Spacecraft

by Benjamin Broke

fuck over your Uncle like that? Won’t you feel bad about it?”

  “Man, fuck that asshole. He never did shit for me or my brother and he beats on my Auntie. What do you think he got a warrant for? Domestic violence. Beating the shit out of my mom’s sister.” He said. “Fuck that asshole. He deserves it.”

  Michael was right, the mall was crowded with grubby, mean eyed children and their fat mothers shuffling from shop to shop and young girls giggling and talking shit. This was where the mentally deficient joined in sexual communion with forces they didn’t understand. Those girls had no idea why they were so turned on.

  Mr. Bennett was demonstrating how to turn a couple of two liter soda bottles whose mouths were held together with a small plastic device into a mini tornado machine. He stood in the aisle in front of a man and a young boy and moved the device back and forth in a stirring motion. When enough force had been gathered, he held the bottles up and revealed a whirlpool tornado that curved and spun for a surprisingly long time. The young boy seemed delighted, but the father was bored and pulled the kid away saying they could make one on their own, without the Science Store product. Mr. Bennett watched them go and noticed me as he set down the bottles. “Nick! Back again I see… What brings you to my little corner of the mall?”

  “Well, actually, I came to see you. I wanted to ask you something about what you said yesterday. About space.” I said.

  “Oh right, space.” He said, scratching his chin. “No such thing really. Why is that so hard for people to understand?”

  “Well, I’ve been thinking about it Mr. Bennett, and I think it’s because light from all different times hits our eyes at once.” I said, not sure if the statement made sense. “You know what I mean?”

  “Yes Nick, I think so.” He said. “You see our brains are good at connecting the dots for us. A movie is just a series of still images, but when you run them together, they appear to be moving. Well, our brain does something similar with time, which creates the illusion of space.” He looked at me with a hopeful expression.

  “Sorry. You’ll have to explain that to me, Mr. Bennett.” I said.

  “Please Nick, call me Chris, I’m not your teacher anymore. I’d be happy to explain it to you in a more informal setting. Here is not the time.” He looked around. “My shift is over in ten minutes, I could explain it all to you if you’d be so good as to buy me a strawberry Julius.” He raised his eyebrows. “A small price to pay to understand your world a little better.”

  “Alright, I’ll meet you over there,” I said, “thanks.”

  “Thank you,” he nodded, “for the strawberry Julius to come.”

  As I walked to the food court I looked at all the people who were shopping with glazed eyes and slack expressions on their faces, hustling around as if they were doing something important. A security guard eyed my skateboard suspiciously as if I was about to jump on it and lead him on a chase through the mall. I ordered two strawberry Julius’ and sat at one of the small tables off to the side of the food court. It was some time before he showed up and I was almost finished with mine. “I’m surprised you’re so interested in this.” He said as he sat down. “I’ve tried to tell many people about it, but no one seems to care.”

  “Well, when we talked yesterday, it got my brain going a little bit, and now I can’t leave it alone.” I said. He nodded and I continued, “I was thinking this morning that our brain must lag behind the present, because all the information it’s getting is slightly old.” I said.

  His eyes widened. “Yes, Yes. That’s true. There are two presents. The hidden one that propels us along through time, and the one that our brains create to make sense of what we experience. They are very close, but the one we create is always a little behind the real one.” He said. “It’s like our soul is riding a wave of time and our brain is constantly playing catch-up.”

  “Does that mean that time moves at the same speed for all of us? ‘Cause I gotta tell you, I’ve seen some skaters who might change your mind there.” I said.

  “Well, I think time does move the same speed on the hidden level -but our brain plays catch-up with that level at different rates. Say I’m in a car accident, it might only take five seconds before it’s over, but I’ll remember thirty different things happening in those five seconds, whereas if I’m sitting on my front porch doing nothing, I may only remember twenty things happening in an hour. That’s my brain playing catch-up at different rates.” He said.

  “Right. So the faster you go, the slower time moves, right?” I asked.

  “No, I don’t think it’s that simple. I think you can change your perception of time regardless of whether or not you are moving, it just takes a great deal of concentration.” He said. “I haven’t mastered it yet, but I’m working on it.”

  “So what’ll you gain from being able to do that? Will you be able to dodge bullets like the American Ninja or something?”

  “Perhaps!” He said with a laugh. “Take one second of time and divide it in half. Now take that half and divide it in half. Keep on doing this as many times as you can and you’re still never going to get to an indivisible unit of time, it doesn’t work that way. You see there’s an infinity in every single moment. William Blake knew it. I believe our brain leaves markers in time that we connect to make fluid, like the still images in movies, and we can learn to control how many markers we leave. Not changing the ultimate speed of time, but certainly changing our perception of it. And the more markers we leave per second, the closer we come to the hidden fluid present.”

  “Jesus. I guess you were right about not teaching that kind of thing to kids, they might’ve thought you were nuts.” I said.

  “Well, yeah. See, it’s all connected to a new way of seeing space. Once you can actually experience space as the same thing as the present, all sorts of possibilities open up. That’s what might’ve gotten me in deep with the principal.” He said. “It’s quite a simple idea really. Space is time, time written incredibly small, time you can see. Or maybe it’s more useful to think of space as the surface of time. Take this table for instance, it has a history, it was built somewhere and shipped here to this mall where it sits, but we can’t see any of that. We can only see it now, in the present. We are sitting at the forward edge of it’s progress through existence.” He took out his keys and dug one of them into the table’s surface dragging a straight gouge in the plastic. “I decided to do that, and now the table will never be the same. The past is set, and the future is uncertain right? That’s common sense. So what’s the present? The present is disconnected physically from the past. It’s like the table has two existences, the historic path it made to the present and it’s present form which is all we can see. Space is the surface of time, and our consciousness is trapped here.”

  “Um.. I have to ask,” I said after a pause, “is this a religious thing? Is it like the moonies at the airport or something?”

  Mr. Bennett took a long sip of his strawberry Julius. “No,” he said, frowning, “of course not. It’s just an idea. That’s the whole point. If it doesn’t work, or a better idea comes along, I’ll scrap my hypothesis. It’s not dogma, it’s just a theory.” I seemed to have hit a sore spot because he remained silent.

  “Well I see a problem with the theory that space is time.” I said, finally. “If space and time are essentially the same thing, what’s an inch? What’s a mile? What’s a yard? Those are measurements of space, not time.”

  “Are you so sure? An inch is just an incredibly small amount of time. Doesn’t any inch you can measure also have it’s history in time? And anyway doesn’t any distance have to relate to an observer? If something’s an inch away from you, or a mile away, isn’t it a distance in time that separates you? It becomes obvious when you’re talking about the huge distances that separate things in outer space. They’re measured in light years, or the distance light travels in a year. That’s a measurement in time and space, which is really what all the measurements you mentioned are. It
’s not as if you can move through space without also moving through time, unless you happen to be a subatomic particle.” He slurped the last of his drink. “And with that, I will bid you good afternoon. I’m late to give my mother her medicine.”

  “Mr. Bennett, hang on,” I said, “what if I have some more questions about your crazy theory?”

  Mr. Bennett smiled for a second. “I work Wednesday though Sunday from nine to two, only don’t expect to talk to me when I’m working, unless you want to buy some science crap. Goodbye.”

  9

  “The problem is that Reincarnated Abortions and Little Jimmy Has Cancer are basically the same song.” Scott said. “We can’t play them back to back, we have to put something in between.” They were in Don’s basement standing on a beat-up Oriental rug laid out on the concrete. Scott’s head was shaved except for long bleached bangs that hung down over his right eye in an extreme version of the skater-cut. Behind him was Kid Karl on drums, an unassuming looking skinny kid with short brown hair. Don was off to the side, half sitting on his big amp from the sixties. He was tall and slouchy and he usually wore a blank expression just this side of dopey. Scott stood in front of them making a triangle. He had a black guitar attached to