“Would it really make a difference if it told you?” The Man said.
He had a look on his face as if he knew. John could tell.
“I need to know.”
“You know enough already. Do you really need to know one more innocuous thing?”
“It’s not nothing. It’s life. Why are we alive?
“What will it change if you understand now before you’ve finished your own story? And what then if you didn’t like the ending, would you put the book down? Would you ever pick another one up?”
“Maybe.”
“But you could never understand the ending without having read the entire story and even then, it might be you who is out of context.”
“Just tell me, why do we do the same thing every god damned day?”
“Existence is an equation; a series of patterns, it is one singularity, divided into an infinite number of wholes which too are further divided into infinitesimal complexity and chaotic function. There is no difference or inequality. A light can be no more on than on, and it can be no more off than off.”
“What does that mean?”
“Everything is one,” The Man said.
“What about people? People are different.”
“A one of any color is still a one.”
“Can I change my future? Can I change the result?”
“Why not just change your expectation? It seems more pragmatic.”
“I wish I didn’t know how everything was going to be. I wish there was one thing that I didn’t know, that I couldn’t see coming. Like when I was younger and everything made sense. If this is it if this is life if I know every outcome, then why shouldn’t I just kill myself now? Why isn’t that the grand philosophical dilemma? If my purpose is to fulfill every expectation and if there are no more surprises, then am I omniscient? Is this how God is with mankind, with his creation, with free will? Has God hanged himself, somewhere where no-one bothered to look, in the dark side of heaven?”
“Yes,” The Man said, bored.
“Who are you?”
“Who are you?” The Man responded.
“I asked first.”
“I am the footprint of my past,” The Man said. “I am like the displacement of water, proof enough that from my past, I exist in the present and, therefore, can be gambled upon someplace in the future. I am a collection of my memories. Without them, I am someone else.”
“I’m John,” said John.
“I know.”
“How?”
“It says so. ON your breast.”
John looked down at the silver name badge hanging from his left breast pocket in plain and simple view. He wondered then, for a second, if there were two lines, or a hundred and fifty characters, written on his back that best synopsized who he was and hinted toward who or what he might become.
“Do you believe in time travel?” John asked.
“I do not see time as linear, with a zero on one side and a one on the other.”
“Then what is time?”
“Something we outgrow. Something to wish and then reflect upon”
“I want to live in the present. To exist. To be. Right now. Always now.”
“You cannot live in the present for you are versed only in the past.”
“That’s not true. Right now we are debating.”
“And you are referring to something that I have already said. The moment I open my mouth and the moment I speak, as you follow my words and interpret them in your mind, you are caught on the coat tail of time, and so you are caught in the past.”
“Right now,” John said, “I am scratching. I’m not responding to you. I am scratching my arm. I can feel it. It is in the present.”
“There is a lag between your conscious and subconscious. You are not existence. You are the expression of existence. You are the wake that trails behind the vessel of the dead. You are the expansive and fraught echo of media that terrorizes after the blood and dust have settled. Everything you think will be in reference to what has already been or in theory, what one day will come to be. But in the future, when it is perceived as being the present, you will only know it has come into being by examining it in the past.”
“I’ve been thinking about the past a lot, like all the chances I had and if I could what I would do differently. If I could…”
“There is an equation for that dilemma. Hindsight equals foresight minus insight. You need to think about tomorrow. That’s it. Nothing else. Think about tomorrow and the day after that.”
“What about today?”
“You would have thought about that yesterday. It’s already covered.”
The bus stopped and The Man got up and squeezed past John, throwing the book towards him and smiling as he alighted through the central door. “But I might be wrong,” he said.
As the bus started to pull away, John took The Man’s book in his hands, flicking through the pages so that the words swam over one another like shadowy waves and he hovered over the pages, as he had when he was a boy, above the edge of a swimming pool, wanting to dive in but scared to death and unsure where to begin. He didn’t even see The Man waving, before turning and walking in both directions, up and down the street.
He put the book down and stared out the window and he saw, on the sidewalk, a big red balloon that had appeared out of nowhere and was blowing down the street, in the direction of a small girl that was holding her grandfather’s hand, waiting in line to buy some colored string. The big red balloon bounced down the sidewalk and stopped at the little girl’s feet. John tried to look behind, but he couldn’t see where the balloon had come from. He wondered if it had been part of a celebration; a christening, a birthday party, a retirement or maybe a funeral.
The little girl, still holding her grandfather’s hand, leaned down and picked up the balloon and then wobbled it around the air. Holding onto the colored streamer that was tied to its end, she waved the balloon back and forth and giggled manically as it flew up in the air and then pulled back towards her, bouncing back off her hand each time.
If that balloon were a book, John would want to know what it was doing there on the street, where it had come from and who blew it up in the first place. He wouldn’t play with it until he knew these things. And a strange astonishment washed over him as he watched the little girl playing with the red balloon, holding her grandfather’s hand and waiting in line to buy some colored string. Though there was no reason for the balloon being there though its presence was without explanation, it seemed that little girl did not care, she still found fancy in its game. And the game didn’t need to be defined to be fun. It didn’t need to have meaning to have a purpose.
Everything in John’s life was to be expected.
Everything was planned.
Nothing ever came out of nowhere.
A Brief Introduction to Active Noise Reduction
Tracy was already waiting at the stop in front their house. She’d asked John if he’d remembered to pick up something to eat on the way back from work and he told her he’d forgotten. She said it didn’t matter, but her words did little to hold back the gale of unease that rocked John’s already shaky foundation. When she asked him why he didn’t drive, he lied and made up some excuse about the car’s distributor and when she asked him what bus he was on, he lied again.
When the bus got close to his house, John didn’t press the bell. He thought about it. He even twitched his finger as if he were anxiously waiting for the right time. But the bus drove right past his house and right past his wife.
It continued in a direction which he hadn’t traveled in many years, into a part of town that he hadn’t seen since he was a boy. And as he stared out the window, seeing the lines of sycamore trees whose thick straggling roots, broke apart the footpath as if it were a poorly sewn seam, John’s mind started to recall memories that like this part of town, he had long since forgotten.
He remembered how when he was seven, he and his friends had thought that th
ese trees were gargantuan and wanted to climb them, and to take nest up high on the thick overhanging branches, kicking your feet and spitting on the roves of the cars that passed below, that was the greatest feat imaginable.
And though he never thought he could, he did, one day when he was all alone, climb to the highest branch that reached out over the cobble stoned street and he sat nervously on the limb, hidden beneath a canopy of green leaves, watching the cars and the people pass by underneath.
And though he knew his friends would never believe him, he told them anyway. He told them about how tiny everything seemed and about how the wind almost blew him off his perch. And he told them about a nest he saw that was literally just within his grasp and in it, the three little baby birds that were chirping and waiting for their mum to come back with food.
And when nobody believed him, he showed them a single leaf that he had picked from the highest branch to prove it but his friends all scoffed and said he was just making everything up that no-one could every get to the top, especially not him, and that it was just a stupid leaf.
The only other time he had called this memory before today was when he first garnered the courage to talk to Tracy. He had wanted to for years, but he had neither the gall nor the confidence to approach her. To speak to her and to make her care what he had to say, for John, when he was a young man, was the greatest feat imaginable.
Tracy had been sitting under the very tree he climbed when he was seven. Now, fourteen years later, he returned to that very spot and took a deep anchoring breath, as he had when he was a boy, and approached Tracy and he told her the story of when he was brave and how he climbed to the highest branch and spent the whole day, high above the earth, hidden inside a canopy of green leaves, watching over a nest of baby birds.
He spoke to her as if they had known each other their whole lives and she listened with such delicate address as if they had. He spoke about how scared he had been to leave the ground and how around his friends, he had less courage than when he was on his own but how he thought that his courage was dependent on this exact tree and none other. And Tracy listened to him telling his story and she heard and felt, in the spaces between his words, the very courage that he spoke of.
And before he left, he showed her the leaf that he had kept with him since he was a boy. And as they aged and their love grew, she kept that very leaf in a locket that she wore around her neck.
Now, staring out of the window, the trees didn’t seem so gargantuan. They just looked like trees and the giant crevices in the earth where the thirsted veins of this great tree scourged through, they were less impressive than he had imagined and remembered. They looked like more of a nuisance than anything.
And though he tried to see them in the same light, he couldn’t.
And as he stared at the trees, which in his sight and now in his thoughts, seemed marginal and hardly a laudable feat, he grew a disliking for the very memory that had for years, for as long as he had stayed away from this street, seemed so full of life and color and immense dimension and inspiration. A memory that now, as a grown man with a cynical and hollow imagination, seemed minute and trivial.
He felt tightness in his chest and a small ache in his mind. It felt as if someone was stabbing a tiny pin through his skull and his brain, and deep into his thoughts, just above his right ear. And that was where he anchored his hand, trying to equal the pressure and stop the sharp stabbing pain.
And then, as quickly as it had come, the pain went away. And with it so did the memory of having ever climbed that tree. And so too, the proof that he remembered having kept with him all those years and having given to the girl whose attention had once seemed as vast and scaling as the tree under which she sat.
As he stared out of the window, he looked at the rows of sycamore trees and the only thing he could think of, the only thing he could remember, was the scoffing and laughing and mocking of his friends. And the pain in his mind, as if someone was stabbing his imagination, it slowly eased like the dulling of a ringing in one’s ear, until the memory, much like an abused frequency, faded and ceased to exist.
Eventually, John got off the bus and walked two blocks along a sprawling footpath in the middle of suburbia. Massive two story houses with equally massive boats and yachts, moored to silver faucets and braced by red stone bricks, and two cars in every driveway, cars as big as boats. Every lawn was manicured and every hedge was trimmed and rounded and there were no fences dividing the people who walked along on the path from their immaculate gardens and their front doors which by all accounts, were probably unlocked.
John strolled by and he felt somewhat foreign. Gone was the intoxicating plume of urgent conspiracy, that which silted his thoughts as he drove to and from work every morning, choking on fetid exhausts, beeping horns and clocks that were never set at the right time.
Gone too was the threat of being held up by bad traffic, flooding rain or some jackass with a replica gun, and never quite knowing the depth and severity of the puddle ahead, but always assuming the worst and waiting until the waters receded, or until the jackass got bored and turned the gun on himself.
John felt different as he walked along the path, staring collectedly at the rows of houses and feeling almost as he had felt as a young boy, walking home from school – almost, but not entirely. Just as he was disconnected from the city, no longer feeding his subconscious a diet [1]of fear, stress and absolute dire consequence, he too was disconnected from his youth, for even then, though his troubles and burdens could be regarded as infant and minuscule compared to his now gargantuan obligations, back then, in fact at every point in his life, everything seemed to always feel ominous and pressing.
The houses were mostly the same and he remembered, as he passed them, how in some, when he was a boy, he was fearful of being mobbed and attacked by the feral children and their tattooed and nocuous parents who smoked on the front lawns and drank beer, at a time when most folks were drinking orange juice or flavored milk; and in other houses, he imagined himself being whisked inside by the cute girl or girls that he adored and while their parents and big bully like siblings were out, having absolutely awesome, incredible sex with one, two, three, five, sometimes every single girl that he could remember from school and the movies, that he thought about in that kind of way.
As he walked past those very houses, he wondered what those girls might have become. And the feral kids too. Their houses were almost untouched, after all the time that had passed. But as he walked past, he felt neither mousey nor ravenous and he thought it a little silly, that he had ever felt that way in the past.
For now, looking into the mangled yard and watching the flickering television through the hanging wire door, he imagined himself so pacifically, as if he were merely stretching out his sleep on a Sunday morning, walking across the road, kicking down the wire door, and taking the young boy who terrified him nearly to death when he was young himself, the young boy who was now a gangly emaciated junky, and beating him to near death, until he coiled on the ground and his swollen jaw jerked and twitched uncontrollably, like a fish out of water.
“You shouldn’t do it you know.”
John looked around. He couldn’t see anyone.
“Down here,” said the voice, sounding muffled. “Under your shirt.”
John pulled the neck of his shirt out and peered down at his chest. His right nipple was already on the verge of explaining everything.
“Listen, we both know you could kick his arse. There’s no denying that whatsoever. All I’m saying is what good will come of it? What do you have to prove?”
“I can make him feel the way he made me feel.”
“Yeah. Ok. You scare the shit out of him maybe you rough him up a bit, but you really gonna make him feel like you felt? I remember too you know. It was just him, was it? The way we felt about him, it was dependent on the way we felt about so many other things. Like the sexy girls, and the overgrown bush that we thought was full of snakes and s
corpions, and the Tyrannosaurus trees that were too big to climb, and how we never had a cool pair of shoes, not once. All of it, the way we felt about everything, it was all connected like lights on a friggin Christmas tree. You take out one bulb, just one, then none of em light up. Now I don’t know man, I’m just your right nipple, but I don’t think we should be fucking with our past. You know? Think about it sure. Imagine it and even want, when we’re labored and chained into our boredom and repetition, but leave it at that.”
“What do you think will happen?” John asked.
“I don’t know,” John’s Nipple said, “but nothing good can come from fiddling around in the past. Let’s say you change one thing, the way you feel about the ass clown. You change that one thing, then how are you gonna feel about everything else? What are we even doing here? We should be at home, cheek to cheek, nipple to nipple with the woman we love.”
“But I left something here, a long time ago. I just want to see if it’s still there if I can take it back with me. I’m not looking to change anything. I know there’ll be some ripple, some event, and then like everything in life, it will all even out and I’ll be no different regardless of whatever change may come. My life will be paternal, consistent and empty. I’ll feel like this again, no matter what. But if I could feel this one thing again….”
They continued along the road – John and his nipple - barely uttering a sound as both idly stared at the rows of houses, feeling waves of familiarity and memory wash faintly over their thoughts and senses like parched breath upon dry sunburned skin.
“Is this it?” John’s Nipple asked.
“I think so” John replied.
They both stared up at the two story house from the bottom of the wooden steps. John had the right side of his shirt pulled up so his nipple could see what he could see.
“Seemed bigger you know,” John said, sounding deflated.
“I know. A lot bigger. And the steps, god the steps…”
“I could barely make it from one to the other, without falling into the gap,” John said.
[2014] The Time Traveler's Wife Page 3
