“The Slipstream Artist”
Short story by Brandon James, 2007
Cold night in September, a glittering blanket of white covers the parking lot of the Stonebridge Institution. I walk through slush on my way to the front door, my socks saturated with bitter ice water. My skin is warm, I’m hugging my arms under the heavy jacket she bought me for Christmas last year or the year before, I can’t remember it’s so cold my brain is frost and the air before my breath crystallizes into a snowflake.
I walk into the building. The guard lets me sign in without my driver’s license. He has a name but I never asked him for it.
“Can you remember the last time it’s been so cold?” he says over the phone. “My windshield cracked this morning, it was so cold.”
Before the drive up, I called her. She apologized for the weather. She said it was something she did ten years ago that brought on this snowstorm. I didn’t argue with her.
She’s sitting on the edge of the table in the visitation room, staring through the bulletproof window and into the Chinese garden behind the building. Two skeletal gray trees stand next to a snow-covered rock and the pond is frozen white. It’s snowing again.
I tell her happy birthday and remove the small box in my pocket and set it on the other end of the table. I don’t want her to open it until I leave.
“You know it’s not my birthday,” she says. “We did this last year.”
She wears a blue hospital gown and a white bracelet. Her skin is pale and her hair is cropped like a boy’s would be. As I move closer to her, I notice she’s holding a piece of paper, folded complexly like origami but of what I don’t know.
She stands in front of the class, the room a hollow shell of null sound. The heads of twenty-odd students nods and falls back and snaps like twigs. Their eyes, red. One man in the back snores quietly. Nobody wakes him. Nobody’s allowed to speak. The clock ticks and the closer the hand comes to class’s end the longer the minutes become.
“Get it?” she asks the class. “Class dismissed.”
She’s demonstrating a quote by Einstein. “Put your hand on a hot stove,” Einstein said, “and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.”
When the Dean found out about her lesson on relativity, and how she spent hours of lecture on deranged theories of time travel, she lost her job. It was around this time I found her journal in a box I was unpacking. We’d just moved into our new house. The title on the journal’s flyleaf was, “Art of the Slipstream.”
I sit on the table next to her so we’re both facing the Chinese garden.
She hands me the paper in her hand. It’s folded tight like a sailor’s knot. Without my reading glasses and with the dim light of the visitation room, I can’t make out the last fold to start unraveling it. The first three folds I find, the paper starts to rip so I stop and look for the next one.
I ask her what it says.
“They’re coordinates,” she says.
To what?
“The slipstreams I need you to go through,” she says. “You still have my journal, right? So you know how to find them?”
Our universe is comprised of four base dimensions, her journal explains, and at any point on the four-dimensional grid there is an infinity of possible scenarios, thus an infinite number of universes. When two universes randomly connect, a slipstream is created that will allow an entity or artifact to travel from one universe to the other. One can travel anywhere along the three axes of space, but only backwards through the temporal dimension. With each moment that passes into the future, an infinite number of new universes, of new possibilities, is created.
One common misconception of time travel, I go on to read, is the idea that someone who travels to the past can make a modification to drastically change the future. She calls this the butterfly effect. In reality, when someone travels to a universe that is ten minutes, ten years, ten centuries behind the origin universe, all of the infinite versions of the universe afterwards are not changed. Rather, they are immediately erased and gradually replaced, instant by instant, with the revised universes, and the only person with knowledge that a change had ever occurred is the slipstream artist.
“Those weren’t easy to calculate,” she says. “Don’t tear the paper.”
The snow falls faster, thicker, until the Chinese garden is shrouded by white and the trees disappear and the stone vanishes.
I ask her, why she keeps asking me to come every September, on this day, if it’s not her birthday. I know it is.
“I figured out yesterday,” she says, “that the farthest back a slipstream can reach from any current universe is three-thousand-four-hundred-and-sixteen years and some odd days. Any stream beyond that, the information becomes jumbled and expires.”
I ask her, if that’s how far she wants me to go. Because I’d do it for her.
“No,” she says. “Not nearly.”
The slipstream will take me back far enough, she says, that I can replace our future universes with better ones. She says that, if I didn’t call in sick for work two years ago, she’ll never have been placed in Stonebridge because she’ll never have killed me.
I touch her hand, and put the coordinates in my jacket pocket. I ask her if she’s cold and she shakes her head, says she’s gotten used to it and doesn’t feel cold ever.
“Go now,” she says, pulling her hand away. “The first slipstream, the most important one, the one that can save your life, it opens tomorrow morning.”
What does it feel like? To travel through a slipstream.
“It’s like December, forever.”
She watches television in my t-shirt that’s too big for her. Marty McFly just pushed his father out of the way of an oncoming car. She laughs at this, says, “If that’d happened in real life, Marty would immediately cease to exist and this movie wouldn’t have been made.”
I tell her, “I’m going to get the mail, babe.”
“Don’t be long.” She hugs her knees and leans closer to the TV.
Our front yard is wet from last night’s sprinkle and a morning wind carries the smell of the ocean to my face. From our front porch, I hear her shouting at the TV, “That doesn’t make any sense! That’s not how it works!”
I walk across the lawn and to the mailbox in front of our car parked in the street. I’m boxed in again by our neighbor’s two pick-up trucks and glad I called off from work because I hate dealing with him, he’s so weird.
The aluminum of the mailbox is cold and wet as I reach in for the bundle of bills and solicitations and letters. It’s only September and winter’s already arrived.
Standing in the parking lot, my arms inside my heavy jacket as the wet sleet hits my face and slips down my collar, I’m wondering if kissing her and telling her I still loved her was a bad idea.
I get back to my car which is buried under two feet of frozen glass. The door needs a few yanks before it finally opens, and then I grab my windshield blade and start scraping the icy snow off my window. I lean over the cold hood to reach the passenger’s side and the paper she gave me slips out of my pocket and is picked up by the wind. I watch it land in a nearby black puddle and I run after it but an SUV with its headlights off squeals past me and by the time I can see again I don’t remember where it fell.
One of the letters in the mailbox had both the origin address and the destination address written in numeric, and each address ended with a date, down to the millisecond. I stood in the street looking at the envelope for awhile, pondering the dates. One was for two years later, today. I opened it, and the slip of paper inside said only, “Hold it tight.”
This is where she said to stand. In this street, right here.
I look at my watch. It’s raining and snowing at the same time and I can see nothing. She never told me what to look for, so I don’t know what to expect, if anything. Though the sun is just peeking over the horizon, the sky is still black and I’m afraid I’ll catch pneumonia. If nothing happens, I reason, then my wife never made sense and she truly is insane. If nothing happens, then she is lost to me forever.
A light in the distance pierces through the dark sleet. My watch tells me it’s five seconds until the slipstream appears. Right here, where I’m standing. Four seconds, the light grows larger and diverges into two. Three seconds and I close my eyes. I can hear the rumbling vibrations of the cosmic gears grinding closer and closer because two seconds remain and I think I’ll travel back in time and go to work instead of calling in sick and I’ll never get that letter and I won’t hold on to the coordinates and I’ll never stand here because, with one second remaining, I know it’s a truck.
is not an exit 
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