To My Son, Of Whom I Am Already Proud

Contributed by Matthew Hartwell on 15/05/09

Dear Bobby,

I understand that you now go by Robert, and even sometimes by Mr. Tarkoff, but you were Bobby last time we talked, and I figured that’s as good a place as any to pick up.

There is extremely little to be done, except to leave these clues and confide that I was there for every moment I could be as you grew up. You don’t know that, of course. Not yet, anyway, though I’m hoping you’ll piece all this together. Who knows, maybe you already did, and I don’t have to worry about taking the 101 Freeway anymore.

The science of it isn’t all that difficult, assuming you’ve got a handful of Ph.Ds and a willingness to completely disregard everything you ever learned about spacetime. With any luck, you’re like me, and just in case you’re not, the pieces assemble into a really dumbed down instruction manual.

I know when I die. It isn’t anything heroic. I am not a martyr for any cause. My death does not prevent calamity, or even result in organs intact enough to donate to a needy patient. I am trapped in a multi-car collision, pinned to my seat. The newspapers report that my death is quick, but the coroner’s report, which I’ve read, obsessively, as if it were a religious document, insists I am not only alive, but conscious for the fifteen minutes prior to the flames reaching my car. That I am trapped between my seat and the steering column that has cracked my ribs, causing a puncture in one of my lungs. That the cuts on my hands are not a result of the initial impact, but due to me attempting to punch and claw through the glass as I smell the smoke that billows behind my car. There is, the report states, evidence I am alive for a further eight minutes once the car starts burning.

It should be very obvious I have no desire to live through this. It’s recorded in the future though, so I obviously don’t find a way to prevent it myself. I know not to mess with the past, but messing with what hasn’t happened yet?

I don’t really understand the ramifications to the timestream. If there is a timestream. Maybe it’s a puddle, or a thousand rivulets of water trickling down a windshield. Maybe I can trace back up one, or have someone else do it for me; maybe I can jump the tracks altogether.

But I have to assume I can’t. All the preparations and journeys may be for nothing. So I spend a lot of my downtime in between missions visiting you. I’ll drop off a clue, then show up at your high school graduation. After that’s over, I pop back home thirty seconds after leaving, so I can spend the evening playing with you. You’ve got such a funny laugh. It sounds like your mother’s.

You walk over with your favorite book. As I turn the pages, you rub the fuzzy duck, and spin the wheels of the tractor, and I think about how happy you are at your wedding. How pretty my daughter-in-law will be. How drunk your Uncle Tony will get, until you and your cousin put him in the limo to sleep it off, the way I had to do at my own reception.

Later, we’re at the park and while I push you in the swings, I start to cry thinking about the pride in your face as you hold your son. You gave him my name for a middle name. I’m honored, and secretly pleased it’s not his first name. A boy needs his own identity, but he’ll always have me watching over him. I want him to have a grandfather around. How can you take him fishing when I never got the chance to teach you how?

I’ve been leaving these clues. Hopefully, I’ll tell you this story some day, when I’m old, and your mother and wife are watching over the boy in the living room. We’ll have a beer in the garage, and I’ll tell you about the time I discovered time travel, and how you used that knowledge to save my life. If everything goes right, you won’t remember a thing, and you’ll switch me to light beers for the rest of the evening.

But if I can’t fix this, if you can’t change everything… I didn’t have to watch in order to be proud of you becoming a man.

Love,