by Charles Yu
We’re on the bus? A space bus?
More like a space elevator. It’s called the Bauman transfer system. A vast network of elevators going in all different directions in ten-dimensional space–time. Some are mainlines, some are branches, some are endpoints.
Like a brain.
I guess so.
Or a bus.
If you insist.
(There’s soft atmospheric music playing, but otherwise it’s quiet. The air-conditioning feels nice. I press my face, still flushed from the heat of the temple, against the cold surface of the window.)
Hello whoever you are?
Still here.
You’re retcon, right? This is the retcon shuttle.
You got it.
Can you pick up Ed for me?
Sure. Who’s Ed?
My dog.
I don’t have any record of a dog.
Technically he didn’t exist.
You had a retconned dog for a pet?
Yeah.
(The driver hits a button on his pants. He says, Someone get the dog . . . yeah, I guess we forgot . . . hold on, let me check.)
What does your dog look like?
Kind of a mutt. Brown. Face like mushy oatmeal.
(He relays the description into his crotch. About ten seconds later, the shuttle stops. The door opens. Ed trots in, flops down next to me. I say thanks to the driver, give Ed a few hard scruffs to his furry neck.)
So why am I being retconned? Did I die?
No. You just got somewhere you weren’t supposed to go.
My own future? My empty future?
Sure.
What does that mean? That I have no future? That I’m dead?
That’s not really for me to answer.
That is annoyingly cryptic.
Thank you. I try.
(We’re zipping along through some kind of color space, hurtling through a galactic-scale elevator shaft. Up and down and all around are other elevator shafts, and snaking all around the Bauman matrix are long tubes of blue and green and red, tendrils and vectors shooting in every direction.
(Out my window I can see the edges of stories as we pass by. Some of them, the space operas, are grand circuses of light. Others are smaller systems, lonesome clusters, dim and muted and private little stories. I had no idea Universe 31 was so big. Bigger than I’d imagined.)
Don’t blame yourself.
For what?
For whatever is making you look so guilt-ridden right now.
Who else can I blame?
The guy who gave you the book.
That was myself. My future self.
No it wasn’t.
I saw him. He looked exactly like me.
You think what makes you you is what you look like?
No. Yes.
Some guy hands you a book and says this is going to be your story, and you stick to it. You don’t know what he’s up to or even who he is and you just do what he says just because he looks like you? Listen to me: think about what he asked you to do.
Stick to the story.
And what does the story do?
Makes me skip ahead.
You are a paradox.
I am a paradox.
Your life is one big paradox.
It makes no sense.
Right. Take a guess who I am.
Me.
That’s correct.
You don’t look anything like me.
Again with the physical universe stuff. What exactly do you think you are? What exactly do you think this place is? You want to tell a story? Grow a heart. Grow two. Now, with the second heart, smash the first one into bits. Gross, right? A bloody pulpy liquid mess. Look at it, try to make sense of it. Realize you can’t. Because there is no sense. Ask your computer to print out a list of every lie you have ever told. Ask yourself how much of the universe you have ever really seen. Look in the mirror. Are you sure you’re you? Are you sure you didn’t slip out of yourself in the middle of the night, and someone else slipped into you, without you or you or any of you even noticing?
(Then he hits a button and the entire back wall and every seat behind me in the shuttle blows apart and falls away, leaving me sitting on the rear edge of an exposed relativistic elevator rocketing along the track at, like, one-quarter the speed of light. The heel of my shoe is about an inch from being ground into pure energy and I realize how good the insulation of the shuttlecraft was, and how noisy the real world is outside, how noisy friction is and damage, how it sounds like the cosmic music of the spheres out here but also like all of creation is one active construction site, either construction or demolition or both, and the noise is almost unbearable and the driver isn’t shouting, he’s still talking pretty softly, and I can hear it in my head, like it’s a voice-over.
(The driver grabs me by the neck. Not in a menacing way, just kind of firm. Like I am a child, a baby whose neck he has to support. I don’t get a great look at his face, but I realize he sort of resembles me. Just tougher. With a bit more facial hair. Like if I’d had to actually work all my life driving a shuttle bus instead of in a climate-controlled desk job in IT support. He grips my head, pushing it forward, forcing me to look at the outside world.)
Now listen to me. Don’t you want to find your father?
(I manage to squeak out an answer.)
Yes.
Then what is the problem?
I don’t know.
It’s your story, numbnuts.
You think this story belongs to me?
Who else would it belong to? Are you the author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe? Own up to it.
But that isn’t me. That’s my future self.
That’s my future self, that’s my future self. Listen to you. You sound like an idiot. Who do you think you are? Imagine there’s a version of you that sees all of it. A version that knows when versions are messing with the other ones, trying to get things off track, trying to erase things. A record of all the keystrokes, the storage of all the versions, partial and deleted and written over. All the changes. All truths about all parts of our self. We break ourselves up into parts. To lie to ourselves, to hide things from ourselves. You are not you. You are not what you think you are. You are bigger than you think. More complicated than you think. You are the only version of you that is you. There are less of you than you think, and more. There are a million versions of you, half a trillion. One for every particle, every quantum coin flip. Imagine this uncountable number of yous. You don’t always have your own best interests at heart. That’s true. You are your own best friend and your own worst enemy. You can’t trust a guy who gives you a book and says, This is your life. He might have been your future, he might not. Only you know how you get there. Only you know what you need to do. Imagine there is a perfect version of you. Out of all the oceans of oceans of you, there is exactly one who is perfectly you. And that’s me. And I’m telling you: you are the only you. Does that make any sense?
Not really.
(Then he hits another button and my seat belt whips off and my chair breaks down and just as I’m about to be tossed out of the shuttle, I grab on to the back of the seat in front of me with both hands and just cling for my life.)
Also, your operating system? You should be nicer to her. You love her, right? But you’re just kind of mean to her. You should tell her. You should tell her while you have the chance. Now get back to your life and quit being such a whiny little wuss. Be a man. Find your father. Tell him you love him. Then let him go. Then go find your mom and eat her food and tell her it’s good. Then go and marry that girl you never married. What’s her name?
Marie. She doesn’t exist.
Neither does your dog, and you love him, right? Anything is possible in this kind of world. You idiot. Go marry Marie. And have a life. And grow a heart. And a pair.
(He gets out of his driver’s seat and walks back to my seat and stands in front of me. He slaps me on the face, hard. And then he slaps me on the o
ther side of the face, then he shakes me like I’m a baby, then he kisses me hard on the mouth, which, well, is one of the more disturbing experiences I have ever had, not incest exactly, because I don’t know that he actually is related to me, it’s just this weird feeling I have, and although the kiss is not, by any means, pleasant, it’s also not entirely unpleasant, sort of like when you’re a kid and you try to practice on yourself, and for a second you realize, hey, I have breath, and I can smell my own breath and it’s not great, and I’m a hot-breathed, mouth-breathing teenager just like all the other hot-breathed, mouth-breathing teenagers, and then he says, I love you, I’m doing this for your own good, and he slaps me one more time for good measure and he hits a button that opens the shuttle door, and shoves me hard out of the shuttle, falling, seemingly without end, and I’m wondering if it’s going to be stories, all stories, all the way down, just stories and stories.)
(Outside. Outside the shuttle, outside of my TM-31, no Tense Operator, no grammar drive, no device around me. Out here. Out here, another free body, another part of the broken-down universe. In a moment, I will be falling. In a moment, I will be falling again, but from here, outside, between moments, the TM-31 looks like a phone booth, looks like a shower stall, looks like a cage. From here, I can see what ten years looks like, what a lifetime looks like, spent inside that contraption, my personal mode of propulsion. I can see how I am always in perpetual motion through time, how I can never stop, obsessed with the past, projecting myself into the future, clutching at and always failing to grasp the wisp of now. For a moment, a nonmoment, I can rest, I can clear my head of the noise of existence, from up here, an inch above the time axis, I can look down and see it all laid out, I can just almost start to hear, just start to make out the original sound, the background voice, just start to remember that there was something I’ve been trying to remember for my entire life, and just when I almost feel like it’s starting to come back, just when I’ve almost got my mind wrapped around it, it’s slipping away, it is ending even as it starts, and I know I can’t stay in this space here, the next moment will be coming soon, it’s here now, and just like that, the memory of the memory of the memory of the sound is gone.)
(And then I’m falling again, Ed is falling right next to me, and we’re about smack right on top of my TM-31. I may have broken my sternum. Ow. Manage to pop the hatch, climb back in. Ahh, TAMMY. Ahh, Ed. But then I see it. A corridor of memory. A series of boxes. An endless hallway, a moving diorama, with no ceiling, no fourth wall. It’s the father–son axis. If I focus on any one point on the line, I can see the memory clearly. If I relax, and look at it as a whole, it is like a general impression of emotion and color and smells and sounds. We’re approaching low, at just the right angle, and I slide into the axis, touching down right in the middle of a memory.)
(module γ)
“We’re in your childhood,” TAMMY says.
Ed senses something different, lifts his head to sniff around.
“Why would shuttle guy drop me off here?” I say.
The view outside the TM-31 is somewhat akin to being inside a very large, very dark aquarium. There are exhibit tanks in every direction, as far as the eye can see, only instead of primordial sharks and bioluminescent jellyfish, all the specimens are me. Me at nine, me at fourteen. It’s an after-hours tour of a private museum. We drift past a memory that looks disturbingly familiar to me.
“What are you doin—?” TAMMY starts to ask, trying to interpret the scene. “Oh.”
This was that magical, feverish, sweat-soaked afternoon when I’d found my father’s stack of old Penthouses, taking it all in, trying to store those images, those poses in my memory forever, making the most of my windfall and, apparently, making particularly good use of the July 1988 issue.
“I feel like I understand you better already,” TAMMY says.
“Shut up. Shut up.”
They’re all here in this corridor, good memories and bad, humiliations and accidents and even small victories, each tableau playing out like the movement of silent, benthic sea life, viewed through the viscous and refractive medium of the years in between, in some cases dim and obscured, and others relatively clear, but never completely transparent, at best suggestions, outlines, emotions and echoes, impressions as relived through the deepest and darkest of waters.
There we are, my father and me, in the garage. Here we are, TAMMY and me, we’re standing in the garage, invisible to them, watching them through the glass case of memory-proof material along this corridor of the aquarium of the past. It looks and feels as if I am standing in the same room as they are, right in front of my younger self and my father. And it looks as if they are staring, not through me, but right back at me, and with their minds immersed in the theory of time travel and their eyes fixed on the future. Maybe, in a sense, they are staring at me. I’d like to imagine that’s what my father was gazing at all those times in the garage, his eyes fixed at some point in the middle distance, our future as a family, which is to say, me, and that maybe looking at me, even though he didn’t know what he was looking at, was some kind of unconscious inspiration for him, that whatever good feeling he might have had was a reaction to some inexplicable thing he saw in the future. I’d like to imagine even that his ideas, which seemed to come to him from nowhere, could have been just a kind of unknowing comprehension he gained from studying the ghostly contours of my TM-31, that somehow in these future-past-memory interactions he perceived the ineffable, the intangible architecture and shape of an invention he had not yet created, that by some mechanism, in trying to learn something from this private museum of their past, I am helping him, from in here, that in some way his own son was the inspiration for the work he was doing.
I want to believe that I was an idea, a feeling, a longing in my own mind, in the mind of my father.
Or even just a queasiness, an uneasy apprehension, as he stares into my face, as I stare into his.
I can see my younger self now, sniffing the air, just as Ed did, and I realize, finally, what that recurring scent was in my nostrils, the one I always associated with big moments in my life, with the oncoming arrival of something bad, of opportunity mishandled, of lost possibility. I thought it was the stinging odor of failure, like getting punched in the nose, the smell of adrenaline and then embarrassment, some biochemical reaction to learning, time and again, with my father, that the world didn’t want our invention.
Now I understand that what I thought was the smell of personal disappointment, the smell of my father’s crushed hope, the smell of fear itself, was really just the metallic-tinged ozone vapor coming from the silent exhaust of the TM-31, was just the by-product of time travel, before my father finally escaped his own timeline.
Could that be it? Why I ended up here? To find my father. My father, who managed to escape from his own life. He figured out a way to do something no one else has. Is he the one who can help me get out of this loop?
As we continue to drift along the darkened visitor paths, a particular chain of exhibits softly lights up, as if we’re being shown the way by some unseen docent. I point the TM-31 in the direction of the illuminated passage and, silently, our vessel starts to glide down that faintly glowing hallway.
Our first attempt at a prototype was a rickety contraption that my father and I put together over the better part of a summer vacation, during my three months of break before entering middle school. We called the prototype the UTM-1. It was a failure.
My mother and father had been fighting for weeks that summer. The fighting, no matter what it was about, was really about money. Not money itself, as they were both simple in that regard, happy with just enough. The problem was that there wasn’t. They fought not about money, but because of the stress from lack of it. They both knew that neither one could do anything about it. They hated themselves for fighting about it. They both tried to hide it from me, but I knew it, and they knew I knew it.
After a particularly bad Fourth of July weekend, my
mother had had enough and went to stay with her divorced sister, who lived by herself an hour away, coming back for more clothes every weekend until her closet was almost empty.
I didn’t speak to my father for the first couple of weeks after my mother moved out. He came and went, made me dinner or picked up takeout and left it for me on the counter. I took the bus to summer school and when I got home, I watched television all afternoon and night and he never said anything about it. I could hear him in the garage working on the prototype. I still felt bad about the thing I’d said months earlier, about us being poor, but I heard through the walls all those fights, was scared of him, of the voice he used, how such a normally quiet man, gentle even, especially with me, could sound like that when talking to my mom. I was a mama’s boy, I guess, and I refused to even go into the garage. Instead, I just sat on the couch and watched Star Trek reruns and generally tried to pretend that I had no idea what was going on. I had always been closer to my mother and it had seemed natural to take her side.
I’m standing here in the TM-31, with the cloaking device on, watching my prepubescent self make a sandwich, and I remember this.
I remember that when the fighting started, I would go to my room and close the door and boot up my Apple II-E. It’s all coming back now. I see myself working on a program in BASIC, a program for making a spherical object bounce around the screen, like an asteroid in space. I remember that I had gotten the physics right, that was easy. What I couldn’t figure out was what should happen at the boundaries, whether the asteroid should, when reaching the edge of the screen, bounce off and reverse direction or keep going right through, around the universe, and then emerge from the other side.
