Before December Productions

A Wedding, A Funeral, and a Time Machine

Part I: A Wedding

Episode 1: Looking Backwards

I awoke is a puddle of my own vomit. It wasn't the first time, and it certainly won't be the last, I thought, reaching over to the night stand in a vain attempt to find some Advil, only to find a bottle of Life Extension multi-vitamins. Pain killers, I need pain-killers, my brain echoed, yet none were to be found.

"He's alive," said a female voice. "Unfortunately..." That must have been the bridesmaid I had accosted last night. Hopefully she wouldn’t press charges.

After considerable effort on my part, I pulled myself out of bed and lurched towards the en suite, which was covered in wall to wall mirrors. What stared back at me was not pretty. My face was a minefield of busted capillaries, my eyes red and bloodshot. I washed the vomit off the corner of my mouth, knocked back a shot of Listerine, and looked at the clock on my phone. "10:14 AM"

"D, man, we gotta bolt," I blurted as I threw on a scarf and threw my rumbled clothes in my roller bag. "I'm gonna miss my plane..."

We were quiet most of the way to DTW. Only a real friend would ferry my alcoholic ass to the airport after all the shenanigans that had unfolded the night before. An old copy of “Awakening the Giant Within” by Tony Robbins played on the tape deck.

"Thanks, again, for you know inviting me..." I said in order to break the silence.

"Oh," replied Dominic quizzically. "I wasn't aware that you had thanked me in the first place."

“Well, you know, thanks for throwing the bash and everything,” I said with the awkwardness of a high-school sophomore. “It was awesome as fuck.”

D checked his left mirror for oncoming traffic. “Your mastery of the English language astounds me sometimes.”

"Christ, man, can you play ball with me here? I know some raw shit went down last night, but cut me a break here, bro."

"Raw shit?" replied Dominic. "Who are you--Dave Chappelle? What you did last night was completely inappropriate." He paused and drew a deep breath. “Even by your twisted standards.” He emphasized 'twisted' in his Michigan accent. The sign for 'Domestic Departures' approached on our right.

"Like you've never fondled one of the bride's maids after one too many Jagerbombs," I retorted with supreme self-confidence.

"Hmm, let me think for a moment..." Dominic pulled to the side near the United departures, almost slamming into the car directly in front of us. "No, I have never fondled one of the bride's maids, either before, during, or after too many Jagerbombs." He threw up his arms in despair. "Normal people don't act like that, Jim!"

"Christ, man, that party was dead. You told the band to play only Johnny Mathis tunes."

"So that gives you the right to jump on stage, deliver an a right hook to the lead guitarist, and proceed to sing some half-assed cover of Slayer's 'Reign in Blood'--badly, may I add -- over and over again until passing out, only to arise half an hour later like some demented phoenix and vomit all over over the birthday cake that my dear mother spent and entire weekend baking..."

I paused to take it all in. "I sang 'Reign in Blood'? I didn't even know I was capable of speed metal!"

"My mother almost fainted! It's nothing to be proud off." D shook his head in despair. "Bringing the Karaoke machine was a bad idea."

We'd arrived at the United departure desk. I turned toward Dominic and looked him straight in his eyes. "Admit it, that was some raw shit!"

"Raw, or not, I just wish it never happened!"

In all the years I had known Dominic (and they were many), I had never heard such despair in his voice. "Are you serious bro?"

"You fucked my wedding, Jim. I never want to see you again." A moment's silence. "Get out." He popped the trunk. I opened the door and grabbed my roller bag as D sped off onto I-75. As I stood in the check-in line, I realized that Dominic, my one and only hetero life-mate, had dumped me. I had to do something about the situation. And fast.

Episode 2: X's Third Idea

As soon as the 737 hit the tarmac at Logan, I got on the Silver and then the Red Line at South Station toward Kendall Square. Our mutual friend Bob Eckert, whom I referred to as X as in “The Autobiography of Bobby X” had recently accepted a tenured professorship at MIT after successfully proving the most difficult--and many would say most important--problem in all of pure mathematics: the celebrated Riemann hypothesis. Once, in front of raging campfire in the middle of the Sierra Nevada, X tried to explain his idea of banishing all the zeros of Riemann Zeta function from the so-called critical line on the Argand Plane. This seemingly arcane analytical exercise had deep ramifications for find a prime number amongst all the natural numbers. The combination of mountain air and vodka gave me the illusion of understanding, but that understanding faded, as all things ultimately must, with time. Needless to say, X’s successful attack on Riemann resulted in a flood of job offers. Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study and Stanford both made similar offers, but X chose MIT because he had some radical ideas on "temporal displacement" and he wanted to collaborate with Alan Guth, whose seminal work on the Inflationary Expansion of the early universe and semi-classical gravity "showed promise," in X’s own words.

Crimson and gold leaves lined the trees along Memorial drive as I entered Kendall, winding my way through the cavernous high rises of Kendall towards the MIT campus and the Math department in building E18. Fresh-faced undergraduate and haggard graduate students, inter-spaced with strung-out postdocs and assistant professors, scuttled back and forth across the quad, jacked up on espresso and the insatiable demands of academic life at the "Tech". What a bunch of losers, I thought, as a took a swig of Russian Standard from my hip flask. I still harbored bitter memories towards this fine institution of higher learning after that asshole Molvig over in the Physics department wouldn't even return my phone calls after my last job search. "Fuck it," I muttered under my vodka-fumed breath--I needed to concentrate on my plan to right the wrongs I had committed the night before in Michigan.

Blackboards packed with equations and Greek symbols stretched down the halls of the third floor of building E18. Some long-haired freak (probably a postdoc, I thought) was trying to explain something about a "Kahler manifold" to a tiny Japanese man with coke-bottle glasses and a short-sleeved white dress shirt that his mother had probably bought for him. I hurried by, unbuttoned my camel-hair topcoat, and found the nameplate "Robert N. Eckert: Distinguished Professor of Pure Mathematics" three doors down the hall. The door was closed, and I heard a pair of voices inside, so naturally, I let myself in....

"Christ, X--you can't remove the singularity from the Ricci tensor that way! It simply won't work!" A frazzled Alan Guth slammed his calculation on the overhead projector and ran his hands through his bushy, disheveled grey hair. They both looked like they had been in the office all night--a "Hi-Five" pizza box lay half eaten in the corner of X's spacious, book-lined office, along with a bag of potato chips and a three liter bottle of lime-green Mountain Dew.

X's eyes darted left, then right--the gears were turning. "You're thinking is quite...four dimensional." X lit a Viceroy cigarette, exhaling swirling vortices into the the light cast by the overhead.

"Four dimensional?" retorted an exasperated Guth. "Look at the indices--alpha, beta, gamma, delta. Your tensorial gymnastics are not going to pass muster this time!"

Still, X was unperturbed. "What you say is true, if, and, may I remind you, only if, we restrain ourselves to the four-manifold. But what if we embed the manifold in a high-dimensional background space..." X picked up his coffee-stained calculation and formed a torus out of the paper and contoured on end onto the other. "...and we apply a simple twist." Guth's eyes opened wide in amazement. Let me remind you that both scientists were so engrossed in their rarefied intellectual exchange that neither even noticed me standing in the door with a silver hip flask.

"And thereby introduce an extra degree of freedom into the Ricci tensor! To model quantum destabilization effects phenomenologically?".

“Precisely.” X stubbed out his Viceroy into an overflowing clay ashtray and grabbed a Cape Cod salt and vinegar potato chip from the open bag laying on this desk. "As we both know, the classical gravitational field admitted closed time-like curves. Godel did this calculation as far back as 1949." X picked up the yellowed notebook pages and waved them in triumph. "But now, with this calculation that I possess right here, we have rigorous proof that the quantized gravitational field also admits CTCs. Meaning..."

"That Hawking is wrong," mused Alan as he grabbed a handful of potato chips from the open bag. "That chronology protection, can, under certain space-time circumstances..."

"Be violated. That quantum effects do not necessarily destabilize pathological regions of space-time.” X crunched a chip as if he were shattering all known laws of Physics. “That time-travel is, in fact...a reality."

I felt the need to contribute to the conversation. "No shit," I said, taking yet another sip from my flask.

"Office hours are by appointment only!" spouted Guth. "Now shew, shew young man and go see the TA about that silly little differential equation that you can't solve."

"Man, I thought it was just Molvig, but all you Techers are assholes," I retorted.

"Robert, who is this...man?" inquired Guth.

X looked me up and down, and replied, stroking his beard, "Jimbo. I thought you were in rehab?"

I strode into the office and collapsed onto the soft, brown, Corinthian leather sofa in the corner and propped my boot-clad feet up on the Ottoman. "I was, until I got the invite to D's wedding." I pulled a book off the shelf. "Gravitation" by Thorne and Wheeler. "Couldn't miss the social event of the season," I uttered as I leafed through a chapter on differential geometry. "I, ahh, didn't see you there, X."

Guth's usually ruddy face burned red with rage. "Christ, Robert, can't this wait? We're on the threshold of a massive breakthrough."

"Alan, I'll stop by your office as soon as this is over," said X in a clipped manner as he showed Professor Guth the door.

"Well, I'm not the Asshole," fumed Guth as he stormed out the door. X and I were now alone in the cavernous office filled with journal papers, random notebook pages filled with speculations on differential topology and twisted braid groups, and all the odd things that used to be in the back seat of his car: a porcelain Buddhist elephant, a collection of dice that told the date, and, for whatever reason, an unwrapped VHS copy of the Terry Gilliam film "Brazil".

X lit another Viceroy. "You really should have called. Or at least emailed."

I rotated 90 degrees on the couch and sat upright. "Look X, I know I fucked up. I've got a love affair with the bottle that's got me one foot in the grave." X nodded along as the cigarette smoke danced through the projector light. I heard raindrops hit the window. "I need help. We both know that. D knows that. And, Goddamn it, he reached out to a burnt-out drunk with that wedding invitation. And how did I repay him?"

X grasped his temples with the palms of his hands, his Viceroy wedged between his right middle and index fingers. "I don't know, Jimbo--how did you repay him?"

I whipped out my phone and display the photo that Jeane, D's older sister, took of me during the wedding last night: fondling the bridesmaids like some filthy old man during a slow dance. And then another of me vomiting on the half-eaten cake while swinging a bottle of Stolinchna around like a wild man.

"Christ, Jim, you're really far gone. What about the group thing?"

"Tried it. Got kicked out after I started railing on about socialism."

"Yeah, well, AA's never been politically progressive. What about individual therapy?"

"I hacked into my therapist's email account. I got kicked out."

"That happens to you a lot, Jim. You gotta stick with it."

I slammed the copy of "Gravitation" shut and jumped up to my feet. "Look, X--you're my last hope. I ain't got nobody else. I thought I had D, but then I went ahead and trashed the most important day of his life. So that's why I'm here--to right the wrongs I've committed in the past, to atone for my sins, goddamn it!" I knocked back a shot and a half of from my flask and grabbed X by his shoulders. "I heard you talking with Guth--I know its possible to change the past."

"Possible, yes," remarked X dispassionately. "But in order to generate a traversible CTC--stable, mind you, for long enough to make it to the other side--that would take an enormous energy source." X broke free of my grasp and meandered toward the blackboard that covered an entire wall. "Where are we going to get the energy?"

"I don't care about petty details! I totally screwed up Dominic's wedding and now I have to repair the damage that I did--by any means necessary."

X gasped. "So you're talking about changing the past?"

"Why not? As long as I don't get on that plane two days ago, I won't go to Dominic wedding and destroy his life." I dropped to my knees and wept like a little girl. "X, please, you are a scientific genius of the highest caliber. You have to help in my quest to un-fuck-up Dominic's life. I've failed so many times in the past--failure is no longer an option!"

X turned his head and thought for a moment. "Well, I won't deny the first point. But that still doesn't solve our power problem. How in God's name are we going to create this time tunnel to get you back to two days ago?" X tapped his desk and then a faint glimmer sparked across his eyes. "I have an idea. To the Toyota of Doom!"

X grabbed his keys and we bolted down the stairs, clutching X's revolutionary design for a time machine across the quad, and onto Mass Ave.where X's trusty 2004 Navy Blue Corolla with 280,000+ miles lay ready, willing and able.

“Where are we going?” I inquired while clearing all the random papers in trinkets in the passenger's seat into the overflowing back seats.

“Come and see,” he said, echoing the Book of Revelations, as he turned the ignition and we tore ass onto Mass Ave and the next adventure.

Episode 3: Opening the Gate

As we veered onto the Mass pike, I sketched out, in broad terms, my plan to undo all the damage I did on Dominic’s big day. “Look, X, as long as we can open up one of your closed time-like curves to two days ago--that is, Saturday--then I can stop myself from ever going to Dominic’s wedding and thereby prevent the chaos that ensued.”

“Opening the gate shouldn’t be a problem,” replied X. The problem is it’s a one-time operation--I have no way to bring you back. Which means there will be two copies of you for this short period of time between when you emerge from the other side of the CTC and when you presumably enter the gate.”

It took me several seconds to fully register this concept. “Wait--are you saying there will be two copies of me running around if we go through with this?”

X took a big sip of black coffee and pushed the Toyota to 85 mph. “Assuming you do go through the gate, there actually are two copies of you running around. Right now.”

“So where am I?” I asked with a straight face. “I mean, the other me.”

“How should I know?”

After driving all afternoon and half the night across western Massachusetts, then down the New York Thruway via the Catskills, and then down through the old coal and oil country of northeastern Pennsylvania, we finally arrived outside of Harrisburg, PA right after midnight. In a prior life, X had been an Odinic wanderer, driving back and forth and up and down through this vast nation seventeen times--via the northern route through the Dakotas and Crazy Horse and Glacier, via the central route over the Rockies via Loveland pass, and the southern route, through mad New Orleans before the flood (or “antebellum”, as erudite X was wont to say) and the endless plains of northern Texas. As we raced through the cold Susquehanna night, the Metallica song “Wherever I May Roam” came on the radio, with that slightly out of tune, Oriental beginning, and I nudged X, remarking “This is your song, man--no matter how many awards you get from the Mathematicians, no matter how many papers you publish, this is you, you were meant to roam, like fucking Mithrandir wandering Middle-Earth, redefining anywhere, anywhere you may roam.” X was a bit old for Metallica, but he could dig the sentiment nonetheless.

I blazed a joint and exhaled the fumes out into the night air, the seventy mile per hour late September wind blasting my right cheek. The dude driving the car next to me should have won the fucking Fields medal twenty years ago. This was the dude who proved Stephen Hawking wrong. He had finally achieved some level of recognition late in life, after many years of unrecognized struggle, living in his Mom’s basement, proving Abstract Algebraic theorems as if he were shooting clay pigeons. Raw mathematical genius of the highest order, right here, to my left, driving into the future as Metallica blasted from the stereo of the Toyota of Doom which had traversed 45 of the lower 48. I drifted into unconsciousness and awoke to four massive hyperboloids stood in the distance, reflecting the beam of the setting full moon beckoning our arrival.

"Three Mile Island--the American Chernobyl," X proclaimed. "The most powerful nuclear reactor this side of the Mississippi. All the power we need to rip apart the very fabric of the space-time continuum." X gulped down the remains of his gas station coffee from a thirty-two ounce Styrofoam cup. "According to my calculations, we should be able to get just enough power from the abandoned core in the T2 tower to keep the gate open for..." X double-checked his illegible computation that he wrote out on the back of a Tim Horton's napkin. "1.7 seconds. But if we keep the gate open any longer." X paused as he contemplated the ramifications of our rouge experiment.

"Meltdown," I exclaimed as I pulled a black ski-mask over my face and strapped on a 100 W headlamp. "It would be an order of magnitude worse than what happened in Pripyet back in 85," said X. "A hundred times worse than what happen here in 79."

"Fuck it," I replied, illuminating my headlamp. "Harrisburg is dead anyway."

X grasped me by the shoulders and shook me back to the land of the sane. "You immoral animal! These people have families, goddamn it!"

I broke free from X's grip. "Hey, you've read Lenin, right--In order to make an omelet, sometimes you have to break a couple eggs." I hopped out of the car and slammed the door. "Let's do this thing."

After a Chinese fire drill, with me in the drivers seat of this Toyota that had been halfway to the moon, my foot on the accelerator, the gate of T2 approaching at 105 miles per hour, which was all she could give me and I could only think of one thing to say: “Kiss your ass goodbye!” and BOOOM!, we smashed through the checkpoint as the guard ran behind us screaming “You maniacs! You’re going to die” yet we knew otherwise as he faded from the rear-view mirror. I was a man possessed by an idea--to become like onto a God, master of time, and like God, forgiver of sins: that is, my own. And no one was going to get in my way--not X, not the T2 cooling tower, and certainly not the goddamn laws of physics or some security guard making $7.75 an hour.

The core had been isolated for six years after the near disaster in 79. Luckily, X with his eidetic memory had memorized the plant layout. “Here,” he said, moving his hand back and forth in the lamplight, motioning toward a stairwell. “This leads down to the sub-basement.” I popped the trunk of the Toyota and grabbed the jumper cables. They’d come in handy later.

“Should we be wearing protective gear?” I inquired as we traversed the hallways of the abandoned reactor. I recalled a documentary I had seen about Three-Mile Island, with the Nuclear Engineer turned President Jimmy Carter prancing about the compound in white booties as protection from stray radiation.

“Perhaps,” replied X absently. “No, no, turn that way,” he commanded, motioning toward the left toward another set of stairs. I noticed a crushed “Tab” can underfoot.

“Damn, I haven’t seen one of these like...ever,” I ruminated as I picked up the soda can and tossed it aside. “Why did people drink this shit?”

“People did dumb things back in the seventies: engage in unprotected sex, devastate their nasal passages with cocaine and nervous systems with ‘ludes--we even drank Saccharine in the form of Tab!” X pressed on through the spiderwebs, ever deeper, towards the core reactor.

“So, X, have you ever tested your theory out?” I inquired after several minutes of silence.

“Test?” replied X. “Who has time for tests? I’m a theorist for Chirst’s sake--leave the tests to the dumbasses with IQ’s less than 180.”

“Dumbasses such as myself?”

X scratched his beard as he opened yet another door. “I had other dumbasses in mind--dumbasses with Ph.D.’s from MIT or even Carnegie Mellon--but you can do for now.”

The door opened up into a hexagonal chamber containing the dormant central core which had almost imploded in 1979. X turned his headlamp toward the control panel. “This facility has a backup battery which was designed to last for 100 years after construction. It was shut down remotely after the disaster, but there should be a way to reactivate it manually.”

After rummaging through the debris for several minutes, I spotted a big red lever with the inscription: “Redundant Power Supply.” Something crossed my mind. “I thought they removed the core several years after disaster in order to prevent further meltdown and, umm...you know, from the Crichton novel…”

“The China syndrome,” replied X. “This is true and not true. They did remove the bulk of the core, but a secondary, experimental core of much greater power remained, consisting of a spherical shell, radiation implosion device--the so-called Third Idea, as pioneered by Soviets.”

“Cold Fusion. In fucking Pennsylvania.” X nudged me to flip the switch. At first, nothing, but several moments later, electricity started buzzing through the compound as the florescent lights came to life overhead. “This must have cost billions to construct.”

“$58.3 billion to be precise. But after the political fallout of the Three-Mile Island disaster, Jimmy Carter decided to cover the whole thing up.”

“So how did you find out?”

“Johnny D’s old CO was briefly part of the project early in his career. When John first told me about a dormant cold fusion reactor, I thought it was his usual line of bullshit. But, I later found out that MIT was trying to get down here as well.”

“Johnny D comes through in the clutch.”

“Say that again.” X grasped one end of the jumper cables and attached it to the control deck.

“Are you sure this is going to work?” I inquired.

X looked at the frayed orange cable and though for a moment. “No.” I smiled in disbelief. “But we have to try.” A attached a meter to the other end of the jumper cables and dialed in 9/28/14 7:00:00. “Look, you’re going to tunnel through time, but I don’t know exactly where you will end up in space. It could be here, it could be in Michigan, it could be in the middle of Lake St. Clair. Hopefully, it won’t be in the middle of some solid object, like a tree or concrete wall.”

“I’m scared X,” I whimpered, my eyes welling up like the bitch that I am.

X grabbed me and looked me square in the eye. “ No one should have their wedding day decimated the way you decimated it. You have go! Now hit that button,” he demanded.

It was big and red and looked like something Brezhnev would have in his office. My hand hovered over the button, frozen in mid-air. In the distance, I could hear footsteps.

“Do it!” commanded X. “Now!” Still my hand would not move. “The security guard is coming down the corridor!” X pushed me aside and slammed the button with all of this weight. Sparks flew from the jumper cable and the footsteps grew louder.

“Put your fucking hands where I can seem them!” ordered the guard as he aimed this .357 magnum at X’s head.

The gate opened. It was like looking at the universal form of Lord Krishna--a glowing, suspended disk of concentrated light, with the brilliance of ten thousand suns. I thought I had been blinded permanently, but it was only for a moment. Without thinking, I dove headfirst through the iridescent disk. Time seemed to slow down as my body careened through the fissure in space-time. I had passed the event horizon toward the singularity that lay within. Would I be torn apart by the tidal forces? I had no idea.

“Don’t move!” said the guard, his voice dilated down several octaves due to the effects of special relativity. X unclasped the jumper cable and was blown back against the control panel. The last thing I heard was a bang.

Episode 4: Into the Michigan Sun

J. Robert Oppenheimer famously compared the first nuclear explosion like looking upon the universal form of Lord Krishna, the terrible destroyer known as Time with a thousand arms whose iridescence exceed ten thousand suns. I guess that's what traveling through time is like, like gazing too long at the light of ten thousand suns. And let me tell you: Once you’ve looked upon the universal form, it takes some time for your eyes to adjust to ordinary sunlight. I was lying in a grassy field and something--with a rather dry tongue--was licking my face. I turned and looked to see a llama. Christ, I thought, had I tunneled all the way to Peru? How would I ever get to Sterling Heights in time? Luckily, the pressing need to escape the llama’s tongue suppressed these thoughts. I heard human footsteps in the distance.

“Chuck, are those vandals terrorizing Bessie again?” inquired an elderly female voice.

“Over my dead body,” boomed a masculine, more menacing, voice. Well, they’re speaking English, I thought, and by the deciduous forests, I can deduce that I’m somewhere in North America. A massive radio antenna emanated from the farm house. And in the kitchen doorway, I saw the silhouetted figure of a farmer armed with pitchfork closing in from the nearby farmhouse. Christ, Jesus, where am I?

“Hey you--this is private property!” exclaimed the silhouetted figure. Grabbing his CB radio from his belt, he called in to wife: “10-4, Intruder is unarmed, I repeat unarmed.” His face was craggy and wrinkled, yet his eyes displayed massive intelligence. “How did you get here, anyway?”

“Quantum Mechanics. General Relativity,” I murmured. All I wanted to do was puke, that’s how awful I felt. “The fucking Grand Unified Theory.”

“Physicists make me sick,” murmured the mysterious figure. “They abuse the Sobolev theory without understand its true meaning” The shadows began to clear from his face. I saw a face wrinkled by time. “Mathematicians, on the other hand, can see the underlying structure of Sobolev spaces.”

My God, he was familiar with Sobolev Spaces! The gears started to turn. The llamas, the mathematics, the CB radio.

“Chuck? I mean, Dr. MacCluer?” I turned my headlamp and temporarily blinded the old man. Those eyes. Those burning blue eyes. MacCluer.

“Mr. Kelly? What in the hell are you doing here?”

I somehow found the energy to push my limp body off the wet ground. “It’s a long story,” I replied. “Got a minute?”

MacCluer lit a home-rolled cigarette. “I’ve got all the time in the world, son.” He exhaled a plume worth of Film Noir. “Tell me your story.”

I never thought I’d shared a triple-malt Scotch in Professor MacCluer’s kitchen at six in the morning. It really took the edge off traversing an Einstein-Rosen bridge. MacCluer, the tyrant of the Industrial Mathematics program at Michigan State University, whose ludicrous homework assignments devastated the lives of his graduate students--MacCluer, who I once equated with the Emperor in “Return of the Jedi”--here he was, enjoying a drink, just any other human being. Asking for my story, like some lone rancher in Monument Valley in a John Ford western.

“Well, I don’t really know where to begin,” I began, finishing my third snifter of Scotch. “I was always running from the bottle, but the bottle seemed to run faster.”

“I noticed that,” commented Chuck as he polished the bore of his shotgun.

“I ran the gamut of this continent--up and down the California coast, then over the Sierra Nevada and out beyond the Continental Divide, across the vast plains and then north, ever northwards to the Upper Peninsula and down the Ohio valley to the Smokies and up the spine of the Appalachians to Boston and the intellectuals in Harvard Yard and then Lowell to pay respects to dear Ti-Jean at Edson Cemetery, who honored life the way is was it was meant to be honored, and then north to the Whites and the Greens, the endless forests and fire towers calling my name and finally Maine to that fabled peak--Khitadin, to see the first light coming from decaying Europe. And then what was left, I asked, what was left, but the final frontier--the barrier of time? This is the question I asked since I was a child, and with the X’s genius, it became a reality.”

“So you’ve been running all this time instead of building something of value.” His pale blue eyes locked onto mine. “Leaning on Bruce and then this so-called ‘X’ when you should have relied on yourself. Have you learned nothing that I’ve taught you?” He emptied his glass on the table and continued: “And you’re not fooling anyone with this bullshit Kerouac thing--I met Jack, goddamn it, and Allen as well--Christ, I cooked dinner for him and Billy Boroughs--and sir, you’re no Jack, let me tell you that!”

I slammed the table with my empty snifter. “Chuck, I’m on a mission across space and time to prevent a disaster and nothing, God help me, nothing--certainly not you--is going to stop me!”

“You showed such promise, son.” He exhaled with great sorrow. “Now you are consumed by hatred and delusions of grandeur. Such a waste.” Leaving his twelve gauge on the kitchen table, he softly exited the kitchen, a defeated American hero, a man who believed in America and its institutions, once a great dreamer, and now nothing but a retired professor at an obscure university.

Paralyzed for a moment, I thought about my life and all my failures. Perhaps I could have achieved great things in Industrial Mathematics. Perhaps I could have revolutionized the world with my radical approach to Fourier Series and Galerkin Expansions. Then I looked at the fully load twelve gauge shotgun. “Fuck all this shit,” I said as I grabbed the weapon and ran like hell out the door and into the rising Michigan sun.

Before December Productions

Thursday, December 25, 2014

Sunday, October 19, 2014

A Wedding, A Funeral, and a Time Machine

Part I: A Wedding

Episode 1: Looking Backwards

Sunday, June 8, 2014

Sunday, February 2, 2014

Rochester International Film Festival

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

A Better Fate Postproduction Update

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Postproduction: Sound

Saturday, October 5, 2013

"The Knife Edge" Finished