The Realm Beneath the Realm of Time
This story first appeared in the Tales From OmniPark anthology
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“What does science mean to you?” Dalton asked him that first day, sweltering in the impossible Texas heat, posed as though quizzing a novitiate on what he meant by ‘the Lord.’ And when Malcolm stammered through his answer, Dalton held up a hand steady as a plank of wood for all the years he’d worked to manifest his dream. “I don’t actually want an answer, young man. I want you here asking the question. Just as we ask it of ourselves each day the sun is so gracious as to rise.”
Malcolm Fulton had never flown in an airplane, or seen the desert, never even been west of the Mississippi. A well-bred boy from Massachusetts and excellent student, he had no vice except the growing conviction that his life must be an adventure: space travel, a journey to the center of the earth, the survival of death. Something. College, almost terminally boring, was only tolerable because it meant that fewer people could tell him “no.”
A month before graduation, flipping through an old volume, he found a brochure for OmniPark, a paradoxical tourist attraction amid the creosote waste of west Texas. As bookmark it made no sense, seemed placed there for him alone. And in the following weeks, he caught himself looking at its pictures obsessively, reading the descriptions, studying the focused and avuncular profile of Dalton Teague, the park’s mercurial founder. He fell in a kind of love with the man’s self-possessed gaze toward the horizon, as if he saw out there what no one else could. Another character drew Malcolm in: The Inventor, who ministered over the park’s Realm of Time in his rust-colored three-piece and the derby hat befitting a Victorian eccentric, the heavy mutton chops and the brass-framed goggles. OmniPark might not be a rocket trip to foreign planets, but its nature was steeply illogical, audacious, and Teague’s team of Technosophers—a consilience of engineering, storytelling, design, and a sort of technological shamanism—challenged Malcolm’s ambitions for himself. At OmniPark, he decided, he would find his route toward something real and novel, even if wild and temporary.
Dalton hired him immediately. Kismet or karma or brute confidence. And OmniPark quickly became home. An uncanny sense that he’d spent stretches of time here longer than his life. He loved the park’s unapologetic and unscientific enthusiasm for science, its attention to detail, and, most of all, its holistic purpose: to enlighten all comers with the deepest knowledge a thrill ride could muster. The Realm of Life a safari-like adventure through terrain home to creatures long vanished from the earth. And the Realm of the Cell a convincing simulacra of the amoeba’s violent world. The Realm of Man a wide-eyed march through the struggles our Adams and Eves survived to liberate themselves from the desert, the ice, and the cave.
But the Realm of Time was where Malcolm most wanted to work. Its very existence struck him as though he were a fish finally noticing water. Here, tricks of light and animatronics took the guests on a white-knuckled caper inspired by H.G. Wells himself. Passengers in Victorian contraptions spiraled through a dystopian melodrama, were attacked by mantis shrimp the size of African elephants, endured the Big Bang’s kaleidoscope of light and sound. The fidelity to its theme was peerless among all the attractions: the faux-laboratory within the convoluted mansion. The buzzing lights and whirly-gigs and brass. Even the gimmick was crucial: Time a retro-futuristic substance we once nearly uncovered and have since let slip back into the ether. Soon enough, Malcolm had ideas for this Realm, as though slowly understanding an aspect of Time itself that was real and novel, even if wild and temporary.
But he waited. He did the work asked of him, and that which it seemed others overlooked, learned rapidly, made friends, became a model young Technosopher, with his eyes always on the Realm of Time and the taciturn Inventor who seemed less a person and more an old-timey ghost haunting the park. Time to time, he could feel the man watching him through his goggles. He’d lurk about as if waiting to catch a glimpse of Malcolm or he’d be patrolling the OmniColor fountain when he arrived in the morning. One day, the Inventor simply stood and watched him at his terminal. Fifteen minutes watching Malcolm earnestly type and rifle through the thick file-folders as he sweat. Finally, he turned to the Inventor, a fresh render of cellular graphics whirring away on his big tube monitor, and the Inventor nodded grave and judgmental even through the goggles—as though he might nudge Malcolm aside to flaunt a complicated Imagineering move with the flick of his wrist.
“Time just going by weren’t it?” the Inventor said. “Yeah. That’s the way she go’ed.” And then he turned and hustled back to his post as if embarrassed.
Weeks went by before Malcolm saw him again. He worked on, increasingly distracted, waiting and then frustrated, disappointed at his waiting. By now he was supposed to be a Mars colonist or an eccentric millionaire. And then, six months into his tenure, Malcolm found a letter in his locker, written in a degraded version of his own hand. He sat down in the break-room to read:
Malcolm,
It’s the Inventor. That’s the name that Dalton himself gives me when I finally arrive here. In this timeline, you got here later than I will. Sorry. . .than I did. Than I have. It is a very tangled bank. For many of the people who visit OmniPark, I will be, have been, am, the Park’s most memorable character. Truest to form. Most reliably who they expect, save my white hair growing grayer by the day and, soon enough, black as on the one in which I was born. But I doubt anyone recognizes how crucial my role is to this place. And not merely the Park’s. To the grounds beneath it, to time itself. The air it breathes. . .
Do you want to know OmniPark’s secret? Why this place is not merely lights and robots and funnel cakes? You already know, just not yet for you. I have held this knowledge for decades now, it seems, and am about to find out. Is this making any sense at all yet?
See, OmniPark was built over land sacred to the men that came before the old Comanches. A reclusive tribe with no name to modern ears. Speakers, Teague says, of a language more of the Aztecs than the Apaches. Believers in a desert faith more akin to the Yaqui than the Kiowa or Wichita all maps assign to this part of the state. It was here, they believed, that a man could walk between the realms. Could see into the soul of the stones and the plants, could dance themselves into the dream world.
I know I do not strike one as much of a dancer, but I have been older than the man you see now just as you have been younger. By the time I have left this place you’ll see nothing but a brittle old fart, but the truth is that fellow is as naive as you will be and are. Such is the most effable facet of the Realm of Time.
Let me tell you a story, Malcolm, and though you think it is about you, I dare say it strikes me even dearer. Recall your little gang of neighborhood friends? Playing games in front yards and shooting hoops and riding bikes and how you were kind of in love with Eleanor? Some of these kids—Bill and Derek—you have never known less than you know right now. Practically crib-mates and your mother’s friends, too, your father’s. You would go up to any one of their doors and you would knock and you would ask “can Tommy come out and play?” And he would, wouldn’t he? I look forward to those days like this morning’s coffee.
All of this true. Half of it Malcolm had not even thought of in years. How deep and permanent the gang’s friendship had been, how quickly it had evaporated. He looked around the break-room. No one watching, only the cantankerous refrigerator, the rattle of the air conditioner, the clock which said he was five minutes late for work.
Deeper, come with me. Because there is one day among those that will be the very last time you are all together. You will knock on Eleanor’s door and you two will go find Tommy in his driveway skateboarding with Bill. And Derek will come out to find you, Cynthia too. And you will all be in that driveway playing basketball—a game of your own device, remember? Know that you will remember its rules through all the changes you will soon undergo.
But this last day. I will be just old enough that my amour for Eleanor will hum in my veins and she’ll be interested in boys finally—not in that teeny-bopper way, but in actuality, will want to talk and plan and sneak notes. And Bill will be starting to play football and he becomes a rugged kind of man. Derek will move out to Maine to follow his father’s work. And then we will be high school kids and the gang we formed nothing but a memory. Like all children: there was a final day in which you came outside to play and none of you had any idea that this time of your life was over.
Why tell any of this? Because you have no idea what Time really is. Or perhaps I did not decide but merely followed the tradition of the Inventor before me. The Inventor is not a person. And Time is no arrow. Suffice to this: Time is a machine. Infinitely complex. And I, me, we . . .we’re the gremlins who run among its gears at night to keep it humming. And so the Inventor is no mere passenger on this voyage and yet it is more than I say. It is a loop. It is a pattern to things. I have no analogies that do not sound grandiose, so forgive this: it is an archetype, like a messiah, like a king, like a Shakespeare who redefines the lingua or an Einstein reality or a Dalton Teague who keeps mankind itself leaning into whatever’s next.
A caveman strode into the break-room, barefoot, his face daubed with paint, shaking out the fur cape he wore through his shift at the Realm of Man. Malcolm nodded to him, the letter laying there like some bit of contraband it was too late to hide. The caveman grunted hello and ooga-boogaed and laughed to himself as he took up the dust-buster hanging there beside the refrigerator. He laid the cape flat and vacuumed at whatever detritus had collected in the fake hair. Malcolm waited, watched him, as the dust-buster screamed, clogged, caught something hard like a penny. After endless minutes, he finished and walked out. Malcolm read on:
But waking up each morning in everyone’s yesterday is a bewildering experience. And this may sound like a trap to you, as though the park becomes your prison cell. Nothing could be less true. The park has closed in 2003 and you have worked until the final day. Dalton Teague has no scintilla of greed in him. You will be retired as a young man. Free to wander the earth, to live in oceanfront villas or hide out in mountain cabins, to travel endlessly as Dalton himself has, seeking some word or image that makes the rest of it all true. And yet, at the same time, you will be an old man living into your youth here. You will split between these two, and others perhaps even grander. And this will happen before you arrive here. And this has happened already.
I want you to consider the true answer to that question Dalton posed. If science is a mere cataloguing of facts, than I have been the poorest of practitioners. It is, you will find, not an articulation of the system by which this world runs, but a charting of and spacesuit for the nebulous concatenation of reality. Dalton’s park, our park, tries to show that. Tries to teach children—and their parents, just as well—that they live in a turbulent sea of harmless chaos. That there is no true end and no true beginning and to pass through the Big Bang or the death of our star is to stand astride the misconception that our time here is limited. You can change the past, if you want, or you can relive it. For you and very few others, this choice is yours.
Esoteric doodles comprised the rest of the letter, inscrutable math equations. Malcolm considered whether to hide the thing or throw it away or take it to Dalton. He’d have thought it was some joke or derangement if not for the story it told. After awhile, he carried the letter with him out into the little alley between the Realms of the Deep and the Stars. The Inventor stood there, recognizable only by the suit he wore, clean-shaven, without hat or goggles. He looked more like an older Malcolm than even Malcolm’s father did, or does. His eyes the same color and shape, the same coordinate in his face. And then here came Dalton Teague, beaming and thoughtful, without a drop of sweat on his stiff collar. He stopped beside the Inventor and gazed out into the park as though he could hear a malfunctioning gear somewhere among its rides. A squealing child ran by hollering about dinosaurs, his chuckling father trailing behind.
“It’s all true,” Teague said with a smile that betrayed a mischievous mood, a knowledge of precisely what would happen. “And we need you, Malcolm, the way everything is now. In other times it will be buried. It will be part of the megalopolis. It will be a mile below the sea.”
“Why me?”
“We wanted an astronaut but they were all busy in the first three dimensions.”
The Inventor reached out to shake Malcolm’s hand and then pulled him in for a hug. “It was all what it is,” he said, shaking his head at himself, rambling on until he said something like: “we will be brothered when it happened, everyone. A long time to be . . .well . . .” He made a motion with his hand like one hastening a slow talker and then stepped back a little frustrated with himself, accustomed to hiding it behind his goggles and beard and script. Even in this stammering confusion, though, this inability to speak in one plane of time, the Inventor’s voice was clearly Malcolm’s own, though scuffed up by experience.
“Are you ready?” Dalton said. “Or would you prefer another year passed typing away in there? It’s all the same to us.”
Malcolm looked at the OmniColor fountain, so brilliant at night and now rather dull. Both things at once and which was the one to measure it by. He thought of his old friends. The ones the Inventor wrote about. Their routes all laid out ahead before they placed their first footstep. Not for Malcolm Fulton. One lifetime was not enough. He slowly nodded his head and then Dalton and the Inventor led him over to the Realm of Time.
They walked down the rails of the Time Tunnel, into the dark corridor before the first real attraction, and Dalton pried a hidden handle from the wall, used this to pull open a door that Malcolm had never noticed, and shined a flashlight down into a stairwell someone had dug into the earth a very long time ago.
“We’re there on this side waited,” the Inventor said. “It was being completely safe.”
Malcolm followed Dalton down the steps and the Inventor closed the door behind them. A sensation of déjà vu so potent Malcolm knew exactly where they were going. Down into the realm where he would remove his clothing and slip into the black clear waters once again, as he’d done countless times. And in this half-dark now, a vision materialized: his bygone friends laughing in the driveway, his own beard going thick and white, a vista spreading below him of swooping rock formations and strange trees. And he saw the day the park closed: Dalton locking the front gate with a smile as though it was all of no consequence whatsoever. And then walking with him out into the parking lot and the both of them, this mad dreamer and the Inventor, looking out to the horizon at something no one else could see.