by Charles Yu
At some point in that year together, the last year we were recognizable as a family, my father had started to sound different. He still spoke in the same manner, gruff, as if I were always on the verge of annoying him, but there was a subtle change in what he said, in the questions he asked. I could hear, within each one, another question curled up, folded up inside, hidden from me, perhaps not fully intentionally placed in there by him. They had gone from tests, games, teaching, to something else. Something like wondering. Something harder, more genuine. Asking.
“Do you think there’s something wrong?” he asked me once while I had my head buried in a control panel.
“Niven ring is cracked. We’ll need to fuse it shut.”
“No, not that. I mean with the theory.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The theory. My theory. Is it, did I take a wrong turn somewhere in the equations? Did I get it wrong?”
My father had begun asking my opinion about the world. He was admitting, in his way, what he didn’t know, what confused him, what frustrated him in this country, at work, in this town, both close and far from the center of everything. He was asking me if I was ready to be part of our family, ready to help him, ready to be a numerator.
I remember feeling small, unprepared, like I had to help him, feeling like how in the world could I possibly help him. I was angry at him for asking, sorry for him for having to, angry at myself for not being more prepared, for not being the gifted kid he once thought I was, for not being who he had hoped I would be.
The house became charged, a field of static potential energy, a kind of vectorless disappointment, a field of invisible isovoltaics, lines with arrowheads pointing in minute directional indicators, a bogglingly complex arrangement of single-point losses, the fine-toothed, fine-pixeled array, the heat map of a thermodynamic system whose ending was already foretold in the current steady state.
It wasn’t until well after midnight that it happened, by that point, we’d been staring at the chalkboard for nine and a half hours. It was cold, but to concede that to my dad would have brought I’m not sure what kind of reaction, so I just kept my mouth shut and my eyes focused on our neighbor, across the street, who was my age, kissing her boyfriend good-bye for what seemed like the entire night.
My father was undeterred. He stood there, staring at the math, working it over and over again. Theta and nu, sigma and tau. The tau doesn’t modulate, he said. “Does that make any sense to you?” he said, pointing to a board full of differential equations.
“I don’t even know what I’m looking at.”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “Sorry. It says that we are colliding with other objects.”
“Maybe we are,” I said.
“That’s impossible,” he said. “Unless . . . ”
He paused, staring off into space, when something hit him, something real but invisible. I could see it, the impact, and his face opened up, his eyes widened, his jaw dropped. So this was what he worked for, all this toiling in the garage: a moment like this. It might come once a year, or once a decade. He yelped in pain or joy. And he hugged me. He threw chalk up in the air and clapped his hands and made a huge cloud of white chalk dust and he jumped up and down and whooped and just generally looked silly. So this was what he loved: science. So this was what it looked like: my father, happy.
Then he erased the whole board and picked up a new piece of chalk and started scribbling, chalk flying, breaking the chalk, yelping in exclamation every minute or so, pounding on his own head in excitement, and when he stopped after what felt like hours, covered in white, his fingers raw, hair matted against his face, sweat dripping from his ears, in his eyes, he said, You did it, you figured it out, son, we are crashing. We are crashing into time machines everywhere. He pointed to the board, an illegible tangle of equalities and inequalities and infinities and asymptotes, and he started to explain, shouting, his voice hoarse.
I don’t remember everything he said, exactly, but I remember the feeling, the idea, where he was going with it, the idea that our equations had been too simple, too naïve, that we had been assuming a time machine was some kind of specialized object, that we only had to solve for an isolated variable, when in fact a time machine was just a special case. He said: A house can be a time machine. A room. Our kitchen, this garage, this conversation, anything can be a time machine. Just sitting there, you are. So am I.
Everyone has a time machine. Everyone is a time machine. It’s just that most people’s machines are broken. The strangest and hardest kind of time travel is the unaided kind. People get stuck, people get looped. People get trapped. But we are all time machines. We are all perfectly engineered time machines, technologically equipped to allow the inside user, the traveler riding inside each of us, to experience time travel, and loss, and understanding. We are universal time machines manufactured to the most exacting specifications possible. Every single one of us.
from How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
TM-31 calibration protocol
To calibrate the unit to your specifications, follow these steps:
Attach the sensors to your fingertips.
Put on the percepto-visual mind-output capture goggles.
Lie back.
Look at the world.
The process takes forty-three to forty-four seconds, depending on factors such as body mass, natural hair color, and degree of self-knowledge.
When the calibration is complete, your vehicle will have the same limits that you do.
You can’t build a car that violates the laws of physics. Same goes for a time machine. You can’t go just anywhere, only to places it will let you go. You can only go to places that you will let yourself go.
I am seventeen years old. My father will turn forty-nine next week. This is the best day of his life.
If a life is an arc, and an arc has a high point, then that high point is today.
We are in the car driving to the good side of town.
“You look nervous,” TAMMY says.
“This is a big day,” I say to TAMMY.
We’re going to meet an important man, the director of research at the Institute of Conceptual Technology, a gleaming black building, behind gates, that sits on top of University Road, up the hill half a mile above town, where they worked on the hard problems. The big ones, like how to keep paradox from destroying the sci-fi world. They were the people my father aspired to be, this man in particular, they lived the lives he longed for, they drove up to those gates every morning and checked with the security guard and showed their ID badges and the gates opened for them, and they drove behind them, up into the compound, the castle of secrets and ideas that only a hundred people in the world knew about, ideas that only a dozen people understood.
Today is the day, that one glorious day in my father’s life. After waiting half a lifetime, half a career, his moment. Today is the day they come calling for him. They, the world, the outside institutional world of money and technology and science fictional commerce. I remember the call. Sometime after our first wobbly orbit and before he was completely sure he knew what he was doing (or rather, before he realized he would never be completely sure about what he was doing), someone had taken notice. They found him, the military-industrial-narrative-entertainment complex, and they wanted to hear his idea. This is the day he has dreamed about, the day even I have dreamed of. This is the day that has hung over our house, in the air, for years, the cloud of a shared dream. If a lifetime in the end is remembered for a handful of days, this is one of them.
After his day of revelation in the garage, he had been back on the upswing, as a scientist, even as a burgeoning entrepreneur. Even as a husband. It was all moving up: meaning, success, our story. For a while here, it looked like we were going to make it. Whatever it is. Whatever making it is. He was going to make it, our family was, my mother and father were going to make it. The world was coming to him, finally. He had made a noise, and the world heard him,
and the world was coming. And just as he had always imagined, it was coming with money. Or more accurately, the promise of money. More than money. Prestige. The promise of prestige and a sense of mystery about him, a sense of intellectual mystery that would surround him, inventor, pioneer, scientist. He imagined the prospect of seeing his name in trade journals, rivals and admirers whispering about what he was working on, his method of working, how he got his ideas. He imagined how the people at work would react when he quit, when a month after he quit they realized what they had let slip away, how they could never afford him now, how they had ignored him all those years, put him in the cubicle, let him inch upward, never seeing the quality of his ideas.
I am excited. I am hopeful. I know how this all turns out, what happens after today, and still I feel hopeful, looking at myself, remembering how it felt to feel that way. He talks about getting something nice for my mother, about wanting to get a bigger house for us.
We’re meeting at a local park, the one in the center of the good side of town, with good photorealistic grass and globally rendered ambient sunshine, the kind they only have in this part of the city. This side is where the private high school is, the school our school doesn’t play any sports against, because the private school is too small. They don’t even field a full football team. They have a debate team. In the student parking lot for the school, the cars are bigger, and nicer, and in that part of town the houses are bigger, the sidewalks cleaner, the air purer, the kind of upper-middle-SF neighborhood where the residents took pains to create a picturesque and manicured reality.
“He looks,” TAMMY says, unsure of the word she is searching for.
“Happy.”
“No,” she says. “Not that.”
So often on drives like this my father was auto-dislocated, there but not there. Early on, by the age of nine or maybe seven or even five, I could already see, had already developed the faculty of chronodiegetical observation, a sensitivity to time–space auto-dislocation, to very subtle shifts in the manifold, the vector field of conscious attentiveness in the interior space of our family car.
But on this day, this momentous day for him, I felt him fully there with me in our Ford LTD station wagon, not even embarrassed about our car, which gave me, for just those few minutes, the ability to not be embarrassed about it, either.
We arrive first, park in the spot nearest the baseball diamond, open the back of the station wagon.
Careful, he says, unclear if it’s for me or to himself or to no one in particular.
In the time it took to pull in, park, and get out of the car, he’s gone from happy to stressed out.
He is doing his jaw-clenching thing, really working it. It almost looks painful. We move the machine gingerly, taking little baby steps the whole way from the parking lot to the baseball diamond, which seems, under the powerful sunshine of this foreign neighborhood, like a near-infinite distance. Dad doesn’t say anything, just grunts and walks a little too fast, and we have to stop twice because I’m losing my grip. We’re standing there in the sun and I notice, maybe for the first time, that my father is a man. A human man. His physicality, his sweaty person-ness.
He has very black hair, a whole head’s worth, more, thick and strong-looking and so black that it occurs to me, not then, but now, that he must actually dye it. My father is old. Not old, not even fifty, still strong in the forearms and calves and his back and on most days, he has more energy in his compact, half-century-old frame than I do in my brooding, sulky seventeen-year-old clothes hanger of a body. He parts his hair to the right and combs the sides back, and a trickle of sweat is edging downward from his hairline on the left side of his face, where his glasses, nearly square-framed (sort of a top-heavy trapezoid shape popular with engineers), gray and metallic, where the arm of his glasses presses against the skin of his temple, and I wonder why his glasses are fitted so tight, why he wouldn’t have gotten a better pair, and I remember that he picked those off the rack at the store between the postal boxes pickup station and the ice cream place, and that he picked them because they were the cheapest frames and fully covered by insurance.
His skin is taut, good living, no drinking, little meat, mostly vegetables and rice and fish and a lot of exercise in the garage and the yard and around the house and just generally being a grinder, being the kind of person who sweats because he has to, not for fun, the only real vice a very occasional cigarette snuck in the backyard after I’d gone to bed. I caught him once, not on purpose, I was going to the fridge late one night and saw him sitting there in the backyard, in one of our white plastic lawn chairs, looking up at the sky, and he didn’t even try to hide it, really, just put his hand down, but I could see the ribbon of smoke from behind him, rising and breaking up into a cloud by his head, he just looked at me and didn’t smile, but didn’t give me a face that he would normally give, it was like he’d taken off his father mask for the night and, for once, for just this moment, wasn’t going to put it back on, was going to let me see him without it, and I saw a face I didn’t recognize, crushed, drained, I saw defeat, I saw even a kind of resignation. But that isn’t how he looks now.
The director pulls up in a Town Car. We’re standing there, a little off the rubber, between the pitcher’s mound and second base. My father is so nervous it almost looks like he wants me, a senior, a kid, a B student in physics, wants me to talk for him. The director is a balding man with a severe set of eye sockets and a neatly knotted tie, a big knot, the kind neither my father nor I ever seemed to be able to do, wide and dimpled and symmetrical. His shirt has cuffs that are a different color from the rest of the shirt, except for the collar. My father’s shirt is buttoned up, he doesn’t have a pocket protector, but he has his shirt tucked into brown slacks one-eighth of an inch too short for his five-foot, four-inch frame, he looks neat and competent and like a perfect engineer. The director extends his hand to my father, nods at me politely, and then, to my surprise, shakes my hand as well.
“We have some ideas,” he says to my dad. “We have ideas about your idea.” And I realize, uh-oh, before any of it has even started: none of this is going to work out. Just the way the man is talking, standing, his tie, his cuff-linked shirtsleeves, his clear, authoritative manner of speaking, the way he manages to treat my father with deference, with respect, while at the same time giving off the impression of doing us a favor, like he is the one who is offering us a chance, because he is. Like we are the bumbling amateurs who have stumbled on a rare coin in a boot in our attic, or had the dumb luck to dig up a Precambrian fossil in our little backyard. All of our plans, our notebooks, our three-ring binders with the college-ruled eight-and-a-half-by-eleven composition paper, all of our one-centimeter-square light green graph paper, every open-ended project, what had it amounted to? Just one success, one partial success. Sure, we are here, this man came to see us, but in the grand scheme of things, we are minor. We are, but for one possible exception, failures. This man has patented world-changing technology, has created whole industries at his desk, in his lab, this man does more real science in a good month than we’ve done in almost ten years, has thrown away better ideas than the best we will ever come up with.
“He seems . . . ,” TAMMY starts, still unsure of what she’s thinking, and now watching, with her little pixilated face, as intently as I am.
And what had we done? We had plugged away, scrap by scrap, paper scrap and metal scrap, we had plied our trade, journeymen, not even a trade, we had our little hobby, and now we were a curiosity. That was it. We have still never gotten anything right. We are dreamers who have stuck around long enough to have one semi-interesting dream. This is not going to work out. I know it on some level. This is us, this is us in relation to the world. If I could draw it, it would look like my father and me very small, world very big, with a barrier between us and the world. We are too slow, too methodical, too square, too plodding. We are naïve. This is how it has always gone with us.
This man, though, this man knows
things. He is a gentleman, he makes me feel small, makes my father look small, makes our family seem tiny, in his formality, his politeness, his kindness, even. He can afford to be kind, he can afford something I have never experienced until now (something I will soon learn about at the university, where some of my upper-middle-class classmates, with their strangely nice bedsheets and faster computers and discreetly expensive clothes tossed casually over the chair or in piles on the floor, so different from my prepressed, store-label khakis, folded in my half-empty drawer, how these classmates took me seriously, were nice to me in a way that got under my skin, how at ease they seemed, at ease in the science fictional world, in this science fictional country, how perfectly nice and respectful they were to me, asking me where I was from, and not meaning my parents, how they had etiquette and manners and even political sensitivities, and yet I could never put a word to it, to what bothered me about their niceness, an idea to it until, in freshman literature, second semester, I stumbled across the phrase noblesse oblige, and immediately flushed with embarrassment right there in class, blood hot in my temples and ears, flushed red in the face at the words, as if a joke, as if it were all a joke, one big joke on me and my dad for all these years, a joke I wish I’d learned long ago), this director of research, this man on top of the profession, he can afford to take us seriously. He has a kind of practical intelligence, savvy. My father and I lack resolve, self-confidence, the willingness to impose ourselves on others, on a situation, on a set of circumstances, to step on things, to willfully forget our deficiencies, we are too self-aware to turn off that nagging internal critic, editor, co-author, to suspend our understanding that we are trying to do what we really have no business doing. We aren’t like the director. This man is someone for whom the world isn’t a mystery. The world is a boulder, but it has levers and he knows when and where and how to apply just the right amount of force, and it moves for him, while my father and I, pushing up against it, don’t have any angle, any torque, no grip or traction or leverage. My father thinks success must be in direct proportion to effort exerted. He doesn’t know where or how to exert the least amount for the most gain, doesn’t know where the secret buttons are, the hidden doors, the golden keys. He thinks that, even if you have a great idea, there have to be trials and tribulations, errors and failures, a dark night of the soul, a slog, a time in the desert, a fallow period, a period of quiet, a period of silent and earnest and frustrated toiling before emerging, victorious, into the sunshine and acclaim. My father makes to-do lists, makes plans, makes business plans. This is how he starts, always with a blank sheet of graph paper. We make bullet points. We identify the key areas we need to research further. We try to figure out how to research those areas. We work in a vacuum. We work in his study. We ponder. We stare at our feet. We stare at the ceiling. We talk to each other, create a world, create a tiny, artificial, formal space, on a blank sheet of paper, where we can imagine rules and principles and categories and ideas, all of which have absolutely nothing to do with the actual world out there. We don’t actually do anything. He writes things down, he crosses them out, he goes back and starts again. The world has always felt just out of his reach. The world of commerce, of men taking advantage of situations, of competition, of sharp practice and words and elbows and speed, a world that was too fast for him. And yet my father will never stop trying, my father will go on for years after this day, thinking that if he just reads another book, just figures out the key, the secret, the world, the world of science fiction with its promise and possibility, will open up to him, to us, for us.
