How to Live Safely in a Science Fictiona (2010) (16 page)

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 glass 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
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 associated 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 embarrassment, 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 passage 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
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 prepubescent 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 space. 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
.

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
, 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

TM-31 Recreational Time Travel Device

Standard-issue chronogrammatical vehicle, rated for personal, private use.

Operating system generally reported to be helpful, even if a bit down on itself.

One notable quirk is the word
recreational
in the product’s name, which can be read either of two ways, with a hyphen or without, which some have suspected to be an implicit acknowledgment of the fact that “recreational” use of the machine is also, in a sense, “re-creational” use as well.

This idea is consistent with the current understanding of the neuronal mechanism of human memory, i.e., every time a user recalls a memory, he is not only remembering it, but also, from an electrochemical perspective, literally re-creating the experience as well.

It was a moonshot, that first trip. It was a soda bottle rocket with a crumpled bottle, it was the Wright brothers’ test run, it was a wobbly and earthbound arc, it never got free of the pull of the gravitational present. It lasted all of a minute, less than a minute, maybe fifty-five seconds. Once we climbed in, we couldn’t get out, but in the mirror we had placed in the garage (in order to be able to position the cooling element on top of the unit), we could see ourselves, sitting there, we saw what we looked like, a scientist and his know-nothing assistant, two guys in a garage next to a makeshift box, a crate really, with a piece of sheet metal stapled twice as a kind of door, except that it didn’t open.

This was how we built it. After fourteen straight days of silence and
Star Trek
reruns, one Saturday morning I went down to the garage and stood there, watching my father work while I ate a bowl of cereal. I couldn’t tell if he was mad at me for taking my mother’s side, or for not coming down sooner, or something else altogether. I thought I was the one who was supposed to be mad at him. He didn’t say anything all day, and we repeated it again the next day.

The next morning, I came down, prepared for a third day of watching him measure things wrong and curse at himself and make trips to the hardware store. This time, though, he handed me a fistful of nails and pointed to a piece of sheet metal leaning against the wall.

“Hammer that,” he said, still looking pissed. I did my best to look pissed, too, or as pissed as a ten-year-old can look, but eventually I hammered the nail, and then another, and before long, it was dinnertime. We worked mostly in silence for the next two months, only talking to each other when deciding what to eat for lunch.

By the end of the summer, the UTM-1 was ready. Or so we thought. We stood there in the garage, looking over our contraption, odd pieces of sheet metal sticking out here and there, little gaps where surfaces weren’t flush, the general overall slumpy, homemade look to our machine.

“That doesn’t look like it’s going to work,” TAMMY says. “But you guys did a nice job.”

She’s right. Although we did leave the present moment, and so in that sense we traveled in time, in every other respect we failed. We looped around in a short circuit, but we had no control over the machine. We couldn’t get out, we couldn’t even stop the thing, it was just a swinging, fishtailing 180, an out-of-control joyride, a minute into the past, and then back, but it took us much longer than a minute to get there, it took us, well, we don’t even know how long it took that first time because we didn’t know to bring a watch or timepiece. We thought we would appear instantaneously at our destination. We would later find out that even in science fiction, it takes time to travel through time, that there is no instant poof, no shazam, that a vehicle is a vehicle, regardless of what kind of vehicle it is, and that the whole point of transport through some amount of space–time is that it is a physical process. Even if it has metaphysical and fictional implications, it is still a physical process.

This was before, before it all, before we learned all that we would learn in the next few years. Before others would make breakthroughs in chronodiegetics, before I abandoned my studies to become a repairman for a large conglomerate, before we had made our rudimentary maps of the science fictional world. Before he got lost.

“We’re doing it,” he said.

“The rig is holding up,” I said, noting that it was only vibrating slightly. We’d been worried that it might hit a resonant frequency in the acceleration phase and vibrate itself into pieces, just blow itself apart, throwing us into who knows what or where or when.

We were in the garage, with the garage door open, I remember, so I park my TM-31 just outside, behind the basketball hoop and trash cans, so I can watch from here.

“Imagine,” my father said, “if we could just stop.” If we could just stop at any point in time. If we could stop right now in this subspace, if we got out and well, what?

If we could just stop at any moment in time and change our lives. Rearrange them.

What could we do? What would we do? What would we have done differently? Instead of the ordinary problems of life, the problem of what to do next, of what to do first, of what to do ever, at all, even the smallest step, we would also have the problem of what to do yesterday, of what to do last year, of how to justify anything, ever. There we were between minutes, between moments. We sat there in the crate, unsure of what or when we were, knowing only that we were in transit, in a space between space, a time between times, in some sort of interstitial gap between moments, a subspace occupied by only the two of us.

We sat there for some indefinite and unmeasured period of time realizing our error, our wrongheaded assumption, marveling at what we had learned: time travel takes time. My father was so excited he almost broke our craft, banging on the front door, such as it was, with both fists in celebration of the discovery. Of course, he said, why hadn’t he thought of it? Living is a form of time travel. Time travel is a physical process. It has to be. Although we hadn’t remembered to bring a timepiece on our maiden voyage, we had remembered to bring a notepad and pencils and even a quarter sheet of graph paper. We thought we would record something, anything, sensory data, our impressions, our physical conditions. But when the time came, we couldn’t bring ourselves to move. We just stared at each other. Even in my anger at him, my indignation, I couldn’t help but smile, if for no other reason than just seeing my father smile. It was so strange and unsettling to see him like this, to see him happy, strange because I realized I had never seen him like this before, not in our house, not with my mom, not when we were all together in the car taking a drive, never. Not like this. We were doing science. Together. In here, in our little box, in our laboratory separated from the rest of the world. For some period of nontime time or a thousand moments, or maybe just one, we were in there, and he was happy and I was part of it. I remember the goose bumps on my arms and the back of my neck, the excitement at seeing this, at doing something right, for once in our lives,
succeeding
.