How to Live Safely in a Science Fictiona (2010) (6 page)

Of course not. I monkey around with the Tense Operator for ten years and right when it starts breaking down is when I have to bring it in. I’m going to need to figure out how to fix it if I want to keep my job.

ALL RIGHT, DON’T SWEAT IT, PHIL. I’LL BRING IT IN. ANYTHING ELSE?

YO DOG, THAT’S TIGHT. WE’RE COOL, RIGHT? I’M STILL YOUR HOMIE? MAYBE WE CAN GRAB A BEER WHEN YOU’RE IN THE CITY. IS THAT RIGHT? GRAB A BEER? GRAB. GRAB. GRAB. GRAB. GRAB.

Phil crashes a lot, midsentence. Sooner or later, they’re going to upgrade, and then no more Phil, and yeah it’s true I could do without all the small talk, but I’m pretty sure I’ll miss him.

Client call. I punch in the coordinates and now I’m in the kitchen of an apartment, in Oakland, in Chinatown, sometime in the third quarter of the twentieth century. A pot of oxtail stew burbles on the stovetop, fills the room with a deep, rich cloud of stewiness, fills the room like a fog bank rolling over the bay.

I go into the living room and find a woman, a little younger than I am, maybe twenty-five, twenty-six. She’s kneeling over a much older woman who lies still, in an awkward position, legs slumped off the couch, left arm dangling down to the floor, mouth slightly open as if she has lost control of it, eyes looking up at the ceiling, or whatever’s beyond the ceiling, filled with a clear-eyed awareness of what’s happening.

“She can’t see you,” I say to the younger woman.

“But I can see her,” she says. She doesn’t look up at me.

“Not really. This didn’t really happen. You weren’t there when she died.”

Now the younger woman looks at me. Angry.

“Your mom?” I say.

“Grandmother,” she says, and I realize in my time away from time, spent idling in my machine, I’ve become terrible at guessing someone’s age.

I nod. We both watch the old woman lying there, coming to terms with whatever she was coming to terms with.

TAMMY discreetly beeps to remind me we have a job to do, rifts in the underlying fabric to repair. If we stay too long, the damage could get worse.

“I’m not saying this to hurt you,” I say. “All I’m saying is that since you weren’t there when this actually happened, you can’t be here now.”

She ignores me and doesn’t take her eyes off her grandmother and for a while, I’m not sure she’s heard or maybe she heard me but doesn’t understand, but then she looks at me.

“So what is this? An illusion? A dream?”

“More like a window,” I say, and I see that she gets it. “By using your time machine this way, you are creating a small porthole into another universe, a neighboring universe. One almost exactly like ours, except that in this alternate world you
were
there when she died. This living room, right now, is the vertex between Universe Thirty-one and Thirty-one-A, and you are bending space and time and light to see into the past, a false past, a past you wish you could go to. Although you can see, through this porthole, what happened back then over there, you’re not really standing next to her. You are in your own universe, our universe. You are infinitely far away.”

She takes a moment to digest this. I open up a side panel and immediately see the problem.

“You tampered with your tau modulator.”

She gives me a guilty look.

“Don’t worry,” I say. “I see it all the time.”

She looks back at the scene in front of us. “I was a sophomore in college. She was the only reason I even made it there,” she says. “She called and I could hear something in her voice. I should have known. I should have known to come home.”

“You had your own life to start.”

“I could have come home. My dad told me it would be soon. I could have come home.”

Grandma closes her eyes. A look of something unresolved twists across her face, and then a flicker of what could be disappointment, and then, exhausted, she takes her last breath, alone, the pot of stew untouched in the next room.

I wait for what I hope is a respectful interval of silence, then quietly finish the repair and go back into the kitchen to allow her a few more minutes. I can hear crying, then low talking, then what sounds like a song, once sung to a little girl maybe, now sung one final time. The stew smells really good. I’m trying to figure out if it will cause a paradox if I have a bowl when the young woman comes into the kitchen.

“Thanks for that,” she says.

“Yeah, take all the time you want. Well, not all the time.”

“I suppose I can’t stay here.”

I shake my head. “If you bend too much and for too long, the porthole becomes an actual hole, and you might end up over there.”

“Maybe that’s what I want.”

“Trust me. It’s not. That’s not home. I know it seems like home, everything looks the same, but it’s not. You weren’t there. It will never be the case that you were.”

A typical customer gets into a machine that can
literally
take her whenever she’d like to go. Do you want to know what the first stop usually is? Take a guess. Don’t guess. You already know: the unhappiest day of her life.

Other people are just looking for weird. They want to turn their lives into something unrecognizable. I see a lot of men end up as their own uncles. Super-easy to avoid, totally dumb move. See it all the time. No need to go into details, but it obviously involves a time machine and you know what with you know who. General rule is you want to avoid having sex with anyone unless you are sure they aren’t family. One guy I know ended up as his own sister.

But mostly, people aren’t like that. They don’t want trouble, they just don’t know what else to do. I see a lot of regular offenders. People who can’t stop trying to hurt themselves. People who can’t stop doing stupid things because of their stupid hearts.

My vocational training was in the basics of closed time-like curves, but what they should have taught me was how that relates to people’s regrets and mistakes, the loves of their lives that they let get away.

I’ve prevented suicides. I’ve watched people fall apart, marriages break up in slow motion, over and over and over again.

I have seen pretty much everything that can go wrong, the various and mysterious problems in contemporary time travel. You work in this business long enough and you know what you really do for a living. This is self-consciousness. I work in the self-consciousness industry.

from
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

nostalgia, underlying cosmological explanation for

Weak but detectable interaction between two neighboring universes that are otherwise not causally connected.

Manifests itself in humans as a feeling of missing a place one has never been, a place very much like one’s home universe, or as a longing for versions of one’s self that one will never, and can never know.

Sometimes I think back to when my father and I were first starting to sketch it out in his study at home, just ideas on a pad, just lines and vectors and tentative inequalities, first starting to realize what might be possible, and I suspect that he knew even then that he would get lost. It was almost like he was trying to get lost, like he knew what it would all lead to, this machine. He wanted to use it for sadness, to investigate the source of his own, his father’s, and on and on, to the ultimate origin, some dark radiating body, trapped in its own severe curvature, cut off from the rest of the universe.

I remember the graph paper we used, the pattern of one-centimeter squares in a light green grid. My father would open a package of five pads, each one a hundred sheets thick. He used to open the package with his company-logo letter opener, pulling the letter opener out of its holder in the heavy brass piece sitting on top of his desk (I can still picture the black box it came in, with fancy gold cursive lettering on it—
EXECUTIVE DESK SET
—how at first, the words seemed like a kind of promise, a looking toward the future, a rare admission of his hope and ambition, and I can also picture the dust that gathered on the box, how, with each passing year that layer of dust thickened into a visible accumulation of embarrassment, how I wished I could have snuck into his office when he was at work and thrown that box away, or hidden it from him, so that word wouldn’t have to be right there on this desk, staring him in the face every day,
EXECUTIVE
, a thoughtless word, a thoughtless gift from the company for ten years of unappreciated service).

He would worry the cellophane in a spot just a bit, just enough to pinch between his fingers a bit of the clear wrap and tear the membrane, making that delicate, fine-structured sound of it being torn.

“Ahhh,” he would say, half smiling, enjoying the sound. He would hand me the wadded-up ball of cellophane, so I could crunch it in my hands and listen to it crackle back a bit, then crunch it harder and toss it into the gray wire wastebasket, where it would sit atop a sliding sheaf of bills and return envelopes for bills and credit card offers, an unstable mountain of debt and credit, an avalanche waiting to happen.

“Choose a world, any world,” he liked to say. It was a stack of planes, an
n
-dimensional space–time, ready to be filled. I would take out one of the five pads and then he would put the rest back into his cabinet. The squares of the grid went all the way to the top, and the bottom, and the edges on either side, which was pleasing and Platonic and right. If there had been any sort of margin on the sides, or at the top, or any other kind of break in the Cartesian plane, something would have been lost, the ability of that graph paper to represent the total, the universal, the conceptual space would have been destroyed.

Where the pad was bound at the top there was a red, waxy strip, and sometimes my father would tear off the top sheet, so we could work on it without leaving impressions from our pen on the two or three or four (depending on how hard we pressed our pencil or pen) sheets below, and that sound would be somewhat similar but in many ways quite different from the ripping-cellophane sound, this one heavier, coarser, deeper, but more often my father wouldn’t rip off a sheet at all, and instead leave the paper on the pad.

“Look at that,” he said. “How the ink bleeds.” He loved the way it looked, to write on a thick pillow of the pad, the way the thicker width of paper underneath was softer and allowed for a more cushiony interface between pen and surface, which meant more time the two would be in contact for any given point, allowing the fiber of the paper to pull, through capillary action, more ink from the pen, more ink, which meant more evenness of ink, a thicker, more even line, a line with character, with solidity. The pad, all those ninety-nine sheets underneath him, the hundred, the even number, ten to the second power, the exponent, the clean block of planes, the space–time, really, represented by that pad, all of the possible drawings, graphs, curves, relationships, all of the answers, questions, mysteries, all of the problems solvable in that space, in those sheets, in those squares.

“Today we will journey into Minkowski space,” and with a few casual sweeps of his hand across the known world, what had been empty world was now a place full of direction and distance and invisible forces.

“Consider a body,” he said, while drawing vectors and truths, “maybe a boy separated from his twin, and moving at the speed of light. Or a lonely astronaut, missing home.”

I loved the way he used the paper, the whole paper, as a space, when he would write notes in the corner, or label the axes, or create a symbol key in the lower left-hand corner, or, best of all, draw a curve on the
x
–
y
plane and then write the equation for the curve
f
(
x
) equals one-half
x
cubed plus four
x
squared plus nine
x
plus five, up in the upper left-hand corner of the graph, floating there in quadrant II of the Cartesian plane, that equation existing in science, in science fiction, in the realm of science fictional equations. I loved seeing his lettering, so neat, practiced from thousands upon thousands of hours of problem sets no doubt, both in school and after school and in his spare time and in his work and in his after-work brainstorming, and now with me, his son, his student, his would-be research assistant. Lettering so uniform, letters so straight and consistent in size and well lined they looked like words in comic book dialogue bubbles. I loved how my father set down the letters, mindful of the spacing, not fitting one to each box, which would have looked too structured, too planned, too spread out, not aesthetically pleasing, those letters would have looked like prisoners, each in solitary confinement, but rather, using the horizontal lines as a guideline, the words, the letters, crossing through and over and on top of the lines, no explanation, no protective underlining or boxing or any other kind of markings indicating a setting-off or a differentiation between text and curve, between space and commentary on the space. The words were right in there, close to the curve, close to the
y
-axis, just floating in the plane along with the graph, this space the Platonic realm, where curves and equations and axes and ideas coexisted, ontological equals, a democracy of conceptual inhabitants, no one class privileged over any other, no mixing or subdividing of abstractions and concrete objects, no mixing whatsoever. The words an actual part of it, the whole space inside the borders, the whole space useful and usable and possible, the whole, unbroken space a place where anything could be written, anything could be thought, or solved, or puzzled over, anything could be connected, plotted, analyzed, fixed, converted, where anything could be equalized, divided, isolated, understood.