The Madman's Time Machine

             I read a clever little short story called "The Madman's Time Machine" by Adam Ehrlich Sachs. This story is quite short, but packs a powerful "punch". In this story, a hobo is taken into the hospital for frostbite. When he is assigned a psychiatrist to speak to, the hobo explains that he used to be the smartest man on the planet, even smarter than Einstein and Newton. He solved all the pressing problems of his time and then built a time machine so that he could travel in time and meet other geniuses. Despite his intense experiences, the genius/hobo man got bored and decided that he wanted to commit suicide, by travelling back in time and killing his grandfather. So, he travels to Berlin in 1932, and kills his grandfather, but realizes that his grandmother was already pregnant at the time. The genius/hobo's father grew up without a father and became an underemployed roofer and was unable to provide funds for his son, who became a hobo and went insane.
            This story has somewhat of an ambiguity. The narrator, himself, is not reliable because he is crazy. It could be that nothing in the story actually happened and that it was just the hobo's imagination, or it could be that the events in the story provide an actual rationale for the hobo's state. I kept trying to look in the text to see if one meaning was favored over the other, but both explanations were corroborated in the story. For example, the writer kept bringing up the fact that the hobo was found in a cardboard box, but then the narrator explains that the box is only a replica he built in order to reminisce in his past. The actual time machine, he explains, was metallic and more complicated.
           I really like the absurdist tone that this story has. Multiple times, I stared at the story and thought "What...? Why is this even in the story? This is so wierd..." But the little wierd details made it an interesting read. Plus, this story is super short, so I would definitely recommend it.