Looking back on it the arrival of The Time Traveler was the complete opposite of dramatic. At first there was no one there … and then there was. No flash of light. No blast of sound. The Time Traveler simply appeared out of nowhere.
What was dramatic was where The Time Traveler materialized. He appeared just behind Blake Arnold and Laureen Whitcomb, the co-hosts of KLRB’s Good Morning Meridian!, at exactly 4:32am … two minutes into the broadcast.
The most obvious aspects of The Time Traveler was that he was incredibly old and that he was pointing a gun directly at the hosts of Idaho’s least favorite morning TV show. I was in the studio’s control room at the time and I could see everything that was happening on the floor.
The first thing the Time Traveler did was cock his gun. I don’t know anything about guns but it looked like one of those six-shooters I’d seen in old John Ford westerns. The two people in the control room clearly heard the sound carried over Blake and Laureen’s mics.
The second thing that happened was Blake Arnold fainted and slumped off his chair onto the floor. I guess being a local celebrity presiding over the grand opening of the Suds n’ Scrub car wash or supplying ‘color’ at the televised annual Junior Boosters County Fair hadn’t prepared him sufficiently to look down the barrel of a gun.
But Laureen Whitcomb was made of sterner stuff. She knew if she could get through this, whatever ‘this’ was, she might be able to parlay it into a better job in a larger market.
I’d been an intern at KLRB for the last two years which meant I worked all the shit jobs at the station. One of my jobs was to get up at the ungodly hour of 3am and get down to the station by 4:00 to be at the beck and call of Dave Samuels, the director of Good Morning Meridian! Dave ran the three cameras on the floor by computer from the control room. No cameramen necessary.
The only people at the station were Larry the security guy snoozing at his desk in the lobby, me and Dave in the control room, Blake and Laureen, and The Time Traveler. Dave checked to see if the program was being recorded and then told me to call the cops. He was concentrating on what was going on down on the floor because he too thought he might be able use this, if ‘this’ turned out to be any good, so he too could get out of Meridian. That left me to call the cops. Which I did … just not right then. I was too interested in what was going on down there.
Then The Time Traveler spoke.
What day is this? asked the old man. Laureen replied ‘Friday December 10th.’
The old man shouted, ‘The year … tell me the year!’
‘2021’ said Laureen.
The old man sighed, ‘I got into the time machine on Wednesday December 10th … 1958.
‘There were five of us working in the lab on the project. We didn’t know what would happen. We always knew it would be a one-way trip. The device couldn’t send anything back into time. Only forward. We could send objects into the future … but we never knew what actually happened to them. In order to know … we had to choose among us who would go into the future.’
The old man looked at his wrinkled hand holding the gun and then looked at Laureen.
‘The jump from 1958 to now seemed instantaneous. But what we didn’t know … couldn’t know … was that whatever travels through time … ages … at the speed of unaltered time. I was 34 years old when I stepped into the chamber. You say it’s 2021? In less time than it takes to blink I’m suddenly 97 years old.’
Laureen asked The Time Traveler, ‘Why did you volunteer? What did you expect to see?’
“Volunteer? Everyone in our group wanted to be the one to go,” the old man replied.
‘I fought in the war. I was wounded and sent back home. What I remember most was the whole country pulling together to win the war. Every city, town, and village held scrap drives, paper drives, and everyone bought war bonds, even little kids saved their pennies to buy war stamps for a dime. Rationing tires, gas, and food staples was a way all Americans contributed to the war effort. It made me proud to be an American to see everybody, whether at the front or at home, doing their part in the war against Fascism.
My kid brother was one of the first to get the polio vaccine. Before the vaccine 35,000 people were crippled every year in the US by polio. He was saved from it. We had just sent our first satellite into space and Eisenhower was connecting the whole country with interstate highways. Everywhere you looked there was real progress. God … Who wouldn’t want to see what America would become?’
‘But you brought a gun …’ Laureen said.
‘Not my idea,’ said The Time Traveler. ‘That was Larry’s big contribution. You never know what you’ll find he used to say. Larry was a pretty good physicist but he was a little paranoid when it came to Russians.’
‘But how did you end up here … in a TV station?’ Laureen asked.
‘A television station? Is this where we are? In 1958 this was a top secret physics lab in the middle of nowhere.’ The old man gestured, ‘The chamber was right over there. But what I need to know is what’s going on right now? Tell me … tell me everything.’
And Laureen did. She told the old man every rotten thing that had happened in her recent memory. She told him about the attacks on New York and Washington DC which led to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. She told him about the camps for immigrants seeking asylum. She told him about president Trump and his supporters. The supporters that became the mob that tried to overturn an election by storming the Capitol building in DC. And she told him about the Corona virus raging across the country and the millions of people who refuse to take the vaccine. She told him everything she could think of and when she was done, they both were crying.
The Time Traveler looked around the studio and said, ‘We gave you the best we had to offer and you threw it all away. You didn’t build anything better. You just took my world and ripped it to pieces.’
The old man got up and walked toward the back of the studio.
Laureen asked him, ‘Where are you going? Where can you go?’
‘Anywhere but here’, he said. ‘Jesus Christ anywhere but here.’
I ran out of the control room through the studio to the emergency exit. The door was closing. I went out and didn’t see anyone. The Time Traveler had vanished as mysteriously as he had arrived.
And then the cops, all four of them, showed up about the time Blake came around. He just looked embarrassed while two of the cops questioned him. The other two searched the building. They didn’t find anyone either. The only crime, if you want to call it that, was an old man waving a gun around before he left the building. I saw Laureen and Dave talking about what to do with the recording. To show you how popular Good Morning Meridian!is nobody called the station. I guess whoever is up that early in the morning is more concerned with coffee instead of time travel.
After everything died down I told Dave I was going home for the rest of the day. He didn’t care. Interns don’t rate concern.
I got in my car and drove off. I was thinking about how to anonymously upload the Time Traveler video to YouTube, Twitter and everywhere else, when the blanket in the back seat fell away as The Time Traveler sat up. He started pulling the latex appliances off his face revealing under the old man makeup a much younger man. Still old though. Uncle Frank is in his 70’s, not his late 90’s.
‘Think they bought it kid?’ he asked me.
‘I dunno Uncle Frank. On the video the green screen effect of your appearing out of nowhere fooled Dave. Blake and Laureen were looking straight ahead into the cameras so they didn’t see you, and I think Laureen believed every word towards the end. Do you think it was worth it?’
As he pulled off the wrinkled latex chin Frank said, ‘I’ll tell you what I do know kid … nobody gives a shit about what an old man thinks. But they might listen to a Time Traveler.’
Submitted for your approval,
Mark twain would be proud !!