Temporal Experiment

A Story by Stan Denski

An earlier experiment in short short fiction.

One Friday in October I drove to the Indianapolis airport. From my house I take Emerson Avenue north to I-70 west. On I-70 it's twenty-minutes to the Airport Expressway and a few minutes later I’m parked and inside the terminal. I bought a round trip ticket to Pittsburgh. By the gate where I would arrive on my return there was a pay phone and I wrote the number down on the back of a friend's business card. I set my watch to the clock in the terminal.

Pittsburgh was fun. My brother met me at the airport and we went to a Thai restaurant where I ate hot red curried chicken and spooned sweet thick peanut butter sauce over the rice. We drank cold Thai beer to cut the heat and went downtown to the Original Oyster House for more beers later.

On Saturday I drove through the tunnels to Oakland and my favorite record store. Jerry's Records occupies the second and third floors over a McDonalds on Forbes Avenue, a few blocks from the University of Pittsburgh. I found a pile of good jazz LPs from the 60s on the Impulse label and a religious folk record I could sell for fifty dollars to a friend in New York who'd sell it to someone in Europe for probably three times that or more. Later, I went to visit a friend I don't talk to as much as I used to ever since his life got more complicated than mine. Whenever we get together, no matter how infrequently, it's always as if we'd seen each other earlier that same day. I only have two friends left with whom I'm that connected. I can remember having more.

My flight was scheduled to depart Pittsburgh at 3:41 p.m. and arrive in Indianapolis at 3:30 p.m. Even though we're in the same time zone, Indiana, or at least that part of Indiana Indianapolis is in, doesn't observe daylight saving time. As a result, we spend six months in sync with Chicago and six months in sync with New York and twelve months hesitating just before we make long distance phone calls. Right as the boarding call came over the loudspeaker I went to a pay phone by the gate. I retrieved the business card from my wallet and dialed the number of the pay phone in the Indianapolis terminal. I fashioned an "out of order" sign from a magazine subscription card and stuck it to the dial with a piece of discarded gum I made a special effort not to touch and lay the receiver on its side and up against the back of the grey-brown plastic booth. It was 3:36.

The flight was just under an hour and uneventful. I sat next to a woman who worked for the San Francisco film festival and we compared impressions of our favorite new wave Japanese films. I’d just seen Yoshimitsu Morita’s The Family Game at a festival recently and went back to see it three times in two days; it’s brilliant. We arrived on schedule. The woman remained on board and I left the plane and walked the short distance to the pay phone. It was 3:35. At 3:36 the phone rang. I was too frightened to answer it.