I remember it being hot. Hermosillo baked in early afternoon sunshine, the heat releasing smells and tastes of Mexico. Frenetic and unpredictable traffic gave off a hydrocarbon haze and a wall of noise; car horns sounding like nocturnal jungle animals. I was lightheaded but alert with that feeling unique to the traveller’s first taste of a new location and culture. A mix of tension, excitement, and expectation threatened to engulf me and I took comfort from a chilled bottle of Pepsi.
The Indian, small and wide faced, moved unsteadily towards my pavement table. He looked at me, sizing me up. I fingered a few pesos in my pocket but he smiled and turned onto the road heedless of the traffic.
I cried ‘look out!’
He seemed not to hear and, cursing my lack of Spanish, I ran out and dragged him back onto the pavement by his collar.
‘Thank you sir,’ he said in very good English. ‘A moment of madness on my part. Forgive me. Is there anything I can do for you?’
His name was Genaro and he was of Yaqui Indian descent. He became my guide showing me Hermosillo, its people and underworld. He became my friend and I met his brothers, sisters, and cousins. They called me Salvador for saving Genaro from Hermosillo’s predatory traffic, and the name stuck.
One night, Genaro said to me, ‘I am a traveller too, you know. Not like you but I go to places you can only imagine.’
I smiled. We were very stoned on the local weed and tequila.
‘And where would that be?’ I said mockingly,’ you mean tripping on mescaline?’
‘You don’t take me seriously. I’m not a simple Indian. You call yourself a traveller and you’ve been all over the World. I travel across time. I have met the Spanish who invaded our country, I worked for Emiliano Zapata Salazar, and I even cut the hair of General George Armstrong Custer.’
‘I’m impressed. This dope’s good but I think it’s gone to your head and made you crazy.’
‘I’ll show you,’ said Genaro angrily. ‘Tomorrow we go to see my travelling friends in the Sierra Madre.’
A year had passed since Genaro’s revelation that night in Hermosillo. I now lived in the mountains with his travelling friends. They had taken me on short ‘time trips’ which consisted of walks along mountain paths after having taken a peyote based drug. We explored caves and valleys which they said were temporal short cuts. Sometimes there I found it difficult to breathe and had to put into practice the mind and body control techniques they taught me. It was a wonderful year but I became restless. I needed to move on. The traveller’s curse was upon me.
I confided in Genaro.
He said, ‘It is natural for you to be restless as you like us are a traveller. I know you do not yet believe that time travel is possible. Let me show you something.’
He took me to his hut and revealed a hidden trapdoor which led to a vault. He lit a lamp and showed me Roman coins, Neolithic tools, ancient leather bound books, jewels, and a wardrobe of clothes from every conceivable period of history. I picked up one of the Roman coins. It looked new.
‘You have chosen your first destination. Let’s go.’
Journeys taken with Genaro and on my own taught me that time is the strangest thing. You can’t really travel into the future. There’s nothing to stop you going there but it’s variable. Go there one day and it’ll be different from the time you went before. The past is different. It’s not set in stone but the further back you go the more reliable and fixed it is. So buying a lottery ticket that’s recorded historically as a winner won’t do you any good because recent history is too changeable. Also ‘short distance’ time travelling is dangerous due to personal time dilation. Travel back a century and you have just over twenty-four hours before the time-travelling drug wears off, a millennium equates to about a week, and a million years lets you stay about one hundred years. If you get caught in the past when your drug wears off, you’re dead or more accurately, you never existed.
‘You have now done ten journeys and have become an experienced time-traveller. Rome has burned, Lincoln has been assassinated, Cortez has subjugated Cuba, and dinosaurs have ruled the Earth. But, have you ever wondered why we do this?’
I looked quizzically at Genaro. ‘I’m a traveller. It’s in my blood. Does there have to be a reason?’
‘Yes, there has to be,’ said Genaro. ‘We believe that the human race has no future.’ Have you ever wondered why travel into the future is impossible?’
‘It’s because time is a continuum. You know that the recent past is not fixed and as you travel forwards in time, it becomes less fixed. I assume that as you go to the future time is not fixed at all but is at the nexus of many probabilities’ I said pleased with my reasoning.
‘We do not believe that. We believe that mankind’s future lies in the past. Think of it Salvador, we can live for a million years if we go back far enough. Think of all the travelling you can do in that time and the great civilisations we can build. We have already started. Our first colony is two hundred years old. What we have here is merely an outpost.’
I stared at my friend Genaro and saw for the first time a glint of fanaticism in his dark eyes.
‘Have you not thought Genaro that your colony might be disrupting time, that its existence may be the reason for mankind’s lack of future?’
‘You disappoint me Salvador.’
Genaro glanced behind me and nodded.
My world exploded and there was darkness.
Four pterodactyls fly overhead on their winter migration, iridescent skull crests and wings of mother-of-pearl flame in the setting sun. Their beauty and power helps me to forget the one hundred and fifty million year gulf as I long for home. I record the event; place, location, direction, and time in my search for a way back and I practice the disciplines and techniques designed for the time-traveller in case madness overcomes me.
©Steve Luckham
23/05/2012
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