Time Travel

“Where the fuck am I?” he said, gasping for air. The world was closing in on him, and it was starting inside his head.

“Not ‘where,’” said a homeless man standing beside him, “but…”

He immediately vomited on the homeless man’s trousers.

The homeless man shook his leg before continuing, “…‘when.’”

“Oh, God,” the first man said, “I feel like my brain ate acid.”

“An side effect of the time travel, I’m afraid, but an brief one. You’ll be experiencing memory loss, lack of coordination, and extreme indigestion. We think it’s the body’s way of defending itself from time-discoordination, but the technology is so new we have no way of knowing.”

He glanced around. They were on the side of a large boulevard near a crowd holding signs he couldn’t make out. “Where,” he paused, “when am I?”

“The year is 2016, and you’re outside the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio. You’re on a mission to prevent Donald Trump from becoming President of the United States. Now start thinking of terrible things he could say.”

“I’m on a mission?” he said. Glancing down at his attire he saw two fuzzy brown slippers and a pink robe not quite covering a t-shirt that read, “DEEZ BALLZ.”

“Don’t let the attire fool you, it just means you were picked up early,” said the homeless man, glancing around them nervously. Some members of the crowd had started chanting, “Build that wall.” The homeless man yelled over them “You’re on possibly the greatest mission of all time: A mission to save the world. You’ll need this to get closer.” The homeless man reached into a canvas bag and pulled out with set of suit and pants, vomit-free.

“In the few months President Trump had power before he was overthrown, the world suffered immeasurable damage. Stocks fell, nations lost faith in each other! But worst of all, he took office at the exact last moment humanity had to stem the effects of climate change. Because of him, Florida and New York are already gone in our time.”

The homeless man began pushing towards the front of the crowd, as the man putting on the suit struggled to catch up. “Which is why we need to think of the most terrible statement ever to be uttered by a political figure!”

“Isn’t that going to be difficult?” said the other man. “President Trump once famously said Mexicans were rapists”

“We said that.”

“What?”

“We said, ‘Mexicans are rapists.’”

“Why would we say Mexicans were rapists? I don’t think Mexicans are rapists.”

“Of course not! But we made him say Mexicans were rapists. We yelled it as he was passing by and, naturally, he took it for his own idea.”

“Oh, God.” He suddenly began to lose his balance. “Oh GOD. That’s terrible.”

“Astoundingly terrible! Yet it made no difference in the polls whatsoever.”

“Did we tell him to say, ‘And I assume some of them are good people’?”

“Of course. We assumed that would make it even more insulting. But it didn’t work.”

“What about the.. didn’t he say a reporter was bleeding out of her vagina?”

“Almost, and that was us.”

“Making fun of the disabled reporter?”

“Us!”

The man in the suit stopped walking. As if expecting this, the homeless man stood in place, waiting.

He tried to speak steadily but his voice quivered “… ‘grab them by the pussy’?”

“Us.”

“Oh, come on!”

“We did it as a joke! We assumed if we strayed far enough from any reasonable history it would fix itself. We had no idea he was actually assaulting people. And, somehow, it still didn’t work.” He covered his face in his dirt-covered hands. “Nothing has worked.”

The man in the suit shook his head. “We’re terrible!”

“We’re not terrible, he’s terrible. We’re on a mission to save the world by destroying any shred of likability possibly left of Donald Trump. And so far every time we’ve failed.”

“I don’t understand,” said the man in the suit. “How many times have we done this?”

“Thirty-seven.”

“Thirty-seven..”

“Thirty-seven times. We’ve come back and tried to change history. Actually, only you’ve been coming back, I’ve been here, obviously.” The homeless man spread his arms widely, letting dirt fell out of the cracks of his sleeves.

“You know, you could change into new clothes, too.”

“There’s no point. The minute we fix history our entire timeline will be erased. We’ll just vanish into the eye of time. Plus, crowds always part for egg smell.” He started walking again.

“Wait wait.. vanish into time? I don’t want to vanish into time.”

The homeless man stopped and looked in the air. He dug into his pockets, pulling out scraps and bits of lint. Finally he unfolded a tattered piece of newspaper, handing it to the man in the suit. “We don’t have a choice.”

The man in the suit got as far as the headline “Man Dies From Drowning, Freak Flood Submerges First Floor Apartment”.

“Am I… oh God… I’m dead.”

“Not yet. But you will be. I’ve been saving up my return trips to get you back here a few minutes at a time. That’s why I haven’t been back. Technically it’s not allowed but…” he raised his arms.

“Get me back here.. oh god. I’m holding my own eulogy clipping. I can’t take this.”

“That’s not a eulogy! It’s a hyped up local news story. But yes, if we do nothing today, you die tomorrow, in the future, from a flash climate-change induced flood. And you die in our bathroom, in our apartment, in our life. NOW THINK OF SOMETHING TERRIBLE FOR REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE DONALD TRUMP TO SAY AT THIS CONVENTION.”

Time froze. The man in the bathrobe checked the inner lining of the pink robe he arrived in: “To my love Steve, from Stan. May this robe keep you warm when I am not near.” He wrinkled his brow. Something in his head was lifting, and the fog over his memory with it.. “We.. have a life together.”

“Oh, dammit, Steve, this is NOT THE TIME to get emotional! We need to focus, we need to find a-”

Steve grabbed the homeless man by the hand. “There’s no point. We’ve done this thirty-seven times already, you said so yourself. And how could we make anything more offensive than ‘Mexicans are rapists’… ‘Grab them by the pussy’? They’re perfectly crafted terrible statements. The Mona Lisa of gaffes. Crowning achievements.”

“Don’t say that, Steve. There must be something we can do. Some way we could cause Trump to lose face with his least empathetic supporters, the ones who haven’t cared at all about his degrading statements. Something!” The crowd began chanting even louder as a line of black cars turned onto the street from afar.

“Stan, I remember now. Stan, you have to let it go. There’s nothing we can do from here.”

“Don’t SAY THAT!”

“It’s over, Stan. After everything we’ve done.. after everything he’s done he still wins every time. It’s gotta a time paradox. How else can you explain it? We never had a chance, babe.”

Stan began crying, wiping tears away into dirty, mud-lined cracks in his face. “I broke time for you. Picked you up before you died.”

“And look what good it’s done you. Stan, you can’t keep me in this time loop, seeing me a few seconds at a time, thinking up terribler and terribler things for that easily lead man to say. That’s no life for us.”

The homeless man began bawling, snot running out the sides of his nose and into his thick, overgrown beard.

“I love you, Stan. I love you for sending for me. And I love you for trying to change my death. But.. there’s no more future for me. This is all the time we have left. This moment.”

Stan continued bawling.

Steve leaned forward, his lips meeting Stan’s in a salivary, snotty, muddy mess of tears and dirt. Stan reached around Steve’s suit, the suit he always brought him, and thought about how inevitable this moment had become, and how it would be the last, real moment of their soon to end relationship.

Just then, Republican Nominee Donald Trump passed, standing through the sunroof of his bulletproof limousine. Seeing them on the sidewalk he began to laugh and point with one hand, making a handjob motion with his other. The movement caught him off-balance and he tumbled over the hood of his car into the crowd. Grabbing blindly for support, he pulled himself up and for a moment seemed to look intently into the scene of their love. The crowd fell silent. A single reporter snapped a photograph of what seemed to be the first reasonable interaction of Donald Trump and a gay couple.

And, suddenly, they were gone.