Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 32 - Harbash

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Prematurely gray hair had goaded Dr. James Harbash since his early twenties. A man of science even at that point in life, he believed appearances should be secondary considerations, and yet his hair was always a source of embarrassment.

In subsequent decades the gray continued taking precedence as his most predominant defining physical characteristic, yet never in the refined way that distinguishes many other men in their fifties. From the first signs, Dr. Harbash’s gray didn’t make him more handsome with age. There was no mere light frosting upon his beard or of the hair above his ears in a gradual and less inconspicuous way.

No, as soon as his hair began its transformation from the jet black of his childhood, Dr. Harbash’s gray was like a wild guerrilla attack, unpredictable, fast, and scattered. He found it distracting and worried his colleagues would feel the same by the way the silver attacked random parts of his head and face in large erratic patches, appearing almost overnight at times even in his bushy beard and often overgrown mustache.

"Always so distracting, this mess of hair,” he said to himself as he looked in the mirror. “Always was. It’s better when it’s all white, but we couldn’t’ve been blessed to land at a time when that already happens.”

He roughly ran his fingers through his tangle of hair.

“That’ll come, though,” he said. “That’ll come.”

He paused amid his self-critique.

“But none of this matters, James,” he whispered to his reflection. “You know that. Offer up this bit, eh?”

He then forced his attention to the clatter of his home. The stacks of unread books and magazines. Trash cans overflowing with tissues and candy wrappers. He was also somewhat disgusted to find that all of his clothes from this time of his life were in nearly complete disrepair.

“Was I always this slovenly?” he asked aloud.

There wasn’t a shirt in his closet or on the floor without drops of coffee or bits of food. He didn’t even like mustard, and yet on his favorite lab coat, tossed haphazardly over the top of the reading chair next to his bed, there was a splotch of bright yellow mustard stain on the left lapel. Most of the remainder of his wardrobe was wadded up and wrinkled and didn’t appear to have seen the inside of a washing machine in months, if ever.

Suddenly his eyes opened wide with realization and Dr. Harbash tapped at his right pocket.

“Oh my,” he said, reached in, and quickly excavated a treasure he thought was lost forever.

“And there you are again,” he said to the object now cradled in his hand. “There you are again. How about that?”

In his palm was a fragile wooden Rosary, handmade with worn olivewood beads connected by dark brown twine frayed with use. At its end was a matching olivewood cross with a metal corpus of Christ delicately nailed into the carved surface.

“And here I always thought you were gone for good.”

He’d purchased the sacramental on his first trip to Israel during his graduate studies. It was a pilgrimage — a vacation, really — initially more of curiosity than faith. He bought the Rosary as a last-minute souvenir before returning stateside and was surprised at the panic that would arise when he’d leave home and realize it wasn’t in his pocket.

Two years later as he approached the end of his first doctorate program, James was invited to present a seminar at New York University’s Center for Quantum Information Physics. He walked out of LaGuardia in the darkness of night, took a cab to the hotel, arrived at NYU before sunrise, and spent the next two days in windowless lecture halls without enjoying more than a passing glance of New York City from the rear seat of a taxi.

Upon conclusion of the conference, James was overjoyed to learn he had eight hours before his flight back to Chicago and hopped into yet another cab. He excitedly directed the driver to the American Museum of Natural History on Central Park’s western edge. After several hours of leisurely ambling through vast exhibits, he continued his spontaneous exploration and made his way through the heart of Central Park until exiting out on 5th Avenue on the opposite side of the museum.

“Which way now?” he asked himself, and slipped his hands into his pockets. In his right pocket, he instinctually clutched his wooden-beaded Rosary.

“To the right, then,” he whispered, and jauntily began his way down the sidewalk, pulling his luggage along behind him.

He made his way past the Arsenal and Central Park Zoo with its penguins and sea lions, past the construction of several new skyscrapers that nearly blocked out the sky, and came finally to the unexpected sight of a funeral ending at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He paused on the sidewalk across the street and watched with surprising sadness as pallbearers loaded a shining casket into the back of a hearse and drove away.

Photo by Joseph Barrientos on Unsplash

Again, he put his hands in his pockets and fingered the Rosary beads. He silently observed the remaining mourners as they embraced one last time before climbing into chauffeured cars and taxis and dissipating back into their own lives. James found himself uncharacteristically solemn and sad. A wave of loneliness washed over him.

Across the street, the massive brown doors of St. Patrick’s were still propped open. The doorway was dark but deep within the cathedral, faraway candlelight flickered invitingly. He was then seemingly caught up in a sudden swarm of passersby, walking among them to the crosswalk, before finding himself at the bottom of the concrete steps that led into the towering church.

Though he’d carried his Rosary souvenir every day since his trip to Israel two years prior, he hadn’t entered a church since that time in the so-called Holy Land. He found historical places interesting, but God wasn’t something James ever gave much thought to, at all. He wasn’t adversarial to religion, though. He just didn’t care.

Yet now, for a reason he was never able to enunciate, that open doorway seemed to beckon James like a mother calling her child with wide open arms. Inside, a cluster of women sat in the front three rows of pews mumbling prayers. In their hands, they each held a Rosary. Their fingers moved nimbly in synchronization with each uttered Amen. Again, James found himself inexplicably moving forward, taking a seat behind them. He reached into his pocket and mimicked their motions.

When the women finished, they crossed themselves with their Rosaries. James attempted to do the same. As the ladies filed out, a wrinkle-faced woman with a huge quilted bag slung over her shoulder made eye contact with James and smiled. He awkwardly smiled back and the woman took that as an invitation to join him.

“Are you visiting New York?” she whispered.

“Yes,” James answered. “I have a flight a flight in just a few hours.”

“Where are you from?”

“Chicago.”

She pointed at the Rosary James still held in his hand.

“Catholic?” she asked with a smile.

“Oh no,” James answered. “I got these in Israel. I had no idea you prayed with them.”

“Oh, it’s a good prayer,” the woman said. “Here, I have something for you.”

“No, that’s okay,” James protested.

“Nonsense,” the woman said. She reached into her quilted bag and pulled out a thin book.

“Here’s how you pray it.”

“I can’t.”

“Pssh,” the woman said and showed him the inside of her purse which was filled with stacks of tiny books connected with rubber bands. “I have plenty.”

In the years that followed, not one of James’s colleagues knew about the Rosary in his pocket, nor the fact that since that encounter with the old woman, he’d prayed the Rosary every day without fail, using the instructions inside the book until he’d memorized all the prayers by heart. A year later, he received the Sacraments of Initiation into the Catholic Church during the Easter Vigil. The Rosary and his newfound faith were a comfort he never knew he desired.

As one of the early pioneers of the research and development that was poured into the eventual construction of Large Hadron Colliders, Dr. Harbash was more than accustomed to ridicule from his peers. Though infuriating at moments, he took little issue with defending himself against the snickers and jeers of the scientific community after standing before them at conferences where he outlined various possibilities of magnetic field technologies and their potential for transdimensional travel. But he never had the same confidence in defending the prayers he was drawn to recite each day.

Long before Stephen Hawking, Harbash once suggested to a breakout session of a Columbia University Large Hadron Collider Physics conference that black holes, rather than being nothing more than dense inescapable prisons, could theoretically be portals where humans could escape by entering into an alternative history where it would be impossible to return to one’s original universe.  Half of the room walked out with uproarious laughter.

So when Harbash read a news story more than thirty years later about Stephen Hawking making a similar claim, a now much older Harbash let out a whoop in the emptiness of his apartment that made his cat jump.  He felt vindicated. But with the vindication came a dip into the same sadness and regret that had followed him throughout his life as he’d irresistibly chased the seemingly impossible. What others saw as ridiculous, though, James considered as nothing more than something that had not yet been made possible through scientific achievement.

James often lived through times in his career feeling like nothing more than a continuous joke, a laughingstock amongst intellectual giants, despite the success and renown that he’d earned through his work with CERN in Switzerland and elsewhere.  But that was merely insecurity.  In reality, despite significant doubt that was occasionally shoved in his direction by his colleagues — most often fueled by nothing other than jealousy — James was still considered the preeminent source for breakthroughs in this area of quantum physics. Therefore, most were easily forgiving of his more outrageous hypotheses in return for the contributions he continually offered towards the acceleration and eventual development of the companion Large Hadron Collider in the United States. 

One of his proteges, however, never doubted him or his theories.

“They’ll try to crush you,” he told the brilliant young scientist with fantastically red hair.  “The knowledge is important, no doubt.  It can be dangerous, no doubt.  But if we ever want to explore and innovate throughout the universe more fully, this is the only path to do so.  Some don’t think it can be done safely, and some don’t think it should be done at all. And others, still, will want to do it for their own selfish reasons. Some will see this technology not for the advancement of mankind, but for the manipulation of their desires.”

“Time travel,” his protege surmised.

“Time travel,” Dr. Harbash confirmed.  “Transdimensional and transchronological manipulation.  If you continue our work in this direction, Dr. Small, you won’t hear the end of it.  You must continue the work for the future of humankind.  But you must not never let them manipulate mankind’s past.”

Having never had children himself, having never even been married, the way he felt about Dr. Tabitha Small was about as close to paternal affection as he’d ever experienced.  The way she hung on nearly every word he spoke, devoured his published journal articles, and was often the lone defender of his work amongst all of their co-workers, allowed him to not only trust someone like he’d never trusted before but to feel protective and territorial over her.  

Tabitha was the one person he almost showed his Rosary to, but at the last moment, he reconsidered.

“I won’t let you down,” she’d stoically promised on more than one occasion.

Shortly after 9/11 when TSA protocols were at their most stringent, James was passing through airport security during one of his many trips to CERN in Switzerland to work on the Large Hadron Collider. He quickly emptied his pockets into a white plastic bowl before being rushed through the newly installed body scanners at O’Hare. At that moment he felt so scattered that he grabbed his belt, shoes, and luggage, but left the contents of the bowl behind. He was later able to retrieve his wallet and keys without issue, but the Rosary had disappeared.

Now, back in 1986, the wooden beads had mysteriously returned to his life. Once again, James held the cross at the end of the Rosary to his lips, kissed it, and then made the sign of the cross along his head, chest, and shoulders. He kissed the Crucifix again and looked lovingly at the Rosary as he fingered the beads.

“Glad to see you, old friend,” he said. “I may need you now more than ever.”

Having suddenly found himself in his somewhat younger body with wild streaks of gray in his hair once again, as evidence mounted through news stories of looting and outbreaks of violence in the streets even right outside his Chicago brownstone, it did not take him long to hypothesize that one of his former colleagues had accomplished what he’d long warned his protege from ever doing.  

James was not surprised, then, when early the next day a knock startled him as he was just finally dozing off after watching the news all night. He pushed himself out of his worn leather recliner and shuffled to the door. Looking through the peephole, he saw a thin child with brilliantly red hair. He excitedly threw open the door.

“Hello, Dr. Harbash,” the shrill-voiced little girl said.  

“Dr. Tabitha Small,” Dr. Harbash said, beaming.  “I’m not at all surprised to see you, my friend.”

He opened his arms wide and Tabitha gladly allowed herself to be engulfed in his fatherly embrace.    

Bonus Content:

Note: This chapter took a lot longer to refine than I wanted, but in the original draft Harbash was never developed as much as I wanted. I struggled with rewriting this chapter for various reasons. Additionally, I’ve been stuck with the rewrites overall as I’ve been pondering whether or not to amplify some of the philosophical and theological ideas I initially avoided when I wrote the first draft. But as I’ve been working on these updated chapters, I’ve come to realize that avoiding these topics of where God is in the midst of this world turned upside down actually does a disservice to the story. If God works outside of time and space, then wouldn’t it make sense that even in a time travel story, God would still be present?

At the same time, I don’t like writing stories that are blatantly religious. I think Flannery O'Connor and other Catholic writers have proven that stories that don’t implicitly dive into spiritual themes can oftentimes be even more impactful.

So the question I’ve been struggling with is if I were to explore spirituality as one of the many themes in this book, from which character’s eyes would it make the most sense? Knowing that there are several characters that have not yet been introduced, I considered making one of them the spokesperson who would ask about God’s role in what has happened. Then suddenly this week, as ideas often do, I had an unexpected realization. Dr. Harbash, a man of science, would be a perfect catalyst for subtly introducing the layer of spirituality into this newest draft.

So that’s what you read in the chapter above. I sincerely apologize for the time between recent chapters and am grateful for your patience. Hopefully the wait is (and will be) worth it.

Along with changing part of Harbash’s motivation for his future behavior as I did in this chapter, I also had the idea that perhaps it would be interesting to you as a reader to see the earlier draft of some of these chapters. So below is the much shorter original chapter:

Harbash - Original Draft

Dr. James Harbash was prematurely gray, but not in a subtle way that distinguishes men in their forties, making them more handsome with age like frosting upon a beard or a lighting of the hair above the ears.  Dr. Harbash’s gray was like a wild guerrilla attack, unpredictable and scattered, touching all parts of his head and face in erratic patches, his bushy beard and overgrown mustache, but never quite settling into something not distracting.

Worse, as he grew older, and even more so after he retired, he devolved into slovenliness, oblivious to coffee stain droplets on his seemingly endless supply of plaid patterned dress shirts, those of which continuously refused to remain tucked in, especially in the back of his pants which contributed to his appearance by frequent appearances of butt crack.  

When he suddenly found himself in the body of a much younger version of himself, and as evidence mounted through news stories and looting and outbreaks of violence in the streets even right outside the tiny Chicago brownstone in which he now found himself, it did not take him long to hypothesize that one of his former colleagues had accomplished what he’d long dreamed of doing himself.  

As one of the early pioneers of the research and development that was poured into the eventual development of Large Hadron Colliders, Dr. Harbash had more than once experienced the snickers and jeers of the scientific community when he’d stood before them at conferences and outlined various preposterous possibilities of magnetic field technologies and their potential for transdimensional travel.  

For example, long before Stephen Hawking, Harbash once suggested to a breakout session of a Columbia University Large Hadron Collider Physics conference that black holes, rather than being nothing more than dense inescapable prisons, could theoretically be portals where humans could actually escape by entering into an alternative history where it would be impossible to return to one’s own universe.  

Half of the room walked out in response to that statement.

So when Harbash read a news story about Stephen Hawking making a similar claim based upon his own research more than thirty years later, Harbash let out a whoop in the emptiness of his apartment that made his cat jump.  He felt vindicated, but with the vindication came a dip into sadness and regret that had chased him throughout his life as he irresistibly chased the seemingly impossible, which he saw as nothing more than simply something that had not been made possible through scientific achievement.

To Harbash, he lived through his career feeling like nothing more than a continuous joke, a laughingstock amongst intellectual giants.  But that was merely his perception.  In reality, despite significant doubt that was occasionally shoved in his directional by his colleagues, he was still considered a preeminent source for breakthroughs in this area, so a majority of the community was overly forgiving of his more outrageous hypotheses in return for the contributions he continued to offer in the eventual development of the Large Hadron Collider. 

After one such humiliation, he’d gone home and over a can of cold tuna he decided that despite his love for his work, he didn’t care enough about the people with whom he spent his days to endure the constant mocking and humiliation and in complete resignation and frustration, he announced his sudden retirement and a future of watching developments as nothing more than an insider.

“They’ll try to crush you,” he told his one protege who never scoffed at his theories.  “The knowledge is important, no doubt.  But it’s dangerous.  They don’t think it can be done, but what’ll happen is we need to go this route if we ever want to fully explore and innovate throughout the universe.  But some will see this technology not for advancement of mankind, but for the manipulation of their own desires.”

“Time travel,” his protege, a brilliant young woman with fantastically red hair had surmised.

“Time travel,” he confirmed.  “Transdimensional and transchronological manipulation.  If you continue our work in this direction, you won’t hear the end of it.  You must continue the work for the future of humankind.  But you must not never let them manipulate mankind’s past.”

Having never had children himself, having never even been married, the way he felt about Dr. Tabitha Small was about as close to paternal affection as he’d ever experienced.  The way she hung on his nearly ever word, devouring his published journal articles, being the lone defender of his work amongst all of their co-workers, allowed him to not only trust someone like he’d never trusted before, but to feel protective and territorial over her.  

“I won’t let you down,” she’d stoically promised at his feeble retirement party which was obligatorily attended by only a handful of co-workers who’d left the room as soon as they’d received their overly frosted slices of cake.  

So when a knock startled him as he was just finally dozing off after watching news all night, he was not at all surprised to open the door to a thin child with brilliantly red hair.

“Hello, Dr. Harbash,” the shrill voiced little girl said.  

“Dr. Tabitha Small,” Dr. Harbash said, beaming.  “I knew it was you before I even saw you.”

Uncharacteristically for the both of them, he opened his arms wide and she Tabitha gladly allowed herself to be engulfed in his fatherly embrace.  

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