Neil and Brenda met just days after Neil invented his time machine, which proved to be a handy access pass. They watched the Beatles play at the Cavern Club. They figured out which religion’s version of God was the right one. They prevented the Hindenburg disaster. They watched the Ashton Kutcher film “The Butterfly Effect,” and undid their undoing of the Hindenburg disaster.
Eventually, they fell into a peaceful routine. Brenda would ask, “What should we do tonight?,” knowing that Neil would reply, “Sal’s?” To which Brenda would add, “2004.” (Sal’s was much cheaper in 2004.)
“I want to take you somewhere,” Neil said one night, after an expensive 2078 visit to Sal’s.
“Where?” Brenda asked.
“I want you to meet me as a kid,” Neil said. “There’s something I think about a lot, and I feel like you’d understand me better if you saw it for yourself.”
Neil and Brenda climbed into the time machine, and he set it to 1995. A lot of people think that time travel is instantaneous, but it literally takes six hours to fly a plane across the country. Why would time travel be different? It takes three nanoseconds to go back to 1995, then six hours to travel from Boston, where Neil and Brenda lived, to Los Angeles, where Neil grew up.
“I wish we could’ve Ubered to your house,” Brenda joked as she got out of the thirty-minute cab ride from LAX, which cost eight dollars.
“Sh-h-h, don’t let them hear us,” Neil whispered, gesturing to little Neil, who stood in a circle with four taller boys. In the center was an injured bird. Boy No. 1 taunted little Neil, “What, are you too scared to put it out of its misery?” Boy No. 2 shouted, “I want to see bird guts!” Boy No. 3 blew a raspberry. And Boy No. 4 did not know how to bully.
Little Neil mustered his courage and brought a hammer down on the bird. The boys’ callousness quickly turned to disgust, their contempt steadily aimed at Neil.
“You see?” old Neil asked Brenda. “It’s funny, watching it now as a thirty-six-year-old man. That bird obviously wasn’t going to make it. It honestly looked kind of dead before I even hit it with the hammer. What a relief. I’ve felt guilty about that forever.”
“You should,” Brenda replied. “That was majorly fucked up.”
“Wh-what?” Neil stuttered.
Just then, little Neil approached the couple and, through his tears, mumbled, “Excuse me. I don’t mean to bother you, but you both look upset.”
“Murderer!” Brenda yelled.
It was an awkward cross-country flight and then time travel back to Boston, 2026. As soon as they got home, Brenda packed her things and left. Neil didn’t go on another date for ten years; he time-travelled to 2036, to speed up the wait.
In 2036, Neil met Florence, who was born in 2009, if you’re keeping track. A few weeks in, Neil posed the question “Can I take you somewhere?” Soon enough, Neil and Florence stood in front of Neil’s childhood home, in 1995.
“What are those kids doing over there?” Florence asked.
“Don’t mind them!” Neil said. “Watch, she’s about to do it.” From behind a tree, Neil and Florence observed Brenda scolding little Neil. “She calls me a murderer and everything!” he said. “I haven’t stopped thinking about it for ten years. Now you can finally understand this part of me.”
“Wow. You’ve been thinking about another woman for ten years?” Florence asked. “By the way, what you did to that bird was seriously fucked up.”
After Florence left him, Neil gave up on love for ten days. He paused time so that he could grieve properly.
Then Neil met Carrie. “Why’d you want to show me this?” she asked Neil, after he’d taken her back to the bird-killing scene, in 1995. “That second bitch was right. Hell, if you brought me back in time just to watch another woman leave you, you’d damn sure better feel like crap. Also, I’m sorry to bring this up on vacation—but I don’t think this is working.”
“You brought me here to watch someone dump you for bringing her here to watch someone dump you for bringing her here to watch someone dump you?” Hannah, Neil’s next girlfriend, asked. By this point, Neil had learned from his mistakes. He’d tinkered with the time-travel machine so that the only way his fellow-traveller could make it back safely was in his warm embrace. Hannah chose to stay in 1995.
Neil planned one final trip. Because of all the Boston-L.A. travel, he had lots of Delta SkyMiles, so he often got upgraded. He comfortably cruised back to L.A., 1995, the day before the whole bird incident. He took the ailing bird from the drawer that little Neil had been keeping it in, and hid it in a nearby forest.
When Neil got back to 2026, he had no memory of killing the bird. Brenda had left him for some other reason, probably because he built a time machine that he used only for dates. ♦