How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe Part 6

Not a good idea. Immediately after sending the instruction, I begin to feel a vibration, slight but detectable, of the walls of the TM-31.

I hit a b.u.t.ton and the hatch decompresses. I pop open the door. This is what I see:

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And now the TM-31 starts to vibrate, at first gently, then more vigorously, like an unbalanced centrifuge. Indicator lights are blinking.

TAMMY informs me, in a neutral but slightly concerned tone, that I have set the time machine on a noncomputable path.

What was I thinking? Because, if I'm being honest, I'm not sure I would even know what I do with myself. Even if you could skip to the end of it all, what would I do the next day with my life that would be so different from all the days that came before? What miraculous change would I make, after getting out of this rut, what new kind of person would I choose to be that next day? And the next? And how about the day after, and all of the days after that?

The TM-31 is shaking pretty good now. The tone of TAMMY's voice has modulated from mild concern to slight alarm. What have I done? Oh, c.r.a.p, duh. It's Time Machine Circuitry 101. Overriding TOAD's a.n.a.lysis algorithm has tripped the causal wiring between TOAD and TAMMY, which is something I wish I'd thought of a few minutes ago.

(At this point, the vibration of the machine, up until now low and erratic, speeds up to what must be a resonant frequency, because the entire unit starts to rattle. The housing for the decoherence module comes loose and crashes to the floor, leaving the guts of the machine slightly exposed, the naked physicality of the thing, the purely material bits, the wiring and the diodes of the randomness generator left vulnerable to damage, to being overwhelmed with data, the data of the world, the datum that is the world, all the other data from all possible worlds, all the could-worlds and should-worlds and would-have-been-worlds, the kind of tiny hidden world only detectable with the ultra-high-sensitivity receptors set to the exact specifications necessary to perceive it.) Then: nothing.

I wake up in an enormous Buddhist temple. I am standing in the vestibule of what appears to be the main hall. The air is cool and smells of incense. It is dark. The small amount of sunlight coming through the s.p.a.ce underneath and between the doors feels like an intrusion into this rarefied place.

There are no clocks in here.

Two wooden railings separate the vestibule from the main room. Between the railings is an opening, and to either side, people have left their shoes. There are small blue slippers available, into which I slip my tube-socked feet. The insides of the slippers are cool on the tops of my toes and the outside edges of my feet.

Among all of the slippers, I see a pair of worn brown men's dress shoes, which look vaguely familiar.

I'm standing just at the edge of the large rectangle that makes up the main s.p.a.ce of the room, at the end of what feels like two square miles of deep burgundy carpet. Three Buddha statues sit at the far end of the room, raised up on platforms, looking over my head, out toward infinity. Not looking, I suppose, but seeing.

On the left and on the right are doors into side rooms, each one dedicated to a subsidiary higher being, specialized Buddhas: the Buddha of Familial Relations, the Buddha of Safe Pa.s.sage, the Buddha of Everlasting Memory. Other than the statues in front, and a few other ancillary statues by their feet, and a few pictures on the walls, there is nothing in the room. No material objects, and a deep pile carpet that I am half sinking into, half floating on top of, slippers that add to the sensation of being immersed into the room, not touching anything, yet deeply embedded into it, almost snuggled into the fabric of it, as if my self, the self, were dissolving right into the universal solvent, pure and clear and odorless and tasteless and invisible and weightless, neither gas nor liquid nor solid yet all three. As if I were an incense stick incrementally burning off, first into smoke, and then becoming a part of the room. My thoughts, normally bunched together, wrapped in gauze, insistent, urgent, impatient, one moment to the next, living in what I now realize is, in essence, a constant state of emergency (as if my evolutionary instincts of fight or flight have gone haywire, leading me to spend each morning, noon, and evening in a low-grade but absolutely never-ceasing muted form of panic), those rushed and ragged thoughts are now falling away, one by one, revealing themselves for what they are: the same thought over and over again. And once revealed for what they are, these hollow thoughts, these impostors, non-thoughts masquerading as thoughts, memes, viruses, signals fired off, white noise generated by my brain, they are gone.

And it is quiet. Quiet in a way I have never experienced before. As if quiet were a substance, and it were thick, as if that substance were now in my head, filling it like a viscous fluid, some kind of gel. Desire is suffering. A simple equation, and a nice catchphrase. But flipped around, it is more troubling: suffering is desire. Not a unidirectional arrow, not causal, as in, desire leads to suffering. Desire is is suffering, and therefore, by axiom, suffering suffering, and therefore, by axiom, suffering is is desire. desire. Ting. Ting. A bell rings. I look around for the ringer. A nun, a monk, anyone. But no one seems to have rung the bell. It rang itself. A bell rings. I look around for the ringer. A nun, a monk, anyone. But no one seems to have rung the bell. It rang itself. Ting. Ting. Ting. Ting. Ting. Ting. The sound is clarifying, purifying, even. It erases every thought from the room, wipes the slate clean. I had been polluting the room with my ideas and they are all gone. And in front of me, I am, for some reason, unsurprised to see my mother, or at least some version of her, standing at the front of the room, just off the center, incense held at the very end, with each hand, between the index and the middle fingers, and hands raised to her forehead, slightly bent at the waist. The sound is clarifying, purifying, even. It erases every thought from the room, wipes the slate clean. I had been polluting the room with my ideas and they are all gone. And in front of me, I am, for some reason, unsurprised to see my mother, or at least some version of her, standing at the front of the room, just off the center, incense held at the very end, with each hand, between the index and the middle fingers, and hands raised to her forehead, slightly bent at the waist.

My mother, short and compact, the version I knew, my actual mother, was capable of the most unguarded, undisguised love of anyone I ever met. At some point in my loneliness, in the TM-31, I lost my capacity for embarra.s.sment, but my mother never had that capacity in the first place. She would ask for your love in that voice of hers, loud and plangent and raw and seemingly infinite in its neediness, her voice so naked and small and open. It was almost reckless how vulnerable she allowed herself to be; you couldn't help but hate her for doing that to herself, and at the same time hate yourself for giving in to it, and underneath all of that, despite your hate for her, couldn't help but love her. She was not the best person, or the most giving, or the kindest or the most understanding or the most wise. She was jealous and quick to anger and rash and profoundly depressed for my entire life, had been that way since the age of eleven, when her brother had been stillborn, had a life without duration, an open and closed end on the tiny rectangular gravestone, and then when her own mother had died, two days later, of complications, medically, but really, of grief. My mother spent a lifetime grieving and yet she still loved my father with all of her heart: all of it. It was a structure and a vector and a power source that could be directed toward nearly any target even remotely worthy. All of her heart, a meaningless phrase, but correct and precise, too. She used her heart to love him, not her head, and not her words and not her thoughts or ideas or feelings or any other vehicle or object or device people use to deliver love or love-like things. She used her heart, as a physical transmitter of love, and what came out of it was no more voluntary than gravity or time or time travel or the laws of fictional science itself.

My mother finishes her kneeling, and places her incense into a large ceramic urn filled with the acc.u.mulated ashes of a thousand, a million, a hundred million earlier sandalwood incense sticks, the dust of past events collected there and made tangible. She pierces the ash pile, fine, talc.u.m-like, soft gray powder, slides her own incense stick down into it, in a perfect vertical, and appears to consider it for an instant, a thin marker, flimsy and direct, an axis, a conduit for prayer, an object and a process that will turn itself from a material thing into the dust around it, transform into visible and invisible substances, will convert itself into heat and smoke to fill the room. The present incense will become the very stuff that props itself up, and allows other, future incense to stand vertically, for a time, each current incense unable to stand alone, only able to perform its function with the help of all other past incense, like time itself, supporting the present moment, as it itself turns into past, each burning stick transmitting the prayers sent through it, releasing the prayers contained within it, nothing but a transitory vehicle for its contents, and then releasing itself into the air, leaving behind only the burnt odor, the haze and residue of uncollectible memory, and at the same time becoming part of the air itself, the very air that allows the present to burn, to combust, to slowly work itself down into nothingness.

She turns to me, and I see at once that this woman is exactly like my mother, but she is not my mother. She is The Woman My Mother Should Have Been.

She is not a could have been. Could have beens are women who are not exactly like my mother. For any given mother, for any given person, there are many could have beens, maybe an infinite number.

No, this woman standing in front of me is something else, she is the one and only Woman My Mother Should Have Been, and I have found her. Looking for my father, I have found this woman, I have traveled, chronogrammatically, out of the ordinary tense axes and into this place, into the subjunctive mode.

This woman turns to me, and she doesn't smile, doesn't really have any emotion in her face at all. This Woman My Mother Should Have Been is like the Platonic ideal of my mother, I realize, and yet at the same time the idea of that angers me. Who made this place? Who is to say that my mother, exactly as she is, my mother-in-fact, isn't the exact perfect version of herself? This woman in front of me, her face clear of any inner turmoil, her face a calm pool of cool water, of equanimity or beat.i.tude or blissful calm. Like my real mother, this woman is a Buddhist, but she follows the teachings, she has spent countless time studying and meditating, slowing her own thoughts down. She has freed herself from her own box, her own tightly circular mental loop, her cycles of highs and lows, anxiety and mania and delayed grief and depression, and in doing so she has become some kind of bodhisattva, has found the peace that my mother always looked for. She is what I knew was always possible for my mom, if all that light inside her could find its way out.

I am standing in front of a complete stranger, a woman whom I have never met, a woman whom I never could have met, in any possible world, through any possible combination of events and chance happenings. A pure hypothetical.

"Do I know you?" she says.

This is my mother.

This is not my mother.

A bell rings.

Ting.

I remember where I've seen those shoes before.

They belonged to my father. Was this where he was? When he was down in the garage by himself, is this what he was building? A machine to take him here?

There are no clocks in this room, because there's no time in this room, because of what this room, this place, this temple is. My mother back on fictional Earth is trapped in a time loop of her own choosing and this woman is her opposite; this Woman My Mother Should Have Been is here now and forever and always and never in this temple of nontemporality.

The room, previously stationary, now feels like it is spinning and vibrating. What is this? Where is this? Is this even a room at all? Am I actually inside of some kind of structure my father built? Am I inside some kind of construct?

The Woman My Mother Should Have Been turns to me, and now she doesn't have such a pleasant look on her face.

"Should you be here?" she says, and I'm about as scared as I can be of a sixty-year-old woman who looks exactly like my mom. What I had perceived as beatific calm has curdled into something sinister, the dead eyes of a prisoner, not a person but an idea of a person, trapped in a temple for all time.

"Just tell me something," I say. "Is he here?"

"Once. A long time ago."

"Where did he go?"

"I don't know. All I know is that he didn't get what he wanted. He thought I was what he wanted, and he just kept saying sorry, over and over again, that this wasn't how he thought it would be, that he had to go."

Her features now soften, ever so slightly, and seemingly without moving a muscle, her aspect has transformed from sinister to forlorn.

"Will you be my family? Will you stay with me here?"

And I'm running, as cruel as it seems, I'm not about to be trapped in this place for eternity with a creepy version of my mother, not really my mother, an abandoned idea, who doesn't have a heart, but is lonely nonetheless. I sincerely hope she finds someone, that she leaves this temple someday and finds some other subjunctively ideal person to spend eternity with, but I've got my own mother to take care of, a flesh-and-blood mother, an imperfect but present tense mother and maybe it's just a rationalization, but for the first time in a while, I am reminded that I am needed, I have obligations to people, as a son, as a guy who fixes time machines, a guy who gets people out of their bad situations. Even if it seems like a dumb back office job and I don't get paid well, people are counting on me, Mom and Phil, and TAMMY and Ed, and if I hadn't gotten a kick in the b.u.t.t, hadn't run into myself and then shot myself and then opened the book and tried to skip ahead, I might not have ended up here, and seen this, and realized that, in my own way, this is what I was headed for, a life in some dead quiet airless construct my dad built, free-floating in s.p.a.ce. I was headed for an entire life spent alone, pitying myself for not being more, ignoring all those people who actually ask me to be more, because they see it in me. I'm running for a door, any door, the door in the northeast corner to the temple. It's locked. I grab the k.n.o.b and shake as hard as I can. It feels very wrong to do this, in a temple, in a place of silent contemplation, but I think I need to kick the door down. I kick it hard, with the entire bottom of my foot, stomping it, just below the doork.n.o.b. This is no ordinary wooden door. Play by the rules, dummy. Who said that? Ting Ting. Do I have to spell it out for you? Okay, who is messing with me? Ting Ting. Buddha? The Buddha's talking to me? No one is talking to me. I'm talking to myself. I'm not where I think I am. I am somewhere else. This isn't real, but it isn't fake, either. This is not a pleasant universe anymore. Ting Ting.

Then I remember: the book is the key. That's what I said to myself. I was giving myself a clue I knew I would need. That's got to be it, right? The book will tell me how to get out of here. I bet there's a secret door! This is so cool! I figured it out! I'm so smart! It's like my very own adventure story. It's even kind of science fictional.

The only problem is that the TM-31 is nowhere to be found. I guess I'm not so smart. I am kind of an idiot. I didn't travel through time to get to this temple. This isn't the past or the future tense, it's the subjunctive. That's why my time machine isn't here.

I cut through the altar area, crossing in front of the large Buddhas, knocking over the huge bowl of incense dust, and now a loose canopy of dust is billowing over the room, and I knock over the stand holding the bell, and that releases a piercing super-Ting that cuts right through my eardrums into the center of my head. In the now ash-darkened room, the haze of incense-past literally clouding my vision, I fumble around and try the other door. Locked. It's hard to breathe, I'm coughing, I'm covering my mouth trying not to suffocate, but this soot is filling my nostrils, my lungs. I don't even want to think about where my fake mom is, somewhere behind me, slow-walking like zombies do in the movies. I try kicking this door, try slamming my body into it. Nothing, not even the slightest movement. I'm scared. I'm scared in a Buddhist temple? Maybe the least scary kind of place imaginable? What am I so scared of? Being trapped here? Wanting to stay here? Nothing? Nothingness? Whatever it is, I need to get out. Okay, think. Think. I am an idiot. This is no ordinary wooden door. This is not a physical door at all. It's metaphysical. This is a time barrier or a logic barrier or some other type of barrier that I am not going to be able to break through with my foot or my shoulder. This is a box I am in. I've been getting into and out of boxes all my life. I say box way too much. Even the idea of a box has become a kind of box for me, a barrier against trying to find another word for it, another device. This room I am in was made by my father, is a construct of a life he imagined. He built it with willpower, with the potential energy of forty years of frustration. This place, that cuts right through my eardrums into the center of my head. In the now ash-darkened room, the haze of incense-past literally clouding my vision, I fumble around and try the other door. Locked. It's hard to breathe, I'm coughing, I'm covering my mouth trying not to suffocate, but this soot is filling my nostrils, my lungs. I don't even want to think about where my fake mom is, somewhere behind me, slow-walking like zombies do in the movies. I try kicking this door, try slamming my body into it. Nothing, not even the slightest movement. I'm scared. I'm scared in a Buddhist temple? Maybe the least scary kind of place imaginable? What am I so scared of? Being trapped here? Wanting to stay here? Nothing? Nothingness? Whatever it is, I need to get out. Okay, think. Think. I am an idiot. This is no ordinary wooden door. This is not a physical door at all. It's metaphysical. This is a time barrier or a logic barrier or some other type of barrier that I am not going to be able to break through with my foot or my shoulder. This is a box I am in. I've been getting into and out of boxes all my life. I say box way too much. Even the idea of a box has become a kind of box for me, a barrier against trying to find another word for it, another device. This room I am in was made by my father, is a construct of a life he imagined. He built it with willpower, with the potential energy of forty years of frustration. This place, in here, in here, is nothing but a frame of abstraction surrounding empty s.p.a.ce and the sublimated intentions of my father. But when he got here, he realized he wanted out. Is that why I'm here now? Did he want to show me this? Is that why I'm in a time loop? Is he asking me to come find him? And as I'm thinking this, ramming my shoulder into the door, it just flies open, and I fly through it, out into nothingness, and then I'm falling and screaming and crying a little bit but mostly just screaming and falling and falling and falling. is nothing but a frame of abstraction surrounding empty s.p.a.ce and the sublimated intentions of my father. But when he got here, he realized he wanted out. Is that why I'm here now? Did he want to show me this? Is that why I'm in a time loop? Is he asking me to come find him? And as I'm thinking this, ramming my shoulder into the door, it just flies open, and I fly through it, out into nothingness, and then I'm falling and screaming and crying a little bit but mostly just screaming and falling and falling and falling.

Now where am I?

You're in the interst.i.tial matrix that fills up the s.p.a.ce between stories.

Who said that?You did.I did? Wait, who am I?You're you.Oh, good. Thanks. Seriously, where are we?We're in a shuttle. I'm taking you back to where you were in story s.p.a.ce.

(This isn't the TM-31. I'm in some other kind of vehicle. Larger. More room and air and light. The interior is clean, all white and black ceramic. Like Apple designed a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p.) We're on the bus? A s.p.a.ce bus?More like a s.p.a.ce elevator. It's called the Bauman transfer system. A vast network of elevators going in all different directions in ten-dimensional s.p.a.cetime. Some are mainlines, some are branches, some are endpoints.Like a brain.I guess so.Or a bus.If you insist.

(There's soft atmospheric music playing, but otherwise it's quiet. The air-conditioning feels nice. I press my face, still flushed from the heat of the temple, against the cold surface of the window.) h.e.l.lo whoever you are?Still here.You're retcon, right? This is the retcon shuttle.You got it.Can you pick up Ed for me?Sure. Who's Ed?My dog.I don't have any record of a dog.Technically he didn't exist.You had a retconned dog for a pet?Yeah.

(The driver hits a b.u.t.ton on his pants. He says, Someone get the dog yeah, I guess we forgot hold on, let me check.) What does your dog look like?Kind of a mutt. Brown. Face like mushy oatmeal.

(He relays the description into his crotch. About ten seconds later, the shuttle stops. The door opens. Ed trots in, flops down next to me. I say thanks to the driver, give Ed a few hard scruffs to his furry neck.) So why am I being retconned? Did I die?No. You just got somewhere you weren't supposed to go.My own future? My empty future?Sure.What does that mean? That I have no future? That I'm dead?That's not really for me to answer.That is annoyingly cryptic.Thank you. I try.

(We're zipping along through some kind of color s.p.a.ce, hurtling through a galactic-scale elevator shaft. Up and down and all around are other elevator shafts, and snaking all around the Bauman matrix are long tubes of blue and green and red, tendrils and vectors shooting in every direction.

(Out my window I can see the edges of stories as we pa.s.s by. Some of them, the s.p.a.ce operas, are grand circuses of light. Others are smaller systems, lonesome cl.u.s.ters, dim and muted and private little stories. I had no idea Universe 31 was so big. Bigger than I'd imagined.) Don't blame yourself.For what?For whatever is making you look so guilt-ridden right now.Who else can I blame?The guy who gave you the book.That was myself. My future self.No it wasn't.I saw him. He looked exactly like me.You think what makes you you is what you look like?No. Yes.Some guy hands you a book and says this is going to be your story, and you stick to it. You don't know what he's up to or even who he is and you just do what he says just because he looks like you? Listen to me: think about what he asked you to do.Stick to the story.And what does the story do?Makes me skip ahead.You are a paradox.I am a paradox.Your life is one big paradox.It makes no sense.Right. Take a guess who I am.Me.That's correct.You don't look anything like me.Again with the physical universe stuff. What exactly do you think you are? What exactly do you think this place is? You want to tell a story? Grow a heart. Grow two. Now, with the second heart, smash the first one into bits. Gross, right? A b.l.o.o.d.y pulpy liquid mess. Look at it, try to make sense of it. Realize you can't. Because there is no sense. Ask your computer to print out a list of every lie you have ever told. Ask yourself how much of the universe you have ever really seen. Look in the mirror. Are you sure you're you? Are you sure you didn't slip out of yourself in the middle of the night, and someone else slipped into you, without you or you or any of you even noticing?

(Then he hits a b.u.t.ton and the entire back wall and every seat behind me in the shuttle blows apart and falls away, leaving me sitting on the rear edge of an exposed relativistic elevator rocketing along the track at, like, one-quarter the speed of light. The heel of my shoe is about an inch from being ground into pure energy and I realize how good the insulation of the shuttlecraft was, and how noisy the real world is outside, how noisy friction is and damage, how it sounds like the cosmic music of the spheres out here but also like all of creation is one active construction site, either construction or demolition or both, and the noise is almost unbearable and the driver isn't shouting, he's still talking pretty softly, and I can hear it in my head, like it's a voice-over.

(The driver grabs me by the neck. Not in a menacing way, just kind of firm. Like I am a child, a baby whose neck he has to support. I don't get a great look at his face, but I realize he sort of resembles me. Just tougher. With a bit more facial hair. Like if I'd had to actually work all my life driving a shuttle bus instead of in a climate-controlled desk job in IT support. He grips my head, pus.h.i.+ng it forward, forcing me to look at the outside world.) Now listen to me. Don't you want to find your father?(I manage to squeak out an answer.)Yes.Then what is the problem?I don't know.It's your story, n.u.m.b.n.u.t.s.You think this story belongs to me?Who else would it belong to? Are you the author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe? Own up to it.But that isn't me. That's my future self.That's my future self, that's my future self. Listen to you. You sound like an idiot. Who do you think you are? Imagine there's a version of you that sees all of it. A version that knows when versions are messing with the other ones, trying to get things off track, trying to erase things. A record of all the keystrokes, the storage of all the versions, partial and deleted and written over. All the changes. All truths about all parts of our self. We break ourselves up into parts. To lie to ourselves, to hide things from ourselves. You are not you. You are not what you think you are. You are bigger than you think. More complicated than you think. You are the only version of you that is you. There are less of you than you think, and more. There are a million versions of you, half a trillion. One for every particle, every quantum coin flip. Imagine this uncountable number of yous. You don't always have your own best interests at heart. That's true. You are your own best friend and your own worst enemy. You can't trust a guy who gives you a book and says, This is your life. He might have been your future, he might not. Only you know how you get there. Only you know what you need to do. Imagine there is a perfect version of you. Out of all the oceans of oceans of you, there is exactly one who is perfectly you. And that's me. And I'm telling you: you are the only you. Does that make any sense?Not really.

(Then he hits another b.u.t.ton and my seat belt whips off and my chair breaks down and just as I'm about to be tossed out of the shuttle, I grab on to the back of the seat in front of me with both hands and just cling for my life.) Also, your operating system? You should be nicer to her. You love her, right? But you're just kind of mean to her. You should tell her. You should tell her while you have the chance. Now get back to your life and quit being such a whiny little wuss. Be a man. Find your father. Tell him you love him. Then let him go. Then go find your mom and eat her food and tell her it's good. Then go and marry that girl you never married. What's her name?Marie. She doesn't exist.Neither does your dog, and you love him, right? Anything is possible in this kind of world. You idiot. Go marry Marie. And have a life. And grow a heart. And a pair.

(He gets out of his driver's seat and walks back to my seat and stands in front of me. He slaps me on the face, hard. And then he slaps me on the other side of the face, then he shakes me like I'm a baby, then he kisses me hard on the mouth, which, well, is one of the more disturbing experiences I have ever had, not incest exactly, because I don't know that he actually is related to me, it's just this weird feeling I have, and although the kiss is not, by any means, pleasant, it's also not entirely unpleasant, sort of like when you're a kid and you try to practice on yourself, and for a second you realize, hey, I have breath, and I can smell my own breath and it's not great, and I'm a hot-breathed, mouth-breathing teenager just like all the other hot-breathed, mouth-breathing teenagers, and then he says, I love you, I'm doing this for your own good, and he slaps me one more time for good measure and he hits a b.u.t.ton that opens the shuttle door, and shoves me hard out of the shuttle, falling, seemingly without end, and I'm wondering if it's going to be stories, all stories, all the way down, just stories and stories.) (Outside. Outside the shuttle, outside of my TM-31, no Tense Operator, no grammar drive, no device around me. Out here. Out here, another free body, another part of the broken-down universe. In a moment, I will be falling. In a moment, I will be falling again, but from here, outside, between moments, the TM-31 looks like a phone booth, looks like a shower stall, looks like a cage. From here, I can see what ten years looks like, what a lifetime looks like, spent inside that contraption, my personal mode of propulsion. I can see how I am always in perpetual motion through time, how I can never stop, obsessed with the past, projecting myself into the future, clutching at and always failing to grasp the wisp of now. For a moment, a nonmoment, I can rest, I can clear my head of the noise of existence, from up here, an inch above the time axis, I can look down and see it all laid out, I can just almost start to hear, just start to make out the original sound, the background voice, just start to remember that there was something I've been trying to remember for my entire life, and just when I almost feel like it's starting to come back, just when I've almost got my mind wrapped around it, it's slipping away, it is ending even as it starts, and I know I can't stay in this s.p.a.ce here, the next moment will be coming soon, it's here now, and just like that, the memory of the memory of the memory of the sound is gone.) (And then I'm falling again, Ed is falling right next to me, and we're about smack right on top of my TM-31. I may have broken my sternum. Ow. Manage to pop the hatch, climb back in. Ahh, TAMMY. Ahh, Ed. But then I see it. A corridor of memory. A series of boxes. An endless hallway, a moving diorama, with no ceiling, no fourth wall. It's the fatherson axis. If I focus on any one point on the line, I can see the memory clearly. If I relax, and look at it as a whole, it is like a general impression of emotion and color and smells and sounds. We're approaching low, at just the right angle, and I slide into the axis, touching down right in the middle of a memory.)

(module )

"We're in your childhood," TAMMY says.

Ed senses something different, lifts his head to sniff around.

"Why would shuttle guy drop me off here?" I say.

The view outside the TM-31 is somewhat akin to being inside a very large, very dark aquarium. There are exhibit tanks in every direction, as far as the eye can see, only instead of primordial sharks and bioluminescent jellyfish, all the specimens are me. Me at nine, me at fourteen. It's an after-hours tour of a private museum. We drift past a memory that looks disturbingly familiar to me.

"What are you doin-?" TAMMY starts to ask, trying to interpret the scene. "Oh."

This was that magical, feverish, sweat-soaked afternoon when I'd found my father's stack of old Penthouse Penthouses, taking it all in, trying to store those images, those poses in my memory forever, making the most of my windfall and, apparently, making particularly good use of the July 1988 issue.

"I feel like I understand you better already," TAMMY says.

"Shut up. Shut up."

They're all here in this corridor, good memories and bad, humiliations and accidents and even small victories, each tableau playing out like the movement of silent, benthic sea life, viewed through the viscous and refractive medium of the years in between, in some cases dim and obscured, and others relatively clear, but never completely transparent, at best suggestions, outlines, emotions and echoes, impressions as relived through the deepest and darkest of waters.

There we are, my father and me, in the garage. Here we are, TAMMY and me, we're standing in the garage, invisible to them, watching them through the gla.s.s case of memory-proof material along this corridor of the aquarium of the past. It looks and feels as if I am standing in the same room as they are, right in front of my younger self and my father. And it looks as if they are staring, not through me, but right back at me, and with their minds immersed in the theory of time travel and their eyes fixed on the future. Maybe, in a sense, they are are staring at me. I'd like to imagine that's what my father was gazing at all those times in the garage, his eyes fixed at some point in the middle distance, our future as a family, which is to say, me, and that maybe looking at me, even though he didn't know what he was looking at, was some kind of unconscious inspiration for him, that whatever good feeling he might have had was a reaction to some inexplicable thing he saw in the future. I'd like to imagine even that his ideas, which seemed to come to him from nowhere, could have been just a kind of unknowing comprehension he gained from studying the ghostly contours of my TM-31, that somehow in these future-past-memory interactions he perceived the ineffable, the intangible architecture and shape of an invention he had not yet created, that by some mechanism, in trying to learn something from this private museum of their past, I am helping him, from in here, that in some way his own son was the inspiration for the work he was doing. staring at me. I'd like to imagine that's what my father was gazing at all those times in the garage, his eyes fixed at some point in the middle distance, our future as a family, which is to say, me, and that maybe looking at me, even though he didn't know what he was looking at, was some kind of unconscious inspiration for him, that whatever good feeling he might have had was a reaction to some inexplicable thing he saw in the future. I'd like to imagine even that his ideas, which seemed to come to him from nowhere, could have been just a kind of unknowing comprehension he gained from studying the ghostly contours of my TM-31, that somehow in these future-past-memory interactions he perceived the ineffable, the intangible architecture and shape of an invention he had not yet created, that by some mechanism, in trying to learn something from this private museum of their past, I am helping him, from in here, that in some way his own son was the inspiration for the work he was doing.

I want to believe that I was an idea, a feeling, a longing in my own mind, in the mind of my father.

Or even just a queasiness, an uneasy apprehension, as he stares into my face, as I stare into his.

I can see my younger self now, sniffing the air, just as Ed did, and I realize, finally, what that recurring scent was in my nostrils, the one I always a.s.sociated with big moments in my life, with the oncoming arrival of something bad, of opportunity mishandled, of lost possibility. I thought it was the stinging odor of failure, like getting punched in the nose, the smell of adrenaline and then embarra.s.sment, some biochemical reaction to learning, time and again, with my father, that the world didn't want our invention.

Now I understand that what I thought was the smell of personal disappointment, the smell of my father's crushed hope, the smell of fear itself, was really just the metallic-tinged ozone vapor coming from the silent exhaust of the TM-31, was just the by-product of time travel, before my father finally escaped his own timeline.

Could that be it? Why I ended up here? To find my father. My father, who managed to escape from his own life. He figured out a way to do something no one else has. Is he the one who can help me get out of this loop?

As we continue to drift along the darkened visitor paths, a particular chain of exhibits softly lights up, as if we're being shown the way by some unseen docent. I point the TM-31 in the direction of the illuminated pa.s.sage and, silently, our vessel starts to glide down that faintly glowing hallway.

Our first attempt at a prototype was a rickety contraption that my father and I put together over the better part of a summer vacation, during my three months of break before entering middle school. We called the prototype the UTM-1. It was a failure.

My mother and father had been fighting for weeks that summer. The fighting, no matter what it was about, was really about money. Not money itself, as they were both simple in that regard, happy with just enough. The problem was that there wasn't. They fought not about money, but because of the stress from lack of it. They both knew that neither one could do anything about it. They hated themselves for fighting about it. They both tried to hide it from me, but I knew it, and they knew I knew it.

After a particularly bad Fourth of July weekend, my mother had had enough and went to stay with her divorced sister, who lived by herself an hour away, coming back for more clothes every weekend until her closet was almost empty.

I didn't speak to my father for the first couple of weeks after my mother moved out. He came and went, made me dinner or picked up takeout and left it for me on the counter. I took the bus to summer school and when I got home, I watched television all afternoon and night and he never said anything about it. I could hear him in the garage working on the prototype. I still felt bad about the thing I'd said months earlier, about us being poor, but I heard through the walls all those fights, was scared of him, of the voice he used, how such a normally quiet man, gentle even, especially with me, could sound like that when talking to my mom. I was a mama's boy, I guess, and I refused to even go into the garage. Instead, I just sat on the couch and watched Star Trek Star Trek reruns and generally tried to pretend that I had no idea what was going on. I had always been closer to my mother and it had seemed natural to take her side. reruns and generally tried to pretend that I had no idea what was going on. I had always been closer to my mother and it had seemed natural to take her side.

I'm standing here in the TM-31, with the cloaking device on, watching my prep.u.b.escent self make a sandwich, and I remember this.

I remember that when the fighting started, I would go to my room and close the door and boot up my Apple II-E. It's all coming back now. I see myself working on a program in BASIC, a program for making a spherical object bounce around the screen, like an asteroid in s.p.a.ce. I remember that I had gotten the physics right, that was easy. What I couldn't figure out was what should happen at the boundaries, whether the asteroid should, when reaching the edge of the screen, bounce off and reverse direction or keep going right through, around the universe, and then emerge from the other side.

"You were a cute kid," TAMMY says, still giggling about the Penthouses Penthouses.

I see myself pretending to work on the program, pretending even though I was alone, I remember how I would always pretend that I wasn't listening to whatever was going on in the living room, the outpouring of anger in a constant stream, ebbing and rising in waves, punctuated by bursts of outright screaming. I remember how I would sit there thinking, Who am I trying to fool Who am I trying to fool, sitting there as if I wasn't fazed by it, every day, for years, ever since I was a small child, as if it had no effect on me, as if it didn't hurt.

I remember thinking all of this and still, and yet, and for whatever reason, continuing to stare at the screen, pretending in my room alone, pretending to myself, as if someone was watching me from above, some semi-omniscient, bird's-eye view observer was watching over me, and what I didn't realize then was that there was an observer, and in fact, it was me, it's me now, looking back at myself from inside this time machine.

from How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe