The Skeptical Lover

The week after his twenty-eighth birthday, Tim Clath began to lose his grip on reality. He manifested his increasing mental collapse in six steps.

The first presented itself as something exactly opposite - a realization so monumental he thought of it as an epiphany. Like most epiphanies, it struck him in the shower.

The second step in his self-destruction was the plan he cooked up while hunched over his bowl of cereal that morning.

The third was enacting his plan later that day. He called his girlfriend, Beth Alella, from the teacher's lounge during fourth period and asked her to come over for dinner that night. "I'll cook," he said.

Beth worked in an open-concept office building. Two of her cubicle neighbors were looking at her. She wasn't supposed to be taking personal calls, and Tim never called her at work unless it was important.

"OK," she said. "Around seven?"

"That's perfect," Tim said, and Beth detected something in his voice. A nervous energy. Was this it? she wondered. Was Tim proposing - tonight?

She put her phone face-down on her desk, trying to hide her smile by sucking back her lips.

For his fourth step, Tim waited in the teacher's lounge until Olivier Marguerite showed up, looking bleary-eyed from his self-imposed, quixotic mission to instill a love of literature in kids who looked at books the way his generation had looked at a multiplication table.

"Aren't you supposed to be supervising study hall?" Olivier said, beelining it to the coffee pot.

"I need to talk to you," Tim said, grabbing a mug from the cabinet and filling it for his friend. "About Beth."

The bleariness seemed to leave Olivier's eyes immediately. "Everything OK?"

"Great. But I need to break up with her."

Olivier ignored the offered coffee. "Come again?"

"I need to break up with her. To know if I should marry her."

A smile spread on Olivier's face and he finally grabbed the mug. "Oh, I get it - this is your way of telling me you're proposing to her? Congratulations!"

Tim shook his head, and the smile slowly fell off Olivier's face.

"Have you gone completely insane, Tim?"

"I've finally gone sane. I've been crazy in love with her since the tenth grade. But now I realize something: I don't know if she loves me."

"Of course she does," Olivier said. "Don't go ruining everything because of... I don't know... insecurity."

"It's not insecure to want to know that the woman you want to marry loves you."

"You know she does!"

Tim shook his head. "I don't know it. I think it, I want to believe it - but only a fool believes in something for which he has no proof."

"You're pulling my leg, right?"

"I need your help, Ollie," Tim said.

"With what?"

"I trust you. But if you won't help me, it'll have to be someone else."

Olivier put the mug down on the counter, untouched. "What do you want me to do?"

Ten minutes later the fourth step was complete.

Even still, Tim stood only at the brink of disaster. But with the fifth step, one foot would slip off the edge, and the other with the sixth. He would go teetering off the cliff, spinning and tumbling lower and lower, heading for a gruesome crash below that would have ruined his own life only as a start. 

Luckily, I was there to catch him. 

#

"Who are you?" Tim said. It was noon and he was still in bed. For the last couple of days, he'd left the safety of his covers only long enough to call in sick at the school. He looked lethargic and listless; discovering a stranger in his bedroom elicited no more reaction from him than curiosity.

"My name is a secret," I said. "I'm from the future."

Tim stared at me for a long time; then he turned over and asked me to leave.

"I'm here to help you get Elizabeth back," I said.

He growled, a pillow-muffled sound that was more pathetic than aggressive. The growling continued until it turned into two words telling me, not politely, to go away.

"Elizabeth and you -"