Between Timid and Timbuktu (short story)

For the television film, see Between Time and Timbuktu

"Between Timid and Timbuktu" is a short story first published in the posthumous collection Sucker's Portfolio in 2013 and reprinted in Complete Stories in 2017.

Plot Summary

David Harnden, a young painter, has become obsessed with time since the death of his wife Jeanette in an automobile accident two weeks earlier. He has come to believe that time travel back to happier days may be possible. While he ponders, he looks out at a neighboring old farmer who is fishing from the end of a wooden pier into the nearby pond. He yells to the farmer to mind the end where the pier is falling apart, but he gets no response. Losing himself in thought again, David imagines alien beings with more than the five senses of humans who would be capable of truly understanding time as more than "a one-way street with a dead end." He imagines the ability to live again in a moment two weeks after his marriage when he and Jeanette first arrived at the house. The pier breaks and the farmer falls into the pond, screaming. David rushes in and pulls him from the water, telling a nearby boy to get a doctor. He furiously tries to revive the farmer, not so much from care about him but enraged at time for winning again. Dr. Boyle arrives and despite David's insistence that the farmer is dead, revives him with the aid of a long hypodermic needle directly into the heart. David is amazed at the power to bring back the dead and wonder if the farmer can say what death was like. Dr. Boyle says he so certain of what the farmer will say, he writes it down for David to look at after the farmer regains consciousness. Indeed, he says it almost exactly: "My whole life passed before my eyes."

Later that evening over drinks, Dr. Boyle dismisses the possibility of such an occurrence at the moment of death since if the heart is not pumping, blood is not getting to the brain, and thus perception is not possible. A very drunk David wakes the farmer, who is still recovering on a couch in the next room, demanding details of his experience. He says it was "kind of like a movie going real fast," but eventually remembers coming back from the fair in Chicago with his parents, and his father remarking that they had spent so little there that they had $57 left, three dollars more than the cost for a new Therma-King range. Dr. Boyle pulls David out of the room, telling him that the farmer is by no means fully recovered while David lies on the couch and writes the details of the farmer's memory. A week later David visits Dr. Boyle at his office and says that he found an old ad at the library showing that at the time of 1893 World's Fair, a Therma-King range cost $54. An exasperated Dr. Boyle replies that time travel can't be logically possible since any actions a person made in the past would change the present. David says if people can only travel back to points in their own lives and not change anything, only relive the experience, then there are no logical problems. Although only a theory, he says he can prove it if Dr. Boyle will kill him and then bring him back to life. Dr. Boyle throws him out of his office.

Two months later, David calls Dr. Boyle, stating it's a medical emergency and that he has a fever of 102F. Saying he's too groggy to drive, Dr. Boyle agrees to pay a house call at 4p.m. Initially worried that he is still obsessed with time, Dr. Boyle is reassured to hear that David has put that behind him. In reality, David has had a complicated apparatus constructed that will inject him with a substance that will quickly stop his heart. When Dr. Boyle arrives, he will be ethically required to save David's life, allowing him to come back with the experience that all moments in a person's life last forever. Needing to wait over three hours for the doctor's arrival, David begins painting for the first time in months, smeared and frantic rather than the delicate work of his past. Unexpectedly the time passes quickly and David hears a car driving up to the house. He straps himself down and with one free arm injects himself. Irritatingly, the phone immediately begins ringing and David pulls it down so he won't have to listen to it while he's dying. Faintly, he hears the voice of Dr. Boyle on the other end saying a premature birth has delayed him and asking if David can wait a couple more hours. Rapidly losing consciousness, David looks dimly at his painting and realizes it's a landscape in which he can make out he and Jeanette arriving for the first day at their new home.

See Also

• God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, fictional accounts of near-death experiences during which Vonnegut interviews the dead
• "The Hooligan", a device used to communicate with the dead in Slapstick