The Advancement of Mateo Matic: April 3, 2027

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Mateo opened his eyes. He was on the side of a hill. The sky was swirling with beautiful shades of purple and orange. Lightning danced across the clouds. A light mist overcame him. The wind was simultaneously moderate and powerful enough to make him feel like he was flying. A gentle stream began to roll from his left side; the dirt separating to give it room. It continued to flow listlessly in circles around him. In the unpredictable stream, he could feel the distant comfort of his family. He sat alone on the hill for fourteen years before the water concentrated in a singular mass and began to form the figure of a person. Details of the mass appeared little by little, until he could recognize it as that of his Leona.

“You’re here,” he said to her.

“It’s about time,” she replied.

“I’ve only known you for a couple of weeks. But I kind of think that I’m in love with you,” he divulged.

“It has been much longer for me,” she said sadly. “There is no question that I’m in love with you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I’m now closer to your age. Had we met at that hospital, for some other reason, you would have ignored me as a child.”

“Is that why I’m jumping through time? Was I just waiting for you?”

“Have you considered that?”

“So...you think I’m done? Do you think they’re going to let me stay, now that we’ve found each other?”

“Might could be.”

“That sounds like wishful thinking.”

“It’s pronounced optimism.”

He laughed.

“Thank you so much for the kidney.”

“I think I would have given my heart. Had you needed it.”

“Theoretical hero.”

He laughed again. “You have my heart anyway, though, I suppose.”

“Don’t be so sappy. I really mean it. You’re giving me the gift of life. Truly. That is a debt I could never repay. I will be forever grateful for you.”

“Wait. Are you here?”

“Of course I am.” She gave him a strange look. “Hell you talkin’ ‘bout?”

“I mean, are you real? Is this not just a dream?”

“Oh. Yeah, it’s my dream.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s mine.”

“I think we’re sharing a dream, Mateo. We must still be in surgery.”

“That explains why I’ve been in the same place for a dozen years, and why you used to be a stream of water.”

“I used to be a what huh?”

He hugged her tightly from the side. “I feel like it’s time for me to wake up now. I’ll see you soon.”

“Have fun. Thanks again. I shall begin to repay you in the real world.”

When Mateo woke up, Dr. Sarka was standing over him. “How are we feeling today?”

He struggled to get his eyes open. He just wanted to stuff himself into the covers and disappear. He whimpered a bit, and felt the urge to whine like a baby. “How is Leona?”

“She’s perfect. There were zero problems. Her new kidney is already doing its job. You did an amazing thing, Mateo.”

“Why are you covered in blood?”

Sarka looked down at his own chest. “Oh, sorry about that. I was a field medic in World War I for a few weeks while you were sleeping. I just got back here.”

“I thought you were only a doctor for salmon.”

“The entire battalion was from the future. The Central Powers won in the original timeline.”

That was an interesting bit of information, but Mateo was far too tired to delve deeper into it, so he just fell back asleep. It seemed like sleeping was one of only two things that he was doing with his life.

When he woke up again, he had been moved to a much larger bed. Leona was lying next to him. “She insisted on it,” Daria whispered to him. “She said that your kidney wasn’t quite ready to be that far away from its counterpart.”

He kissed Leona on the forehead. “I agree.” He looked over to his aunt. “When did you get in?”

“I’ve been here for a couple hours,” she answered. “It would seem as if the powers that be have set up visiting hours for you. Your father is here as well.”

Mateo looked around the blurry room. “Where?”

“He stepped outside when you started waking up. He isn’t sure that you want to see him.”

Mateo took a deep breath. “Seeing as that I can’t get up, could you please inform your brother for me that he needs to get his ass in here. He’s missed twenty-eight years. A few minutes isn’t asking much.”

“You know it wasn’t his fault, right?”

“Yes, I do. That doesn’t mean he should waste what few opportunities he has.”

“True,” Daria said. “I’ll go get him.”

Mateo woke up again hours later. Leona was gone from his side. “What happened?”

“You fell asleep again, honey.”

“Is that normal,” Mateo struggled to say. “I have dry mouth. Am I about to teleport?”

Daria took a noticeable step back from the bed. “I sure hope not. But I do believe dry mouth to be a side effect of morphine. You were in quite a bit of pain. You were screaming and crying. I’m glad that you do not remember that.”

“My father was here.”

“I still am,” Mario said from the other side of the bed.

The morphine was starting to become more obvious for him. He was talking in a way that was unlike him. But he couldn’t help it. “Mario. Mario!”

“Yes?”

“Mario! Answer me.”

“I’m here,” Mario said patiently.

“Mario. What’s your middle name?”

“I actually do not have one,” his father answered. “It’s not a part of our family’s tradition.”

“It’s not a part of mine either. My father never gave me a middle name.”

Mario couldn’t help but laugh. “No, he didn’t. You’re right.”

Mateo rubbed the sheet between his hands, and then pounded on the mattress with his fists.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m trying to start a fire! I’m hot! This place is dangerous!”

Daria and Mario looked at each other, not knowing what to do. “This doesn’t sound like morphine,” she said.

“Isn’t it supposed to make you feel happy and calm?”

Mateo narrowed his eyes and looked between them with caution. They were conspiring against him. “What are you two talking about? You sons of bitches are gonna pay. I hear you whispering over there. You think I can’t, but I can. Where’s my mother!?” he screamed. Where’s my mother? Where’s my mother? Where’s my mother?” Mateo started freaking out; thrashing around in the bed, tearing up the pillow case, and screaming obscenities to Mario and Daria. They tried to hold him down. “It’s your fault!” he yelled up to him. “You were supposed to protect her. You were supposed to be there for her. You were supposed to be there for me! Where were you? Where did you go? What was so important that you have to travel through time instead of taking care of your freaking family!”

“Mateo,” Daria comforted. “Please calm down. Everything is going to be okay. We can explain things to you. But you have to be still.”

“He’s supposed to be with her,” he spat.

“I know,” Daria agreed. “And he would have if he could have.”

“He says he loves her, but how can he? How can a man love a woman when he’s only there one day out of the year? Leona has to spend all that time alone, and what does he do? He just runs out on her. What kind of man leaves the woman he loves? She was just fifteen years old. She was just a kid! How could he do that to her? How could he get her mixed up in this? Leona doesn’t deserve this.”

“He’s pretty messed up,” Mario said. “I don’t know if it’s an allergic reaction, or what, but Sarka better get back here fast, or we’re screwed.”

A young man burst into the room. “I’m here!”

“Who are you?” Daria asked.

“I’m a healer. I was told that this is my latest appointment.”

“Sarka is the doctor,” Mario said.

“I didn’t say I was a doctor. I said I was a healer.”

Daria was struggling to keep Mateo from kicking her in the face. “What does that mean?”

“He just needs a transfusion.” The man opened a drawer and began to draw blood from himself.

“I know you!” Mateo yelled in paranoia. “You were there; at my party. I saw you. I met you. You shook my hand. Did you do this to me? It was you, wasn’t it? You piece of crap! What is it? What did you do to me? Take it back! I don’t want it anymore! I just want to stay in one place!”

“He didn’t do this to you.” Mario turned his attention to the stranger. “What exactly are you doing?”

“I’ve been spending the last year, going around the country and healing people with my blood.”

“I’ve never heard of someone who could do that,” Mario said skeptically.

Even through the protests of Mateo’s father and aunt, the man injected Mateo with his own blood. He immediately felt better. His paranoia dissipated, and tranquility spread across his body before settling down the drain and leaving him in a state of normalcy. The debacle was over.

“It’s something I picked up from another planet,” the man explained. And with that, the wall behind him changed. It turned into some kind of portal to another location. It was in the middle of a forest. The wind even blew a few leaves into the recovery room. The man looked back at it and breathed a sigh of relief. “And they are finally letting me go back. It sucks there, but I left my best friend, and I need to find her again.” He started to walk towards the portal.

“Wait,” Mateo said. “What’s your name? Just so I know who to put on the thank-you note.”

The man smiled and stepped outside. “It’s Vearden.”

After the portal closed, Mateo fell asleep once more, and didn’t wake up until next year.

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: March 26, 2019

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Mateo gently removed his face from Leona’s. She gave him her best evil smile. Then she turned around and grabbed an infant from Carol’s arms. “Mateo Matic, say hello to your son, Theo.”

“What!?”

“I’m kidding,” she laughed. “He’s my baby brother. Half-brother.”

Carol pursed her lips. “Wasn’t funny when you told us you were going to do that joke, and it isn’t funny now that you’ve actually done it.”

Leona handed Theo to Mateo. “Funny from this side. How was your trip, honey?”

“Instant,” Mateo replied. “Theo does sound like he’s named after me.” He lifted the baby’s hand with his finger and shook it politely. “Little odd.”

She took Theo back. “It’s a family name. Er...well, not really. But my dad says he was incapable of naming him anything else; like it was already his name, and we were just discovering that fact.”

Everyone went to bed. Leona’s father and stepmother were on a vacation, so Carol and Randall were taking care of little Theo. He was technically Leona’s responsibility but she, of course, had classes to worry about. They were more than willing to pick up the slack, having felt a deficit since the onset of Mateo’s condition. Frida’s father passed not long after Mateo’s last departure. He lived long enough to see Frida’s engagement to her now-husband, but not long enough to be there for the wedding. Kyle was better than ever, and had all but moved on with his life. He was back to being a lawyer, and was rumored to be a far more genuine one than before.

Upon waking, Mateo snuck out of the house again. He needed some alone time. It was selfish of him, but he had just spent the last several days dealing with all this. It was true that he would be completely alone in only a few weeks when everyone would be dead, but he couldn’t help it. He and his friends liked to hang out at the large cemetery on the edge of town, but there was a smaller one in the middle of nowhere that only he knew of. That was his secret hiding place. There, he could find some of the oldest graves he had ever seen. There were those who had died in the early 19th century. It was peaceful and calm, and not just metaphorically. It was literally calm. Something about the formation of the trees, or maybe by divine choice, made the air milder than just outside of its borders. When it was cold outside, the secret cemetery would be warmer, and during the summer heat, it would be cooler.

He leaned up against a headstone and began to pray with his birth mother’s rosary. “Sorry to disturb you,” came a voice from the side. He opened his eyes and saw a middle-aged woman dressed in two coats. It was much too warm for that. She took the first one off and stuffed it in a bag. “Could you tell me where I am?” She removed a bottle of water from her bag and took a long drink from it.

“I don’t think there’s a name for this graveyard,” Mateo answered.

“No, I mean...I mean the city,” she clarified.

That was an odd question, but she was dressed in more layers than necessary. She must have been a nomad. “We’re a few miles Southwest of Sherwood Lake. In Topeka, Kansas.”

“Oh, wow,” she said. “That’s not far from home.”

“Where do you live?”

“Kansas City. I don’t suppose you were driving that way.”

“I wasn’t.” She was deeply saddened, clearly having been far from home for a long time. He had selfishly left his family at home and come to cemetery to pray. This was a sign. It was a very Catholic sign. She needed help, and he was the only one around. The chances that she would be here at this special place during the one day of the year that he was in the timestream were too low. She needed to get to Kansas City, so he was going to take her there. “But I am now.”

They stepped into the truck and headed out. She introduced herself as Daria. When he introduced himself with his full name, she laughed. “Are you joking?”

“No, why?”

“That’s my name too,” she claimed. “I’m Daria Matic.”

“Ah, well. It’s my birth father’s name. I never met him.”

She sat in silence for a good long while. At a glance, it looked like she was working something out in her head. “His first name wouldn’t happen to be Mario, would it?”

He freaked out, and his first instinct was to stop the car. But he remained calm, and kept driving. There were very few things that Mateo knew about his father. One was his first name, one was his last name, and the other was that he hated pickles. That’s all his birth mother had ever said. In fact, the third one had slipped out in the middle of dinner once, and she treated it like a matter of national security; like she had just committed treason. He tried looking for him, only for intellectual reasons, but he could find no trail. Mario Matic was a ghost. “Oh, my God. Are we related?”

“Looks like it. Are you a traveler?” she asked. She emphasized the word in a way that made it seem like she wasn’t just talking about a person who goes to other places. Traveler was a category. It was a species.

This time, he did stop the car. “On my 28th birthday, I traveled forward in time exactly one year. I get one day every year, and then I’m forced to move on. My girlfriend...I mean, my friend calls it a timeslip.”

“Oh, interesting,” Daria said thoughtfully.

“Do you do that too?” he asked, not sure what answer he was looking for.

“I’ve never heard of any time travel. I’m a teleporter. Like you, I can’t control it. But there doesn’t appear to be a pattern. When I start having dry mouth, I have a few minutes to gather my things, and then I’m gone.”

“I don’t get dry mouth. I get really tired before it happens, but it’s always at midnight anyway, so I don’t know if that’s part of it.”

“Yeah, I call that my indicator. Speaking of which, I’m really thirsty.”

“Well, we can stop somewhere. Oh...” He realized what she meant. She was about to leave again. “We’re not done with our conversation!”

She rummaged through her bag to make sure she had everything she needed. “I am certain that we will see each other again. These journeys are controlled by someone, and they know we didn’t have enough time. That was surely done on purpose. But I have to get out of here. If someone is too close to me, I risk bringing them along. It’s not uncommon for me to end up in Antarctica.” She tried to open the door.

“Oh, it gets stuck,” he apologized. “You have to—just...here.” He leaned over to get it for her.

“No!” she screamed, but it was too late. They disappeared.

They were still in a sitting position when they teleported out, so they fell to the concrete upon arrival. “Had a little too much to drink?” a stranger asked jokingly as he passed by with his friends. Mateo got to his feet and looked up to where he could see the Eiffel Tower. “Heavenly father, we’re in Paris,” he exclaimed.

“No,” Daria said. She moved his head over so that he could see the Arc de Triomphe. Those two landmarks were not that close together. And they weren’t that small. No, they weren’t in Paris. They were Vegas. Either way, he wouldn’t get back to his family for another year, at least.

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