Timethief Part I

Timethief

A short story by: J.Jay Ross






         The sirens were getting closer now, John heard, and he had very few options left. He spied an open doorway in an alley, ‘this was a good place to get killed’ he thought, looking left to right for any sign of gang members or drunken bums who would defend their turf. The sirens became louder as he hesitated for fear, and decided to chance the open door. Down the final thirty feet and into the door he went, tripping over the steps that led up-three of them to be exact-banging his right shin on the last one as he tried to regain his balance and make it down the corridor to another door. Just as he reached the door the handle turned and John’s heart skipped three or four beats. He paused for a half second as the panging in his leg was overcome by the fear he was about to be cut off from his escape. He looked to his right and saw an open window leading to the street level on the south side of the building and leapt through it.
         He ran the length of the street and he could hear the sirens had stopped-for the moment he figured-and so did he. He was panting now, ‘hard to be inconspicuous when it looks like you just ran a forty’ he mused with a grain of concern. The street was vacant, except the drunken bum lying on a cardboard box over a utility grate on the sidewalk. The old man lifted his head to see who was huffing and puffing, he shot John a “stay away” look at him and the drunk settled back down. John heard a door slam open behind him; he whirled around to see how his life was going to end when he felt a sharp pain in his side. “I’m shot!” he yelled out loud, which woke him up.

         John looked around his room. He had managed to pull his nightstand lamp onto his chest as he had dreamed, again, quite realistically. ‘This one was scarier than the rest’ he told his mind. He was partially soaking from the sweat and John noticed that his shin was aching. He lay motionless for a moment; trying to determine what damage he had done this time, what crime he had committed, and who would be looking for him. He could always recall his dreams-well for the most part-right after he woke up. Sometimes as the day panned out he could remember more details as he went about his daily routine of looking for work.
         It had been six weeks and still no job, John L. James had applied everywhere in the city of Sacramento, California. Every place that would take his older-he was thirty eight-body and use it for labor, labor of any kind at this point. He was paying for his rent by a very unconventional means; a scary and often dangerous venture that John believed would eventually cost him his life.
         John was a thief; he stole things of sometimes little or no importance. Occasionally he would take something worth tens of thousands, but be able to pawn it for several hundred dollars or so, enough to make rent and buy food and vodka, lots of vodka. At first John had wondered if it was the alcohol that drove him to the crimes he would commit every other night or so, but later discovered when he went weeks without booze, he slept better. That was bad, he didn’t walk the streets semi-weekly to commit his crimes, and he did them in his sleep. Up until tonight, he had just dreamed about a place and time past present or future and had varied realizations about his crime, and woke up with a new gadget or even cash sometimes, on the bed next to him.
         The dreams were realistic as any other, faces mostly indiscernible but he knew in by relation who these people were, some of them he never met, and he was taking things from them. Tonight’s dream was the most terrifying so far, some weeks he recalled were getting more intense than previous and then back to simple light hearted or even love lost slumber scenes. This last one though, John knew he had to seek out help, job or not, by using his ill gotten booty to pay for it, not from this last item of course he would have to figure out what to do with that later. As for now he looked around his apartment, a small three room affair, one room was the bedroom. The next room was the kitchen and the final contained the bathroom. It had an old style shower in it, which consisted of a claw-foot freestanding tub, a shower rod that encircled the iron behemoth and a ratty old cloth shower curtain. A high tank pull-chain toilet and a pedestal sink complete with separate hot and cold water faucets with vintage handles.
         The kitchen wasn’t much more modern, the stove was gas with a gas oven-John had determined that it was unsafe after trying to cook a TV dinner, the flames melted the foil-and a refrigerator that made noises like it was about to fall over and roll out of the room. The sink was itself antique, porcelain with a half dozen or chips in it leaving it too look like a spotted pattern. It too had separate handles for hot and cold, with a little soap dish mounted on the top of where the two joined together by a brass rod. His kitchen table consisted of chrome-plated legged nineteen-fifties vintage, with a top that matched the linoleum of the floor, white speckled with blue and red dots.
                The rent was cheap, a mere six hundred dollars a month payable in cash to the landlady who lived downstairs. The place was a far cry from the three bedroom two bath he shared several months ago with his wife, who had divorced him because of his “problem”. She hadn’t even written or called since they parted ways, ‘well who could blame her?’ John thought to himself often when she crossed his mind. He glanced the thought of her off the wall and moved his gaze to the room. It was more of a museum, a curator of any museum in the world would pay top dollar to be in this room for just a few minutes, but the collection was not for the public’s eye.

                  John would set out today; find a shrink that would best suit his needs as a person he could trust, trust with his story and maybe even his life.

                  The receptionist looked him over, somewhat tall-perhaps six foot two or three, a few pounds overweight at about two thirty or forty and dark hazel eyes with a brightness that reflected in the light. He had a sad look on his face, which stretched the lines and made him look about forty or forty-five not the thirty-eight he reported on the questionnaire. Still there was something that was handsome about this man, he seemed troubled-which obviously why he is here-but he seemed at peace at the same time. ‘These are the dangerous ones’ she told herself as she scanned the computer-appointment schedule for an opening today. “Four thirty?” The voice was tart.
                  “Hmm?” John looked from a copy of ‘Highlights’ magazine.
                  “How about four thirty this afternoon?” The receptionist returned with a more compassionate voice than before.
                  “That would be fine. Thank you.” He rose from his chair and wondered what he would do for three hours. ‘Stop and get a drink? Nah that wouldn’t look good’. He could probably just walk around the boardwalks here in Old Sacramento. He nodded at the young girl behind the desk and stepped outside into the hall that led through two eighteen hundred era door frames, well over twelve feet high, and walked out into the summer sun. The location of the shrink’s office had caught his attention in the yellow page ad;

                                    DIVORCE THERAPY
                                    GRIEF COUNSELING
                                    SLEEP DEPRIVATION
                                MOTIVATIONAL ANALYSIS
                                  Discreet and Confidential
                                    $200.00 initial visit fee
                                        Micheal Tandy
                                    1203 K st. Suite 209
                                      Old Sacramento
                                          916-555-1125

                      John seemed to need all of the above, except he focused on sleep deprivation. When the dreams first started his wife and he went to a medical doctor who performed dozens of tests, even had him spend the night at the hospital in a special room made to monitor a person as they slept. He didn’t know it was the different noises, the cool room, or even the fact he was out of place, but he slept like a sloth each time he went there. The doctor could find nothing wrong. Adding insult to injury, he didn’t dream, at least not like he had at home. And when he did, it was pleasant and he awoke without holding anything he had taken.
John walked down the ancient stairs that were very narrow, and creaky, to the street. It was a Wednesday, a weekday and the tourists wouldn’t be arriving till Friday, then the streets would be jammed with folks looking to buy trinkets and candy. A real tourist trap with all the trimmings, but it was better than the blight the downtown area turned out to be. Old Sacramento brought people in from all over the country, the same folks who spent a weekend visiting ‘Virginia City’ and ‘The Ponderosa Ranch’ of ‘Bonanza’ fame. They were looking for the path to the old west, the trails that the pioneers followed for gold and silver, the hardships and the rewards of the wealth in the eighteen hundreds.
                      He loved this place, the smell of fresh cooked popcorn and boiling candy. The slightly decaying smell of the foliage around the Sacramento River. He could hear the boats on the river now and headed for a look, over the old train tracks past the south end of the Railroad Museum. He stood on one of the many overlooks placed for the tourists to pay fifty cents to look thorough dirty spy glasses to catch a glimpse at a fisherman hauling in a big bass or a topless young thing on the bow of a passing ski boat. There were neither today, just then usual expensive looking mini-yachts that were heading towards the Delta, then on to Suisun Bay and San Francisco. John felt around in his right front pocket and pulled out his last wad of cash. He “brought” this roll home three nights ago, from a place somewhere in the late 1990’s. It consisted of twelve hundred dollars, all in twenties, from an ATM machine. He didn’t know how he had gotten the ATM card or even the pass code, but in his dreams he rarely had control and they just played out until he woke, cash in hand. He pulled ten bills and stuffed them into his left pocket, payment for the shrink, and counted the rest. Five hundred and sixty dollars left, he already paid rent two weeks ago and his fridge was full. John didn’t drive for fear he might fall asleep, so he had no car payment. He pulled three more twenty dollar bills from the pile and returned the cash to his right pocket. He stared at the bills for a moment and then at the door to the front of the California State Railroad Museum. He loved the place, a bastion for a history buff-as he was becoming in his dreams-and a place a person could lose two or three hours, fast. A safe place if you were being pursued, quiet and many hiding places.
John smiled as he thought about one of his ‘travels’. It was 1896 and he was almost killed by patrons of the bar he was in, because of his twenty-first century clothing. Somehow he managed to draw a pistol from a holster he had (never in real life, it was just there on his side in his dream) and shot a man that had charged him. The rest of the saloon cleared out, and John awoke to find he was holding a ‘poke’, a small bag the size of a quart freezer storage bag, made out of animal skin and full of gold dust. It belonged to the man he had shot in the dream. It had taken him weeks to pawn the dust off, he learned that gold was tested for it’s origin at a modern assay office, and it’s ore content could nearly pinpoint the place it was mined-or stolen from and melted down-so he could only gain a little at a time from his treasure. It was then he realized he could get rich by dreaming, not thinking of course of future escapades and perils.
                      He paid his fee and entered the main building from the small entrance area, immediately he could smell the past. Timbers soaked in creosote to preserve them; oil dripping from the engines, even the steel from the rails and cars-called rolling stock-had a particular smell. He could hear a few people meandering about the halls, the clip clop of heels and whispered voices. Like any museum, most folks whispered to each other here, it was like a respect for the magnitude of the building and its historical contents. He passed the booth that rented self-guided tours, recorded on little transmitters at each station, then broadcast to the handheld radio you held to your ear as you approached and stopped to listen to the particular piece of history you were viewing. Besides, John knew nearly every word of the recordings; they played in his head as he walked the displays. He smiled sometimes as he would recall a bit of the ‘recorded’ history on some of the models. He had seen that piece in real life, well in his dream, and he knew the real history. Sometimes they had to make stuff up, or relay what they had heard from and ‘expert’ someone who studied the time and knew little about what they were saying. John was there, he knew, he saw, he felt the past. Some of the museum relics had sat in a scrap yard and were fixed up to resemble the machine they were portraying here. But the tourists and even some of the ‘experts’ never knew the difference. John knew, because at first he had traveled the past. Right here in Sacramento-the real Old Sacramento-before the museum was built, before the huge towers of glass and steel that can be seen in the distance. He walked these boardwalks, mud caked boots and all. The streets were filthy then, not clean and maintained for the eager travelers to enjoy as they were munching on their “Old Time Peanut Brittle” or handmade chocolate strawberries.
                        At times he had returned from slumber with a pistol or even a stupid horseshoe. But one time he came back from his sleep with a brass clock off the pilot deck of a river steamer, the “Delta King”, from a dream he had during about 1929. He was a purser on the floating passenger hauler, and when he woke up he was lying next to the now museum piece. It nearly cost him his freedom, when he tried to sell it to a collector. It seems these history buffs know a lot about what they are buying; after the man had seen the clock he called the authorities to complain John had stolen it from a museum. It took weeks but the case was resolved when it was discovered the original clock displayed on the boat today was a mockup, built in the 1940’s to replace the ‘missing’ one, stolen sometime around the late1920’s. John had made up a story that his great uncle had given to him, a collector who found it in a small town antique shop. The research could only go so far back so the clock was retained by the authorities and John was given a warning not to have any other missing historical pieces in his possession. He still laughed even today as he passed the Delta King on his way to the museum, thinking about the plaque next to the timepiece on the boat;

                        ORIGINAL CLOCK RECOVERED 1992
                        FROM A MUSEUM IN OHIO SHIPYARD

                Lying bastards. John had wondered from that point on how much history was “recovered” from that point on, and not just made up lies few would ever question.

                John wandered around the trains for awhile looking at his watch often, wondering if he was really in trouble this time, the artifact he returned with was dangerous to possess, this one could put him in Federal Prison for decades. His last glance at his watch told him it was 4 o’clock; it was time to head back to the shrink’s office even though he would be early by about fifteen minutes.
The office he was taken to and left alone to sit, waiting for the “Doctor”, was a quaint little room about twenty by twenty with a large wooden desk in one corner. He scanned the room while he waited; the decorator had tried to make it look the same as the rest of Old Sac; large wooden file cabinets, the oak desk, antique chairs that were uncomfortable, and antique of the period. The walls in both corners behind the desk were lined with cheap framed acknowledgments of schooling, both psychiatry and counseling alike. A very comfortable looking couch sat splayed by the large window overlooking K Street and the building across the way. John wondered if the Doc was going to ask him to lie down and tell of his woes of past family members and failures that brought him here for therapy.
He heard voices outside the office, the receptionist was telling the therapist that the ‘four thirty was here’, and he heard the door handle turning. He moved to see the door opening and the Doc stepped in. His heart sank, it beat wildly for a few half seconds and then he gained control of his emotions. The Doctor was a woman! He had not expected this, he had enough trouble talking to men openly about his life, let alone women and now he had paid to speak to a female about his troubles.
                    “Good afternoon, I’m Doctor Micheal Tandy…” She spoke softly and pointedly as she offered her hand. She pronounced the name like Michelle.
                    ‘You idiot!’ John scolded himself as he took her hand, ‘You misread the damn name on the yellow page!’ He stuttered his name out; “J John. John James, ma’am.”
                    “Call me Micheal.” She smiled warmly. Again stressing the pronunciation of her of her first name. “Please, sit down.” She pointed to the chair in front of her desk, not the couch, which somewhat relieved John. She moved swiftly like a cat, precisely to her wooden oak chair, which creaked when she sat down.
                    He assessed her, about thirty five or six, brunette with her hair pulled into a professional looking ponytail with one band holding it in place. Her hair shimmered in the afternoon sun glaring in from the large window. She hard a small frame about five foot ten and slightly athletic, but she still had an hourglass figure John could see, even with her professional looking skirt suit she wore. Very little makeup was brushed around her little puffy cheeks and no lipstick; she would be very beautiful outside of this room, perhaps in a gym or out dining on the town. John swallowed hard, he was very intimidated now. ‘I can’t tell her my secret,’ he worried to himself. “I, I thought you were a …” he drifted off, knowing he had already sounded sexist.
                      “A man?” Micheal smiled at that and looked him right in the eyes with her soft brown ones. “Quite a few folks do. It’s the way the name is spelled. A joke I think my parents were playing on me, been that way even in school when I was a child.” She looked him over quickly, “Do I make you nervous?” She smiled inquisitively at him again.
                      “A little, I was expecting a man. I’m sorry.” John lied, he was extremely off kilter. “I mean, this could be quite personal, if you know what I mean.”
                      “Well, you paid. There are no refunds, I’m sorry but this is a tricky trade sometimes. Would you like to tell me what brings you here, and then I can tell you if it is too personal for a woman doctor to hear...” She leaned back into her chair and pursed her lips together, waiting for an answer, or for him to bolt out the door.
                      John tried to put his thoughts together, ‘how can I do this and get out of here without alerting her to the real problem?’ He managed a dance around the truth. “I have had some disturbing dreams lately…well for the last six or seven years.”
                      “Nightmares or dreams? Do they scare you awake with cold sweat or do you feel comfortable about them until you recall them later?” She went right to work.
                      “Dreams, sometimes I have nightmares, but the dreams in total. They are very; well, disturbing to the real world.” He thought of an escape plan, an excuse or something as she looked at him, then she stopped his plans dead in their tracks.
                      “Do your dreams seem to come true, or do you feel you have lived these out somehow?”
                      John froze. ‘Do they seem to come true?’ “They don’t come true, it is like I live them, you know in my dreams, and I live the dream out, then…” He broke off before he tattled on himself about his crimes. ‘Why the hell did I tell her that?’ John mentally punished himself for his openness.
                      Micheal leaned forward and picked up a pad and pencil. She examined the tip of the Number Two with her eyes. When they focused on the point John felt a rush of lust.
                      ‘She was beautiful, her focus, so professional…’
She caught John looking at her eyes and stared right back with a smile, “Mind?” She inquired as she nodded to the note taking tools.
                        ‘Now she’s going to write this crap down, I’m going to have a record!’ He paused, “Well, some of this stuff is kind of incriminating, and some of it could get me into serious trouble, I think…” ‘You idiot! Why are you opening up to this woman?’
                        “You have paid me; I’m now officially your counselor. Anything you tell me from this point has all the respects of privilege.” She scratched a few notes down and looked at john again, “Do you know what privilege is?”
                        “Sort of, I’ve heard used a lot on TV shows.” He smiled at her sheepishly.
                        “It means, simply that I cannot tell anyone of our meetings, the content or the nature of your ‘crimes’. Unless they are federal crimes; they aren’t, are they?” Her pause was a panicky.
                          John thought about his last dream, it was a federal crime, but only in a dream. It was what he awakened with; the mere possession of it was a crime. He lied, “No.”
                        “Good, I must also warn you that I would have to report any crime you mike think of committing or have planned, capital crimes like murder, rape, battery. These must be reported. Anything like that?”
                        “No ma’am.” He had not planned anything in his future, as a matter of fact that is why he was here, he wanted the dreams to stop and he wanted to stop waking up holding the prize of his travels.
                        “Fine. These dreams, you say they come true?”
                        “Not exactly. They are true,” It was the best he could muster.
                        “You think these dreams are true, like you are moving through them and what you do is real? They seem so real you feel they are just like you and I sitting here talking?” She had a slight grasp on what he was trying to say, but nothing more.
                          John pondered for a few seconds. ‘She just won’t get it until you tell her everything, everything except about last night.’ “This is going to sound crazy…” He paused as he thought he had committed a sin in therapy; saying the word crazy.
                      “Isn’t that why you’re here, because you are a little crazy?” She smiled and John melted.
                    He took a deep breath and explained, Dr. Micheal wrote as he went. “Seven years ago, before I was married, I started having dreams. Not really nightmares, not yet, but little dreams where I would travel back and forth through time. They seemed so real, I could remember small details; clothing, items of interest, places, everything except people’s faces. They were always blurry, but I knew who they were, sort of a recognition thing, you know? These dreams didn’t come every night like they do now, but once or twice a week. And they didn’t produce things that they do now.” John paused to let Micheal catch up. As soon as he stopped talking she raised her head. ‘Probably using short hand or something’ he mused, ‘or just drawing doodles…’
                    “Could you give me an example?” She seemed interested.
                    John thought for a second or two, and then nodded at her question. “Once, years ago I dreamed I was on the Hunley. Do you know of the Hunley, Dr? It was one of the first submarines ever built for war, the Civil War. In the dream I saw the crew, all drowning. I was drowning too and as I was able to escape to the surface and swim to the shore in Charleston Harbor, the ship went down.”
                  “Most dreams are not that unusual, John. Was there something unique about this dream that scared you or left you feeling anxious?” The good Doc was tilting her head as she spoke, like a dog listening to a friendly command.
                  “I never had heard of the Hunley before or anything about its circumstances. They raised the ship I guess a few months later, it was all over the news. But the next morning, after the dream, I knew everything about what the Hunley was about, the names of the crew and the circumstances about its sinking. It isn’t as they, the historians had said. And I…” He paused at the thought of what he going to say next.
                  “Yes?” She was very patient.
                  “I have one of the watches, given to me by the crewman sitting next to me, a Corporal Carlsen forth crank operator on the boat.”
                  “You have his watch?” She stopped writing on the notepad and looked at his wrist.
                  John followed her eyes and saw she was looking in the wrong place. He thought ‘what the hell, you’ve gone this far you loony’. John reached into his inside jacket pocket and his hand returned with his watch. A gold cased timepiece, round with a large thumb dial on top for winding. He pushed on the knob and the cover popped open showing a face with only Roman Numerals. The color was browning a bit but other wise it was intact. John offered it to the shrink. Dr. Tandy took it from him, a deep look of casual disbelief on her face, as she examined the inscription on the inside of the cover;

                                                      To J James
                                                  From J F Carlsen
                                                Don’t be late again!
                                                      CSA 1864

         
         Micheal looked the inscription over as skeptical as she could. “Interesting, who is this Carlsen?”
         “I told you, the fourth crank man. I was number five. We powered the ship in my dream. Right before it was sunk by the blast from our torpedo, not from a bullet like it was described in the history books.”
         “Umm Hmm.” She looked the pocket watch over again as if to see some miraculous evidence of John’s claim. “Looks brand new.” She went to hand it back then paused. “Anything else?”
         “No ma’am, I mean Micheal. That’s all I took from that trip.” He looked at the watch; he felt the cold water of Charleston Bay on his back, the air being sucked out of his lungs by the pain, the cramps he endured on his swim back. Just as his hands grasped the sandy shore he woke up. Soaking wet and holding the watch in his hand. John took a deep breath and told her what he just felt.
         “This trip? Have you trinkets from other adventures in your sleep?” Micheal was still dangling the watch out in front of her, looking at it.
         John let the cat out of the bag, almost completely. “Yes.” He then spun his tales, tales of the dream and the spoils he returned with. The clock from the steamer, a handgun from a stranger in a theater, a handful of rice from a Chinese woman he knew he loved-in his dream of course-all that he could think of for the moment. Then he started to tell about last night’s dream but stopped short. “Last night was the first time I felt like I was in real danger, from the p…”
         “Police?” She looked at him for a minute then at the clock on her desk. It had been twenty minutes since this man had walked into her office. Ten to go. “Did you take something important?”
         John immediately looked down. “You said you could turn me in for federal crimes.”
         “John, it was just a dream. Right?”
         “It was real for me, that is why I’m here. I think I’m in big trouble and I have no one else to turn to.”
         Micheal paused, trying to re-link her patient to the real world. “You said you were married. Does your wife see these things you bring back?”
         “Only one thing. That’s the reason we are divorced, and she hasn’t spoken to me since.”
         “What was it, what could you have dreamed that sent her away?” There was a hint of caring in Micheal’s voice.
         “I had this dream, an erotic one…” John paused as he felt his face blushing. ‘This is why you wanted a guy shrink!’ “Well, we woke up and I had her sister’s panties in my hand.”
         The doctor nearly banged her chin of the desk it dropped so low. “You what?”
         John cleared his throat, repeated his finding and how he got it: “I was dreaming of having sex with my wife’s sister. I felt everything,” His face turned red as a fireplug, “It even ended with a, well you know.” John felt sick to his stomach.
         “It’s okay. I’ve heard worse.” She had.
         “Well, when we woke up that morning-my wife and I-I had her sister’s underpants in my hand.” John felt as if he were going to pass out from embarrassment.
         “How did your wife know they were her sisters?” ‘Curiosity killed the cat, Doc’ she thought to herself.
         “My wife had them monogrammed, a special present for the bridesmaids of our wedding.” John was going to pass out. “Do you have any water I could have?”
         Dr. Micheal Tandy was frozen in place. She stared at John for a few seconds. ‘Do I have a psychotic here or just a cheater who likes to lie?’ She thought about the situation, which would have been humiliating for all parties involved. ‘Maybe this guy is making up this whole story to get absolution about his divorce or authentication of some sort to explain to his wife.’
         “Turns out her sister had the same kind of dream, or so she says.” Again a confession of the soul.
         Micheal was still frozen.
         “Doc?”
         “Oh, yeah sorry. She stood up and went to the globe behind her. The doc lifted the top for the earth and there was a mini bar hidden inside the sphere. She grabbed two bottles of water, cooled by a hidden mini refrigerator. Micheal cracked open her bottle and took a long sip before handing the other one to John.
         There was a long pause in the room, three or four minutes. Then a bell rang from the clock on the desk.
         They both stared at the device for a second and the doc spoke first. “Times up, John.” She looked at him right in the eyes again. ‘He’s hiding something, this is really interesting, I could write an entire paper on this guy, if he telling the truth about his dreams, well the dreaming part.’ “Can you come back again?” Her voice was full of sympathy and curiosity. “Soon?”
         John thought for a moment and figured he had either hit a wall or he was digging a bigger grave, with a person who could testify that he was insane. ‘That might help if you’re caught…’ he smiled. “Sure, when?”
         “Tomorrow sound okay? Say around five?” She knew she usually closed at five, so this way she would avoid any other scheduling differences.
                “Sure. Okay.” John thought about ditching her. “Can I be billed? I don’t have much cash on me right now.” A lie.
         “Sure, talk to Jenny. She’s the receptionist; tell her that I Okayed a three visit with home billing. You do have a home?”
         “An apartment off of 116th.” He lamented
         ‘Cruddy neighborhood, but I have to hear the rest of this guy’s story’ “Okay then, we’ll se you then.” She rose; John did the like and nodded at her. He thought about shaking her hand, but instead she came around the desk and put a hand on his shoulder. His whole body temperature shot up ten degrees when she touched him, even through his clothes. She made him comfortable a little, but now he was taken by her. Either her simple beauty or her interest in his tale.
         “John, can I keep this?” She was holding up his pocket watch. “Just to look it up at the library.”
         “I’ve had a run in before with collectors, trying to find out about the stuff I bring back. They aren’t a very receptive crowd to outsiders who have these kinds of things in their possession.” John confessed.
         “No one will see it but me, I promise.” She sounded sincere. “Do you have anything else on you that I could look at?” She was going to say ‘to verify your story’, but that would show she didn’t believe him, which really didn’t and she didn’t want him clamming up right now, she knew there was something he was going to tell her eventually, a bombshell that could set her up in the therapist world for life.
         John looked at her for a moment and thought about last night. “Do you have a piece of paper?” She handed him a notepad from her desk and a pen. He scribbled something on it, folded it and handed it to her with the pen and paper. “Don’t read this ‘till you watch the news tonight.” He turned and walked out, stopping by Jenny’s desk to relay the message about his appointment, and left without looking back.
         Jenny walked in with a puzzled look on her face. “You really want to see this guy again after business hours? Is he a charmer or what?”
         Micheal opened the note, even though John had told her not to, and read it:

                                    Los Alamos Lab
                                    Missing disks containing
                                    Sensitive information
                                    Please be discreet!

         Her heart fainted. ‘He is a psychotic’. “Yes, as much as I can. Clear my schedule for a week or so, please in the afternoons.” She refolded the note and placed it in her shirt pocket.

         Hours later Dr. Micheal Tandy was at the library. It was her second home, the first being empty due an unfaithful husband and a prior secretary/ receptionist. It was hard for her to hire another pretty face, but the patients she had, mostly men, responded well to a kind feminine face, for obvious reasons.
         She had worked mostly divorce therapy cases, hearing reasons of the separation from both sides. She even agreed with the men more that the women, mainly men were just running on animal instinct, and women could be so vindictive-mean-for no reason at all. It was like a vengeance they had, she had it too when she found out about her own husbands infidelity, but her education forced her to deal with it, respectfully. She did keep the home, her cheating husband keeps the payment, and California law was good that way sometimes.
         She spent seventeen minutes looking through the reference section, looking for the Hunley. When she located it, there was a note attached inside to use a web site for further reference.
                Dr. Tandy looked over the history of the sub, how it was actually a boiler converted to be somewhat watertight, how it was propelled by eight men turning a crank in the middle of the boat, how it had sunk a Union warship, and how it sank.



         The illustrations and notes made about the crew mentioned the name J F Carlsen, and a John James! ‘The only survivor’. Now Micheal was a bit of a shut in, but she knew the story of the Hunley from the Discovery Channel, she knew there were no survivors ever mentioned before. She might have taped the show to watch, ‘that would be a thing to look at’, she thought. She eventually found the items that the soldiers of the Confederacy carried aboard the boat as keepsakes. The list was mostly of coins and pipes, some leather shoes and a pocket watch, a gold pocket watch. The watch recovered was said to have belonged to Lt. Dixon, the commander of the boat. But it was identical to the one she held in her hand now, comparing the photo to the real thing. Her heart pulsated for an instant, when she read that the archeologists believed that Lt. Dixon had commissioned one for each crewman, with the inscriptions to be made by their owners. Micheal had not heard of that either, it seems she had not watched that program very closely or the story had changed. She smiled at the prospect that John had dreamed about history and changed it.
         Micheal left the library after only an hour, wanting to get home to watch the news like John had asked. It was too late for the local news when she returned home and the Evening News was just ending with the sports report. She flipped her channel changer to CNN. After about ten minutes she heard the news she was told about indirectly; “Official on the condition of anonymity has reported to CNN that a very important piece of data has been lost from the Los Alamos Laboratories in New Mexico today. Hours ago, although it has been yet to be confirmed by a spokesman, someone has lost or made off with a micro disk containing sensitive information about employees and contacts at the lab…”
         Micheal lost her appetite, and nearly her lunch. She was staring at the crawler at the bottom of the screen for more information. She was stunned and scared all at once. Micheal picked up her phone to call the police, but froze when the next line came across the screen: “Officials at Los Alamos now confirm a data disk has been lost, sometime around four this after noon, they have no suspects…”
         ‘Four this afternoon? There is no way John James could have stolen that information, he must have had inside information or knew the thief.’
She picked up the phone and began to dial 9-1-1, but stopped short of the final 1. ‘Who the hell do I talk to? What do I say? This guy told me travels time in his sleep and he stole the disks yesterday, even though they went missing today and he has confessed to me, his psychiatrist…’ She slammed the receiver down. ‘They’ll lock me up and suspend my license.’