There comes a queer lookin’ dirigible — oh, baby, is she stepping.
-Buck Rogers, “Meeting the Mongols”

When the mine caved in on me, I thought I was dead. When I woke up, five hundred years later, I thought I was in heaven. The future is heaven, the past is hell, the present is limbo.

This is my paralysis gun. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My paralysis gun is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I master my life. Zap. Zap. Zap.

Powered by turbo-tronic, posi-sonic, supra-tomic action, these gyrocosmic relativators are top of the line and fully tested.

Here I am, just emerged from the mine, from five hundred years in the past, and Wilma is unconscious at my feet. I take her pistol, a curious model, and fire it at the marauding Mongols. It produces no flash or detonation from its muzzle but the air lights up with explosions. It knocks the dirty pups for a row. Still groggy from her fall to earth, Wilma looks up and says, “Are you married?” Later she will shove me into a chair and run a series of electro-hypnotic tests to prove that my story is true. It will burn off all the hair on my body and make the fillings in my teeth disintegrate. When she is finished, she gives me a rocket gun and leaves to go on air patrol. This is what comes of trusting a woman.

Cen-tur-eee…eee…eee.

C’mon, shout it into an open piano. Let the strings vibrate. Eee…eee…eee.

Here I am, in space, with Wilma Deering, my beloved soldier-girl. She does not want me. She does not need me. She has a mechanical mole and I am a relic from the past. At night, alone, I produce cosmic relativity under the sheets while I dream of Queen Ardala.

The sound of my rocket, roaring across the galaxy, is the sound of a troublesome air duct on the twenty-first floor. It goes, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.

We take the inertron from our jumping belts and hammer it into a powder and snort it off of a pane of metalloglass. It costs many currency discs but it’s worth it. When I give some to Wilma, she relaxes and unzips her flight suit. Wilma is always spunky but when the inertron gets into her bloodstream, she gets really spunky. We fall, up, up, up. It is heaven, the future.

If I did have any love affairs, five hundred years ago, they’re awfully dead by now. I cannot remember their faces. The past is hell, and it bleeds into the present, and it pushes you into the future.

Here I am inside the Huer Super Cyclotron. I am the goat. Wilma yells at Dr. Huer, “Are you crazy? You’ll disintegrate him,” but I’m already inside the machine, this peanut roaster, this pet project, a test tube turned upside-down. I stand, ready, and when the switch is flipped, I feel my body squiggle into positive and negative electrons. I can hear Wilma scream, “Buck, D-darling, why did I ever let you submit to this horrible experiment?” and I believe that maybe, now that I am dead to her, she is mine. I feel my electrons rub against each other in a pleasing way. I wait for the integratron to chemically reunite my body and when I emerge from the cyclotron, I feel Wilma’s bikinied body against my own. The dead skin sloughed from my body blinks like fireflies and alights on her hair.

The sound of a psychic restriction ray is that of a Schick razor, whirring, pressed against new skin.

Ajan, Efeb, Imar, Opri, Umay, Bejun, Culy, Daugu, Fisep, Gocto, Jocto, Lovem, Medec.

Here I am on a submarine, searching for the lost city of Atlantis. Here is Ardala, evil and cunning and possessing a deep-seated though infrequently acknowledged love of me. She refuses to wear the uniform of a submarine Third Officer while on board my ship. She looks like a flapper, slicked-down hair, a garter on her arm, a dress like wet paper. Wilma looks pale in her presence. “You like that, Buck?” Wilma asks me, and I gulp. She whispers in my ear, “I’ll make Ardala look like a rag doll,” and then she is gone. Ardala says she will make love to me and then, when I finish, will kill me painlessly. It is the best offer I’ve ever received. But there is Wilma, returned, stripped out of her uniform. She looks like a boy, a long-distance runner, and she bends Ardala over backwards. “Ouch, quit, you’re hurting my back, owwch,” says Ardala, and I turn my jumping belt way, way down, and wait for the ocean’s pressure to crush us all.

I am a Rocket Ranger and every courtesy is to be extended to me in whatever Interstellar Confederation I may be.

I liberated the planet from the Mongols, pounded the Tiger Men from Mars into a frothing, angry paste, and disintegrated Killer Kane’s internals with the XZ-38. All it got me was one night in Niagara with Wilma, ten kisses in thirty-eight years.

The future is a dense, wooded area, lovely, dark, and deep. With synthetic food requiring no farmable land, floating cars making roads a thing of the past, and gleaming towers of metalloglass hovering above the treetops, the future has become the past. The forest is as dark and airless as space, a vacuum. I strap on my jumping belt and allow myself to fall into the forest, the sky turning damp and black, rattling in my ears. I touch the ground, my foot tapping the earth as if locating a point on a map, and then I return to the open air. If I do this enough times, it is like I am traveling even further into the future, day and night and day and night, until I find a place that is comfortable for me to live.

Kevin Wilson is the author of the collection, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (Ecco/Harper Perennial, 2009).  His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, One Story, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere, and has twice been included in the New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best anthology.  He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the KHN Center for the Arts.  He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, with his wife, the poet Leigh Anne Couch, and his son, Griff, where he teaches fiction at the University of the South and helps run the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.