Previously on Don’t Let The Days Go By, Greg had been emailing a girl who randomly found him on the Internet, and he had learned some things about her that made him uncomfortable…
I pedaled my bike across campus after leaving my house and looping around west Jeromeville. A while back, I came up with a ride for when I was feeling particularly ambitious, around the entire perimeter of Jeromeville. The ride was about fifteen miles, and my goal was to get home in under an hour. I had done this same ride about five times in the last year, and my fastest time was 59 minutes, 11 seconds. I tried to concentrate on the thrill of pedaling fast and the challenge of racing the clock, but all I could think of was a girl two time zones away whom I had only known for a month and a half, and never met in person.
Casey Gauthier was a community college student from Texas. She randomly found my website and sent me an email, and we seemed to hit it off right away. Her grandparents lived in East Bayside, an easy day trip from Jeromeville, and we had mentioned meeting in person the next time she visited them. But I quickly realized that she was not exactly the good Christian girl that I thought she was. Furthermore, it had been over a week since I had heard from her. It happened quite often than I would have great conversations with girls from the Internet who would then disappear completely. I was angry for both reasons, even though if she were to write back, she still would not be the kind of person I once thought she was. I wanted the girl I had in mind when I first met Casey back, even though she did not technically exist. At this point, I kind of wished I had never met her. If I had a time machine, I could just go back and delete her first email before I had a chance to open it, and none of this would have happened.
As I crossed Highway 100, on Cornell Boulevard near In-N-Out Burger, dripping sweat as the morning sun rose higher, it suddenly occurred to me that I could deal with the Casey situation the same way I had with other girl problems: by writing about it. I could play with this time machine idea and write a story with elements of science fiction. I loved movies and TV shows involving time travel and changing history. What happened with Casey and me, though, did not feel like a dramatic enough reason for someone to want to change history. For the rest of my ride, as I crossed back over Highway 100 and headed west on Coventry Boulevard before detouring into the Greenbelts of north Jeromeville, I tried to come up with ways to embellish the story, in order to make the character’s desire to change history more plausible.
I pulled up in front of my house and looked at my watch, pressing the button to stop the stopwatch from counting. 58 minutes, 56 seconds. A new record. More importantly, I had an outline in my head of what happened between these two characters, as well as how the character acquired a time machine in the first place, and how the story would end. I also had a title, a word that would figure into the plot but also carried a hidden meaning because it sounded like “Casey.” After I got out of the shower and dressed, I sat at my computer and wrote for the next few hours.
“Cosine”
The young man landed in the middle of a field about a mile from the city limits. He wondered what time it was. He had given himself adequate time to complete his mission, but still, he did not want to be late. He knew that he had to do what he had to do and then return home quickly. If anything did not go according to plan, he and Dr. Bowman could both get into serious trouble.
He walked down the road to a bus stop. He waited for ten minutes, but no bus came. He looked at his watch. It said 3:04 PM, Tuesday, May 25, 1999, but he knew that was wrong. A large-sounding vehicle turned the corner. He looked; it was the bus.
The bus driver asked the man for his fare. In this, a college town, students could ride the bus free. The man started to reach into his pocket and pulled out his student ID card, but then caught himself. He gave the driver the fare instead, in quarters, each of them well worn so that the lines in George Washington’s hair barely showed. The man took a seat in the back of the bus next to a college-age girl with a nose ring. It reminded him of Cameron’s nose ring, a nose ring he was risking his life to forget. The man waited for the bus to approach the university campus.
The man knew that he wanted to speak with as few people as possible in this place, but he just had to know. He looked at the watch the girl with the nose ring wore. It was 12:06 PM. This made him feel better. It didn’t give him a whole lot of time, but it was enough. Michael was currently taking a calculus midterm, until 1:00. The bus would arrive at 12:20, giving him plenty of time to go to the computer lab and read Michael’s e-mail before Michael could get out of the midterm and do the same. The exam was very difficult, and there was no chance Michael would finish early.
The man looked around the bus. The person sitting next to him, on the other side from the girl with the nose ring, wore a Bay City Captains sweatshirt. Nice shirt, he thought. He thought of how Cameron loved the Captains. In fact, that was one of the first things that Michael, the person whose life he was about to change, and Cameron discovered they had in common. And one of the only things they had in common.
The man looked on the seat next to him and found a discarded copy of the school newspaper. Friday, November 14, 1997. Top story: the chancellor issued a press release regarding his views on affirmative action and diversity. Weather: partly cloudy and breezy. Highs in the mid-60s. Showers tonight. So far, so good, the man thought. It looked like his first major concern worked out.
A tall blond guy walked onto the bus. The man recognized him as someone he knew named Steve. The man instinctively waved at Steve. But Steve looked back at him with a puzzled look of non-recognition. Steve took a seat in the back of the bus. Of course, the man realized. He and Steve had met in a class they had together at this university, in the spring of 1998. Steve would not recognize him yet here, in the fall of 1997. Although the man had seen all of the Back to the Future movies around eight times, he still wasn’t used to actual time travel.
The man got off the bus at the school. He made sure to avoid seeing Steve to prevent further confusion. The fewer people he interacted with during his mission, the better it would go. The man looked around at the university, just as he had remembered it a year and a half before. The new social studies building was still under construction, but everything else looked pretty much the same. It made him think. He might still be going to school at that university, in 1999, if not for his nervous breakdown. But all that might change shortly if things go as planned.
As he understood it, sometime earlier that week in November 1997, a thousand miles away, someone named Cameron Gross had been surfing the Web when she came across Michael’s home page. She noticed that they both liked the Captains. Also, Michael lived just a few miles away from a city where Cameron used to live, where she still had relatives. Michael had written back asking this mysterious person to tell more about herself. This time traveler’s plan, as he understood it, began with an eight minute walk to the computer lab across campus. He knew from experience that this computer lab was rarely full, so the man could get on and off quickly before Michael got there. He knew Michael’s password, so he would not appear suspicious at all. Cameron should have replied to Michael’s message that morning; all the man had to do was delete that message. Then, later that afternoon, Michael would go to that lab to work on a project. He would take a break to check his e-mail, he would find no message from Cameron, and he would quickly forget that she ever existed.
The man walked past a brick building full of classrooms. He knew that building well. In fact, he knew Michael was in room 115 taking the calculus midterm. He decided, in a move that could risk the mission’s success, to check and make sure that Michael was there, to make sure this in fact was happening. In fact, it felt like none of this was happening. Nothing had felt right since his life began falling apart, beginning during spring break 1998, leading to his nervous breakdown, causing him to drop out of school, and culminating in this X-File that he was standing in the middle of now. In fact, he remembered having seen something like this before on “The X-Files” on TV. An old man caused a mysterious death while trying to change history. The man liked that episode, because five minutes into it he guessed who the old man was and what he was trying to do. This made him happy because he never knew what was going on in “The X-Files.”
The man slowly cracked open the door to room 115. He knew exactly where Michael would be, in the corner away from the window. Michael was there, all right, frantically trying to erase something as if his entire future depended on it. The man knew that Michael had written “cosine” where he should have written “tangent,” and this had thrown his entire answer off. The man knew this because, a year and a half ago, it had been him sitting in that corner trying to erase the cosine.
The man, Michael, gently closed the door to room 115 so as not to bother any of the students. He walked down the hall and out of the room. He remembered leaving that exam, feeling okay about it, like he had done well but not spectacularly. He also remembered that that was the day he had gone to the computer lab and found the message from Cameron. He remembered being surprised yet happy that Cameron was a girl. When she first wrote him, he had figured that Cameron was a guy, since she talked about football and also since one of his good childhood friends was a guy named Cameron. Apparently, since he knew a male Cameron, he tended to assume that people named Cameron were male. He remembered that this was the day it happened because he told Cameron how he did on the exam. He remembered Cameron’s reply, that she was no good at math. Sometimes it scared Michael just how much he remembered.
Just outside of the building, Michael saw his friend Jennifer. “Hi, Michael,” she said. “Didn’t you have a midterm now?”
Michael didn’t know what to say. “At one o’clock,” he lied. He hoped that Jennifer wouldn’t notice that he was wearing different clothes.
“Oh,” she said. “I thought it was now. Oh well. See you later.”
Michael glanced at Jennifer’s watch as she left. It was 12:30. He needed to hurry. If something happened to the time machine, Dr. Bowman wouldn’t be very happy with him. He thought about how amazing it was that he was walking around one day, minding his own business, when Dr. Bowman, a physicist from a major defense contractor approached him and asked if he wanted to take part in a top secret experiment. It was risky; not only was time travel technology in its infancy, but afterwards he would have to undergo something they liked to call “amnesia therapy” so that the secret time travel research remained a secret. God certainly makes people meet for interesting reasons.
Michael found that, as he walked across campus, he kept remembering the events leading him to this point. Michael’s friendship with Cameron had grown fairly well for the first few months; he even got over the initial shock at seeing her nose ring when she first sent him a picture. Things first started to come apart during spring break of 1998, when Cameron came out to visit her relatives and met Michael in person. The two of them spent a very interesting day together. It began when Cameron arrived at Michael’s apartment. They took a walk around the neighborhood and the university, and then had lunch. It was then that Michael first began to see that behind the happy, outgoing, fun-loving girl he saw in her e-mails lay a girl who liked to drink, party, and rush into relationships. In his sheltered conservative Christian upbringing, Michael tended to stay away from people with problems like that, and a lot of times it bothered him to find that people he considered friends would make such dumb decisions.
Yet as the day went on, despite all this, he found Cameron more and more intriguing. He found that he really enjoyed spending time with her, and that despite their differences they seemed to get along well. He sort of put it out of his mind that she liked to get drunk at parties. That night, they had gone downtown to see a movie and they ended up making out at his apartment. He figured that he was digging himself into a deep hole, since he probably would not see Cameron for months after that night. But he went ahead and did it anyway, mainly because this was the first time in his life that he had ever had the opportunity to get close to a woman. He felt that Cameron would have been ready and willing to go even further as well if he had let her.
Cameron left Michael’s apartment a little after midnight. It seemed to them that there just might be something between them more than just a friendship, and that they would talk about it after Cameron got home. Michael, however, felt really uneasy about the situation, and he did not sleep at all that night. He suspected that Cameron would experience a lot of pain in the future because she rushed into relationships, and he, the one person who could have broken that cycle, instead just fed it further. He remembered looking down at the red and white “What Would Jesus Do” bracelet he wore on his left arm and thinking about how he had just defeated its whole purpose.
About a week later, Michael called Cameron on the phone. They talked for a long time, reaching the conclusion that this was probably not the best time for a relationship for them, but that they wanted to stay friends. Things went okay again for about another month. Cameron had e-mailed Michael, in early May of 1998, about some serious problems in her life. She was sleeping with her older brother’s best friend, and she suspected that her brother knew but she couldn’t talk about it. Michael tried his best to understand, to be a friend to Cameron, but he really wanted to drop her right there, telling her that she got herself into this mess and that she should get herself out. He always thought this kind of thing only happened on Melrose Place and the Jerry Springer show, and it made him mad that people could be so stupid and careless. He had no idea how to react when these things happened to people he called friends.
The next week, Cameron experienced a painful breakup when she found out that her lover was seeing someone else. Michael was glad to hear that she had gotten out of her misguided relationship, but disappointed again to hear, two days later, that she had met a new “boyfriend” while drunk at a party. That was the breaking point. Michael found himself unsure of what to do. Nothing he could advise was reaching this girl. He found himself so irrationally upset over what Cameron had done that he could no longer concentrate in school or relate to his old friends. He had a nervous breakdown with just a few weeks remaining in the term. He withdrew from school, taking incompletes in his classes, and began a long process of therapy and medication. He had hoped to enter school again in the fall of 1999.
But that was before he found the scientist and the time machine. Now he had an easy solution to all his problems. He would simply prevent himself from ever meeting Cameron and then return to 1999, where he would be living a perfectly normal life.
Michael looked up and narrowly avoided running into a tree. As he turned to dodge it, he saw Jim, a friend from his freshman dorm. Jim waved, and Michael waved back. Here in 1997, Michael and Jim were still friends, although in about a month Jim would find a sleazy girlfriend and completely ditch all of his old friends. Michael still felt hurt and betrayed whenever he thought of Jim. On Valentine’s Day of 1997, Jim had given an anti-love party, and Michael had himself a great time there. Michael had been looking forward to Jim’s next anti-Valentine’s party all year, but when February 14, 1998 came, Jim spent it at an expensive restaurant with his girlfriend while Michael spent it surfing the Web at home, looking at the electronic greeting card Cameron had sent him. She was the only person who wished him a happy Valentine’s Day that year. That made an otherwise miserable Valentine’s Day not so bad.
But none of that mattered now. The computer lab loomed about twenty yards away, and then Cameron would be just a memory. No—she wouldn’t even be a memory. He would have no memory of Cameron at all, except perhaps as some guy who liked the Captains and never answered his e-mail a year and a half ago. He thought of the other Michael, the one who was still working on his midterm. He remembered taking that midterm. The other Michael would soon realize that his initial answer of problem 3, where he had written “cosine,” was correct after all, causing him to fix the problem quickly before time ran out. Time would run out soon, and then it would take Michael a few minutes to get over to the lab. That gave Michael, the time-traveling Michael, enough time to delete one message from the other Michael’s e-mail.
As he opened the door to the building, he smiled widely, anticipating his coming success. He saw someone he recognized across the hall, his friend Jeff, but Jeff did not see him. Jeff had really helped him through some tough times. During Michael’s freshman year, he had many difficulties adjusting to college life. Jeff, who was on Michael’s dorm floor that year, really helped Michael gain perspective and get closer to God that year. It was during a talk with Jeff that Michael really felt like his Christian faith meant something personally. Michael really needed a friend with a strong relationship with God at that time in his life, and God had provided one in Jeff.
Michael pressed the up button on the elevator; the computer lab was on the fourth floor. Sometimes he wondered where he would be—or wouldn’t be—if he and Jeff had never had those talks during freshman year. He felt bad sometimes. A few times, when he got really upset, he felt that he should be doing something else rather than burdening Jeff with his problems. But he was so thankful that Jeff had not abandoned him, so thankful that he often wondered if God would ever give him a turn to be the Christian friend in another troubled peer’s life. If Jeff hadn’t been there to help him through the hard times, to invest in their friendship, he might have given up on school altogether… or worse. What if Jeff hadn’t been there? What if Jeff had decided Michael wasn’t worth his time?
What if Jeff, deciding that he couldn’t handle Michael as a friend, hopped into a time machine to change history so that he and Michael never met?
The real purpose of Michael’s mission suddenly became clear to him. The bell rang, signaling that the elevator had arrived, but Michael turned around and left the building instead. He walked out, careful to avoid the route that the other Michael would walk after getting out of the midterm, toward the bus stop.
I went to Bible study the night after I wrote “Cosine,” and I reread the story after I got home. It felt like it still needed work. I took a fiction writing class a few months ago, and today I had been concentrating on just getting my ideas typed, not using the new writing skills I had learned. In that class, when we had to share our writing with the class, I also learned that most people did not relate to my conservative Chrsitian views on relationships and sexuality. If I shared this story with someone who had not heard frequent sermons on Christian purity and dating as preparation for marriage only,as I had, this reader would not understand Michael’s regret at making out with Cameron, or why he was upset at her promiscuity when he had agreed not to date her. I needed to tell that part of the story differently.
But I was tired when I got back from Bible study. And tomorrow I had to pack for a weekend trip to Bay City with Taylor, Noah, and Cambria. So I saved everything, turned off my computer, and went to bed.
I never came back to this story. My weekend sufficiently distracted me from thinking about Casey that I never really felt inspired to perfect my tale of Cameron and time-traveling Michael. I never did hear from Casey again in real life, and I was okay with that.
The draft of “Cosine” sat in my hard drive, and got transferred to my next new computer, and my next one, and my next one, and this one that I use now, over a period of twenty-six years. Normal people would probably clean out their hard drives and not bother to transfer files they did not need, but I always wanted to save as much as I could. I always found it interesting to look through things from my past, and think about who I was, who I have become, and what I have learned. Old files have value, and so do old memories, even unpleasant ones.
Readers: Have you ever, or do you currently, wish you could travel back in time to change history? Would there be any drawbacks to changing the past in your case? Tell me your thoughts in the comments.
I actually did write “Cosine” in 1998. It is mostly intact as it was the last time I worked on it, although I cut a few things out to make this episode not be too long, and I also made a few minor modifications to make some of the details consistent with what has happened in the DLTDGB storyline. In 1998, it was more common to write “e-mail” with a hyphen, as opposed to the modern “email,” so I left this spelling as it was at the time. I am also planning to write a behind-the-scenes post about this episode… update, I finished that, so click here for that.
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Don't Let The Days Go By 