by Charles Yu
Could this be the time? Is this the day that happens? My father is talking slowly. The director asks him questions, looking at the machine, standing off to a distance, trying to study it while listening to my dad. I can’t tell what he’s thinking, it could be that he can already see some kind of problem, some wires crossed, misplaced, some fundamental flaw in its architecture. Or maybe he’s just listening to my dad talk slowly, too slow, that’s always been a problem for him, I’ve even tried to hint at it, and the way the director is looking at my dad, a little quizzically, a bit puzzled, patiently but like that patience will not last forever, it just seems impossible that we will actually pull this off. And yet, there he is, he’s still asking questions and my dad is answering them and the director is nodding, and even smiling, even squinting his eyes trying to visualize something my father is saying to him, and somehow, even though I already know what is going to happen, I can’t help feeling excited, I can see that my dad is feeling the same thing, too. If a lifetime in the end is remembered for a handful of days, this is one of them. This is a day when my father is everything he has always wanted to be. Everything I have always wanted him to be. Everything he normally isn’t. But maybe this is who he really is, maybe we go through life never actually being ourselves, mostly never being ourselves. Maybe we spend most of our decades being someone else, avoiding ourselves, maybe a man is only himself, his true self, for a few days in his entire life.
As I watch my father talk about his project, our project, I stop recognizing him. He is saying the right things in the right way and now I am starting to feel ashamed for ever doubting him, for the way I had ducked my head at the director when he shook my hand in a gesture of unconscious, preemptive apology for taking up the man’s time, which we presumably did not deserve. I feel ashamed of it, of myself, ashamed for all the head ducking I’ve done in my life, literal and otherwise, for the way I go through life apologizing for my father, for myself, for our family. I feel angry at myself for not having realized all this years ago, for all the wasted opportunities, avenues that I had looked down wistfully thinking, If only we were more prepared, more savvy, if only we had our acts together. If only we weren’t ourselves, could somehow be better versions of our selves. I am angry at myself, realizing how many hundreds or thousands of instances in which my father must have looked at me, his son, looked in my eyes to see if I believed in him, if I had any more optimism than he did, if I saw the world just as he did, or if instead he had imparted his sadness and feeling of incompleteness on me. I have let him down. I have let him down countless times. I am seventeen years old, and even then I know that seventeen years old is not very old, but it is old enough to have disappointed him, old enough to have been able to help him, and then chosen not to, it is old enough to be a coward, to have not protected him when you could have, even should have. Seventeen years old is not old, but it is old enough to have hurt your father.
And now, here I am, feeling proud, feeling guilty about feeling proud, feeling stupid about feeling guilty about feeling proud because I should be in the moment, trying to help him, instead of wallowing in my own guilt over my belated and unearned and undeserved pride. My father explains his theory, which, to this day, I still wonder if he made up on the spot. He is doing it, he is pulling it off. I am his son. This man has asked to come see us, not the other way around, and we are worth his time.
“The acquisition of tensed information,” my father explains, to both of us listening and possibly to himself as well, “that is the key here.” How do we find out about information at a time other than our present? This was the key insight I had in my laboratory one night (me: you did?), while looking at my son working on the bench test (me: are you talking about me?).
The director breaks in to ask a question. What does any of this have to do with time travel?
A good question, my father counters, sounding uncharacteristically polished. The director is even more hooked. My father explains that humans, because of our memories, are good at perceiving intervals of time. That we all have some intuitive understanding of scope and scale and size and units and structure and sequence, an innate ability to organize and process information about such intervals.
“The key question of time travel,” my father says, “is this: How do we know what it means to perceive an event as presently occurring, rather than as a memory of a past event? How can we tell present from past? And how do we move the infinitesimal window of the present through the viewfinder at such a constant rate? Why can we see a faraway snow-tipped mountain range, or a jet taking off, or the moon, or the sun, or stars, and not an event that took place a moment ago, let alone a month ago, a year, thirty-three years ago?”
The director is nodding and smiling and my father is smiling a little and I’m allowing myself a smile.
“Maybe it’s because we need to be able to do so, for our survival. For food-gathering purposes, for outrunning the saber-toothed tiger, for jumping across jagged rocks in a rushing river, to care for our crying infant, we need to focus, we need to know what is going on now. That is to say, our physical ability to understand time has been honed by evolutionary pressures to select for traits useful for survival, in all aspects, and time perception is no exception or special case or even magical or mysterious case.”
My father looks at me and smiles when he says this next part. “Which is where I started to have hope. If there is no absolute logical reason why we could not experience the past just like we experience the present, perhaps we can untrain, or perhaps retrain, ourselves to have such a capacity. Maybe some lobe in our brains, buried in a fold given over to language or calculation of differential survival rates or logic, maybe within that brain structure lies the long-dormant (for our species at least) ability to experience time in a different way.”
The director here raises his eyebrows at the suggestion that my father seems to be making: time travel is not a technology built outside, with titanium and beryllium and argon and xenon and seaborgium, but rather it is a mental ability that can be cultivated.
“We have evolved to have current, temporally proximal beliefs about the world,” my dad says, “which is to say local-scale accurate beliefs, but perhaps in this case, local-scale accuracy is not the only goal worthy of obtaining. We perceive the present, but we remember the past. The converse is not possible. We obviously cannot remember the present. Or can we? Déjà vu. What does that feel like? It is the oddest experience, one everyone has had, one that is commonly described as a feeling of certainty that one has experienced just this exact experience before. Which in itself is quite strange, the idea that one could have an identical experience, down to the last detail, down to the internal qualia, the exact interior frame of mind, emotions, a frame of consciousness duplicated with startling exactitude, that would be unsettling enough. And yet it’s stranger than that.”
And I know what he means. I’m standing here, on this baseball field. I have done this before, but not exactly.
“We experience the present and remember the past,” Dad continues. “We can’t remember the present, except what is déjà vu but a memory of the present? And if we can remember the present, why can’t we experience the past? What kind of machine is this? This machine, what my son and I have built, this is a perception engine, and it works in your mind as much as anywhere else.”
TAMMY says she’s figured it out, what that look is that my father has, and I tell her to shut up, because truly today for once in all of our days, it is going great, just great, really great, and for a brief moment at the top of the arc, we weigh nothing and it seems like maybe the arc wasn’t an arc after all, but a straight shot, up to where we have been looking, not aiming, afraid to even admit our aim could ever be so high, but looking, secretly, at a different trajectory of life, and in that moment I think maybe we might have escaped the pull of our lives, of our story, of the chronodiegetic field, of the forces of physics in this science fictional universe, the path and shape and limitations, the constr
aints, invisible, intangible, but more real than anything, the parabolic track we are on, the equation floating next to our function, I think maybe my father has done it, and then slowly, over days and weeks and months, slowly over a year, and also all at once, in that hot moment at the park on the grass with the day brightening and the air heating up, I begin to realize that this feeling is a familiar one, one I have felt before.
“He looks like he already knows it won’t work,” TAMMY says, finally, just at the moment I see it, in his face, see what she’s talking about, see that it’s not the freedom of escape I am feeling, rather it’s the weightlessness that is, in fact, the telltale sign of inescapability, that brief instant being the necessary top, the maximum, the defining characteristic of an arc, that weightlessness is really the last second, tenth of a second, the last few milliseconds we will enjoy as we start to come down from the top.
Failure is easy to measure. Failure is an event.
Harder to measure is insignificance. A nonevent. Insignificance creeps, it dawns, it gives you hope, then delusion, then one day, when you’re not looking, it’s there, at your front door, on your desk, in the mirror, or not, not any of that, it’s the lack of all that. One day, when you are looking, it’s not looking, no one is. You lie in your bed and realize that if you don’t get out of bed and into the world today, it is very likely no one will even notice.
Hitting the peak of your life’s trajectory is not the painful part. The painful day comes earlier, comes before things start going downhill, comes when things are still good, still pretty good, still just fine. It comes when you think you are still on your way up, but you can feel that the velocity isn’t there anymore, the push behind you is gone, it’s all inertia from here, it’s all coasting, it’s all momentum, and there will be more, there will be higher days, but for the first time, it’s in sight. The top. The best day of your life. There it is. Not as high as you thought it was going to be, and earlier in your life, and also closer to where you are now, startling in its closeness. That there’s a ceiling to this, there’s a cap, there’s a best-case scenario and you are living it right now. To see that look in your parents’ faces at the dinner table at ten, and not recognize it, then to see it again at eighteen and recognize it as something to recognize, and then to see it at twenty-five and to recognize it for what it is.
The worst part of the drive back from the park was not that we didn’t talk, that would have been okay, fine, that would have been better than what happened, which was my father pretending to be happy. He turned on the radio, he asked what song I wanted to listen to, he asked me about the song on the radio, he even tried, and this is the worst part, to sing along. I knew what was happening, but he kept it up for long enough and was singing and smiling all crazy enough that I wondered if he’d burst some pipe in his head, if the pressure and force of the crushing blow had damaged his own emotional machinery.
There’s my dad, pretending to be okay, pretending he isn’t reeling, hasn’t just had the wind and life and fight knocked out of him, hasn’t just had something inside of him, the last bit of anything delicate inside, smashed into a couple hundred tiny pieces.
I see myself staring straight ahead at the road, trying hard not to look over at my father, already replaying the events in my head.
“So,” the director had said, “only one thing left to do. Fire it up.”
My dad and I look at each other. As agreed, he’s the one to get in. He takes off his suit jacket, hands it to me, and I lay it over my arm, hoping to impart some ceremony to the moment. My father has on short sleeves under his jacket, and if the director thinks it odd, he doesn’t show it. Dad looks small in there, his shoulders a little slumped. He nods and I close the hatch.
I am watching my self thinking, We should have stayed in our garage. I am watching him think that and I am thinking it myself now. Why couldn’t we have just stayed in there, in our laboratory, our space. We should have stayed where we were safe. Maybe things would have been different, maybe the thing would have worked, the piece of junk, maybe I wouldn’t have had to watch my father sweat and strain and stand there awkwardly, trying everything for what is probably eight, ten minutes but feels like my entire life. It is, it was, it has been my entire life, my father’s life, too, those few eternal unending merciless minutes dragging and stretching on in silence, the director ever the gentleman, unwaveringly polite, which makes it worse, polite until the end, the etiquette of a situation like this unclear to me and to him, as we stand there for the awful duration of this stretch of time on what was supposed to have been the best, brightest-shining hour of my father’s story, through the first phase of let me try this, it must be that, simple fix, to the heh heh, that’s funny, this never happens in our lab (me knowing, and hoping the director doesn’t know, even as we are failing, hoping that the director at least can’t imagine what my father means when he says “our lab,” our messy garage in our messy house, with our scribblings everywhere, our workshop with the random objects everywhere, a basketball, an old yearbook of mine, a rusted fork sitting on top of a tray full of assorted screws and nails and bolts, bad tools, bent and tired, decade-old oil stains under our LTD wagon, the cat’s litter box stinking the whole place up), then on to the stage of oh what were we thinking that we could pull off something like this, the stage of self-questioning, asking me, Hey son, do you remember if I checked this or that, a stalling tactic, a misdirection, of me realizing then how good a man my father was and is, how, even in his worst moment, he would never, ever, in a million years blame me for something, even if it was my fault, not like this, not in front of this stranger, even if it was my fault, and who knows, it probably was, I wasn’t half the scientist my father is or was, I never could have been, of me realizing my father would have never even thought about trying to pin it on me, though he could have, it would have been easy enough, and I wish I could freeze time right then and there forever, wish I could hold that knowledge forever, the realization that, even in the gut-turningly horrible awkwardness of that situation, the absolute low of all lows, in the most desperate minute of this hour of his greatest embarrassment and unexplained bad luck and, yes, failure, even though he could be absent and fuzzy and unlocatable and clench his jaw at me and always be disappointed in me and use silence as a form of cruelty to me and my mother, despite all of that, my father would always protect me against the world, would always stand between the world and me, would always be a buffer, a protective covering, a box for me to hide in.
And then finally comes the last stage, we can almost go home now, in the hot car and then the cold garage and the even colder house, can almost go back into our box and hide, but not before a couple more minutes of head-scratching, my father actually standing there scratching his head with his hand, his small hand, strong and with well-defined veins, but still small, how the smallness of his hand, of his entire height just hit me, the image of him looking like an immigrant, like a bewildered new graduate student in front of the eminent professor, a small man with a small hand in a large foreign country, not so much scratching his head as just pushing his hand up against it, as in, Oh what’s happened, oh why now, why like this, betrayed by his own invention, the anguished embarrassment made that much worse by all of his soliloquy, by all of his grandstanding theoretical monologue that preceded it, and worst of all, because he has just finished explaining how his machine is an idea, is a device of the mind, this failing not being just a fluke, not just a piece of bad mechanical luck, but an actual failure of his own mind, his own concept. The silence is just unbearable now, and to make things worse, now kids are starting to appear at the edges of the diamond, parents pulling up with coolers, bags of bats, the slapping of mitts, the thwock of warm-up catch along the first-base line, people a little curious about what’s going on, feeling the eyes on us.
A father and son run out toward right field, the dad with a ball and glove and the boy with his slightly undersized bat, not the standard Little League aluminum bat that the o
ther kids have, that sends a ringing noise through the air, but a wooden bat, a Louisville Slugger tee-ball bat. I see him now, holding that bat, trotting out along the chalk line behind his dad, a jaunty step, he’s proud of his dad, who looks like a real athlete, like he could have played two sports in college, he’s looking around to see if the other kids are looking at him, but he’s also a kid and he’s taking it in, looking at the grass, squinting up at the sun, at the sky, stunned by the fullness of the day. Trying to absorb it all, hoping maybe time will stop right this instant, forever, and never start again. That this will be it, right here, on this field, that’s all. I see myself at seventeen, already feeling nostalgia for being a kid his age, feeling the weight of all the bright Saturdays I spent in the dank garage instead of in this bath of sunlight and heat and blue and green, embarrassed for how little I had lived, how little my father had lived, wondering if it was something I would pass on to my son. This was the big day for my dad and I had woken up that morning amazed at the rarity of a day like today, when we might come home champs, when we (my dad, me, our family) might get a win for once, but now, standing here looking at all of this, I remember how stupid I felt as I realized that for most of these kids, a day like this happened every weekend, that none of these kids thought of life that way, as a series of mostly bummer days with the occasional chance at getting a win against life. Who thinks that way? I was seventeen. Who thinks that way at seventeen?
