's transported back to the present, things are different. There are no donuts. Disaster! Just as he zaps back to the past, Marge says 'Oh, it's raining.' And it's raining donuts. It's classic. No one in that timeline is aware that something has changed in the past. It's completely normal for it to rain donuts. 

Adrian's clients were not hoping to make it rain donuts, sadly. Turns out the future is not a very pleasant place. In a couple of years, there's a worldwide pandemic. It doesn't decimate the world population, but in the process of stopping its spread, it obliterates economies. There's widespread unemployment. There's civil unrest in the US. The climate crisis escalates as permafrost in Siberia melts. There's war with China. In five years, Adrian invents his time machine. In ten years, his clients approach him with a grand plan, hopes and dreams for a better future. They’ve isolated the period of December 2018 to February 2019 as the catalyst for some of the worse problems. The Adrian talking to me right now isn’t the Adrian of 2018. He’s Adrian of 2029. He’s taken what he calls a ‘one way ticket’ back to now. Sounds like a bum deal, I tell him. With great seriousness, he tells me living through all of that again would be better than living in 2029, if there is even a sliver of a hope that things could be better.

Once a change is made, the present reflects an altered timeline. No one is the wiser. Except for Adrian, his clients, and me. He is exempted, so he can observe how the timelines change. They are exempted so they can make the changes. This affects me because I am his twin sister. And again, he launches into an overly technical, theoretical lecture. For the most part I can’t follow him. There’s a whole piece involving DNA and sequencing and predictive algorithms. skin glistens with sweat. His eyes are bright. He trips over his words, the way he did when he was younger and overexcited. The moon is well across the dark, cold sky by the time he finishes speaking.

'What if they don't succeed in fixing things? What if they mess things up even worse?' I ask. 

'There is a contingency, a fail-safe.'

For fear of another lecture, I said, 'You sold your tech to these guys... You’re stuck here in 2018, no matter what happens. Did they make it worth your while?'

'Enough so that neither of us will ever have to work again. Lucy will never want for anything.'

I nod. He knows I am grateful.

'I'm not losing her too.'

He sits next to me on the couch and takes my hand in his. ‘There is a fail-safe, Ange.’

I want to ask him to go back and stop Zack from getting in the car that day six months ago, but I’m not sure I buy into this yet. If Adrian has lost his mind, he's done so completely and nothing I can say will change it. If he's telling me the truth, then nothing I can do will change what's about to happen. I'm just a passenger on someone else's time travel adventures. 

'Why couldn't you have just been... a veterinarian? Or a geologist?'

He smiles ruefully. 

At first, the changes are imperceptible. We watch the news morning and evening, waiting to see something significant. But Trump is still president. The world is still a mess.

But, we know changes are being made. We feel them in our bodies. It’s like mild déjà vu - a dizzy, disorienting, hyper-aware sensation. I imagine different versions of myself disappearing. Angela who has cereal instead of toast for breakfast. Angela who shares a chocolate with Lucy instead of eating it while she's at childcare. Angela who decides to crush her grief by going back to work instead of taking a few months off. Angela who copes by having an extra glass of wine every night. 

Weeks pass. Summer takes hold and calls the shots. We wake with the sun, revelling in its rosy golden glow, remarking on the beauty of the morning sky. We curse the sun a few hours later as the temperature soars. Australia is in the grips of a devastating drought. Some places haven’t seen rain in seven years. This is shaping up to be one of the worst summers in history. There are debates about climate change. There’s talk of severe water restrictions. Nothing new. This happens every year.

The holiday season ramps up and Christmas is around he corner. The air is full of smoke from bushfires, the smell of sunscreen and meat cooking on barbecues. There are invitations to end of year gatherings, Zack’s friends and my friends, everyone wanting to use this opportunity to check in on how we’re coping without Zack. It’s the last thing I want to do, talk about how I’m coping. Am I coping, or have I bought into Adrian’s time travel story as a way to escape it? Im addicted to my news feeds.

While we see no evidence of Adrian’s clients fixing the future in the news, we notice other changes. We turn up to a Christmas party to find out it was scheduled on a different day in a different timeline. I shop for Christmas presents only to return home to discover an empty car boot, because in this new timeline Angela decides to go shopping tomorrow. I spend an hour or two decorating the Christmas tree to find it packed away because Angela decides to cancel Christmas altogether.

It’s less a story about some heroic philanthropic future organisation travelling back in time to solve world problems, and more about the trials and tribulations of Angela, the great procrastinator. This amuses Adrian no end.

We are spared any surprises on Christmas Day. Lucy opens her presents with squeals of delight,  thrilled with her Peppa Pig clothes, her books and her Bluey figurines and dollhouse. We shower her with cuddles and kisses. We feast on seafood and ham, pavlova and too much champagne. We go to the beach in the afternoon to sleep it off in a little tent, the waves predictable, unchanging. Zack would have loved it.

On Boxing Day, we awaken to the regular Christmas headlines and a snippet of the President's address. But it's not Trump. Instead, a handsome, well-spoken woman. She exudes confidence and compassion. What a Christmas present to the world that has no memory of that travesty.

In the new year, the headlines start shifting. We hear less about school shootings and more about medical breakthroughs. Happy ending stories about people being evacuated before volcanic eruptions, typhoons, hurricanes, tidal waves and earthquakes. International agreements are made to slow climate change.

We are all happier, it seems. We make a life of it, as best we can. We talk, about good times and bad. There are so many changes, so many alternate timelines, that maybe there is one where Zack didn’t die, where we did have a second child, or a dog, maybe a cat. 

Adrian makes the most of this time with Lucy, reading stories to her before bed every night. Watching episode after episode of Peppa Pig with endless enthusiasm. He knows all the words to all the songs on the album too. It feels like he’s making up for time he’s lost somewhere along the way between now and 2029. I dare not ask him about it.

Despite all the fixes being made by invisible hands from the future, some things remain unchanged. Late summer is still harsh. It hasn't rained since November. The grass turns yellow, grows brittle and dies. The plants in the garden wilt and weep for moisture. We raise our voices to be heard over the roar of cicadas. Water restrictions limit us to 4 minute showers. We can’t use the sprinkler anymore. We stop leaving the house after 10am for fear of being caught in the heatwave. The air is so thick with smoke the government advises we wear masks. Burnt leaves litter the footpaths. 47 degree Celsius days are not uncommon. The heat is unrelenting. It radiates through the windows, through curtains. It invades the night. The power grid starts to fail and we are intermittently thrown into still, sweaty, dark nights. None of us get much sleep. 

And grief remains a constant. Sometimes quiet, shadowy. More often a dull ache. I grow weary of discovering the ways other versions of myself have tried to cope. Journals I find as I try to process my feelings with curiosity. Things of Zack's I find stashed in places, like secret guilty pleasures. Or worse, all evidence of him gone, packaged up and dropped off to goodwill. 

'MA-MA! My pop-sicle is melting! Make it stop!' Lucy shrieks one Sunday afternoon as we sit on the back deck during a brownout. Our Sunday afternoon ice blocks are a ritual, a semblance of normality in an ever chaotic and disintegrating reality. Mummy can't stop your popsicle from melting, honey. Mummy can't control time. Someone else does. 

We start to endure, rather than enjoy, ourselves. Adrian and I argue about little things. We argue because I am hot and tired and Lucy is throwing more tantrums and I miss Zack and I am sick of Adrian being around all the time. I pick fights, I admit it. I blame him for all of this, probably unfairly. It's easier to blame him. It's easier to just suffer than commit to change.

Then one day, Trump is President again. The next, the US teeters on the brink of war with China. North Korea and Russia stand by them. Puppet strings pull India and Pakistan into play. The following week, tempers flare in the Middle East. Atrocities are uncovered in Syria. Endangered species go extinct in Africa. Thousands die in landslides in South America. A chunk of permafrost in Siberia has dissolved. Islands in the South Pacific are swallowed by the ocean. Bushfires rage out of control across Australia. 

Then, Trump is no longer President. Someone else is. Things are better. Then they're worse. Then there's a nuclear explosion. Then there's not. It’s exhausting. It’s pointless.

Each night we sit on the couch and watch the news in silence, like two brooding, sullen teenagers.

‘Fail-safe my arse,’ I mutter.

He doesn’t reply. Then he is gone and I am alone on a still, dense summer evening. My eyes burn with tears.

…

It's a Sunday in December 2018. In Sydney, it's a glorious early summer's day. The cloudless sky is vast and blue and bright. The afternoon air carries the scent of an early bushfire season, that unmistakable, menthol smell of burnt eucalypt.

We've spent the day in the back garden under the trees having a tea party, a sausage sizzle and soaking up the sun. My shoulders are burnt. The straps of my singlet will leave white lines on my skin. Lucy's nose is a little red, and no doubt within a few years she’ll be covered with freckles, just like her dad. Adrian sits in the shade. He's always been clever like that.

Lucy is running under the sprinkler as it sprays a thin shower of water in lazy circles around the garden. I can’t wait till her little brother arrives in at the end of summer, so she’ll have someone to chase one day.

She’s asked me for a ‘popsicle’, and that’s why I’m in the kitchen now. As I bend over the freezer, I’m seized by the strongest sense of deja vu. For a moment, I am uncertain how many ice blocks to get. I pick up four. Then put one back. Then I feel like I'm going to cry. Damn hormones.

I glance out to the back deck. Zack and Adrian are laughing. Four ice blocks. I shake my head, shake off that dark feeling, and walk back out.

Zack’s laugh is the sound of summer. It’s light and bright and heartfelt. His eyes fall on me and he grins.

'Really, Angela,' says Adrian, You've been standing there watching us for ages. The popsicles are melting. You're gonna get it all over-' He seems older than I remember him. I study him for a moment, the deja vu rapidly fading. 

It's a beautiful afternoon. A perfect day. A promising start to a long summer.

I am smiling. I think of the word 'fail-safe'.