Asimov's SF, July 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  She had been lucky, she eventually understood. Lucky that, although she did not belong in the world, she had found persons of love and heft to anchor and keep her from flying apart, wild and disjunct, into the place where sense and love could not live.

  7.

  After meeting herself at Hole-in-the-Wall, Alice (the Younger) almost told Daniel about the experience. She thought about how her older self had known she would meet her there and had implied that such meetings happened often. And she wondered how her older self knew that the “crazy chaos” where they had met “preceded the world” and was nowhere. Did this mean that in years to come she would find a way to make sense of what she often felt must be a delusion? She had never told Daniel anything about it. Daniel was a physicist. And it would sound like New Age craziness, she'd thought. But might not a physicist make sense of it, at least as much sense of it as her older self seemed to have done?

  Only a week after the meeting at Hole-in-the-Wall, Alice dropped again into a long frozen instant of time where past and future penetrated her consciousness of the present. Her fingers were keying numbers into a project's budget file. And in the fraction of an instant lying between one keystroke and the next, she was slung into a moment that seemed to stretch subjectively into hours of time, where multiple moments of herself in the world overlapped and collided—and then slammed back into ordinary life, where her fingers still marched over the numeric keypad without the slightest hesitation, toiling on as if time had not fractured, as if no interruption had come between her and the world.

  How often did such fractures strike? She admitted that they happened more often than she remembered. Usually she kept doggedly on with whatever she was doing and either forgot or dismissed such occurrences as momentary mental aberrations. And when it happened while lying in bed, waiting to fall to sleep, it struck her as an aborted drop into a hypnogogic state that should have led to REM sleep but didn't. At one point in her life—before she recognized the chaos as a locus to which she would always be drawn—she assumed that the fractures were the result of her accessing hypnogogic images with unusual frequency, perhaps as a consequence of certain neurons firing by mistake when she was awake instead of en route to REM sleep. Some of the images, though, recurred, coming from seemingly nowhere, striking without reference to anything but themselves: an enormous plain of dried brown chaff, tundra stretching as far as the eye could see; a length of rusted railroad tracks, in which a sharp, bloody spike thrust out of the rail bed, impaling the jagged shards of gray and purple sky rushing down to meet it; a jumble of boulders that made her think of death every time she saw them—cold, gray, and lifeless, shining and lonely before a thick backdrop of total, endless night. These images she saw often enough that she began to remember them and thus notice the fractures.

  Daniel knew she felt she didn't “belong.” This he took for a permanent flaw in her psyche, a wound, perhaps, of a difficult childhood. If she were to tell him about meeting Alice the Older at Hole-in-the-Wall, she'd have to tell him also about her experience of fractures. All of these were simply mental events: perhaps with neurological causes, perhaps simply daydreams. What was there, after all, to actually explain? The evidence was subjective, all of it occurring within the precincts of her mind. Physics could have nothing to say about any of it.

  8.

  Alice returned often to Rialto Beach, hoping each time for another encounter with herself. She had in mind that certain physical places themselves made the encounters possible and that Rialto Beach was one of those places. She reasoned that the encounters always happened in places she happened to visit at two different times and that therefore the places themselves must be instrumental in throwing temporally discrete instances of her self together. Although the crazy chaos was nearly unbearable in the moment, she nevertheless longed to meet her older self again. Her older self, she thought, could help her understand. Her older self could comfort her. Her older self knew even better than Daniel the wound that made her an exile.

  But though she got to know Rialto Beach well, she encountered her self there only at fifty-three, on the other side of that same meeting. So Rialto Beach was no magic window. And the meetings, when they occurred, were not often comforting. Being ignored by her nineteen year-old-self in the restroom of Napoleon House made her feel lonelier than ever—and a little bit angry and resentful, too, because it reminded her of how at nineteen she had allowed herself to believe that she had been wrong to think she had no place in the world, that it had only been a matter of finding the people she belonged with, through whom she would discover the sense of place that had been lacking. Returning to the courtyard just as the waiter was serving their Pyms Cups, her heart felt heavy as a stone. “I was just remembering the first time we came here,” she told Daniel. “And what a horrible, shallow person I was then.” How else to describe her sense of alienation from her past self ?

  Daniel only laughed and said that that must explain what he'd seen in her at the time. Alice thought of the young woman, slimmer than her older self, well on her way to a major hangover, staring self-absorbed into the mirror. And then she thought of her own constant longing to meet an older self she believed had the answers, and wondered if there were any difference. She was lonely now. Maybe her older self wasn't. It stood to reason, given the difference age could make, that her older self had other needs altogether.

  And even if she did meet her older self again, it wouldn't change anything. She'd still be Alice; she'd still be out of place in the world. The self could not, after all, reach across time and transfer the knowledge, understanding, and wisdom of one moment to another. And so Alice finally gave up trying to make a meeting happen.

  9.

  Alice was sixty-one when she nursed her mother through the final stage of raging, metastasized cancer. For three months her entire existence centered on making her mother as comfortable as possible. The rest of the world blurred around her, unreal, without interest, a set of inputs that abraded her senses when she noticed it. She strained to read her mother's slightest movement, to understand every grunt, whimper, and syllable, and to intuit her mother's every immediate need with a precision and alacrity verging on the telepathic. Ferocious in her will to serve her mother's needs, she let no one and nothing come between herself and them. She could not stop the cancer, but all else bowed to her will. And so the world shrank to her mother and herself. And for a while it was almost as though she had acquired heft.

  That brief sense of heft carried a price, for her mother's death left her feeling the lack more sharply than she ever had before. For months she flitted in and out of the place of chaos, uprooted and drifting, tethered by only the thinnest of filaments to blood and earth. And for a while she wondered if perhaps she might be schizophrenic, and whether the sense of lacking heft might be the root cause of the severest forms of psychosis. Everyone she knew saw her as a woman mourning the loss of her mother.

  If Daniel had had just a little less heft, she would have slipped out of the world entirely. Perhaps the extremity of this dependence should have frightened her. But she was so caught up in the chaos and her desperate wish to understand that she did not pay it the slightest attention.

  10.

  As her mother's executor, Alice sorted her mother's papers and disposed of her possessions. She took from her mother's house three boxes of photographs and slides, some of them more than a hundred years old. Usually there was nothing more to identify the subject of the photos than a date on the frame or the reverse. Two adolescent girls in long dresses and hats held hands by the side of a lake; 1907 had been penciled on the reverse. Who were these girls? Alice wondered. Would she recognize their names if she knew what they were? Certainly they looked as though they had belonged in their world, endowed with the heft that any ordinary person enjoyed. But did that mean anything now, almost a century later? Alice shuffled through the pictures and wondered. There was an order to the world she could see in the photos, an order absent to the place of chaos
.

  And what did love have to do with any of it?

  Tucked away at the back of a shelf in her mother's closet, Alice found a worn and cracked black leather book with the word Photographs stamped on its cover in gold. Only a fraction of its heavy black pages had photographs glued to them. Her mother had never shown her the album, never mentioned having it. Alice recognized none of the people or places in the pictures, but knew, judging by the clothing, they could not possibly postdate World War I. All were carefully posed, both children and adults whether in couples, solo, or in groups. Women held one another or were shown picking fruit from trees or sharing the excitement of reading a letter together while standing against a wrought-iron fence. Often the men wore suits they looked uncomfortable in, and they posed handling a fishing rod, or standing near an early model of an automobile, or holding the leash of a chimpanzee dressed in a bellhop's uniform. A whole series of photos showed women in long black dresses and white aprons, solemn and poised, with palm trees exotically soaring behind them. The sole photo with a caption showed one of these women standing before a palm tree, a bicyclist riding past in the background; herself in uniform was written in script below it.

  Who, Alice wondered, was “herself"? Alice never knew she had had relatives so long ago who had lived (however briefly) in a place where palm trees grew. Surely her mother would not have kept an album that had belonged to someone who had not been a blood ancestor?

  Alice tried to imagine the history of this old, unfinished album, the story of how it had come to live on the shelf in her mother's closet. Her mother had been the executor of her own mother's estate. She must, Alice speculated, have found it in her mother's possessions, or perhaps gotten it from Aunt Sally, an unmarried, childless woman who had been the repository of old family treasures. Had her mother known who was in the photos? If she had, why hadn't she shown it to Alice? And if she hadn't, why hadn't she been able to discard the album (or even the loose, uncollected old photos of unknown men, women, and children jumbled together with more recent photos)?

  Alice could not bring herself to toss the photo album into the trash. It could be of no real use or interest to her, and yet as a collection of photos, it possessed a certain authenticity, an integrity she could not question, presenting its images as documents of the world as it had once been.

  Object that it was, worn, abandoned, unanchored in facts, names, and verifications: still it had heft. It belonged in the world, though the world had altered so radically—perhaps because the world of the album, the world that had made the album and of which the album was made, no longer existed. Might that be what gave it heft?

  Pondering this question, Alice realized that her sense that an old thing could have heft did not extend to many old films. Cut off from the local cultural context in which they had been produced, the ability of their audience to make sense of them had become so attenuated as to make the flimsiness of scenery and actors speaking lines in scenes cut and pasted and dubbed so apparent as to threaten to reveal that only imagination and visual enchantment had ever held them together in the first place. And yet she saw nothing flimsy in the photos, all of which had been staged, and some of which distinctly reminded her of the early silent films, of situations constructed to resemble scenes the people taking the photos wanted to imitate—desiring, apparently, to reproduce the images they had seen at the movies, desiring in some way to make themselves into actors. She understood these desires—surely such modeling characterized American Modernity and formed the basis of the advertising industry, of television, of film: real people imitating the figures on the screen. Shaping their lives with careful, sometimes obsessive attention. As for the converse ... film, after all, did not imitate life. It never had, and Alice could not imagine that it ever would.

  She struggled to draw insight from the contrast she perceived, but it eluded her. When she tried describing the contrast to Daniel, he said that the photos were images of real persons and places and the films were not, and it was as simple as opposing reality to fantasy. Alice didn't think it was that simple. Clearly the photos incorporated the kind of fantasy that pervaded “real life"; and yet, for Alice, that didn't make them false, but added an inexplicable depth—maybe even the heft she felt so lacking in herself. Daniel's reasoning certainly didn't explain why she, like the old, abandoned, and now flimsy films, lacked heft.

  As though she had stepped out of one of those films, from a world constituted by two dimensions and black and white, and was trying to pass herself off as solidly and substantially human.

  11.

  At sixty-four, when Alice, attending a conference in Chicago, made a quick trip to the town she had grown up in to revisit the scenes of her childhood, she went to the old, no longer used graveyard only because every other place she had known had been razed and replaced by condos, strip malls, and parking lots. Meeting ten-year-old Alice, grieving at her grandmother's grave, Alice only then remembered that it was her grandmother's birthday. And the child's pain reopened the wound of a loss that she had lived with for fifty-five years. Comforting the child, she comforted herself.

  “Little Apple, little Apple,” she murmured to her scrawny, sobbing, younger self. Alice ached with desolation but she refused the temptation to take the child with her.

  Alone in the wild, untended graveyard, Alice knelt in the weeds and cleared the three stones so that she could read the names and dates engraved on them. For several long moments, her being hummed with memories. The people buried here had given her life—charitably, however mistakenly. Her body remembered Apple's search for gravity and laid itself down on the stones, her head on her father's, her heart on her grandmother's, her knees on her grandfather's. Had she given them enough love? she asked herself. She thought of the rows of gleaming pint jars filled with slices of pickled beet lined up on the shelves in her grandparents’ basement, tangible evidence of her grandmother's love—for her family, for good food, for the homely potential of the vegetables themselves that might otherwise have shriveled up and rotted unnoticed except by the worms and beetles that composted starchy roots left to rot in the soil. And for the first time she wondered whether she, Alice, gave enough love to the world. She thought of how often she recognized the world's beauty but felt shut out from it, unable to feel it in her own self. She had wanted the world to accept her, to make her feel wanted by it. But she had never thought it was hers to love and had thus failed even to try.

  The chill of dusk crept over the graveyard. Alice lay motionless against the stones. Her grandmother had told her; but Alice hadn't understood. She had loved this person and that one, and she had looked to them for heft. But for someone who did not naturally belong in the world, loving only individuals could never be enough.

  Alice thought of how often she got caught up in the jagged chaos out of time. She considered her failure in the light of that fact. And she concluded that it was too late for her to do anything about it now.

  12.

  In the month following her encounter with her forty-six-year-old self, Alice, now seventy-two, thought obsessively about two things. One of these was death. Because she could not recall ever having met a self older than she was now, she knew that she might have come to the end of her encounters with herself and that this might be because her own life would soon be ending.

  Although her obsession with this thought depressed her, she found it less painful than the second thought preoccupying her. And to stop herself from endless, do-nothing brooding, she assigned herself the task of setting her affairs and possessions in order. She did not tell Daniel what she was doing. But she did not conceal it, either.

  And so it was that the morning after a dinner party she hauled half a dozen boxes of old photos and slides down to the dining room table and methodically sorted them into piles. One pile contained images of her mother's side of the family; a second pile, images of her father's; a third pile, images of the generations succeeding her grandparents’ generation; and a fourth pile, images of Dan
iel's extended family. The fifth pile consisted of everything left over—images of their friends, places they had visited, and miscellaneous things that had interested them. Alice intended to make packages for various nieces and nephews; and if she had the time and stamina, she would label all the images she recognized.

  “What is all this?"

  Alice looked up from the work, glad to take a break. So much bending and reaching was making her back ache. Marian looked like she'd just woken up, her hair tangled, the skin on her face creased. “I need some coffee,” she said, turning around and going back into the kitchen.

  An old friend about twenty-five years younger than Alice, Marian was visiting for a month on a working vacation. They had first met during Marian's internship at the arts foundation where Alice worked. Discovering a shared passion for performance art, they'd developed a low-key friendship attending On the Boards events together. Marian usually stayed with Alice and Daniel when work brought her to town. She had once told Alice that she would probably never have even noticed she was “there” if it hadn't been for the On the Boards poster she'd mounted on her cubicle wall.

  Marian returned with the thermos and a cup and sat at the end of the table, well away from the mess. Alice passed her the old black leather album. “Take a look at that,” she said. “I found it in my mother's closet but haven't the faintest idea who any of the people in the photos are."

  “There's a story here,” Marian said when she'd looked at roughly half of the pictures. “These photos offer traces of a recognizable world, but one that has become opaque now that that world and the people in it are gone and no one bothered to write down their names or the stories the photos document."

  “And everyone thinks a picture is worth a thousand words,” Alice said as she continued with the sorting.

  “People put a lot of store in genealogy,” Marian said. “But if these people are your ancestors, then the question arises whether their pictures have greater significance to you as a sign of a general cultural history in your roots or as a sign of your specific genetic—genealogical—history."