Allergic To Time (10 page)

He looked up at me calmly and adjusted his glasses slightly. “Well, life has to carry on you know. It’s the first week of semester and we’ve got a lot of work to get on top of.”
 

I figured he was just trying to assert his superiority, to remind me that he was the senior lecturer and I was just his student, and that whatever else might be happening the basic facts weren’t going to change. He basically wanted to remind me what my place was. Sometimes I really hated the University and all this hierarchal bullshit it encouraged. Martin had probably convinced himself that my visit that night was purely academic, and the issue of, you know, time travel conspiracy was just a peripheral issue that we would get to afterwards. Though I would have loved to know how he’d explain the presence of Robert at the meeting, if we were really only meeting about academic issues.
 

Still, his cold, serious tone of professional distance made me close up as well. I didn’t dare to mention the real reason we were all in that room. So I simply answered, “Yes, I’m prepared for the seminar.” I had done all the preparation the week before, when we were still on semester break. I was actually offended that Martin would insinuate that I was unprepared: I hadn’t forced my way into the PhD program — with the most controversial thesis in the University’s history, to boot — without being an outstanding student.
 

“Glad to hear it.”

Robert looked at us like we were even more alien to him than we were before. “Err, hello?” he said,
 
switching his focus between our two faces. “What about the real reason we’re here?”

Martin cleared his throat. “Yes, I suppose there are some...practical issues to sort out. For one, where is Robert going to live?” He shot Robert a cautious look. “Assuming – which I don’t — that you are telling the truth about your situation.”

Robert and I both groaned. I was incredibly frustrated that we seemed to have taken a step backwards from that morning, when Martin had all but admitted he had authored the Nick Cooper papers. Why had he suddenly gone so cold on us?
 

Robert shifted in his seat. “I thought I would just stay with Anna.”

Martin side-eyed us.
 
He raised an eyebrow. “Is that practical?”

I wasn’t entirely sure it was, but I wasn’t about to throw Robert out into the street. I was still the only person he had in the world that he could rely on. Jennifer would eventually start asking questions, or demanding that he pay her rent money. I couldn’t even afford to pay my own rent, let alone Robert’s as well. But I shrugged and nodded. “Of course,” I replied.
 

Martin turned to Robert, his eyes drilling into him. “And what exactly are you planning to do now that you have ‘travelled through time’? Are you going to find a job?”

“Look mate,” Robert began, sitting up in his chair, indignant. “I don’t appreciate the tone. It isn’t like I did this on purpose. Do you have any idea what it feels like to wake up in a totally foreign world? Where you barely recognise anything and you don’t know anyone?”
 

I thought I saw a flash of recognition — or a memory — cross Martin’s face, but it passed, and he didn’t answer.

Robert continued on, shaking his head. “Look, man, I don’t know what the hell even
happened.
I was just walking along, and then there was this bolt of light, and I woke up here. I didn’t choose it.”

Something about what Robert said changed Martin’s expression. Finally, slowly, as though it caused him great pain, he nodded. Then, in a murmur so low we could barely make it out, he said. “I know. This isn’t your fault.”

***
 

Robert had stepped outside for a cigarette, as Martin refused to break the rules of the physics building to allow him to smoke inside, despite that fact that it was freezing outside. But he was right, it would set off the smoke detectors and the onsite security would turn up, wondering what we were all up to.
 

Martin seemed relieved that Robert had left us alone for a while anyway. He took a deep breathe and
 
scratched his neck like he was considering something. He finally stood up and walked abruptly behind his desk and pulled out a desk drawer. He retrieved a thick folder of files and thrust it towards me. “Here, before I change my mind,” he said.
 

At first I assumed the folders must be more professional bullshit, like course outlines for the subject I was supposed to be tutoring, or something. But turning over to the first page I saw that it was anything but.
 

It simply read: “Time Travel Case Studies” on the opening page. I glanced up at Martin in shock, but he wouldn’t return my gaze. I returned to the folder and began flicking through it.

There it all was: all the research and notes from the Nick Cooper articles I had read. There was 10 times as much information as those articles had contained.
 
There were pages and pages of transcribed interviews, photos of strange, terrified looking people and almost
 
500 pages of detailed information about their stories. There were medical reports, almost all of them containing the same detail: the
 
patient — or time traveller — waking up in a hospital bed, unable to breathe, their lungs unable to process the air.
 

As I paged through one of them — a more detailed account of one of the cases I had found most compelling in my own previous readings — the case of a woman who claimed to have travelled from 1880 to 1980, a hundred years out of time, who had become terrified and an outcast of society – I couldn’t help murmuring, “Why do you have all this printed out?” I knew Martin wasn’t much for technology but it kind of seemed like both a waste of paper to have printed all of this, as well as being dangerous to keep a hard copy sitting in his desk.

“It’s the only copy I have.” He leant up on his desk as he quietly spoke. “There is no electronic copy at all. I couldn’t risk it being copied or uploaded. I keep this in my desk, hidden in plain sight.”

“Who would want to find it though?”

He didn’t answer. I thought I already knew. The man in black.
 

I shut the folder, shaking my head. “There’s one thing I just don’t understand,” I said looking up at him. “All these people travelled through time, right? And you believe their stories?” Surely he couldn’t deny that now, given what he had just handed me?
 

He nodded. “I believe them,” he responded quietly.
 

“But...” I began, confused. I tried to gather my train of thought. “At the hospital, yesterday, the man in black and Bianca both said that
no one
had ever survived a trip through time before. That Robert was the very first one.”

Martin looked down at his hands, avoiding my statement for a second. He took a deep breath in, and looked at the door, listening to make sure Robert wasn’t about to come back in.

“He’s not the first one to survive a trip through time.” He paused and looked at me through heavy lids. “He
is
the first one to survive their experiments.”
 

The door quickly swung open and I spun around, my heart beating fast, as I almost dropped the folder on the floor.
 

“It’s bloody freezing out there man,” Robert said, coming in and huddling over Martin’s small bar heater in the corner. I looked him up and down, in his ridiculous glam rock outfit, and I felt very sad and terrified for him. He noticed the looks on our faces and asked us what the matter was.
 

A glazed look hung over Martin’s face, but he stood up and pulled himself together. “We have to go to Nelson Bay,” he announced. “We have to go there right away.” He moved around the other side of his desk and began to hurriedly pack up his belongings.
 

“Nelson Bay?”
I asked incredulously.
 
There was only one person I knew in Nelson Bay. And that couldn’t possibly be the reason we were going there. Martin didn’t even know of that person’s existence, let alone the fact that that person lived in Nelson Bay. There was no conceivable reason for Martin knowing that fact. “What the hell do we need to go to Nelson Bay for?” I asked, wondering what the hell could possibly be going on. “Do you want to get some fishing in or something? Because I don’t think this is exactly the time for it.”

Martin zipped his bag up and made toward the door. “We’re going there to see your father.”

Holy shit, I thought, and nothing seemed real again.

Chapter Eleven.

It was a three and a half hour drive from Sydney to Nelson Bay. If there had have been traffic on the road it would have been much longer, but in the middle of the night we pretty much had the highway to ourselves.
 

Robert was in the front passenger seat, next to Martin who was driving us in his old banged up commodore which Robert probably recognised from the 1970s. I was slumped in the backseat, still in disbelief over what was happening.
 

“Cool man, road trip!” Robert called out, his window down so he could flick cigarette ash out of it.
 

There is nothing cool about it
, I thought, sitting back in freezing cold silence. The only reason I was going along with it was because, as Martin had explained, at least we would be safer if we got out of the city. Ever since he had told me about the man in black and these apparent “experiments” I didn’t want to be anywhere near RPA Hospital or the University of Sydney.
 

But it had been a freaking long time since I’d been to Nelson Bay, and I’d had no intention of
ever
going back there.
 

I could see that Martin kept checking on me in the rear-view mirror, but I was angry at him now, and determined to sulk for the entire journey. We were about half way into it when we passed a 24 hour McDonald’s on the highway and Robert called for us to pull over. “I’m starving!” he announced, though I wasn’t sure how that could be, considering that he’d consumed almost the entire large pizza we’d ordered earlier that evening. Martin pulled into the parking lot anyway and turned off the engine.
 

“You coming in?” he asked, glancing over his shoulder at me. By that stage I was becoming bored of my own sulking, and was dying for a coffee, so I pulled my seatbelt off and climbed out the door, without saying anything. As we walked in Robert seemed excited to be at a place he recognised, although I figured he was in for a rude shock when he saw the menu prices.
 

The other two ordered burgers and I asked for a long black. We sat in a booth opposite the lonely highway, which was empty except for the occasional truck thundering past in the dead of the night. At least the inside of the McDonalds was heated. There wasn’t a lot of warmth in the car considering that Robert needed to keep his window wound down almost constantly. I still couldn’t believe how much he smoked. He was literally chain smoking: lighting each new cigarette with the butt of the previous one then moving onto the next.
 

As we huddled in the booth it became clear that I was not 100% done sulking. I didn’t say anything as Robert shovelled his burger into his mouth and Martin picked at his, making small talk about the town we were technically in, Wahroonga. I couldn’t believe he could be so blasé about the entire thing. He’d still barely explained anything to me — just as things had begun making some kind of sense to me the rug was pulled our from under of my feet yet again. I just stared down into my coffee, refusing to join in with the conversation.
 

When it became clear he wouldn’t get any response from me, Martin began to make chit chat with Robert, which was a strange sight to witness. “So...” he began. “What is it like in the 70s?”

I rolled my eyes. Martin should know, considering he was a hundred years old. I didn’t think Robert was going to dignify him with a response, but he seemed willing enough to talk. He wiped his face with a napkin and shrugged. “Kind of shit, actually.”

Martin raised his eyebrows. “Really?”
 

“Weren’t you born in the 70s, Martin?” I asked, unable to resist. “You should remember it vividly.”

He seemed to realise that I was only looking for an argument and ignored me. He turned back to Robert. “What did you do there?”
 

Robert swallowed another bite of his burger. “I sung in a band. Wasn’t really going anywhere though.”

Martin seemed bemused by his answer. I wasn’t particularly shocked myself, considering the get-up that Robert was still insisting on wearing. Even though he now had a plain black jacket of Martin’s on over the jumpsuit, he was only slightly less conspicuous. It was lucky there wasn’t anyone else inside the deserted McDonalds, because he wouldn’t exactly have blended in amongst the rest of the residents of that small town.

God knows what they were going to make of him in Nelson Bay. It was a small, backwards tourist town, made up of conservative voters mostly 55 years and over. I didn’t think there was a single non-white person in the entire town either.
 

I wished we could get into the car and just head back to Sydney, but that didn’t seem like an option either. We were screwed if we went back, screwed if we continued on to Nelson Bay. Martin glanced over at me and saw that I was lost in my own thoughts. “Anna?” he asked. “Do you want me to explain why we’re visiting your...”

“No,” I snapped, interrupting him. “None of your explanations are any good.” I sat up and turned toward the window where a ten tonne truck carrying fruits and vegetables rumbled past, causing the windows to shake. I refused to turn my glare back towards him.
 

Martin sighed and continued with his conversation with Robert instead. “Anything else? Did you have a paying job, or a family? A wife?”

“I’m engaged,” he replied, whether wistfully or hesitantly, I wasn’t sure.
 

Martin prickled at the term and looked down at his half-eaten burger. For a second I also glanced back over to check the look on his face. I’d always felt like ‘fiancé’ and ‘engaged’ were forbidden words in his presence. Not that Robert would know anything about that. But talk of a long ago, possibly dead fiancé, must have struck more than a slight nerve. Robert sensed the unease and moved on.