The Life You Save

The dry air seared the inside of his lungs a little, but as he trembled on the ground, the feeling in his arms and legs slowly coming back to him, Charlie realized that the problem wasn’t that the air was hot; it was that everything in him was cold.

And wet.

And stiffly, bruisingly full.

He just managed to turn his head, half-jolting his shoulder to the side, before he sputtered, coughing, and expelled rust-coloured river water into the grass. He was half-empty and retching from the gut by the time he dropped back flat on his back, but his lungs at least knew what to do with air this time.

The sky was gray above him, and a couple of flecks that might have been lake gulls wheeled high in the air, not a care in the world. He heard the sound of a car whizzing by—he was on the grass off the side of the road. How did he get here?

He tried to sit up, but a deep ache ran through the whole of him, and he could only tip his head back, seeing a bluff upside-down, butting against the edge of a concrete block where the roadway extended out onto a bridge—okay, he could place it. He was where Edman Avenue crossed the river about a mile and a half from town, and halfway home from work.

Work—that was it. He had been driving home from the office at the midtown chamber of commerce. He’d taken a half-day to go home and rest. He probably should have called a Lyft.

He coughed again, tasting the bitter half-flavour of the river again, and a shiver wracked his body.

Something firm and warm clapped on his shoulder, and he felt the fight go out of him. “You’re all right, kid,” a voice said, and Charlie craned his head to one side to see a man sitting on the embankment next to him. The man was a few decades Charlie’s senior, sporting a beard thin enough to belong on a much younger man if it weren’t already going salt-and-pepper. He gave Charlie’s shoulder a squeeze and spoke slowly again—like he knew it would take a minute to get through the fog in Charlie’s brain. “You’re gonna be fine. Can you sit up?”

Charlie couldn’t, under his own power, but as the man asked the question, he gently prodded and somehow found leverage, scooping Charlie into a sitting position in the grass. Charlie coughed again—thankfully, nothing came bursting out of his throat this time, and he managed to slump into a position that didn’t hurt too badly.

The man was dressed comfortably, in soft pants and a thermal shirt, with a jacket that didn’t quite fit, a logo on the breast and again on the sleeves that Charlie couldn’t place, all of it sopping wet and hanging off the stranger’s frame. He wore the same kind of rectangular glasses Charlie preferred, and it was only then that Charlie realized he wasn’t wearing his own—no wonder he couldn’t make out the gulls in the sky. Beyond the treeline, the woods became a wall of green, and beyond the man sitting next to him, the bridge faded quickly into a haze.

Where were his glasses? Where was his car?

His stomach dropped as it clicked into place. His clothes were cold and heavy with the weight of water too. The river.

“It’s lucky that car didn’t have the doors locked,” the man said. “Might not have gotten to you in time.”

“Yeah,” Charlie said, surprised at the rasp in his voice as he sputtered again—his whole chest burned with the effort. “That’s what I get for buying the cheapest pre-owned; the automatic locks don’t work.”

The stranger nodded. “I used to have a car just like that.” He gave Charlie a thump on the shoulder blade that seemed to dislodge another cough. “I only hope you weren’t trying to do anything stupid, now.”

Charlie shook his head. Of course he hadn’t been trying to do anything like that. Had he? No, even though he was feeling pretty overwhelmed—there had been a lot on his plate lately, sure, especially after the news from the doctor—but surely, if he’d decided to do anything, he’d remember.

“Maybe you fell asleep at the wheel, just a little?”

“I don’t think so—” Charlie started, but that was all he had to go on. One second he was on the road and maybe just a little bleary-eyed, then the next second, the car was already gone. What had the doctor called that possibility? An absence seizure? “But maybe. Something like that.”

“Just good to see you back here with us,” the stranger said.

They sat in the quiet for a few seconds before sirens squealed their way to the top of the embankment and suddenly cut out. “That’ll be the authorities,” the stranger said gently then got to his feet. “Over here!” he called. “The driver got out okay, but he’ll need to be checked out. Cracked rib, maybe.”

Charlie stared as the stranger took over the scene just long enough to direct a medic down the hill to them. He heard the medic ask the stranger if he was okay too but didn’t hear the response.

A second woman scrambled down the damp grass and caught herself right in front of Charlie, penlight in hand, emergency bag slung over her shoulder. She did a quick check of his pupil reactions. As she dug in her bag for more supplies, the stranger turned back to him and gave his shoulder one more squeeze.

“Once you get all checked out, you just go home and rest, okay, bud?”

Charlie tried to respond, tried to dismiss the concern, but it was too slow coming out, and the stranger was speaking again.

“They’ll help you figure it out, and you’ll learn to manage. Just trust that things can always get better.”

***

“I’m sure the police will want to take a statement,” the ambulance driver was saying as the stranger watched Charlie get strapped to a plastic stretcher-board for the short trip up the hill to the rig. “They’ll come talk to you after we make sure the driver’s stable. Maybe you could wait over there?” She pointed to a little stretch of level ground nearly under the bridge, and the man nodded, making his way over. One of the concrete pillars supporting the bridge stood on a poured foundation, giving a nice right angle perfect for sitting, so he sat and watched Charlie get carried slowly up.

“Mr. Davidson?” asked a voice behind him.

He turned and saw his licensed tour guide—what was her name? Julie? Jolie? July?—in the shadow of the pillar. She blended right in, even with the big logo on her brown jacket matching the one he’d been given to wear.

“You know you can’t stay and give a statement, right?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Honestly, I’m surprised the head office greenlit this expedition. You just broke about sixteen different protocols.”

“Protocol? Is that what was on that big ‘Time-Travel Carefully’ poster in the lobby?” He chuckled. When she scowled, he rolled his eyes. “You’ve never heard of the Novikov Self-Consistency Principle, have you?”

His guide quickly consulted the tablet she carried, but he waved it away. “It just means this is already how it happened. If I hadn’t done this little visit, then everything would be a broken paradox, and if I weren’t supposed to do it, the universe wouldn’t have let me.”

“I don’t know that the universe particularly cares what you do while you’re here, sir—” she started, but he cut her off.

“No offense, but I think God’s system probably has better failsafes in place than your company’s.”

The guide looked like she wanted to say something else but thought better of it. “So is it actually just like you remember?”

The man shrugged. “It all played out just like this. Of course, I mainly just remember cold and gray. I think we just got used to thinking of the whole 2020s being gray, didn’t we? I’d forgotten how bright the sky was.”

“Yeah,” the guide mused, smirking. “We actually get that a lot.”

They both glanced up the bank; they could just see the uniformed officers talking to Charlie in the back of the ambulance. At most, they had a minute before they had to be gone.

“Just out of curiosity,” the guide asked, “When did you realize that it was you? You know, that saved… you?”

“The second I saw that story about your company on the news. I’d like to say I put two and two together hearing about the new thing in tourism, the chance to re-live your best memories, but mostly I just recognized the logo on the jacket.” He looked down at his own wrists, tugging the sleeve down so the circle that slowly faded from world-map globe on one side to analog clockface on the other came into view.

“Are you ready?” the guide asked, and the man nodded.

As he stood, she showed him to a stake in the ground she’d set for the generation of the field. She consulted her tablet, reviewing fast-flowing streams of quantum subspace calculations the man couldn’t even begin to understand. But just before she pulled up the button to initiate the jump, she stopped and asked him one more question.

“That news story was months before you came in to see us. I mean, it doesn’t exactly matter when your departure is, but, if you knew right away, why wait?”

The man smiled. “I had to learn how to swim.”