Stephen White: Reluctant Outdoorsman,
Uncertain Suitor, Time Traveler

by J. B. Hogan

Stephen White is a nerdy software engineer from the little town of Nevada, Missouri. He works at Animatec, a startup computer animated graphics, with his best friend Tom Harris and the object of his unrequited affection, the bright and beautiful Lisa Backman.

Stephen is a late-twentyish, lumpy, decent-enough fellow who is in the process of detaching himself from his less-than-approving parents. Sometimes Stephen goes caving — although he’s a bit on the claustrophobic side — and he has also gone rock hunting in the Arizona desert while on vacation outside Tucson. Mostly, however, he’s inclined to plop himself down on the couch or old Barcalounger in his small, single man’s apartment and watch television or read an interesting sci-fi book.

When he’s not being a couch potato, or even while he is, Stephen’s thoughts return again and again to the lovely Lisa, for whom he harbors a not so hidden but not reciprocated love. Like a lot of us, Stephen compensates for his failures in life and love by eating and drinking. But sometimes, often enough to be unnerving to him, after he has consumed this or that bit of food or drink, Stephen finds himself becoming light-headed, tired, sleepy, asleep — or something like it.

Waking then becomes an adventure. Never sure how or why, Stephen finds himself in completely unexpected times and locations. On a murderous run with 1860s outlaws, walking Jerusalem’s Via Dolorosa, at a Russian mock execution, in a strange futuristic world of wild berserkers and Gestapo-like police, in distant lands of the Conquistadors, the Hoovervilles of the Great American Depression.

In his time travels, Stephen hangs precariously between confusion and understanding, between action and passivity, between concealment and detection. Are these worlds and places real, is he really there, do the people there see him? The answers vary from episode to episode but there is a final, unsettling aspect to his journeys: when he reawakens in his own world some small piece of where he has been has come back with him. It might be a piece of cloth, part of a feather, a broken guitar pick.

All Stephen White knows is that he will not know when or where the next journey will come to him. Or what it will be like. Where it will take him. But he is certain there will be another and that it will hit him at the oddest of times. There seems to be no rhyme or rhythm to these episodes and no expectation that they will stop. He will just have to learn to live with them.

Copyright © 2006 by J. B. Hogan