by Charles Yu
“Kids at school say that you,” I start to say.
“That I? I’m what?”
“That you’re, uh.”
“Strange?”
“Crazy.”
I actually say this. I remember saying this. I remember regretting that I had said it even as I was saying it. I regret it even now. Regret what it started, regret all that came after.
He keeps his eyes on the road. I can’t tell if he’s mad. He doesn’t say anything. I’m scared I’ve angered him somehow; I have a ten-year-old’s crude sense of having found a subject that is dangerous, a son’s sense of having wandered into the line of fire, into some sort of yet-to-be-discovered axis running between my father and me, and yet, and still, for some reason I keep going. Not to hurt him, no, I keep going just because, for the first time in my young life, it feels like my father is here, in the car, with me, listening to me, that for the first time ever I have his attention not as a boy, his son, but as a person, as a future man, as someone who is just starting to go out into the world and bring parts of it back, parts that can remind him that I won’t always be his to teach, parts that may remind him of how small our family is.
I ask him if it’s true what they say.
He says what’s that.
“Do you really think it’s possible to travel to the past?”
He’s got to be mad now. He doesn’t get mad often, but when he does. Not good. I’m sure he’s mad, I’m positive, I’m considering how much it would hurt if I opened the car door and just jumped out, but then he just laughs and takes his foot off the gas and pulls into the slow lane. “We’re time traveling right now,” he says, the cars speeding by and honking in Dopplerized frequencies.
And then he pulls completely off the road into the parking lot of a video rental store and shuts off the engine and I am thinking he’s doing this to somehow prove his point even further, that he’s going to explain to me how even now, completely motionless, we are still time traveling, I am thinking I’m about to get a lecture about how I would understand this if I just kept up with my math homework, but instead, my father turns to me and tells me, in all seriousness, this idea he has had, a secret plan, an invention.
My father, the inventor. I had never thought of him that way before that afternoon, although a small part of me felt lifted, opened, as if the world was bigger than I’d imagined, that there were parts of my father I could never have guessed at. I thought of him as old, as someone with a job, as, well, Dad. Not someone with dreams or ideas. My father had ambition. Ambition he had never previously shared with me, and why would he, I was ten, but he also didn’t share it with my mother, or anyone else. He kept it inside, in his study, in a box, in himself.
My father had originally come from a faraway country, a part of reality, a tiny island in the ocean, a different part of the planet, really, a different time, where people still farmed with water buffalo and believed that stories, like life, were all straight lines of chronology, where there was enough magic left in the real, in the humidity of August and the mosquito and the sun and birth, enough magic and terror in the strangeness of family itself, that time travel devices were not only unnecessary, but would have diminished the world, would have changed its mechanic, its web of invisible dynamics. The technology of the day was enough, the technology of the sunrise and sunset, the week of work and rest in cycles, in rhythm, sixteen hours of hard rice-farming labor, the remainder of time in a day left for eating and sleeping, the seasons, the years passing by, each one a perfect machine.
As he described his invention to me, I found it hard to look at him. He was talking a little too loud, for one thing, which, if you knew my father, was alarming all by itself. My father was quiet, but not meek, soft-spoken but not unsure. It was more than that. Quiet speaking was more than just a controlled softness of the voice, more than the virtues of decorum and tact and propriety. Quiet speaking was more than manners, or a personal preference or style, or personality in total. It was a way of moving about the world, my father’s way of moving through the world. It was a survival strategy for a recent immigrant to a new continent of opportunity, a land of possibility, to the science fictional area where he had come, on scholarship, with nothing to his name but a small green suitcase, a lamp that his aunt gave him, and fifty dollars, which became forty-seven after exchanging currency at the airport.
And here he was, voice raw, talking fast, excited in a way that made me uncomfortable, hopeful in a way that worried me. I didn’t believe it, or maybe I didn’t believe in him, maybe I’d absorbed enough defeat in my short life from watching him, the look on his face as he pulled into the driveway every night, that I already doubted my own father. I thought he was brilliant, of course, he was my father, and a hero, but would the world understand him? Would the world give him what he deserved? There were opposing vectors, stress from the tensors pulling between what was and what could be, between his science fictional hopes and the reality of the station wagon we were sitting in.
He spilled out his secret theory in an excited rush, and part of me was thrilled that he wanted to tell me this, that I mattered to him, that I was grown-up enough to trust with his idea, with his hope, with his plan, but I couldn’t show any of that to him, so I just stared straight ahead, through our grit-coated windshield, at the posters in the window for Back to the Future and Peggy Sue Got Married and Terminator. All of those stories about time travel, they were comforting, and at the same time it bothered me how they always made it seem fun and how everything fit into place, how things could only ever be how they were supposed to be, how the heroes found a way to change the world while still obeying the laws of physics.
I remember my mind drifting to the last time our family had gone into the video store, together, how my mom and dad took forever picking a movie and I’d wandered off and found, next to the licorice and cardboard boxes of chocolate-covered raisins, a comic book. The story itself was a trifle, some sort of third-class superhero, a forgettable guy with some useless power. It was something else in the book that caught my attention.
Way in the back of the comic, in the advertisement pages, in the lower left-hand quadrant of the second to last page, a little box, there was a rectangular ad, maybe four inches by five, that read at the top, in bold all-caps:
CHRONO-
ADVENTURER
SURVIVAL KIT
There were no exclamation points or any squiggly lines indicating weirdness or jokiness, or any other graphics to signify, This is for kids, this is a toy, this is just make-believe. It just had those words, and it was dead serious. Finding that little box of text, with those words in there, felt like I’d found a secret, a technology no one else knew about, something that might help me be the hero of the block, that might help my dad be the hero at his work, that might even help my dad and mom.
For five dollars and ninety-five cents, plus a self-addressed stamped nine-by-twelve envelope, sent to a PO box somewhere in a faraway state, the good people at Future Enterprises Inc. would send you a survival kit “of great use and convenience for any traveler who finds himself stranded on an alien world.”
Half of me knew it was stupid. I was old enough to know better, but on the other hand, that font! Those letters in all-caps. It didn’t look attractive and well formatted, the kind of thing a kid’s eye would be drawn to; it looked like it came from a typewriter, unevenly spaced, like there was too much text, too many ideas and words and things that someone had to say, had to let people know about, it looked like it came from the mind of a brilliant, lonely, forty-year-old man, sitting somewhere in his basement in that faraway state, half crazy, sure, but on to something.
According to the ad, the kit had over seventeen pieces, but from the picture I could only see a plastic knife and a Chrono-Adventurer patch to sew on your clothes, and a map of the terrain of the science fictional universe, and what looked like a decoder, which I figured was for translating languages spoken by different life-forms—all of which totaled four piece
s. I wondered what the other thirteen pieces were.
The ad said the kit was your only chance for survival in the harsh environment of an alien universe, but what I remember the most was the picture in the ad, not even a picture, but a tiny line drawing of a boy and his father, holding hands, not smiling, just staring out at you from their little box in the text, buried in the corner of the back page of that comic, and the ad didn’t say, but it was reasonable to assume, to a ten-year-old me, that they were unlucky enough to have been stranded, but at least they had gotten the kit.
This is what I was thinking about when my father, a little out of breath, finished telling me everything he had kept bottled up inside, when he had finally confessed his most guarded dreams and stopped talking. For a long moment, it was silent in the car, and then he turned to me.
“So,” my father said, “what do you think?”
I shrugged and kept my eyes fixed on the families in the window of the video store choosing their movies together, ready for a night of fun and popcorn.
“Dad,” I said, “are we poor?”
I remember he was just starting to look disappointed that I wasn’t at least a little bit excited. Then I said it. To this day, I don’t know why I said it, where it came from. I was ten years old, he was my father, I wouldn’t want to hurt him, couldn’t know cruelty yet, what or why or how to be cruel. Could I? Did I? Of course I did. Maybe I’d learned it from the kids at school, had already incorporated it into my own growing theory of the world. Maybe I’d absorbed the capacity to hurt someone by listening to my parents every night, who were under the impression that turning the volume on the television all the way up somehow drowned out the voices, when the truth was and is (and my father, of all people, should have known this about the physical properties of materials, about what goes through walls, what moves through houses, what is muffled and what makes it through): everything gets transmitted. Call it the law of conservation of parental anger. It may change forms, may appear to dissipate, but draw a big box around the whole space, and add up everything inside the box, and when you’ve accounted for everything you find that it’s all there, in one phase or another, bouncing around, some of it reflected, some of it absorbed by the smaller bodies in the house. The edge in their voices and turning up the TV only meant that I listened to them destroy each other to a sound track of Fantasy Island or The Incredible Hulk or The Love Boat.
Even now, to this day, I don’t know if I said it because I was thinking about that survival kit, which I knew I couldn’t ask him for, although I wasn’t sure why, exactly, not this month, maybe for Christmas, or maybe next year. I didn’t know why exactly, I just knew not to do it without anyone having to tell me, and that made me sad for my father, but at the same time it made me a little mad.
Maybe I just wanted a reaction from the man, who was so often cold and distant with Mom and even sometimes with me, the same man who had just now spoken to me about math and science and science fiction with more passion than I had ever seen him speak about anything. I wanted a reaction and I was sure I’d gotten it. He had to be mad now, I thought, but I was wrong again. He just started the car and backed out without a word.
I spent the rest of the drive home with a puddle of melted Popsicle juice pooling on the top of my tightly clenched fist, afraid to move, surprised that he didn’t even look a little mad. He just looked embarrassed. Or really, he looked crushed.
And in truth, I was half asking and half not-really-asking-but-knowing-the-answer, and I think that mixture of genuinely not understanding and half starting to understand the reality of our family, of my father and his job and his dreams and our car and our neighborhood, it did something to him. It hurt him deeply, but maybe also lit a fire in him, it put a distance between us that would persist for years into the future, and yet it opened up something between us, a channel, an axis, a direct line for honest communication.
from How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
socioeconomic strata
Minor Universe 31 is composed of three basic regions, which are sometimes informally referred to as neighborhoods.
At the lower end of the scale are the unincorporated areas, which have, as the name suggests, no particular look and feel, no genre.
Although sometimes referred to as “reality,” it should be stressed that this layer of Universe 31 is quantitatively, but not qualitatively, different from the other regions. The difference is one of degree, not nature.
On the other end of the scale, the affluent inhabitants of the upper-middle to upper-end neighborhoods, perhaps searching for authenticity, or nostalgic for a different age, devote significant amounts of their time and resources to the creation of a simulated version of the unincorporated areas. Considerable expense is required for the upkeep of these highly stylized “reality” gardens, with the verisimilitude of one’s personal family garden being a point of pride and a symbol of status among this stratum of inhabitants.
The remainder of the SF jurisdiction is occupied by the large, stable, middle-class regions, i.e., the subdivided science fictional zones, which make up the bulk of Universe 31.
A few decades ago, it became permissible for families to emigrate from the unincorporated areas of “reality” into the science fictional zones.
Permissibility, however, has not necessarily translated into economic permeability.
Despite improvement in recent years, successful transition into the SF zone remains difficult to achieve for many immigrant families, and even after decades of an earnest and often desperate striving for acceptance and assimilation, many remain in the lower-middle reaches of the zone, along the border between SF and “reality.”
Although technically SF, the look and feel of the world in these borderline neighborhoods is less thoroughly executed than elsewhere in the region, and outcomes of story lines can be more randomized, due to a comparatively weaker buffer from the effects of 31’s incomplete physics. As a result, the overall quality of experience for the residents of these striving areas is thinner, poorer, and less substantial than of those in the middle and upper regions, while at the same time, due to its mixed and random and unthemed nature, less satisfying than that of reality, which, although gritty, is, at least, internally consistent.
You can get into a lot of trouble in the city when you live like I do.
I’ve been on the job for a decade of my life now, but it’s only been a week since I was last in the city. All the techs talk about how weird it is. You forget that your life is a short window, that you are stuck in the present, forget how your life is still here, waiting for you, wondering where you are, going on without you. You forget that people know who you are, think about you, might even be happy to see you.
I don’t feel like running into anyone now, though. I’m only here for a night, and I have nothing to show for my lost decade except for biweekly paychecks from the company that, year after year, broke my father’s heart.
I take the subway uptown, to the second-to-last stop. I find my way through the old neighborhood, around the all-concrete park where it’s a bad idea to walk this late, up the little hill near where the subway comes above ground, turn the corner and there it is.
From where I’m standing near the dumpsters, I can see my mom in the window of the kitchen. It’s two thirty-one and fifty-eight seconds in the morning. At two thirty-two she will look up, smile. She looks up, smiles. She’s washing vegetables.
She’s on the second floor. I jump and catch the ladder, pull myself up onto the fire escape, get a footing on the outside rail, and jump over. She’s got her back to me. I duck down, watch her moving around the kitchen, setting the table for two.
“Come in,” she says. “You want me to squeeze you some orange juice?”
She’s not talking to me, of course. Well, me, but not me. She’s in the prepaid time loop, living the same stretch of her life, over and over again. It’s only an hour, which is what she can afford. I told her I’d help
her upgrade, maybe ninety minutes, but she just patted my hand and said she would let me take care of her when I made it big. Whatever that means.
She goes over to the counter, heaps food onto a plate, and sets it down in front of my chair. She looks up, like she’s remembering something, almost as if she could sense me here.
“Hi, Mom,” someone behind me says, and she turns to look out the window. It’s my hologram me, coming up the fire escape, the way I just did.
“Get inside,” she says. “It’s cold.”
“Love you,” hologram me says.
“Scoop the rice.”
I watch my ghost-self eat as she continues to move around the kitchen, the whole time, never really looking at hologram me, just as she never really looked at me, either. She just wants someone to take care of, something to worry about. That’s all. That’s enough. I’m watching her idea of me, who is, in turn, watching her. She’s just going about her business.
After a while, my ears and nose are cold enough that it occurs to me that I should check my watch. Twenty-eight minutes, right on time.
She clears all the plates, washes them, and starts cooking again. I recognize this part. The loop is about to end. Before it can reset, I tap on the window, lightly so as not to scare her, but she nearly falls down in fright anyway.
She snaps out of her time loop, groggy. Not quite happy to see me. It’s been so long that it almost hurts her more that I’m here. This brief visit is just a reminder of how long it will be until the next one.
She opens the window, doesn’t invite me in.
“You never call. You should call more often.”
