SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

After that night, I didn’t set foot into the shop for a week. Instead, I glanced at it from the window of my room during the night—a dark shape against the slightly lighter background of the meadow behind it. An emptiness had spread through our house during that time. My stepmother was a ghost, busily moving from room to room, organizing my father’s belongings. My sister was consoling her but I could see that it was her who needed consoling more than anyone. She and my dad had had a difficult relationship. It didn’t help that when she was a teenager, I began to want to help him in his shop and therefore spent much more time with him than she ever did. Now I could see in her the regret of never wanting to listen to him when he spoke about the furniture he’d built or the iron gates and door hinges he had made.

I rarely went downstairs anymore except when I had to eat or do chores around the house. I spent most of the time up in my room, doing homework or looking at the shop from my window. When I lay in bed at night, my thoughts always went back to the notebook. Why did my father tell me about the drawer if he knew I would never be able to build the machine? The question kept me up at night and even my days were filled with trying to answer it. He had written the manual for me but it was clear he had intended to build it with me, not have me try it all by myself. In the hospital, he probably thought I should have it to remember him. But I didn’t want to remember him. Remembering him was too painful. I wanted to see him again. I wanted to feel his gentle touch on my shoulder when I worked on a project in the shop, hear his words of encouragement when I burned a hole into the steel or the welding rod got stuck in the bead.

I caught myself thinking about the items on the list and where to get them. A 12 Volt/700CCA car battery, the magnets, a six-by-six foot piece of metal fencing, a few copper connectors, about thirty feet of one-inch galvanized piping, a seat cushion (if needed), the display of an analog alarm clock and a few other things I could get at our hardware store. If I were to try to build it. Which I wouldn’t. But as much as I tried not to think about it, I couldn’t stop. I had forty two dollars and seven cents in my savings box. That would barely be enough to get the magnets. If I wanted to do this, I needed to get a job. But I didn’t want to get a job because I couldn’t possibly build the machine. I paced back and forth in my room, but this made me even more agitated than I already was. Eventually, I sat down on my bed and, just as I did sometimes, opened The Time Machine without any particular page in mind.

"I told some of you last Thursday of the principles of the Time Machine, and showed you the actual thing incomplete in the workshop. There it is now, a little travel worn, truly; and one of the ivory bars is cracked, and a brass rail bent; but the rest of it is sound enough. I expected to finish it on Friday, when the putting together was nearly done, I found that one of the nickel bars was exactly one inch too short, and this had to be re-made; so that the thing was not complete until this morning."

I closed the book again. Should I try it? I’m not sure what happened at that moment but something inside me gave way. I couldn’t hold out any longer. I guess the pain over not being with him was greater than the fear of building a machine that would, in the end, be just that—a machine with no purpose but to have made a fool out of me. I got dressed and went downstairs.

"Where you going?" I heard my stepmother call from the living room.

"I’ll be right back. Just going out to the shop."

I’m sure she didn’t want me to go. It was almost ten o’clock at night and tomorrow was a school day. But she couldn’t forbid it either. I felt for her at that moment. Her loss was mine and while I stood at the entrance door, we were joined in our grief over whom we had loved the most in this world.

The shop was cold. Freezing. I could see my breath when I turned the lights on. I kindled a fire and warmed my hands for a while. It would take a half hour for the room to become comfortable. Better get to work. I decided to clear one half of the shop to have an area where I could place all the needed parts. That way, I could see what was missing and add to it without losing a sense of where everything was. I also wanted to get an inventory of what tools I might need so that I could move the rest to the opposite wall.

It occurred to me that the notebook didn’t mention any finishing work on the metal. No metal rasp to soften the edges and joists, no steel wool to smooth out the welding lines. My dad was never about appearances. It didn’t interest him. He always said that appearances hide the truth behind them. In everything. I never understood this until much later. Whenever we spoke about our book, my dad would give me one or two items from his philosophy about time. Like the Traveler in the book, he would speak with great conviction, sucking on his pipe once in a while to give me time to think about what he had just told me.

"It only appears," he would begin, "that we are bound to three dimensions and that the fourth—time itself—is a given and cannot be changed. I don’t accept that. I don’t believe that. And neither should you."

I loved listening to him too much to interrupt him, even though I understood but a small portion of what he told me back then.

"Time travel is a constant. We are always traveling through time. Right now, at this very moment, we are traveling through time. Otherwise we would be frozen in that very instant and no longer exist. We can only be here if we move through time. Who says that we cannot accelerate the speed of travel? And if one object moves forward in time and the rest doesn’t, the object will disappear. Just like if you and I would have a race, and you, because you are much faster than me, would move ahead and eventually be gone from my field of vision. You would not occupy the same moment with me anymore."

I moved the belt sander and band saw all the way to the wall next to the door. Both machines were heavy and it took me a long time, sitting on the floor and pushing them, inch by inch, with my feet. I cleared the area of all the leftover piping and metal pieces and moved them toward the wall as well. Then I swept one more time. I used a piece of charcoal from the forge and drew a square with four equal parts inside. One was dedicated to the centrifugal rotor, one to the battery compartment and controls, the third to the chassis, and the fourth to the rest—the seat, the display, and other miscellaneous parts. For the next three hours, I arranged what I found in the shop and applied it to the sections. I thought we had more than we actually did but at the end of the night, I had a list with tools and items I needed to get.

After school the next day I went to the hardware store. Paul McGuiness, the owner, knew me from the countless times I had accompanied my father and, later on, was sent on errands to get parts for the shop.

"How are you doing, kiddo?" he asked.

"I’m okay," I replied. “I think.”

Paul had cried at my dad’s funeral. He had known him since they went to school together forty years ago.

"What you got?" Paul finally asked me.

I gave him the list with items. He looked it over.

"You sure this is right?" he said. "What’s this gonna be after it’s done?"

I hesitated. He looked at me for a while over his reading glasses. Then he wordlessly got up and began to collect the material.

"I actually just wanted to see how much it all costs," I said. "I don’t have the money right now."

"Your dad had store credit," he replied as he added up the items at the register. The amount came out to $134.45. "It was a bit more than what this comes to so I’m adding a few packs of WL-20 welding rod. I think you might need them."