"I work on missiles on a secure base," he tilted the scrawled-out diagram first one way and then another, "but the engineering of a simple bowtie," he sighed when he found what he hoped was the right side up and set it carefully on the dressing table in front of him, "seems to have alluded me."
Lez Morris worked in stern silence with his fingers, typically attuned to intricate work, jumbling up fabric quicker than one might claim Bob as his uncle. He growled as he hurriedly unknotted the mess. Lez stared momentarily at his reflection, his grey suit and starched white shirt immaculate save for the crumbled mass of cloth around his neck. As he moved to set about trying again, his newly gifted gold cufflinks caught the morning sunlight streaming through the windows. Lez slowed his movements.
"'Start with the bowtie lying face up,'" he looked at his reflection, then back at the diagram, "how am I supposed to know if this is face up or down, Donald?"
Lez felt a sliver of satisfaction at calling out his friend for the vague instructions. They'd been hastily written on a napkin, the words slurred together and, in places, nearly blotted out due to liquid residue bleeding the ink out in every direction. But he should be grateful that Donald had taken the time to draw them out at all during his stag party. Though it hadn't been much of a stag party, at least not what most men his age would expect of one. It'd just been Donald and a few other colleagues from base sharing drinks and dinner at a diner a few towns away. The secretive nature of their work meant long months of isolation from family and friends. Although even when he wasn't confined to base, Lez didn't have much of a family to go home to. His grandmother lived in Buffalo across the river, and that was about it. His younger brother, Gerry, had died in the war, and their parents had both been out of the picture long before either of them had signed up for the service alongside all the other naïve youth who never came back.
Lez counted himself lucky that, though he didn't have much family, he made up for it with the likes of Donald, resident prankster in their small "family" of civilian technicians assigned to the Grand Island Nike Base. Donald never tired of reminding Lez of how much of a lucky son-of-a-gun he was for:
1. being friends with Donald (always said in a tone that denoted a serious case of self-importance),
2. being employed by Uncle Sam (this was always said with sarcasm since Donald shared similar scars from the war),
3. being able to "play" with large explosives and design "big kids" toys,
4. having the most no-nonsense-loving grandmother known to humanity (Donald's words, but Lez concurred), and
5. having an amazing woman like Alice Coleman agree to marry him.
For that marriage, Lez was now at an impasse with this bowtie.
Hearing the door behind him click shut, Lez spoke without looking, "I hope you're better at tying these dopey things than you are drawing them, Donald, because --" his words died out.
"I'm afraid I never learned how to tie one of those either." A stranger standing inside the doorway spoke first after allowing a brief, confused silence. "I prefer clip-ons."
"Who are you?" Lez finally asked, ignoring the stranger's vain attempt at humor. "What are you doing here?"
The stranger shifted from one foot to the other with nervous energy. He wore simple black slacks and a khaki button-down. Lez didn't recognize him from Alice's side of the family, though he did strike Lez as familiar. There was something else about him, an essence that lurked about his shoulders.
"I --," the stranger raked a shaky hand through his hair and spoke out on a whoosh of air, "you'd think by now I'd have this speech down pat." A mirthless chuckle followed his words.
Lez raised his eyebrows. "What speech?" Lez had the crazy thought that maybe he should call for help.
The stranger brought his tired gaze back up to Lez's and, without further preamble, stated, "You can't marry Alice."
The room's air seemed now to crackle with foreboding. Lez frowned, "Pardon?"
"I said, 'You can't marry Alice.'"
Lez laughed, "Oh, I heard you the first time, buddy. My response was more along the lines of 'Why the hell not?'" He crossed his arms over his chest and widened his stance. "Last time I checked, Alice loved me, I loved her, and nobody had staked a prior claim or made a law against our marrying." Lez pointed at the stranger's throat. "I want to know who you think you are to be coming in here on my wedding day, saying this sort of hooey?"
The stranger shifted his weight again before pointing to a nearby pitcher of lemonade. "May I?"
Lez cursed his childhood lessons in manners when he acquiesced to the man's request without first demanding an answer. The stranger's hands shook, causing some of the lemonade to upset and dribble to the floor, but the majority found its way into his glass, and from there, that majority found its way from the glass into the man's mouth—though a good deal still trickled down his throat. The stranger wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, took a deep breath, and spoke with determination.
"I am from a future." Lez blinked. The stranger kept himself from looking directly at Lez as his nervous energy had him pace in a slow circle around Lez. "The future I'm from is peaceful and financially stable. We have no missile bases, standing armies, or a topsy-turvy stock market that warmongers use to finance proxy wars. It is a time of technological innovation, the third industrial revolution, as some call it. That's how I built my time machine, you see? Scientists and inventors aren't used to create weapons to bring about destruction; we can use our skills for the betterment of mankind." Halting where Lez had once been in front of the mirror, he looked at Lez as if everything he'd just said made perfect sense.
"You're joking, right?" Lez waved a hand in the air. "You expect me to believe you've come all the way from the future just to tell me I can't marry Alice? And for what? Because…wait a second. I don't even know what my marriage has to do with your supposed shiny future of peace."
"If you marry Alice today, my future will no longer exist. We've cured cancer and ended world hunger in my future. We're colonizing the moon and working towards Mars. If you marry Alice, then all that will not happen." The stranger's tone turned once more to one of pleading. "I will not happen."
Lez shook his head and backed away from the lunatic, as that was what this man was: an escaped asylum patient. Of course, the closest asylum was across the river, but he could've snuck onto the island by truck or ferry. Crazy things like that happened in this world. Rarely. But they happened. Time travel, on the other hand, was still a theory.
Lez made for the door. "So, for the sake of the cure for cancer, world peace, stable currency, and moon colonization, I'm not supposed to marry Alice? I don't see how those events even correlate to one another."
"Alice wasn't supposed to fall in love with you." Lez stopped and quirked his head to the side, studying the stranger. "You have to travel back in time with me, today, now, and ensure that Alice will fall in love with the right man."
Lez laughed. That last statement did it. It was just like Donald to send a lark on his wedding day, mere hours away from the ceremony. He'd never let his friend live this one down.
"All right, you can cut the joke now. I get it." Lez boldly walked forward and punched the stranger on the shoulder. "Donald put you up to this to get my mind off the wedding jitters. You can tell Donald that it worked for a little while." Pausing, Lez was struck again by that eerie sense of familiarity, but he hid his unease behind a smile. "Though let him know that next time, go easy on the doom and gloom. That's a bit much for a wedding day." Despite his bravado, Lez noticed his fingers shook when he reached up to start over on his tie.
"If you don't come quickly, a much darker future than you expect for you and Alice will happen. And it'll happen sooner rather than later."
Lez dropped his hands and glared at the stranger through his reflection, "What do you mean?"
Donald's appearance cut off the stranger's answer. Donald was out of breath, and his suit appeared crumpled. No doubt he'd woken up mere minutes ago. Lez turned to point first at his friend and then to the stranger, "Good job, you old dog. Now get your prank and cut out so I can get ready in peace."
Lez noticed confusion cross his friend's face, then replaced with determined curiosity when the stranger pushed Donald out of the way and fled the room. Donald quickly followed, leaving Lez alone. Only he wasn't as alone as he would've liked. The stranger had left an ominous feeling in his wake. There was something about him that left Lez unsettled. The abject sincerity he'd seen in the stranger's eyes when he'd spoken of the darkness he and Alice could be facing churned in his stomach. He'd deck Donald the next time he saw him.
"There you are." Lez saw his grandmother in the doorway, as pristine as ever. "I see that you're not ready yet." Despite her aging, she strode forward on a confident gait. "Some things never change."
Her words could be considered harsh, but Lez knew she spoke them with love. She'd always pushed Gerry and him to be their best. She'd tried to be everything they needed: father, mother, grandmother. She hadn't always succeeded, but she'd certainly tried, and he respected and loved her for it.
As she took over, Lez laid his hands on her thin shoulders, "How are you holding up?"
"Funny question to ask me," she harrumphed at her own efforts to tie the bowtie before undoing what she'd just done and looking down at Donald's diagram, "when you're the one getting married. What was Donald drinking last night when he drew this?" She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth.
"How is Alice?"
His grandmother shrugged, "Pacing up a storm in the other room with her bridesmaids trailing."
"Do you know if anyone we don't know went in to talk to her?"
"What do you mean?" His grandmother went back to tying the tie. "People have been coming and going all over today, and I'm still learning her side of the family. There are so many of them." A few seconds more, and then she stepped back. "There now. Have a look."
Lez looked at his reflection, then smiled at his grandmother. He would keep it with pride regardless of whether it'd been well-made. "What would I do without you?"
"Practically nothing." She turned on her heel and marched over to the settee, where she sat with a purposeful grace Lez had only ever seen in one other person: Alice. "You want to tell me why you're acting so jumpy?" She held up a hand before he could speak. "And don't try to say that it's the heebie-jeebies because of the wedding, because that's a lot of hooey to me. I know what wedding day jitters look like."
Lez couldn't imagine Donald surviving the tongue-lashing his grandmother would put him through if she knew the truth, so he was determined to distract her with other pertinent points: the responsibility of thank you cards, living up to expectations, future planning, not-so-distant fatherhood, and he would've gone on, but their conversation was interrupted by a not-so-distant alarm.
"It can't be," Lez whispered as he looked toward the base.
"Does that mean that the Reds are attacking?" Lez turned from the window to see his grandmother clutching her pearl necklace, her fingers brushing over them like rosary beads. "Isn't that what that alarm means, Lez?"
Remembering himself and his audience, Lez shook his head, "I'm sure it's an unscheduled drill." He knelt in front of her and smoothed his hands over her knees. "I'll have to check in at the base now."
As he helped her to her feet and moved towards the doorway, she spoke, "I don't recall having seen published a pre-approved schedule for when they bombed Pearl Harbor or blitzed London. How can you be so certain it's just a drill?" The panicked hitch in her voice unsettled his stomach.
"I don't think they'd do it. Not today. It's too pretty a day for mutual destruction." They went through a narrow corridor to the side entrance of the chapel. "You and the others must get to the air raid shelters until the drill ends. If you DO recall, that procedure was published in the packet sent out from base a few weeks ago." He winked at her sudden, exasperated look.
The chapel was empty when they hurried through. Lez barely took note of the flower arrangements Alice had been so excited about. A church should have organ music, not the wailing of promised destruction. Lez made a beeline for the entrance, seeing ladies gathering outside, waiting for his grandmother to join them. She hesitated when they stood on the wooden planks of the church porch and turned back to face him. Her hands sought out his, and she held tight. Her movements and expression set Lez's teeth on edge, much like the genuine pleading in the stranger's voice when he'd spoken about the future and their coming doom.
"You be careful with your rockets, Lez."
"Missiles, grandma. And I doubt we'll be doing anything with the missiles today. Except maybe polish them." He squeezed her hands. "It is just a drill." Leaning forward, he kissed her cheek, "The others are waiting for you. Go on now."
She left his side with one more gentle push. They quickly began loading up the cars, but Lez didn't see the telltale white of a wedding gown. Where was Alice? Lez stiffened when a pair of white lace-covered hands came over his eyes.
"Don't you know seeing the bride before the wedding is bad luck?" Alice whispered. Her breath was warm as it tickled across his skin.
He tried humor, "With this alarm, you would think I'd done much more than just see you."
"Lez!" She playfully slapped his shoulder. Then her arms came around his waist, her palms flat against his chest, as she hugged herself tightly to his back. Lez felt the change of emotion in her touch, and he tried to stave off her misgivings with a press of his hands atop hers. "I love you, Lez."
He closed his eyes, "I love you too, Alice." He squeezed her hands closer to his body and felt her arms tighten their hold in response. "I really gotta go now, honey."
"I know. I'll be with grandma and the others in the shelter." Though it was a warm day, he felt chilled when she let go and heard her departing heels on the wooden planks.
Though he knew she'd box his ears later for doing so, Lez couldn't help but steal a glance at Alice's retreat. The breeze lifted her veil just enough for him to glimpse the blonde locks of her carefully coiffed hair beneath it. He waited until he saw her lithely slide into the same car his grandmother had disappeared into, and he nodded to himself.
Lez turned and started for his own car, but caught sight of the stranger and stopped. Lez narrowed his eyes. The stranger had been no hoax, and Lez was suspicious that he was somehow connected to the alarm. Lez hurried off the church steps toward the strange man, muttering when the stranger immediately retreated through the trees. If the stranger was trying to hide from Lez, he wasn't doing an outstanding job: his trail was as obvious as if an army tank had gone through the undergrowth. Lez felt that the stranger wanted to be found, and the further he moved away from anyone who could be of possible help in case this went south, the more Lez wished he'd thought of bringing some sort of weapon.
Lez pushed aside the last of the brush hiding the shoreline near the new bridge construction site. A perfect spot for a murder. Or for a secret rendezvous with a getaway boat. Lez readied himself as he stepped onto the sunshine-brightened shore. Directly in front of him stood the stranger. He didn't look any different than when Lez had seen him before, aside from holding a remote device in his left hand.
Lez stopped and pointed to the device. "What is that?"
"I told you. I built a time machine. This device," the stranger held it up higher, which had Lez shifting on the balls of his feet for better leverage in case he needed to flee, "will recall my machine. It is outside of time and space right now as it can't stay within any given time for longer than a few seconds; otherwise, it melts down."
Lez jerked a thumb over his shoulder, "And the alarm? Do I have you to thank for that?"
The stranger's arm lowered, "I warned you." His eyes held a promise of pain when they settled on Lez. "That alarm was set off because one of your colleagues mistakenly believed the Soviets launched an attack. The radar sensors were wrong; it was not a missile he saw, but a glitch in the system. The Soviets will think it was an unprovoked attack and will retaliate with their missiles within hours. The American president will try to call the Kremlin to stop further attacks, but it will be too late. Both sides will then plead with their allies to join them in a crusade of mutual destruction." The stranger looked at his watch and shook his head. "You are a day away from World War 3 and the annihilation of everything you love."
"Did you cause the glitch?" Lez asked despite himself. He couldn't bring himself to believe. There would be no attack. It was an unscheduled drill. He would marry Alice today. But his instinct, which had brought him through the war with barely a scratch, told him that this stranger was telling the truth.
The stranger pressed a button, and a rounded ball of energy appeared. "Does it matter when this war is inevitable, as things are now poised? What difference does it make if it was me, the Soviets, your colleagues, or truly a glitch? Unless you come with me now, this will keep happening. Only you won't realize you're repeating hell. And I will continue to come back to plead with you to stop being a selfish ass." The stranger stepped closer to the ball of energy, "So what's it going to be?"
Lez undid his bowtie, ripped the material from his body, dropped it to the ground, and unbuttoned the top of his shirt. If he were going back in time, he'd rather go without the noose around his neck. Pulling off his suit coat, Lez hung it on a nearby branch; he would also go without the straitjacket. Once they were settled in the machine (the piece of evidence Lez had needed to reassure himself he was doing the right thing), he turned to the stranger and asked, "Why today?"
"What do you mean?" The stranger busied himself with checking the various dials and levers that cocooned them in a cramped space barely big enough for two. It was both exactly what Lez expected of a time machine and not at all. What looked like a hand-drawn portrait of a young woman, tucked carefully between two dials nearest the stranger, stood out as something unexpected. However, the repeating clicks and whirs of the machine were exactly as he'd have imagined.
"Why did you travel to my wedding day?" Lez continued. "Why didn't you travel to an earlier time?"
The stranger lowered his hands to his lap, "Oh. Well," he returned to his earlier nervous tick of running his hand through his hair, "time works in waves, the same as sound, light, radiation, etcetera; these waves are all influenced by the gravitational pull and push from the sun, planets, and surrounding stars. Time jumps can occur only when a spherical alignment exists among certain celestial bodies. So --" He cleared his throat and then hurried on. "It took much trial and error to come to a close enough time to do some good without risking absolute failure. In fact, this is my third attempt, and each attempt has been to a different point in your timeline."
Lez couldn't ask what had happened in the first two attempts. From the expression on the stranger's face and the tone in his voice, neither of those attempts held much by way of hope for this one.
"You said you were from 'a future' but not 'the future,' and you mentioned me repeating hell on multiple timelines. Why did you have to travel to this timeline and stop my marriage?" Lez nearly mimicked the stranger by running his hand through his hair, a habit both he and Gerry had gained from their father, but he stopped and kept his hands in his lap.
"Think of time as an ongoing silk tapestry: elaborate, intricate, dynamic." The stranger leaned back, as much as physically possible, and spoke while his fingers adjusted various dials and levers. "If you snag it somewhere along the way, you can still keep the tapestry and keep building upon it, but that's going to cause other snags, future unraveling, and the overall look and feel of the tapestry will be ruined because of the original snag."
Lez couldn't help but find sardonic humor in the idea that his marriage to Alice was of such consequence that a time traveler had felt the need to come back not once or twice but three times to stop such a "snag" from happening. Lez allowed his morbid amusement to show when he spoke again, "So my marriage is the time snag for the tapestry of our combined existence?" The stranger's cheeks flushed, and he looked away, drawing Lez's eyes back to the hand-drawn portrait. "Who is that?"
"The integrity and consistency of tapestries have to be protected." The stranger spoke as if Lez hadn't asked the question. "Because they're delicate, beautiful, and worth saving." Lez watched the stranger reach out and lightly draw a finger down the line of the portrait's cheek.
His voice held such conviction that Lez deduced the woman in the portrait was as much a motive for the stranger to time travel as ensuring the colonization of the moon and the future's financial stability. His earlier dislike and distrust of the man partially diminished now that Lez could grab hold of at least one thing they had in common: they both had someone worth bending the rules for.
Then, just as suddenly as they'd been whisked out of time, they were dropped back into it. The pair was dumped into a field, and the machine disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. Standing side by side, they took in their surroundings in silence. It was early morning by the looks of the sun, just peeking over the trees, and light reflected off the dew-covered grass like droplets of fire. When he breathed, Lez could see his breath. The air carried the scent of early autumn.
"Where ar --"
The world exploded, and Lez and the stranger were sent hurtling backward, landing a few feet from where they'd been standing. Lez immediately recognized the sound and damage of an exploding shell, and in confirmation, more came raining down across the field further away, accompanied by the sounds of M-1 and K98k rifles. They'd traveled back to the war. And directly into a firefight. Lez rolled onto his stomach and covered his head. He waited until the shelling stopped, and the firefight seemed to momentarily shift away. He lifted his head and looked around for his time-traveling companion. Lez spotted him lying not too far away and crawled towards him.
"Oh, buddy," Lez assessed the time traveler's damage. He could smell both the tang of blood and the pungent stench of feces. There was a hole in the stranger's side where some of his lacerated intestines had fallen out. The stranger reached down and attempted to push them back in, but seemed to be losing the strength to keep up the fight. He was bleeding out fast. Keeping his voice calm, Lez forced a thin smile, "Hey there, fella, how're you holding up?"
The stranger used his one good hand to grab at Lez's, his eyes wide but clear when he looked at him, "The man Alice is supposed to marry --" he coughed, and the action caused a reaction of moans and spasms as more of his guts gushed out on a wave of blood, "he will die today. Unless," he squeezed Lez's hand hard, using it as the anchor, "unless you get him out of harm's way. You gotta --"
"Sshh," Lez leaned over the dying stranger, "I get it, buddy. I get it. You don't have to worry." He nodded at the stranger. "Hey, you never did tell me your name."
The stranger's sudden smile took on a loopy quality, and Lez knew he wasn't long for this world. "I was named for the man who saved my father." Lez had to lean closer to hear the whispered words as the firefight grew louder again. "Leslie."
Lez jerked his head back and stared at the stranger. The stranger nodded, the smile still on his face, and then Lez understood the familiarity he'd felt. Rustling in the grass just behind him jolted his attention away from the stranger, and Lez turned to stare at the bayonet point on the end of a rifle barrel. He acted on instinct: ducking to the side, Lez used the barrel to jerk his assailant closer, punching at his assailant's face almost in one motion. His assailant fell over with a grunt. The bayonet stuck in the ground, but his assailant forewent the weapon and was back on Lez in seconds. Lez scrapped with him in the grass, doing his best to get the upper hand. Alice. Grandma. Future.
His assailant got him into a headlock. Lez punched and scratched at the man's hold, but he didn't budge. His mind grew fuzzy. Alice. Grandma. Future. Lez looked to the side and saw the dead eyes of his time-traveling companion staring back at him with one last look of a pained plea frozen upon his face. Lez felt down the arms, then the torso, and finally the legs of his assailant until he found what he was looking for. Gripping the handle tightly, Lez unsheathed the boot dagger and stabbed in and twisted upwards between his assailant's ribs, more than likely piercing a lung and, if lucky, nicking an artery. The grip around his neck loosened. Lez took full advantage of it, pulling away from the headlock while repeatedly stabbing backward into his assailant's torso.
Scrambling to his knees, Lez faced his would-be killer. His assailant's head was bowed, staring at the blood seeping into his hands as he clutched at the wounds Lez had inflicted. When he looked up at Lez, Lez found himself staring into a matching pair of green eyes with a matching expression of confused horror. A shell exploding nearby, showering them with dirt clods, snapped Lez out of his revulsion. He pushed the dying clone onto his back and worked to strip him of his coat.
"Who --" the voice was weak as he spoke, and his hands clutched helplessly at Lez, as Lez finally pulled off his uniform coat and put it on.
Lez placed his hand over the man's mouth and shook his head at his dying gaze. He grabbed the discarded rifle with one hand and the fallen helmet in the other. Lez shouldered the rifle and ran, leaving his dying counter-self beside the corpse of the time traveler. This had been where he'd survived, and his brother hadn't. Up ahead, Lez saw the convoy of his old comrades moving down the road in pursuit of the retreating Nazis. He ran faster. He knew he didn't have much time.
Though he knew it was coming, the first explosion still surprised him. It halted him in his tracks, along with everyone else. Then, everyone began yelling at once. Some thought they were being shelled again and scrambled for cover off the road, only to find themselves blown skyward when they took a wrong step. Landmines. Lez stopped long enough to scan the frantic mass of soldiers, his eyes homing in on his target almost immediately. He did not heed the officers' orders as he dashed through the frenzied mass of men.
His eyes connected with his brother's just as they both heard the click. Arms outstretched, Lez threw himself forward. He imagined the press of Alice's hands against his chest, her skin's smell, and her lips' taste. He heard her laughter. Lez would do anything to see her smile. Even if it meant her smiles would be for someone else, even his own brother. His hands pressed against Gerry's chest, pushing his brother off the road and away from the landmine.
Lez then smiled as his world ended.