So it’s a rainy Thursday night, and I’m sitting in Sam’s Derby Club downtown. Sam’s isn’t a swank drinking establishment. Clean the place up a bit, and you might be able to call it seedy. But I like it because it’s small, dark, and the faces staring at the bar are always the same.
Except tonight. Tonight there’s a middle-aged man in a rumpled brown suit, and he’s eyeing me. He’s nervous, and it looks like he wants to talk. Which is something that I try to avoid, so I’m not going to help him out.
“Uh, excuse me?”
Damn. I glance over at him.
“You don’t know me, do you?” He’s staring at me, almost desperately.
“No, can’t say that I do.”
His eyes drop back to his glass. “I didn’t think so. I guess I didn’t get everything right, Jimmy.”
Not many people get to call me Jimmy. “Um, have we met?”
He slumps from desperation to depression. “Yeah, but not here. Well, here, but not really here. I’ve been coming to this bar for ten years…but not this bar…”
“You lost me, buddy.” Great. Some drunk who thinks he knows me. Gotta watch my wallet.
He sighs. A long, drawn-out, pretty damn impressive sigh. “I screwed up history, Jimmy. But I fixed it; most of it. You and I…well, we weren’t best friends or anything, but you knew who the heck I was. I’m Larry.”
“Maybe it’s time to go home, uh…Larry.”
Bloodshot eyes fix on mine. Bloodshot, but with a wild-eyed amount of whiteness showing around them. “I built a time machine, Jimmy. Well, I will build it…I did built it. Shit, it’s all so confusing now. Look, I gotta…I gotta tell someone. Please.”
My plans for the evening include: 1) Drinking and 2) Staggering home. The rain wasn’t easing up, so I had enough time to humor the crazy man. At least he didn’t smell.
“Go ahead then,” I said. I order a couple more beers.
“Well…you know I was working for a research…oh. No, you don’t know. Anyway, I was doing some research into this new branch of physics. More of a sub-branch, really, since it was derived from…” He catches my glance. “Uh, anyway, I was getting close to something, and I’m pretty sure it was time travel.”
“I thought you said you did discover that?”
“Well…yes. But I didn’t; I was going to, though. Look, it’s like this: I was onto something, something big. Really big, but I was stuck. So I swore that as soon as I figured out the rest of it and was able to make use of the discovery, that I’d come back in time and give myself the answer. And the next morning I woke up, and there were the plans.”
“You figured it out overnight?” I thought I was following him, but once he got going he was chattering like a hyperactive squirrel.
“No, I figured it out sometime in the future. And then, in the future, built a time machine, and dropped off the plans.”
“So…wait…you built this thing, or not?”
“Yes! I built the time machine once I had given myself the plans from the future. But I built it before I was going to.”
I had either had too much, or not nearly enough to drink. “So you built it before you solved the problem?”
He fidgets with a peanut. “Yes. But I would have…”
“So if you did that, then you really never solved the problem at all?”
He fidgets even more. “Um. I’m not sure. I guess the fact that I would have was good enough. Anyway, I built the time machine. It was fairly small, and simple. I couldn’t go forward or back too far, only about two, three thousand years. I didn’t want to push my luck and blow a circuit or something…”
“But you screwed up,” I said, hoping to get to the point of this little story.
“I…I was curious. I could visit any period of history that I wanted! Well, not that I knew a lot about history. What’s the point of visiting 1511 if you don’t know what to expect, right?”
“Yeah, sure. Best to be prepared.” I’m good at humoring crazies. I don’t like it, but I’m good at it.
“Exactly. So I started small. Just forty years.”
“1963?”
“Yes. I wanted to see who really shot Kennedy.”
“Ah. Yeah, ok, that’s a good mystery to solve. So who did it?”
“Oh, it was Oswald. Well, it was Oswald.” He was shredding another peanut shell.
“What do you mean?”
“I shouldn’t have done it, I know. But I had to. I wanted to get closer, and really see what Oswald was doing, so I snuck into the building…”
“And?”
“And he saw me. Oswald. He saw me, and he ran. He was a really nervous guy.”
“You don’t say.”
He looks up at me. His expression isn’t getting any less manic. “But you see what that means, don’t you? Kennedy wasn’t shot. He lived.”
“So? That seems like a good thing.”
He has quite a little pile of peanut shells going. At this rate, I’ll need a shovel to find him before he was done telling his story.
“No, it wasn’t. Things were too different. Nixon…well, it just wasn’t my world, not at all.”
“So you had to fix your mistake. You needed to kill Kennedy.”
The peanut flew out of his hands. “No! I couldn’t do it. So I needed to find someone who could. The obvious choice was the Illuminati.”
I chuckle. He doesn’t. He’s serious. “You’re serious? You decided to go with a conspiracy theory? Wait a minute…do you mean they really exist?”
“No, of course the Illuminati didn’t exist. That’s why I had to create them.”
“Good story, pops. Try selling it to a magazine.”
“No!” He doesn’t shout so much as croak. Benny down at the end of the bar almost looks up from his scotch, but he’s far too committed to it. Larry goes on. “I’m not joking. I knew how the rumors said they started, so I went back a few more years. I found Adam Weishaupt, convinced him that I was from the future and that I knew what he was supposed to do, and we went to talk to Washington.”
“Why would talking to the government help?”
“No, no. George Washington. Adam Weishaupt supposedly killed Washington, took over his role, and established the Illuminati influence in America.”
“Let me get this straight: You were on a mission to kill two U.S. presidents.”
He looks aghast. “Not at all! Washington wasn’t president yet.”
I feel a headache coming on. I order more beer.
“Thanks, Jimmy. Look, I tried to get Washington to listen to reason. He just thought I was crazy.”
I restrain myself. “So, you did him in, Larry?”
“Adam did. He was a bit caught up in the idea of his destiny by that point. But I didn’t kill anyone. I just got rid of the body.”
“How’d…”
“I dropped it in 1511. I told you, I didn’t know anything about that year, so I figured it couldn’t hurt.”
“And did it work?”
He sighs again. “Yes, it worked. There were some changes, like the pyramid on the dollar bill. But, mostly, things were the same.”
“So. All in all, not too terrible. You screwed up, and you found a…an interesting solution. Convoluted, but interesting. Could be worse; we could all be giant cockroaches now.” I said, eying one crawling on a glass behind the bar.
“Yes, yes. Everything was generally ok. It made me a bit over-confident, though.” He gets back to shredding peanut shells.
I have a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. “What’d you do, Larry?”
“Nothing, Jimmy! Not much, anyway. Well, maybe a little tweaking. But, still…Jesus seemed to take it rather well. You know, all things considered.”
It’s my turn to sigh. “Sam? Bottle of whisky down here.”