The doctor who tells me about temporal recall is my doctor.
I didn’t meet her outside your physiotherapy room. I met her months ago, but she visits me when I’m outside your physiotherapy room.
This is the thing about memory—it’s a mosaic, not a list. Not a timeline you can open out and stretch from here to eternity.
Memory is what happens when you tear up a whole book of paper and toss the bits and pieces into the air.
She tells me this ability to cross universes comes with a price. Like everything. Like love.
You’re going to die.
But everybody dies.
You’re going to die sooner than others.
Sooner than Billy.
Billy, how’s your head?
When you open your eyes. When they remove the bandages. When your raw dark eyes look into mine.
How’s yours? you ask.
Because we made a pact. We have a deal. If one of us dies, the other one follows.
You’re the one following me through time, after all. Through all of our millions of lives. My millions of memories of us, dying.
It eats into my brain in every life, this madness. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. You can’t hold so many memories and lives in your head and not overflow, or be eaten. My brain is eating itself to make room for more. Every life just chewing on the grey squishy bits, synapses snapping between my teeth, creating little jolts of electricity. And with each bite I make space for another life.
I make space for you, Billy. Allen. Tristan. Love.
So many names. I write them all in my notebook in the hope that one day you might find it, somehow, through time. And you will recognize yourself. Like I recognize you in every life.
We recognize each other.
The body dies, over and over, but the soul untethered becomes caught in certain gravity. This gravity is you, pulling the disparate parts of my matter to a cohesive whole.
Here we are through all scenescapes of time.
An asylum.
A desert.
A hospital after a crash.
(On a glacier.)
In rooms, fighting.
On the road, racing.
I write it all down, too many pages to count. Tear them up when you’re finished reading. Throw all of the pieces into the air and let’s start again. At the same time. Again. When I’m old and you’re young. When I’m dying and you’re alive. When you chase my death because we promised. You’ll die again too. We’ll run together toward the other side of life. Through each veil of waiting memories. They wait for us to find them.
Are we always together?
Yes, always.
Again and always, running together.
Author’s Notes to My Younger Self: Be kind to yourself and cultivate a love of learning and connection. Human beings grow, develop, and become compassionate through honest introspection and connection to others. Rein in the ego, attempt a wider perspective to balance too much self-involvement. Seek joy and recognize pain as a part of the whole. Life is a spectrum of experiences.
Sympathétique
Alvaro Zinos-Amaro
When we arrive at the parador in the early evening I should be pleased, for it’s been a long journey, but instead anxiety snakes through my mind as an unfamiliar silence descends within. The guiding voice I’ve relied on all these years is gone.
The incandescent Andalusian sun even at this late hour only grudgingly relinquishes its seemingly indomitable hold on the sky, a golden furnace shimmering with orange hues streaked with blood. My grey tee clings to my armpits and tugs at my skin as I insist on manual driving while hunting for a parking spot. After finding one, I refrain from picking at the dried sweat crusted on the back of what I suspect is a now sunburned neck, irritated at myself for having forgotten to apply sunscreen. Maybe I can blame Dr. Linares back home, who threatens me each time I postpone my big four-oh checkup, and who warned me to go easy on salty foods and booze during this trip but failed to mention anything as banal as sun protector.
Jann and I unload our suitcases with few words. I tell myself the tingling in my forehead, which has been intensifying with each mile that’s brought us closer to the coast, is simply fatigue.
I know this is not true.
Jann, with her fresh tilted frisette haircut and breezy chiffon overlay blouse, appears just as cool and prim as when we boarded our flight from Toronto to Madrid. I observe her with admiration and maybe a dash of jealousy. Despite our two-hour, delay she was her usual cheery self on the plane, finding distraction in movies and games while I groused about our lost time. Even when the AC of the bright red Volkswagen Polo rental we picked up in Madrid began to falter five hours into our cross-country road trip, her spirits—though not her back—remained undampened. The AC unpleasantness coincided with our hitting noxious traffic in the vicinity of El Chaparral, Granada, one of the freeway’s few non-gridded interchanges, and I came close to calling it quits. But Hydrargyros had whispered to me about a poor outcome for such a deviation, and I decided not to risk it. Jann’s encouragement may have helped me stay on track too.
“Our drive was longer than the flight,” I remark, puffing at the weight of our bags as we traipse toward the parador’s ah, snug, entrance. I’d forgotten how small things feel in Europe. “Cozy” is Jann’s preferred term.
“But we’re here now.” She pauses. “You can smell the Mediterranean.”
As I approach the young man with slicked-back hair behind the front desk, I sense Jann basking in our new surroundings. Her relaxation is an almost perceptible phenomenon to me, little currents of satisfaction that mingle with the breeze coming off the sea. Six years of marriage and I still don’t know how she does it, this process of effortless adaptation, immersion. It’s like a magic trick, a spiritual osmosis that allows her to dialogue with the environment while the environment in turn converses with her, a two-way convergence of energies. The clerk returns my credit card and hands me our keys. As we enter the hall, a yawning sense of loss at my broken connection hits me—hard.
I stagger forward.
“Hey,” Jann says, offering her arm.
“I’m fine,” I mumble, but I hold on to her until the metaphysical dizzy spell has passed.
I knew this was a bad idea, I think. Ninety-two percent probability of lost connection, Hydrargyros had predicted. Fool that I am, I chose to ignore the odds. We haven’t been here all of ten minutes, and I’m already starting to regret the trip.
“Maybe I’m dehydrated,” I say as we head to the elevator, attempting to salvage respectability, to hide the severity of my inner defeat.
“Maybe,” Jann says.
Once inside the room, I fall asleep almost immediately. Around midnight Jann tugs at my shoulder and offers me a snack. I shake my head. She proffers a pill for my headache, and I swallow. In the dim moonlight I see her on the balcony, sipping wine, a mere few feet from me, yet in a different universe. I groan, turn over, and return to the darkness.
Except that I don’t settle back into the depths of my initial slumber, caught instead in the churning dregs of semi-consciousness. I’m self-aware enough to know I haven’t dreamt—and that I won’t dream, not tonight, not for the next ten nights of our coastal sojourn. When I was a teen, I discovered that large bodies of water, even medium-sized lakes, cause interference. I wanted to believe that this might have changed since my last such experience, that whatever invisible muscle permits my linkage might have become strong enough over time to overcome the signal interruption. Clearly, that was wishful thinking.
In the dark, Jann’s soft breathing is a welcome, familiar mantle, but ultimately not comforting enough. I listen intently to the nothingness of the room, as though it might have something to say.
I turn to face the balcony, then turn back ag
ain, pull the pillow over my head.
My body tenses.
Adrenaline flows.
I haven’t experienced an absence of connection this profound in years.
It terrifies me.
Lack of oneiric contact means no new information for Hydrargyros, and no new data for my quicksilver companion means no reliable guidance for tomorrow. No tips on what best to say, where best to go—how best to be. Each dreamless night that passes I’ll become increasingly stranded, more and more cut off from the only reliable source of information about my own well-being: my future-self.
In the morning I wake up late to find Jann showering. I blink and retinal-access the latest model predictions, which I downloaded via Hydrargyros the night before we left Toronto. According to the most recent model iteration, a light breakfast is the way to go, followed by a jaunt to the convenience store, and then our first expedition to Fuengirola’s beach. Eighty-nine percent odds that these events will lead to a pleasant lunch and a superior evening, with a small margin of error. But it all starts going wrong almost immediately. First, Jann seems to be taking forever, and nothing I do imparts upon her a sense of urgency.
“I’m sorry you didn’t get good rest,” she says, slathering sunblock on her legs, “but don’t take it out on me. Here, do my back, please.”
She’s right about the effects of my sleeplessness. My headache has worsened. A distinct rumbling in my stomach lets me know a skimpy breakfast will be unsatisfying. And my body’s torpor undermines my verbal attempts to encourage swiftness.
“I’m going to clean up,” I mutter. It helps. After a cool shower and shave, I refocus my thoughts. By now Jann is in a higher gear too. We zip through toast and coffee, grab some items at the food-and-fruit bazaar next door, and then march down Calle Miguel de Cervantes for two blocks until we hit the main beach walkway, the Paseo Marítimo Rey de España. Far busier than I expected, we find ourselves jostling among crowds, mostly German- and English- and Portuguese-speaking families with rambunctious children whose unstable trajectories seem designed to cut us off at every turn.
The beach itself is also crowded, a plague of mushroomed yellow and watermelon-red sombriyas de playa, as they call beach umbrellas here. Jann finds us a decent spot. I plop down the cooler and set up our stuff. We have a difficult time entering into relaxed conversation. She makes a few attempts, as do I, but nothing seems reciprocally satisfying. At one point Jann asks me a question twice, only it’s not a question, but her telling me she’s going for a walk. I grunt acknowledgement, annoyed at my own distraction. Is this really the best possible version of this day? Beneath my shades, I close my eyes. I try to give myself up to the moment. Instead, memories of conversations with my future-self surface. This has been happening with increasing frequency. The more solitude I seek, the more I run into myself.
“Maybe it’s time to call it quits,” future-me is saying.
This conversation occurred on campus during my first semester as an assistant prof. I locked my office door.
By this time my future-self and I had perfected something approximating real-time communication—whatever the word real-time means when you’re talking about signals that instantaneously leap across decades—but we didn’t have a system in place to measure what we were doing.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I say. “Clearly, I’m benefitting from your knowledge, and don’t tell me your retirement isn’t being enlivened by an influx of ever-new memories.”
“Ever-new yet evergreen, is that it?”
His sarcasm is impossible to miss, but I choose not to respond to it.
“If this arrangement is really so peachy,” he continues, “shouldn’t we be, I dunno, happier by now? We’re investing a lot of time into something with no clear payoff.”
“Investing time?” I mock. “Is that a joke?”
But he’s managed to get to me. Why must my older-self insist on reducing our conversations to emotional, ultimately un-shareable subjectivities like happiness? It’s been almost a year since our initial contact, but his grindingly skeptical attitude is truly wearying. Am I really destined to become this negative?
“We are happier,” I say with an authority I don’t feel. For a moment, I wonder who I’m trying to convince. “Problem is, we’re losing track of all the changes, so our baseline keeps shifting. Without a fixed standard, we can’t appreciate how much better off we are now than we used to be. It’s all about incremental well-being.”
“I don’t know, kid,” he says.
“Would you have enjoyed being called kid when you were my age?”
“Oh, get over yourself,” he scoffs. “That fancy university title doesn’t mean crap. You know I had it worse than you.”
According to what he’s told me, his life at this point was considerably messier than mine. A bitter break-up with Jann, failure to secure a position at the University, depression. That alone, I think, should be enough to convince him that we should stick together.
“You did,” I say. “Which is why you should be thankful I’m course-correcting—for both of us.”
“For all I know, what we have here is the existentially blind leading the existentially blind,” he says. “Double the misery, half the fun. You remake my reality, but how do I know it’s improving?”
I could have argued or poked holes in the simplistic analogy, but the bottom line was that he was right. When I began making decisions directly related to future-me’s knowledge, we wondered how his experience of reality would be affected. It turned out to be anticlimactic. Even major ripples caused him no physical sensation at all: one instant his memories aligned with the world and the next they simply didn’t. No vertigo or sense of discontinuity. When we connected, the link somehow reached inside his head and his memories shifted. Most changes—the ones not absorbed by time’s inherent inelasticity—were subtle and required little readjustment. Still, we needed version control. We needed a way to measure how my altered behaviour in the present translated for him downstream. We needed to be able to map specific actions to specific consequences. As good a mathematician as I was, there were far too many variables for me to track. I didn’t even know how to define the parameters of the problem, a realization I’d found overwhelming.
But when I considered it that day, I had an insight. I realized I didn’t just have my resources on hand, but his too—
Jann returns from her walk, interrupting my reverie. She looks satisfied. Peaceful. Or perhaps distant? I’m tempted to blame the fact that the combo of my sunglasses and hers makes it hard for me to read her eyes, but the truth is that I’ve never been great at guessing her moods. “Hey.” I look up at her and smile. “Nice walk?”
She sits on the empty foldable chair beside me, dabs at sweat on her forehead. “Hotter than I expected,” she says. “You sure you don’t want to go into the water?”
I survey the scene. Up ahead parents are doing their best to teach their children how to paddle on their comically-shaped inflatable contraptions—with limited success. There’s much splashing, laughing, and tumbling about. My head hurts at the very notion of getting closer to the boisterousness.
“You go on,” I say.
Jann’s head falls in disappointment. She purses her lips, about to speak, stops herself.
Something inside me sags.
I push it away.
I look again at the water, which now appears a deeper, more enticing blue. The gentle lapping wavelets, with their white frills, offer a tantalizing glimpse of tranquillity, of refreshed perspective. But I hold my ground.
After reapplying sunscreen and sipping one of our diet beverages, she heads out.
I sit back and close my eyes.
During that conversation with future-me I realized I’d been thinking about our problem in too limited a fashion. Even if our worlds were separated by fort
y years, what was stopping us from using both of our technologies rather than just mine?
“How far has AI advanced in your time?” I ask future-me. “Give me specifics.”
That he does. We deep geek for about twenty minutes, and when we’re done I feel the inklings of an answer to our version control challenge.
“Walk me through the schematics of a Feigenbaum AI,” I say, “and I promise you you’ll start seeing the dividends soon.”
A pause. Has my ambition scared him off? Maybe he’s not looking for this kind of intensity, for this level of committed entanglement. More than once I’ve pictured my own retirement as a placid affair with little pressure or responsibility, a time to enjoy the fruits of youth’s labour. But after having come to know future-me, I realized this fantasy was foolish. Who we are, and the world we inhabit, always become more complex, never less so. Having now studied both sides of the equation, I’m convinced our labours never end but merely adapt themselves to our ebbing abilities.
To my relief, he breaks the mental silence. “I think I see where you’re going. Like Wordsworth said all along: the Child is Father of the man. Engrams,” he guesses.
“Yes,” I say. “Every memory and sense perception your brain stores. Your AI codifies the data and then you shunt it via neural interface to me. Then I pass it on to an AI on my side, and presto. If there are any patterns, we’ll find them.”
“You might get overloaded,” he says.
“We can limit the transfers to once a day,” I propose. “We’ll do it while I sleep. That way my brain will have more bandwidth to assimilate whatever you send. And if it becomes too much, we’ll stop and come up with a new plan.”
Seasons Between Us Page 16
