Time on My Hands

by Peter Delacorte

You're a somewhat jaded travel writer on assignment in France. You've just been jilted by your Parisian girlfriend for an unwashed Left Bank philosopher, and you can feel the onset of middle age in your bones. Everything seems gray: You've been all over the world, more or less, and you're considering the possibility that your life's share of adventures has been expended. Then, as if by providence, while museum-going one day you bump into a fellow American, an aging hippie physicist from California, or rather he bumps into you. You strike up a conversation; he invites you for a coffee. You can't shake the feeling that he knows you, but you don't know him. His story emerges; he has a proposition to make, an offer no self-respecting travel writer could dismiss out of hand. In his possession, he tells you, is a time machine; yes, a working device to transport its user backward and forward in the fourth dimension. You scoff; you make as if to leave, but something about this man gives you pa