Sublime Messages

Thirteen, A

Ruby's world shrank considerably after her father told her. She hadn't believed him. It'd been too impossible to believe that he wasn't her father but her brother. Or, more correctly, that he was both her father and her brother. He'd taken her into his car, had the others stand watch while he talked in private with her, and she'd sat in baffled disbelief while he calmly went about it.

He was her brother Whit, he'd said, and he'd mentioned childhood events and games and secrets from their past (which was more distant to him than it was to her) to prove it. What he'd told her about Arlo Kirk, what Arlo had done to him as a child, well, that was true, he'd said. That monster had hurt him in ways he didn't care to revisit, but though Whit had been left for dead, he hadn't actually died, just felt as if he had. After his abuser had left, he'd managed to crawl a distance, toward a place he didn't exactly recognize, and there, nearly delirious from pain and blood loss and dissociation, he'd somehow come across something he'd never managed to find again: it was a little patch of the very air in front of him, moving with strange energy, like a floating oil slick, and when he'd touched it, something had happened. It now seemed so long ago, he'd explained, that he could hardly remember it, but his body had been so broken that the agony he'd experienced moving through time had seemed just another ache. The next thing he'd known, he'd woken in a humble hospital room. He'd been found in a ditch on a local couple's property, near death from his wounds, and they'd called authorities.

Whit had told her how he'd slowly come to realize what'd happened, that he'd somehow been sent back in time nearly twenty years. His location hadn't changed much, but his parents and sister didn't exist, as far as he could tell. He'd been fostered out to the local couple who'd originally found him, who'd appreciated the extra help around their farm, and while the locals had tried to solve the mystery of his appearance and the condition in which he'd been found, no answers had ever come up, partially due to Whit's reticence in discussing his attacker or the attack.

He'd never quite understood what his time traveling had meant for his future, not until he was a grown man, somewhere in his mid-twenties, and found himself looking at his own father in the mirror. A girl with whom he'd had an intoxicated one-night stand had come calling weeks after the fact, telling him she was pregnant with his child. In the daylight, sober, he'd recognized her better, that younger version of his own mother, and he'd known it then—he didn't just look like his Daddy, he was his Daddy, and that baby the woman (Annabelle, she'd said was her name) carried in her belly? His own older sister, Ruby. What was worse, he'd realized he'd have to claim that woman, his own mother, if he wanted to be able to fuck her again in order to create himself. If he didn't, he'd never be born, never exist, and what exactly that'd mean for him couldn't be anything good.

The repugnance of it all was something he'd had to overlook, and yet as he'd watched Ruby be born and grow, as he'd watched himself slide out of the very woman he'd planted himself into, he'd been unable to bear being around them all, to see his younger self and know its loathsome origins, to love his younger self as his own child—because he knew he'd have to allow young Whit to be abused again, or he'd never be sent back in time in order to create himself. And it'd been pouring salt on wounds to move to the trailer park, make sure he placed his younger self near the heinous Kirk brothers, tolerate the presence of his tormentor—well, it'd been too much. His infrequent random visits to check on his child self had been difficult enough to endure; there'd been no way he could've lived with his family.

"God only knows how many times I thought of murdering the pervert," Whit had told her, and Ruby had caught some distant malevolence aglow in his eyes as he'd stared out the window into the dark night.

He'd gone on, told her how he'd tried in vain to figure out how exactly he'd traveled back in time, how failing in that endeavor, he'd sought other means of bending the laws of creation desirous as he was of gaining control over the process, now that he'd lived the reality of its possibility. Ruby had been so overtaken with information that she'd struggled to listen after learning her family tree's tangled branches; she'd sat there attempting to come to terms with the fact that her brother had shared relations with their mother, that he was his own father. It was too much to believe, and even after sitting hours on end in her attic and contemplating it again, she felt mad trying to grasp all of it.