The Time Travel Chronicles (48 page)

“C’mon,” Marty said.  “You know what the odds are of guessing the right card every time?”

“No,” I said.  “But neither do you.”

“Did anything happen to anyone else?”

“Yeah,” Dave said.  Déjà vu again.  “In the tank I saw Veckner giving a pop quiz today.  So this morning over coffee I looked up the answers.  Sure enough, she gave the quiz, and it was fill in the blank.”

“That can’t be right,” I said.  “I mean, Veckner teaches Eastern Religion right?”

“Tradition.”

“What?”

“Tradition, not religion.”

“Whatever, Eastern Tradition, Eastern Religion, you know it like the back of your hand.”

“Not this material I didn’t.”

Or did he?  I was becoming confused.

“If you saw the answers to the quiz why did you bother looking them up?”

“I saw myself
taking
the quiz, and studying beforehand.  But the quiz would have been a surprise otherwise.”

Marty’s tongue was rolling across the top of his lip, and if the room hadn’t been soaked in patchouli and pot, I’m sure I would have smelled the gears grinding.  “We have to go back in,” he said.

“We can’t,” Dave said.  “Remember.”

This was scary because I did remember.  This is what Dave had said—was saying—about what Marty was going to say next, only Marty hadn’t said it yet, but then he did.

“Right,” Marty said.  “We have to wait til our systems build up more DMT.”

* * *

By Sunday things were back to normal.  We hadn’t seen any further ahead.  Danny used some of his winnings to spring for a feast of wine and flaming cheese at the Greek restaurant in old town, a real treat since I was living mostly on burritos at the time.  We talked a little bit more about it over dinner.  Dave suggested we all abstain from anything over the next week and to practice some basic lotus position stuff.  Apparently he and Danny had processed the whole trip a lot better because they meditated.  I was surprised to discover that Danny was into that too, but then again we were all dabbling in transcendental mind expansion.  It didn’t seem like a bad idea.  I was a bit strung out from the last trip, so drinking a lot of water and juice over the next few days wouldn’t be horrible.

The last trip had been okay for my schedule but Dave and Marty had gone to class the next day, so we all agreed to meet on Friday after Danny’s shift.

Everything went down about the same, except I admit we were all a bit more excited.

I say about the same because Marty altered the mix a bit.

“Don’t take these until you’re ready to close the lid,” he said.  “They’re more potent.”

“Whaddaya mean?” I asked.  I was concerned, of course, about the psilocybin.

“I added DMT to the mix.  So the molecules don’t deplete your own.”

That somehow made sense, I figured he wanted to be able to try again sooner rather than later and that with the extra dose he wouldn’t have to wait.  I knew better, but a dose was a dose.  It was after I drank the vial that I realized why he really wanted it.  It was the holiday weekend and he wanted to see further ahead than two days.  I realized that fairly instantly because we were on the way to the Indian reservation casino and he was explaining in the car.  And then we were at the casino.  And then I was back in the Greek restaurant the week before, and there were tentacles at the restaurant, and there were eels on my date with Julie the past Tuesday, and then Marty was dead.

That caught me off guard.

I should mention that I couldn’t quite nail down how long I was in the tank.  I didn’t have the discipline that Dave and Danny had.  I had two weeks of information happening at once, fast forward, rewind, freeze frame, and then I was in the back seat of Marty’s red Mazda.

Steve Miller was cranked up on the stereo, and it was black outside.

I’d been calm, but then, with the realization of Marty’s demise, a course of adrenalin shot through me.  “You guys didn’t see that?”

Everyone else in the car ignored me.  Dave was sitting next to me slowly nodding his head as he mouthed the lyrics to Jet Airliner.  Danny was in the passenger seat rolling a joint by the dashboard light.

“Marty,” I asked the back of his head.  “Did you see that?”

He was calm, probably thinking about the casino takedown we were about to pull off, and the fact that we were about to make a fortune over the next few days.  “It’s not what you thought,” he said.

“No?” I asked.

“No.  I end up fine.”

A slug-like eel slid up onto his left shoulder, around the back of his neck, and disappeared over the other shoulder.

“What the hell?” I said. I think it was the psilocybin, but it could’ve been the diatomic particles too, either way, that was the first time I saw one out of the tank.

“Just focus on the program,” Marty said.

“Right… Yeah.”

We’d decided to call it the program when we got out of the tanks.  It was Marty’s idea.  “A plan,” he said, “is just that.  A list of steps that with preparation fall into order, a mere intention.  The program has already happened.  All we need to do is show up.”

We didn’t quibble with him.  There was no point.  We were broke, just enough for gas, but that was okay.  We would drive to the casino.  Danny was going to play a few rounds of roulette.  We would all be hungry and tired so he wouldn’t waste time.  A few spins, enough for breakfast and a suite and then we’d rest, save the next day for the big money and comps.

And that’s how it went.

And it was eerie.

Danny put his chips on the red box with the number twenty-three and when the wheel finished spinning the little ball landed in the corresponding pocket.

“A winner,” the croupier yelled, and then raked a stack of chips over to Danny.  “Place your bets,” he continued without missing a beat.

“Red five,” Danny said.  The croupier raked the two stacks across the felt table to the red box marked five, spun the wheel, and tossed the marble.  When the wheel finished spinning, the marble landed on red five.

“Another winner,” the croupier called out.

To see it happening again was mind-boggling.  We knew the winning number so he picked the winning number, and we always saw him pick the winning number.  But which came first I couldn’t figure out, and when I tried, when I thought about it too hard, I just lived it again.

Over the next few days, I felt like I was a character strolling through someone else’s movie.  The dealer or waiter or bartender would say his line, and then I’d say mine.  I had a starring role, and my costars had their parts to play as well.  The words didn’t seem forced or contrived.  I said what was on my mind even though I knew ahead of time what I was going say, always surprised at the words as they came out.  It was natural, yet not.

Dave and I both won big at roulette and the casino version of High-Low, Acey-Deucey.  That card game was on the floor.  Marty and Danny were the only ones to mess with the poker lounge.  They both avidly enjoyed gambling and, Marty more than Danny, basked in the attention of the winning seat.  Danny played the role with a bit of realism, dark sunglasses, keeping quiet to himself.  Not Marty, the higher the stack of chips, the more flamboyant he became.  I was tempted to go in and warn him to keep his cool, but the poker lounge was loaded with flying eels and tentacle clusters.  I wasn’t going in there.  He was handing out chips to every girl that walked by and it wasn’t long before he had a thin blonde on either side.  It was his parading that got us our comp though, a suite that made our first one look like a pillbox – grand piano, master staircase, pool table, hot tub, the whole bit.

We let Marty take the master bedroom.  He was making use of it with his newfound friends.  I didn’t want to look through the bedroom door, but I was compelled to, I had before.  My fate was determined.  And I did see him, with the two naked girls, on a writhing bed of tentacles, just as I saw in the tank, but I
really
saw them that time, and time again, and what I’d interpreted as a death scene was some other sick thing.

That’s another weird thing about déjà vu.  Something that’s disgusting the first time is still disgusting the next.  Marty made that palace of a suite so uncomfortable that we just went back to the floor and made a few million more.  Of course, we knew we would.

As much as we did see, there were still things that we couldn’t.  Like when I crashed out Sunday afternoon and woke up freaking out.  I’d seen myself sit straight up, my t-shirt soaked, the late afternoon light creeping around the curtains.  What I didn’t see before is what happened in my sleep.  It’d been the same as the tank.  I’d seen another week out.  No, more than that, two maybe.  The diatomic molecules were flop flipping all on their own.

I went to the suite’s bar, poured a tall glass of water, and guzzled it down.

“We don’t need another dose,” Marty said.

I spun around to find him standing at the end of the marble bar.  “The diatomic molecules,” I said.

“You’ve got enough to last.”

“How long?”

“Don’t know.”

I misinterpreted the conversation the first time I saw it; often seeing is not processing.  I thought it meant that I didn’t need – as in shouldn’t have – another dose.  But he meant that I had enough
diatomic quantum flop
to last me a while.  Perhaps a long while.  Not from the dose we took the Friday before, or the next, or the next.  It was the fifth trip to the tank that made the state permanent.  I was there now, in the tank for the third, fourth, and fifth time.  I was also at the bar of the suite.  I felt a pressure push into the center of my forehead, an invisible thumb pressed up against my flesh, into my pineal.  My hair ripped at my scalp, threatening an exodus.  The room changed around me, the colors became brighter, the edges sharper.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” I said.  “You’re not here.”

“But I am,” Marty said.  And he was, but he wasn’t.  I was talking to a future Marty.

“Quantum superimposed,” we chimed together.  I didn’t know what that meant yet, but I did, because I would soon learn that since the past, present, and future were just different states of the same time; I could willfully traverse them.  Absorbing those states into my present mind — the mind that was in the suite — was a dizzying echo of the tanks, a flash of surreal.

A long, iridescent blue snake-like eel came up from behind Marty’s back and slithered down around his chest and up behind his arm.

“Do you see that?” I asked.

“Uh huh,” he said.  “There’s one on your arm too.”

I looked down and sure enough, a long, thin eel was coiling around my forearm.  “Hell!” I yelped, and then time slowed to a crawl.  Simultaneously the blue eel slithered through the air and the water glass dropped.  The glass exploded on contact with the floor and shattered into countless shards.  But I could see each one twinkling, individually rising from the point of impact, blossoming out and away.

I must have seen that glass shatter a dozen times.  More than that, I’m sure, because I want to put a number on it.  A linear number.  But all of those times were the same time and I was viewing it again in a constant, still frame loop.  I just processed little snapshots, slow still frames of a grander movie.  Is the cat dead or alive?  It’s both until you open the box.  My observation, my presence of mind, was no longer passive as it’d been a few days before. Observation had become an active process, a superposition of
realities
.  I could see what was happening in the box.

“The riddle,” I said.  “It’s a paradox, a mirror.”

“There is nothing that is not known,” Marty said.

“And you, you were the one that told yourself about the diatomic molecules.”

Marty appeared stunned; he was travelling.  “I didn’t tell, exactly,” he said, staring off, most likely watching the event.  “No.  I
gave
myself the eureka moment.”

And it all made sense to me in a way beyond words.  I experienced a new clarity of encompassing time, was aware of my immersion in it, as I never had been before and with all of the knowledge I was yet to learn accessible to me, I immediately possessed the benefits of living in the past, future, and now.

And then he said the most dangerous thing, “We’re gods among mortals.”

And in an epiphany – both physical and cerebral – as if spoken to by a god, there were further revelations.

Marty shared the experience.

He must’ve, because his face lost expression in synch with my realization that with all of the money and the power we could,
would
acquire, that would not be enough for him, that one day we would confront each other.

And that was the beginning of the chess match.  For years, we played our roles politely, evenly matched in forecasting the outcome.  Until our confrontation.  Until his
accident
.

A freak accident I suppose he didn’t see coming.

* * *

Dave has always had the best handle on the flop.  He went to Dharamsala to meditate with the Dalai Lama and learn the advanced tantric of Kalachakra.  He shared some with us, then he went to Arizona and opened an Ashram.