Page 56 of Tito
He kept shaking his head.
“How do you know?” Valencia asked him.
“Yeah, are there more um, travelers out there?” I asked. “Ones who could possibly tell you their stories. Like do you have conventions or something like that?”
He rolled his eyes at me. “No.”
“No conventions or no other travelers?” Valencia smiled at him.
“Can you imagine that? A Time Traveling convention?” I joked.
“I haven’t met one in perhaps 200 years,” he mused.
“I think you are in love with Maria, Max,” Valencia told him.
“I cannot be. It would be too much.”
“What do you mean it would be too much?” I asked.
“For my own psyche.”
“Like you would lose your mind or what?” I stared at him.
“Maybe or what,” Valencia said as she kept nodding her head at me like she was attempting to tell me something. “I say, he’s fine as he is.”
I got it. This subject was taboo for Max. And that meant he was in love with my mother. “So, you can travel great distances almost instantly. Although you won’t say how you do that, butit has something to do with that fake fire you had going earlier. You can make people forget by, I assume, taking them back to a time before or even after they learned whatever it is they need to forget.”
“I’ve got a headache now,” Valencia quipped.
I nodded. “ It’s like that movie Terminator, if the guy hadn’t come forward in time, then he wouldn’t have been born.”
“Exactly!” Valencia exclaimed. “Or if they came back to the past and removed the chip that was left from the future AI killer machine then the AI would have never been built to turn on humans in the future.”
“STOP!” I joked. “I’m gonna need a tylenol soon.”
Valencia and I laughed.
“I loved that movie.” He nodded.
We stared at him.
“So is it like that?” I asked him. “Change the future to…No, wait… You would have to go into the past and…” I again stalled out and rubbed at my temples.
“It isn’t as complicated as that,” Max assured me. “But I do know that I couldn’t save your father as too much time had passed when we heard about it.” He shrugged. “Then again, I didn’t think at the time to go back and save him.”
“And why do you think that was Max?” I asked him.
He shrugged and didn’t really answer my question. “I somehow knew that if I grabbed your father’s killer up and rushed him forward and back through time that it would reduce him to ash. Although, I had never killed anyone before or since.”
The surreal feeling of all this suddenly hit me hard as Valencia and I stared at him.
Chapter Sixteen:Sticks And Stones
Valencia
“Well, that’s good to know,” I replied and then I teased him, “At least you aren't dangerous.”
“No, he isn’t,” Tito said. “He’s been here for a long time and we would have found out that he was dangerous before now. I mean damn, he was almost like a parent to us.” He paused to look at Max. “Except he never laughed or got angry with us.”
