If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home By Now
I make eye contact with the time traveler the second I step foot into the library. East Village. Tompkins branch. I know he’s a time traveler just from the look of his smoke stained face, the wild look in his timeworn eyes. He’s covered in soot, hiding himself between the flimsy, unfurled pages of a free newspaper. Gaunt and haunting, wild brown hair crackling toward the ceiling like an electric shock. I dedicate the time I was supposed to be spending on writing to texting all my friends updates with the frantic devotion of a sketch artist on a deadline: He’s like. A 1930s chimney sweep in head-to-toe tattered tweed. I send a zoomed in picture of his page boy cap resting on a stack of unkempt papers. Tell me this wasn’t perched atop his head as he leapt over rooftops in 20th Century London.
Memory is my favorite medium. Its malleability, its ability to preserve the past like amber. It’s not unlike time travel itself—a time machine in which you can infinitely return to the past orbiting in the synapses of your hippocampus. All that life you’ve stored away, always in reach of teleporting back to.
In the backrooms of my own brain, that wormhole of memory, I so often go back to Bridgeville: Delaware’s Front Porch. A tiny drive-through town marked by a sign emblazoned with the hypothetical promise: if you lived here, you’d be home by now. I’d always pass it by on my way from Baltimore to Ocean City. I was a waitress. It was my final shift of the summer. The night before, I’d dreamt a customer had left without tipping me, and it had actually come true—the busboys carrying around my tipless check avoided me like puppies who’d torn my pillows all apart. All summer, I’d served tables, written my name upside down and backwards on papery tablecloths in pink Crayon, forced older servers to help guests crack crabs (partly because I didn’t want to get Old Bay stuck under my manicured fingernails, mostly because I didn’t know how. At least not well enough to help tourists from landlocked states in “I POOPED TODAY” boardwalk T-shirts scoop out crustacean guts with a series of surgical scalpels.)
On the day I so often dream of, The Hostess’s mom was stuck at work, couldn’t pick her up. She couldn’t drive on account of only being 15, so I volunteered to take her home. The sunset somehow seeped into the air, like we were swimming through a sea of pink silk, our faces, both our hands draped in it. Top down, back roads, a real country song of a summer evening stretching out before us. We were in matching black Crabhouse t-shirts, both our nails painted bright red, wind gushing through our open ears. We tilted our chins up to the cotton candy ice cream sky and sang into the breeze. In my pockets: a wad of cash and a Juul (mango pods) both of which I would go home to hide in my sock drawer. When I dropped her off and drove myself home, the sunset had settled over the fields, all hazy gauze now. The sky’s eyelids growing heavy, the sun a lazy orange sliced in half by the tops of the trees, dripping its juice all over the landscape. And just a solo driver flying down the one-lane highway— everything so possible, so deliciously uncertain. So much future to speed toward on the horizon.
* * *
At dinner we talk time travel, unraveling all of its potential intricacies over steaks at Le French Diner. “I don’t think it’s a technology,” Gutes explains. “I think it’s more like a superpower.” I consider this with the reverence of a rocket scientist.
“He could’ve fallen down a chimney and into some sort of time-warp portal.”
We all have questions. Plenty. Like: if you return to a memory, are you reliving it first hand? Or watching your past self live through it? Like: Does the time traveler get to keep all his memories from his original time period when he returns to the past? Or do they disappear? We have questions of preference for each other, too. Would you rather travel to the past or the future? What would you just die to see? I think I’d want to see my parents’ wedding, my mom beaming down the aisle in the dress my sister infuriatingly already called dibs on. Go to the Library of Alexandria before it burned. Write American Psycho first.
“Well I can’t go back too far. What if my Abacus doesn’t have the Maps App?” Olive asks as her little gem salad arrives.
“I think I’d want to see, like. My older sister when she was a little girl,” Gutes says.
In my mind I teleport back to the day they brought My Sister home. I was at the mall with my Aunt Susan, who isn’t really my aunt we just call her that, padding through The Baby Gap picking out clothes for the sister I hadn’t met yet. Clothes for my sister, who my parents were picking up that afternoon. We got the smallest pieces we could find: soft pink cotton onesies, white t-shirts with glittery flowers lacquered across the front. Striped, frilly pastel pants. Impossibly tiny yellow socks. I remember standing outside watching my parents turn up the winding driveway docking my dad’s Sequoia into the alcove by the cottage. She was 10 days old. I was 2,343 days old. It was my first day as a sister. When they brought her inside, she screamed so loud that my Uncle Geoff, who isn’t really my uncle we just call him that, said that she could shatter glass. I didn’t want the other kids to hold her because she was supposed to be all mine. My sister. Note the possessive determiner.
Back at the library, The Time Traveler checks out a book about Lou Reed and slides it into his worn khaki shoulder bag. The library is such a perfect place for a time traveler, if you think about it. All those archives—books, newspapers, DVDs—filled with all the future you’ve missed.
I used to go to the Baltimore Public Library as a little girl. I’d play inside the plywood castle they’d painted to look medieval. They even drew a dragon snaking its way through the windows above the short, steep slide. My mom and I would check out The Magic Treehouse: a series in which two tweens named Jack and Annie are whisked away to the past by the winds blowing through the open windows of their childhood treehouse. Mummies in the Morning, Pirates Past Noon, Dinosaurs Before Dark. Always to the past, never the future. One day, on the way home from the library, we got in a car accident. Time stood impossibly still, books soaring from backseat to front, our minivan hit so hard my red ruby Dorothy slippers slid right off my tiny feet.
I wonder: Where else would I go? Portals skim across the surface of my mind like smooth stones—one night, in bed with a boy, a joint drifting back and forth between our fingertips, singing “Body Paint” but mostly just dancing to it—a mass of perfectly timed flailing limbs and the kind of so-in-love laughter that blurs your vision at its edges. Don’t get emotional, the song commands, it ain’t like you (it’s just like me.) Or maybe the day my mom dropped me off at swim practice not knowing it was canceled. Michael Phelps was there, filming an underwater headphone commercial in the deep end, and with no parental supervision for three straight hours, there was no one to stop me from splashing into every shot before the director finally told me to scram. The whole scene smelled like pool fries. I spent all afternoon underwater, staring up at the sky.
In the end, none of the clothes we got My Sister that day at the mall fit. She had to wear my American Girl doll’s clothes—Samantha Parkington (obviously), paired with Felicity’s bonnet. Our American girl. Can’t you picture it perfectly? I look for the time traveler every time I go back to the library but he’s in a different decade now. They took the treehouse down in my backyard; we don’t live there anymore but we can always return home to it in our minds, no matter which way the wind blows.