To Raquel, who since 2002 is the three times and the four dimensions and the seven magic cups, and to H.G. Wells, friend and companion of numerous conversations, walks, and cantinas between his death in 1946 and my birth in 1970.
Good morning, afternoon, evening, says the Time Traveller when his machine is moody and doesn't ask him where (or to when) he's going.
( ▲ )
The Time Traveller holds out his hand and traps the first raindrop. All the others prevent the world from learning about this feat.
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The Time Traveller dreamt a “flashforward,” in which he awoke, traveled backwards in time, slept, and dreamt a “flashforward.”
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The Time Traveller’s passport recognizes him as a citizen of a land that doesn’t exist yet and that no one will remember when it disappears.
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The Time Traveller uses a machine propelled by lost, ignored, and wasted hours. He’s pleased: he’ll have fuel forever.
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The Time Traveller says hello, leaves 4 ten yrs, wants 2 see you again, returns seconds be4 the first time. Déjà vu, you’ll think. Or think.
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The Time Traveller, who can spend an entire year in a single second, holds the secret of youth.
No, he won’t tell it.
Or sell it.
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The Time Traveller went to 1888 & saw Jack the Ripper’s face. He shouted: it was everyone’s face at once; they say the same about Adam.
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The Time Traveller has seen many movies (from different eras) about your life. And now he’s anxious to meet you to know the truth.
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Annoyed after six hours of noise in the adjoining room, the Time Traveller went back six hours, went into the room, found it empty & understood.
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“What sense does it make if they don’t kill each other?” said the gladiator to the Time Traveller while they watched the soccer match.
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The Time Traveller sends word that he does remember the future but isn’t psychic: he doesn’t know who you’ll meet or how it’ll turn out.
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The Time Traveller sits quietly in the darkest corner of the Bioys' dining room. Will he take out his camera? Borges is coming for lunch.
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The Time Traveller writes this text to be read in the 490156673th century, when every one of his words will mean something else.
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(a)
The Time Traveller takes me to a friend who died in 2003, who, upon seeing me becomes worried & says “You look like you aged all of a sudden.”
(b)
The Time Traveller arrives with a friend who I saw yesterday & now looks 10 years older. I immediately get it. “What are you doing here today?” I ask anyway.
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The Time Traveller goes back slowly, very slowly, to see Michael Jackson walking forward.
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The Time Traveller stopped his machine. For a long instant that no one else perceived there wasn’t a single death anywhere on Earth.
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The Time Traveller pours coffee, goes back full speed & sets down the cup just in time to receive the liquid.
“Lazy,” his mother scolds him.
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The Time Traveller arrives at an unspecified date in the future; someone tells him it's the 12th of Never & that tomorrow's Friday the 13th.
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The Time Traveller goes back one minute, car and all. The light is red again. How strange being a motionless point on the street.
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The Time Traveller’s library holds forgotten, lost, & forever unpublished books. No writer colleague has wanted to visit it.
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The Time Traveller returned many times to the same instant & confirms that 1000s of people can have the same original idea at the same time.
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#Kafka returned 9537 times to the same bureaucratic process. “Thanks,” he said to the Time Traveller. Slowly but surely he understood.
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The Time Traveller might have fed the baby eaglet snakes & taught it to land on nopales, which is not the usual custom of its species.
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The Time Traveller went to tell William Blake he wasn’t crazy, then disappeared. Terrified, Blake waited for his Angel to appear with her message.
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The Time Traveller goes back: the nameless corpse in the old cemetery is a little girl who likes to play and doesn’t believe in death.
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The Time Traveller will take you several hours into the future; but he won’t take your place in the boring meeting or take minutes for you.
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The Time Traveller took Carlota, aged and crazy, to a few hours of her very short Empire during the previous century. She didn’t notice.
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The Time Traveller took Plato to see The Matrix. Plato was fascinated by the lights that went off in the cavernous place.
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The Time Traveller watches the instant before the Mountain Buddha is destroyed by cannon fire.
In a solid instant, like stone.
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I forgot today was Wednesday, I told the Time Traveller. He consoled me: in the 44444th century, there’re weeks with 1001 days w/ random names.
*
The Time Traveller tells Freud the future of psychoanalysis.
Shock. Horror. Then acceptance.
“This was like years of therapy,” he says.
*
The Time Traveller read in a forgotten magazine from he doesn’t know what century, someone’s first and last article. The topic: eternity.
The Exact Second
When the Time Traveller finally reached the exact second, the tortoise was a half-second ahead. Etcetera.
*
When the Time Traveller finally reached the exact second, it turned out that the dodos could die at will and the last one was very sad.
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When the Time Traveller finally reached the exact second, you had skipped forward and were reading this word.
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When the Time Traveller finally reached the exact second, it turned out that my father and mother had locked the door.
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When the Time Traveller finally reached the exact second, the second went “bang” and unfolded, revealing all of space. Unbelievable.
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When the Time Traveller finally reached the exact second, he decided he liked the wonder; he didn’t try to stop himself & watched himself leave the first time.
▒ )
If you had a disappointment today, the Time Traveller can give you a list of all those that still await you.
“It helps sometimes,” he says.
*
The Time Traveller goes to the childhood of the official who will prohibit time travel. He watches him play with his ball. He sighs.
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The Time Traveller saw (in a moment of poverty) a chunk of dry cheese. He went back a week & the cheese was fresh. He ate it & realized his mistake.
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The Time Traveller was forced 2 work organizing tours: 20 centuries in 20 days. No one understood anything, not even at the end of the trip.
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The Time Traveller goes to show Méliès that in the distance, in the limitless Vastness, everything looks just like it does in his movies.
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The Time Traveller heard about 2 bad politicians from today in the future, when their story, dressed up, is zealously taught and learned.
*
The King of Britain, when the Time Traveller told him the many adventures that were attributed to him:
“What kind of name is ‘Arthur’?”
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The Time Traveller says to Ray Bradbury: “When you step on a dinosaur, he usually bites. Wouldn’t it be better if the character steps on an insect?”
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The Time Traveller has met several cultures whose languages only allow important things to be said.
“They all end quickly,” he explains.
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“I know,” Rimbaud said to the Time Traveller, “at 40 I’ll be washed up.”
“No,” the Traveller said, and the boy (gladly) refused explanations.
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The Time Traveller recounts the tale of the Prisoner of the Second, stuck in a dark instant of an early morning of 1903 for disobeying his parents.
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The Time Traveller drinks water that will rain in a few hours. He shudders: he feels in his mouth the height and the vertigo and the fall.
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Every so often someone asks the Time Traveller to spare him the formalities and take him to the instant he enters the hotel with his girl.
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The Time Traveller felt uneasy for several days after going to visit Joan of Arc, seeing her scream, get down on her knees, praise him.
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At midnight the Time Traveller keeps the last light of day in his pocket. “You’re just remembering,” says a skeptic, who doesn’t see it.
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The Time Traveller watches the bombs fall in Dresden and doesn’t think about Slaughterhouse 5 by Vonnegut. He thinks about the dead.
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The Time Traveller goes to the huge concert at his favorite time: that kiss on the other side of the stadium, behind the star band.
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I fell asleep. When I opened my eyes the car I was riding in was somewhere else. For a split second I was the Time Traveller.
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The Time Traveller sees the walls of Troy fall from inside and out. The war’s brilliance dazzles him: he’s almost killed by an arrow.
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On stage, Hamlet gives the performance of his life, holding his own skull, provided by the Time Traveller, from a date he doesn’t want to say.
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“Stop me,” begged the suicide victim’s letter to the Time Traveller.
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The Time Traveller returns, years before, to help himself figure out the manual that came with the time machine.
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According to the Time Traveller, in the 17332th century, every year we’ll be able to request a remake of our lives. But the rights will continue to belong to the producer.
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The Time Traveller spent two hours at the train station giving the wrong directions to Juan José Arreola, who was in such a hurry.
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The Latinist complained to the Time Traveller: “Why in the #☢%*❆•☠ had he brought him to Imperial Rome, where he’s just another poor devil?
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The Time Traveller collects evidence of impossibilities (e.g. the flight of the bumblebees, happiness, or time travel).
*
In his nightmare, the Time Traveller could only transport himself to the same 2 hours of that exam in sixth grade.
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“I don’t understand it, and I don’t like it,” says Giuseppe Garibaldi about mariachi music in Plaza Garibaldi. (The Time Traveller’s Mistakes.)
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The Time Traveller didn’t understand (because he read it in Spanish) and went to see if Descartes really thought first and existed later.
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The Time Traveller buys in the 99th century a retro-TV to see a moment in his past. He turns it on & sees his exit from the 100th century.
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The Time Traveller put his machine in neutral and Duchamp watched, from inside, as his model descended the staircase.
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A century before, the Time Traveller was swept under by a wave, which greeted him with its voice of water, “You’d already been here within a century,” it said.
*
The Time Traveller goes to the Paleolithic Age to see my most distant ancestor, whom they call prophet for foretelling the Time Traveller.
Apocrypha
The Time Traveller went to Comala several times and could never be sure that his own voice wasn’t heard among the rest of the murmurs.
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The Time Traveller carried Atlas so he could once and for all put the stone of Sisyphus in its place.
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The Time Traveller carried away the controllers from the airport at Crete so that they could guide Icarus’ descent.
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The Time Traveller knows the letter before A, analogous to zero, that the Khazars used to talk about the absent and the frightening.
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The Time Traveller went back and persuaded Count Vlad to attack, before anyone else, Bram Stoker. We lost a great novel but also a thousand bad ones.
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Sir Canterville went with the Time Traveller to meet Oscar Wilde. They scared him to death, appearing, just like that, in his sitting room!
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The Time Traveller convinced Helen that Paris wasn’t right for her.
“Well,” commented Menelaus, “the version of events in the movie with Brad Pitt is even worse.”
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The Time Traveller returned to Eden. The Serpent stole the Machine. Since then evil awaits in all ages.
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The Time Traveller met the Androgyne before it became Adam and Eve. For that reason alone many pursue it in every century.
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The Time Traveller insisted: there had been a mistake: creatures like him, and not microwave ovens, had been the dominant species on Earth.
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The Time Traveller regrets visiting Fernando Pessoa: Caeiro, Reis, and the others are jealous and insist that he visit them too.
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The Time Traveller got the Invisible Man out of jail, who was happy—justified in his evil plans—until the Traveller left him in the Land of the Blind.
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The Time Traveller went back to murder H. G. Wells. He then lived happily, and in secret, for all of eternity.
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The Time Traveller apologizes: stuck in the 7th C. he won’t be able to bring today the Man Who Was Thursday, so it’ll continue to be Wednesday.
*
The Time Traveller saw the lightning strike the flying DeLorean, destroy it, continue its path to the ground & set the bush on fire, much to Moses' horror.
*
The Time Traveller watches Frankenstein’s monster, the black smoke in the extermination camp & the last sun of 999 and 1999 rise.
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The Time Traveller went to the End of Everything. Since no one was there he was able to erase the logos after the Closing Credits.
*
The Time Traveller didn’t know how hard it was to teach a crow to say “Nevermore” or anything else for that matter.
( ☼ )
The Time Traveller gathers the stories he’s heard told about his adventures. Half are still in the future. He doesn’t know if he should be happy.
*
No historian ever accepted an invitation from the Time Traveller.
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The Time Traveller goes back to 1911 for his old photos from the year 2111, which he left there in 1811. They’re in good condition.
“He’s been this lazy since childhood,” his elderly mother says.
*
“The end of the world?” the Time Traveller asks. “Or the end of humanity?”
They’re not on the same date.
*
The Time Traveller has found colleagues who travel because of Emotions, Desires, Fundamental Constants, and the Color Chartreuse.
*
The Time Traveller visits a time when only the subjunctive is used. There’s only “may" and "might.” It’s no more or less happy than other eras.
*
The Time Traveller arrives at a shy century, which out of embarrassment, has no number. The people are meek and honest. Some say “strange.” So does the Traveller.
*
The Time Traveller arrives in the 20002th century, where it is forbidden to speak or write in anything except palindromes:
“Wow,” he thinks.
*
a)
The Time Traveller arrives in the wrong century: in this one, people don’t feel honored to be offered cockroaches as hors d'oeuvres.
b)
The Time Traveller arrives in the wrong century: in this one, cockroaches aren’t timid, rather they haven’t learned to speak yet.
*
The Time Traveller has arrived in the wrong century: in this one, you can’t kiss anyone so quickly.
*
The Time Traveller went to sell land to himself so he could later resell it to himself. Years later he began to question the deal.
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The Time Traveller went back to the day when the meteor was going to fall. The event was scarcely mentioned in the dinosaurs’ social media.
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The Time Traveller always knows how the people he admires end up, so he always says goodbye to them in their happiest moments.
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The Time Traveller looks at the bride & groom: each one’s child looks just like them at their first wedding, many years after today and after they’re born.
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The Time Traveller, having returned that night and in that brothel, looked at himself from a distance, almost a child in adult circumstances. After that nothing was the same.
*
The Time Traveller went to make strange faces at me when I was still in the hospital incubator: he’d heard me talk about my old nightmare.
*
The Time Traveller couldn’t convince the great librarian of Alexandria of the danger, nor was he allowed to check out a single book.
*
The Time Traveller took the tiny Heraclitus from his time (which was another and deserted).
“Look,” he told him in ancient Greek. “A river.”
*
“The future is speculation,” said Bertrand Russell, “and the past, memory.” The Time Traveller kept the “souvenirs” that he was going to give him.
*
One boring afternoon, the Time Traveller taught creationism to a very early hominid. So, ever since . . .
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The Time Traveller dreams from time to time about Rellevart Emit Eht., inhabitant of Dimension X, where the future was first.
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Good morning, as the Time Traveller says, to praise them, when he sees them stretched out before him, one after another, multicolored and replete.
*
How disappointed was the Time Traveller when Galileo said to him:
“And what good does it do me if they say I’m right in a few hundred years?”
*
The Time Traveller went to advise me on that crucial day. He says. He also says that I paid attention to him. And that my life was going to be worse.
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Thousands of years ago the Time Traveller heard this complaint: “What’s this new thing they call ‘writing’? And what’s to become of our stories of long ago? No good can come of it!”
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The Time Traveller received an empty box as a gift. FILL IT, read the card. How insufferable, he thought, he was in his puritan period too.
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The impostor founded the “Church of the Time Traveller.” He lifted his faithful into a tub and said, “Your trip must be spiritual, change your past within.”
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The Time Traveller saves the life of an un-famous person who doesn’t influence History. A photo from the police blotter disappears in the newspaper.
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The Time Traveller listens to the 9th on his iPod while watching in the distance Beethoven compose the 9th. It’s a discrete form of prophecy.
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The Time Traveller goes to time zero & on returning upsets everyone: Should he say that the explosion sounded like a voice or vice versa?
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The Time Traveller sowed the seed from which grew the tree that gave the apple from which came the seed.
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The Time Traveller goes and saves the last drop of rain that will fall in the world for a long time.
*
Then he comes to this afternoon and opens the bottle, and waits.
