Skip, Hop, Jump

by Amanda Bintz

It is the present and the sun is about to rise. I can see its fire-glow orange light licking up the dark oceanic horizon.

I am standing on a beach of what was once the Gulf of Mexico but is now nameless, claimless, land. Empty miles of sand meeting ocean; sand made by ocean; sand that has been eroded by the ocean since the beginning of time and will keep being eroded until the end of time, from past to present, and never the other way around.

In the pre-dawn light, I notice something sticking up out of the sand. Something unnatural. Something manmade. Something distinctly human.

I stoop to dig it free. It is a child’s toothbrush, pink and green. I wipe layers of clinging sand and dirt away to reveal a faded cartoon Tinkerbell on the handle.

I had a toothbrush just like this once. I hold it like I would to brush my teeth. It feels so much smaller than it did then. I turn it over in my hand, feeling the edges with the flat of my thumb. The body has been worn smooth as sea glass and the bristles have rotted away. This could very well be my toothbrush. They said all our plastic garbage would stick around for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

They were correct. I know this because I’m a time traveler.

All humans are time travelers, in a way. Throughout our brief lives, we travel through time in one direction: forward, from past to present. According to the world’s most prominent quantum physicists of my time, this is the only direction in which time travel can work.

I don’t know if they were correct, but it doesn’t really matter anymore, does it?

#

It’s like this:

If time is Interstate-90, with Oregon being the past and Massachusetts being the future, we all drive on the highway from the west coast to the east for as many miles as we can go before our cars, like our frail bodies, break down. A heart attack leaves the engine smoking, unusable. A stroke takes the whole transmission out. Our tires flatten and we can’t pull over to replace them; we have to fix the car while we’re driving, and if we can’t fix it, whatever the problem is gets worse, exacerbated by stress and wear and tear. We hit mile marker after mile marker after mile marker on the highway of time, each one in order. Cruise control is permanently on; it is set to a certain speed and cannot be reset. We can see as far ahead as the horizon through our windshield, and no farther. There are no shortcuts, no exit ramps, no off routes. We can look in the rearview mirror and consider what we’ve passed, but there are no U-turns allowed. When we die, we stop driving; we can only stop driving when we die. Time moves this way for all of us, whether we’re cars or people or mountains or stars or even galaxies.

At least it’s supposed to.

In the rearview mirror I am five years old and I have a toothbrush just like this.

#

I am five years old and I am sitting in a doctor’s office. My mother holds my hand. The doctor presses play on a blue-black moving image on a screen on the wall that I will later come to understand is an MRI scan of the blood vessels of my brain. As the doctor talks, my mother squeezes my hand so tight it hurts to the bones.

That day, I learn the word “aneurysm.”

Later, I will come to understand the concepts of “operable,” and “inoperable,” and the cruel, crucial difference between them.

On the drive home I ask my mother if we can stop at McDonald’s. She says yes, right away—I don’t even have to ask twice. My Happy Meal toy is a little purple plastic Furby. My mother watches as I make its dramatically lashed eyes blink open and closed, open and closed, and starts crying, right there in the corner booth of the PlayPlace.

#

I wonder where that Furby is now. It certainly still exists somewhere, just like this maybe-my toothbrush. Could it be buried elsewhere in this sand? Or perhaps it’s at the bottom of this ocean, which stretches as far as my eyes can see. Atlantic, for Atlas, the Titan who held the world on his shoulders. Am I holding it now? Is that why my shoulders and my neck and my back never stop aching? Or is that just time finally catching up with me?

I imagine my Happy Meal Furby in the depths: the occasional shaft of dim, watery sunlight piercing through near-darkness to reveal it overgrown with algae, nestled in a submarine forest of swaying seaweed, inspected now and then by creepy-crawly bottom-dwellers. Perhaps its bulging eyes and Troll-doll-esque tuft of white hair would not look as pretty or poetic on the seafloor as a broken Grecian statue sunk off the Mediterranean coastline or a Viking sword rusting in ancient Arctic mud, but it is a profound artifact of human existence all the same. An artifact of my existence.

#

For the Christmas immediately following the diagnosis, I got a real Furby. I also got a Barbie Dreamhouse and a Sega Dreamcast and a pink toy Jeep that I could actually drive—all the things I always asked for and my parents always said were too expensive. I didn’t understand what Make-A-Wish was. I thought it meant I made a wish, and it came true.

Years later, I would make another wish that came true. Sort of.

#

Imagine you’re on the highway of time. You’re driving along—driving forward, obviously—and you’re about to cross the border between Oregon and Idaho. But your car can jump now, sort of like in that ¬old Dreamcast game, Crazy Taxi 2, where you can make your vehicle do a Crazy Hop to bypass traffic and other obstacles to get your fares to their destinations faster. You press that proverbial green Y button on your controller and your car launches itself so high up in the air that you skip over Idaho’s panhandle entirely and land in Butte, Montana. Now you’re farther along on the highway than everyone you know and knew. You can’t turn back. You can’t slow down. You can’t speed up. You’ve jumped ahead, and now you must keep driving from where you are.

Or you can jump again. You can jump as many times as you want.

#

My wish was for a cure. What I got instead was a way to search for a cure.

I spent my youth insinuating myself into, first, the inner circles of the world’s most prominent neurosurgeons and then, when I realized they didn’t have what I was looking for, the world’s most prominent quantum physicists. Through hearsay and whispers and warnings I ignored, I connected with a scientist from the other side of the world trying to make theoretical physics a lot less theoretical. He was sure his device would work; he just needed someone willing to test it. Enter me: a thirty-three-year-old so obsessed with the fact that death via inoperable brain aneurysm could strike her down at any moment that she wasn’t afraid of a predictable, potentially far more painful death via crackpot time-traveling experiment.

After a few successful tests, I left and took his device with me.

#

I thought once I found a cure, I’d have all the time that everyone else got. Time to be with my family. Time to make friends. Time to fall in love. Time to live without faceless Death tap-tap-tapping me on the shoulder; swinging one of those old-timey gold watches on a chain back and forth, pointing to the hands tick-ticking away with his long bony finger.

The watch tick-ticks away to this day, like the time-bomb in my head. I always thought of it as a countdown, but if it is, I don’t know what it's counting down to anymore.

#

Everyone I knew remarked on how little I aged as the years went on. I was doomed to a potential premature death from birth, and yet I seemed to have tapped into the fountain of youth! How ironic, they said, smiling at how I was still alive, still alive, a miracle! as their engines started smoking and their tires burst one after the other and their transmissions failed, faces drooping and speech slurring, limping along Interstate-90, getting closer and closer to the end.

I watched my grandparents die (both sets), then my parents: Dad first, then Mom.

I couldn’t stick around much longer than that. I was afraid people would start to get suspicious. I could look 33 at 50, reasonably; I could not reasonably look 33 when I was supposed to be a septuagenarian. So I left town and I kept pressing the button, kept moving forward in time, kept searching for a cure in all the future generations of eminent doctors and scientists humanity produced.

It was as if I was an astronaut attempting a mission to reach the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. My theoretical spaceship traveled so near to the speed of light that time slowed down for me and me alone, while everyone I had ever known crumbled away to less than dust—broken-down cars rusting in towering scrap heaps on the shoulders of the time highway.

Eventually, there was no one left alive that I knew. I left them all behind, eating my dust.

#

It doesn’t hurt, the jump. It hardly feels like anything. It’s sort of like when you’re really cozy on the couch, watching a movie with someone you love, and they poke you and say you fell asleep, and you say you didn’t fall asleep because you never felt like you fell asleep, but the movie has skipped ahead and you’ve lost the plot, so they must be right—you must have fallen asleep.

Except your eyes are open the whole time.

#

I searched for years. I jumped, and hopped, and skipped, and at every new present I came to, every new mile marker I reached, I was stymied: They had yet to develop a way to operate on my inoperable brain aneurysm.

Crazy Hop.

No cure.

Crazy Hop.

Still no cure.

I kept pressing the button and things kept getting worse. Crazy Hop. Impending climate disaster. Crazy Hop. The decline of democracy and the rise of fascism. Crazy Hop. Wildfires. Crazy Hop. Land swallowed by the rising sea. Crazy Hop. One-hundred-year storms became five-hundred-year storms became one-thousand-year storms. Crazy Hop. World War III.

After the second global fascist takeover plunged humanity into a third Dark Age, no human being left alive had the ability or the know-how to even find my aneurysm, let alone cure it. No one could tell by looking at me that I was anything other than a perfectly healthy 33-year-old woman.

Crazy Hop.

Turns out the Seventh Mass Extinction is the one that gets us.

#

And here I am, in the present.

I still haven’t felt any of the symptoms I have been constantly terrified would overtake me at any moment since I was five years old: a severe, sudden, thunderclap of a headache; a stiff neck; vomiting; pain when I look into the light.

The device that’s brought me here, to the end of the world, fits in my pocket. I take it out and rest it in the palm of my hand. It is a black metal disk, thick in the middle and thinner on the sides. It has one button: circular, made of black plastic that sits flush with the metal surface.

The sun is above the horizon now. By my slapdash calculations, this sunrise marks the dawn of my 34th birthday. I stare into the shimmering, white-hot orb until my vision blurs.

I thumb over the button. I could try to make it to the end of I-90, to the metaphorical Logan International Airport of bygone Boston, Massachusetts. Maybe there I could exit the highway, leave my car, and take flight. Maybe my plane could become a spaceship, hurtling me past Alpha Centauri, past Barnard’s Star, past the Andromeda Galaxy, into the beginning and the end of time at the site of the Big Bang that started it all, 13 billion years ago.

I held the device between my forefinger and thumb; I flick my wrist and let it fly out over the ocean. It skips like a stone toward the rising sun. After the fourth hop, it sinks beneath the waves. I can’t leave the highway until I die. Might as well try to enjoy what’s left of the drive.

I kneel and bury the Tinkerbell toothbrush in the wet sand. I take my shoes off and sink my bare toes into the gritty damp. I close my eyes and feel the morning sun on my face. Clumps of filthy seafoam float in on the tide. I scoop up handfuls and blow them away like the flames of candles on a birthday cake. I don’t make a wish. They never come true like you hope.

This story first appeared in “Issue 055” of Luna Station Quarterly, published September 2023. It has since been revised slightly. “Issue 055” is available for purchase on Amazon.