TimeLiners

By Emily Blaisdell 

“We’d like to welcome you to the Past. . .”

 BOOK ONE:  DEPARTURES

I’ve been on a calendar but I’ve never been on time.

                                                — Marilyn Monroe

ONE — The Pioneers

         Thirty-nine travelers, a dozen sipping Prosecco in business class, the rest nibbling pretzels in coach, made the first regularly scheduled trip back in time.  Time Jockeys Flight 1927 departed from an open field along New Jersey’s Hackensack River at 7:04 a.m. on June 10, 2027, a Friday.  Destination:  a century back, back to the year of Lindbergh, the Jazz Age, and the footloose fun of Prohibition.

       On that first TimeLiner, we expected what cheap sci-fi taught us to expect — shaking, shuddering, our watches whirling backwards.  But such dramatics seemed silly once the trip began.  Though we called it a “flight,” we were never airborne.  We did not feel the cabin lift.  We did not see sun and moon rise and set through dozens of dawns and dusks.  Instead, we passengers watched as the windows darkened into the inky blackness of a winter night.  Then the liner began to hum and the blackness gave way to spangles, golden sparkles of pure time against a charcoal backdrop.  As time’s light show unfolded, there was no sense of motion, no timesickness bags, no timelag on arrival.  Other than slight turbulence when passing through the Sixties, the only curiosity was our conversation.

       “!sdrawckab gniklat m’I ,yeH”

       “!looc is sihT  !oot eM”

       Backtalk, as it came to be known, was easy to understand.  A few Pioneers thought they heard Satanic curses, but the rest of us chatted as if we’d spoken backwards all our lives.  And as decades flew by, there was time enough to complain.

       “?eivom on, zeeJ”

       “ti rof yap attog eW”

         Backtalk assured us we were not on another 737 to Dallas or Denver but were riding a TimeLiner bound for 1927.  That was the moment — one of those “Is this really happening?” moments — when we struggled for a bigger picture.  Metaphors flowed freely among us, likening time to a river, a road, an arrow.  Clichés became our common currency.  A stitch in time.  In the nick of time.  Time waits for no man, etc.  Then a woman in the emergency exit aisle quoted the Timemaster’s recent Blather — “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.”  From Thoreau, someone said.

         “So now the Timemaster is quoting Thoreau?” 

         “Right, like he reads anything.”

         “Creep.”

         Though unsure what to expect in 1927, we knew just what we were leaving behind. Three days in the Jazz Age would free us from the madness of our own times.  Global warming?  Wasn’t even a term in 1927.  Fake news?  Just gossip over a back fence.  Decline and despair?  Where we were headed, America was rising like a skyscraper.  And if escaping the dirges of 2027 was not enough, numbers were on our side.  Our world back home teemed with eight billion people, but 1927 — some of us looked it up before we lost 6G — had all of two billion.  Legroom, living space, a chance to go somewhere that is not a human anthill — these drew us back as much as any specific year.

         Packed into neat rows, watching time glittering outside, we rode on.  We had no North Star or Lonely Planet to guide us, just a dour, bespectacled chaperone seated in the front row.  Lindsey, she said her name was.

         After a rough takeoff, the early flight was smooth.  Then, passing through 1968, the liner began to shudder.  The captain turned on the seat-belt sign.  An announcement reminded us about Timerule #7 — “slight turbulence is normal when passing through turbulent years.”  The buffeting continued until the liner cleared the Cuban Missile Crisis.  The rest of the journey was calm except for the buzz of Backtalk.  One skinny man with a tie-die shirt and gray ponytail kept saying “Turn me on, dead man,” but no one knew what he meant.

         For this first flight, with no timeports yet, our liner had to land in the field where it departed.  We came to rest along the Hackensack River at 8:04 a.m. on June 10, 1927 — still a Friday.  With the Twenties roaring, New Jersey was at work.  No one saw the faint outline of a huge green box, hulking as a double-wide trailer, darken against the hazy backdrop of purple elderberry and pink joe pye.  Kicking up dust, our liner settled softly into the past. Inside, we saw time’s candles fade into the ambient darkness.  Then like a light going on, the past appeared through our windows — the field, the scrub brush, the full June morning.  Throughout the cabin, an attendant’s voice sang out.

         “We’d like to welcome you to 1927!”

         Filing out, we claimed our luggage beside the liner.  It was muggy and miserably hot, but before we even had time to sweat, all thirty-nine of us whipped out our phones and held them at arm’s length. 

         “Hey!”

         Our chaperone, glaring through owlish glasses, knifed her way into group.

         “Selfies are absolutely, positively, completely forbidden,” Lindsey barked.  “I’ll confiscate your phone if I see you taking one.”

         There would be no chaperones on later flights, but Time Jockeys, worried about lost passengers, stuck us with Lindsey.  The snarky woman wore her frosted hair in a tight bun.  Holding a red umbrella overhead, she led us from the liner, striding ahead as if she’d been to 1927 many times and knew the year well.  When the pony-tailed man in tie-die turned and raised his phone, Lindsey was on him like the mosquitoes all around us.  His phone went in her pocket.

         “Lighten up, lady,” someone said.  “It’s the Roaring Twenties.”  Lindsey did not seem to hear.  We trailed behind her, the wheels of our suitcases snagging in the weeds.  By the time we reached two boxy buses waiting on a dirt road, our clothes were soaked in sweat.  The shuttles took us along the river, rank with raw sewage and suds.  Reaching the Hoboken Terminal, we stepped into the blazing sun. 

         “Looks like a model train set,” someone said.  We gazed up at the towering spire and along the tracks where old locomotives belched black smoke.  Inside the terminal, commuters hustled by, oblivious to our Hawaiian shirts and pastel crocs.  We caught a train under the Hudson to 33rd Street, Mid-town, the past-scape of our dreams.

         “Roaring Twenties, here we come!”

         “Gonna get me a swig of that bathtub gin.”

         “Me and Jada are headed for the Cotton Club.”

         “Anyone spotted Gatsby yet?”

         “My mother is five-years-old.  In Brooklyn.  I have the address.”

*        *        *

         So the whole mess started when the Timemaster made his breakthrough.  Digitime, the little twerp called it.  Suddenly the past was open for travel, exploration, tourism.  Once the Timemaster bankrolled Everywhen.com, the TimeLiner start-ups descended on Wall Street.  Past Perfect, Time Jockeys, Zeitgeist, Time After Time. . .  Each had a splashy logo, a baby-faced CEO, and promises of escapes like none we had ever known. 

       “Why fly to Miami when you can fly to 1968?” 

       “See 1945 like you’ve never seen it before!”

       “1982 is waiting for YOU!”

       By the fall of 2027, whole fleets of TimeLiners were taking passengers from all over the world to whenever they chose.  1966 — see the Beatles at Candlestick, the Stones at Royal Albert Hall?  Five flights a day, some non-stop.  1989 — watch the Berlin Wall come down?  Luft-time-za was taking hundreds each week.  Get in line, have your time passports ready, because by 2028, everyone who was strung out, frazzled, worn ragged by our own time, which meant everyone, was headed for the past.  All the Romantics, the Nostalgics, the Seekers were queueing up to slip the surly bonds of time.  Each had a dream destination — hometowns before the mall came, childhoods before parents split, our best memories replayed, relived.  Thanks to the Timemaster and digitmetm, the entire 20th century and half the 19th was open for exploration.  Book tickets on Timewarp.com or at the nearest timeport.  LAXT.  JFKT.  DFWT. . .  Check your luggage.  Clear TTSA.  Head for your gate.

       Though TimeLiners became routine, there were still glitches.  Zeitgeist re-routedpassengers into nightmare years.  Layovers stranded tourists decades from their destinations.  And there was that Boston woman who boarded with her service dog, Chia, a German shepherd.  A sweet dog, passengers agreed.  Alert, head-cocked to one side.  A shame what happened to her.  Seems the woman was headed for 2003 to see her mother, but she forgot what everyone knows about “dog years,” seven of theirs to one of ours.  So the woman got to 2003, all right, but poor Chia ended up in the mid-19th century.  No one ever took a service dog on a TimeLiner again,  The Timemaster even made a rule against it.  #9.

       But mostly it was miracle and wonder, with little bags of pretzels for snacks.  Some boarded first flights wondering if it was worth the check-in hassles, the cramped seats, but once they saw time sparkle, stepped into the Seventies or saw the Live-Aid concert live, once they wove themselves into the timefolds of their own childhoods, five hundred bucks seemed a pittance to pay for the gift of the past, unwrapped and spread before us. 

         *        *        *

         Setting out into Mid-town Manhattan, June 1927, we felt like the “Pioneers” the media back home was calling us.  Wonder dominated our first moments, wonder at walking through a black-and-white newsreel unfolding in full color.  The Model-Ts jostling, the pushcarts peddling fruit and flowers, the crowds sweeping along littered sidewalks.  Unlike our own daily parade of comic characters, no one in 1927 seemed dressed to call any attention.  Everyone looked alike.  Grim men in fedoras, women in cloche hats and scarlet lipstick.  And kids!  Ragtag toughs in floppy caps, girls in starched pinafores, newsboys on every corner.  So few cars, so many trolleys and buses.  The faint smell of tobacco everywhere. 

        We must have looked like a lost flock, sightseers from the future, suitcases grinding behind us as we followed Lindsey’s red umbrella along Broadway toward Times Square.

             “Look up!” someone said.  We craned our necks toward an open sky, the tallest building perhaps fifty stories.  “Check it out.  No Empire State Building.  No Chrysler.”  Several of us, aiming phones from waist level, took photos.  Lindsey never knew.  Strangers approached and asked where they could buy luggage like ours, but mostly we heard grumbles from people pushed aside. 

            “Watch it, lady.  Cripes almighty, think you own the damn sidewalk?”

            Ours were the only bare heads in Manhattan.  Some natives stared at our clothes, pinks and greens in seas of gray or blue serge.  They must have figured us for tourists.  And like tourists, we shared first impressions.

            “Seems like we should hear Gershwin in the air.”

            “Or jazz.”

            “I just know Babe Ruth is out here somewhere.”

            When we reached Times Square, ads high overhead read CHEVROLET and Maxwell House.  On one billboard, a dapper gent was ready to “Walk a Mile for a CAMEL.”  But there were no flashing lights, no soaring screens, no news scroll.

            “Think anyone notices us?”

            “Nah, this is still New York.  They could care less.”

            One of our group stood out from the rest.  She wore faded blue jeans and a man’s white shirt rolled at the sleeves.  Nice smile.  Electric blue eyes.  But it was the purple hair that turned heads and drew passing comments.

            “What’s with the hair, lady?”

            Hands on her hips, the woman snapped.  “I’m from the future!  Deal with it!”

           Lindsey booked us into the Metropole just off Times Square.  . .