Q: A Novel (23 page)

The only question is how he got the money to come to see me. Maybe it is from an inheritance. Maybe he had good fortune at the races. This older me is older than any of the others who have come before. Perhaps the price of time travel comes down in the more distant future. Or perhaps in the future they have a welfare program to help people whose lives have gone horribly wrong, as his has. Perhaps in the future he is standing on a corner of his own.

I don’t know. I don’t want to know.

The waiter arrives and asks whether we would like dessert. Unlike his predecessors, I-77 has ordered modestly, just a bowl of matzo ball soup and a diet Dr. Brown’s cream soda. It’s not much to eat and I think to myself that he must be hungry. And, indeed, he appears fleetingly tempted by the possibility of a rugelach or hamantaschen. Nevertheless, he politely declines.

“Won’t you have something else?” the waiter asks.

“No, no. Thank you so much for your kindness, but a bowl of soup is more than enough for an old man like me, and besides, I haven’t had one this good in years.”

I refuse dessert too. The waiter says he will return in a few minutes, and while we wait for the bill, we pass the additional moments mired in a grim, awkward silence. I-77 is not the sort for small talk, so my only distraction is to further scrutinize
his appearance. I notice that underneath the makeshift manicure, the cuticles of his nails have been bitten to shreds and are flecked with blood. I see that the right arm of his glasses has broken off and is being held in place by a tightly wound rubber band. I see that his socks have holes in them and, anyway, are too thin to provide adequate warmth. He notices my noticing them and shuffles his feet under the table and averts his gaze from my eyes.

I am worried about him. “Where are you staying tonight?”

“I have a place to stay. I’m fine.”

“Would you like to stay with me?

“No, but thanks very much.”

“It’s no trouble. I have enough room as you know, and a cot. Or you can sleep on the floor if you like.”

“No, but thank you again. You are most kind. Besides, I need to be getting back to my own time.”

The check arrives, and I-77 moves quickly to take it from the waiter. “Please allow me,” he says.

“No,” I say, taking the bill. “This one’s on me.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

T
he decision to attend law school sits fine with me. Before deciding on graduate school in history, I had considered going to law school but was daunted by the LSAT. The LSAT is an examination that predicts whether one will be a good lawyer.

In most of the questions, people with names like Abel, Baker, and Charlie, are seated around a circular table subject to certain conditions. For example, if Abel sits next to Baker, then Baker does not sit next to Charlie. The thought is that if you can piece things together and figure out who sits next to whom, chances are, you’ll be a pretty good attorney. To prepare for the exam, I enroll in a class and spend several months diagramming seating arrangements.

I do well enough on the test that I am admitted to the University of Pennsylvania Law School. I resign my position at City University, sublet my apartment, and sell off my meager belongings. I move to a dormitory on Sansom Street, just one block from the law school campus in University City. Though I have lived in New York for my entire life, I do not mind leaving. Without Q, it no longer feels like home.

My first law school class
, contracts, is energizing. We spend the ninety-minute session debating
Raffles v. Wichelhaus
, an 1864 case from the Court of Exchequer concerning an agreement to sell 125 bales of Surat cotton, to arrive on the ship
Peerless
from Bombay. It so happens that two ships named, inaptly in retrospect,
Peerless
, are scheduled to arrive from Bombay, one in October, the other in December. The defendant thinks the agreement is for cotton on the October ship, while the plaintiff thinks it is for cotton on the December ship. When the plaintiff delivers the December cotton, the defendant refuses to accept it, and the matter ends up in litigation. The court holds that since there is no
consensus ad idem
—that is, the parties did not have a meeting of the minds as to what was being sold—a binding contract does not exist. It is all very controversial, and there are as many different views as there are students, each one passionately held.

The class discussion is most stimulating, and I am in the finest of moods as I exit the lecture hall when a conspicuously well-dressed version of myself, I-59 it turns out, buttonholes me and asks to have a word in the student cafeteria.

“Don’t you mean Morimoto or Buddakan?” These are the finest restaurants in town.

“No,” he says, “the cafeteria will be fine.”

I reluctantly agree. I would prefer to lunch with my new classmates, but I am also happy to be spared an expensive meal, which I can ill afford on my student budget. Together, we go through the line. I order tuna on wheat toast and a Diet Coke. He takes an egg salad on rye. Like his immediate predecessor, I-59 is dressed in a three-piece suit, but this one is the real deal. It is constructed of a fine, worsted gabardine wool, accented with a bold silver tie and silk pocket square. In the crowd of aspiring lawyers, he fits in just fine, though when we reach the cashier he inevitably looks to me. I pay and we find a table in the corner where I-59 gets right to the point.

“You need to drop out,” he says.

I nearly choke on the tuna sandwich, which is predictably terrible.

“Why?”

“Law school,” he says, waving his finger, “is not for you.”

“Couldn’t you have told me this before the first day of class? If you withdraw before the first day they refund your money. You only lose the deposit. If I leave now, I’ll be out half the semester’s tuition.”

“I’m sorry. I couldn’t make it in time.”

“Why not?”

“I got tied up in court.”

I’m starting to get fed up with all of this.

“What is it?” I ask angrily. “What’s so terrible about being a lawyer? Law school seems interesting enough. Today we debated
Raffles v. Wichelhaus
.”

“Surat cotton to arrive
ex Peerless
from Bombay,” he says, summarily.

“Right! It must have made quite an impression on you if you still remember it thirty years later.”

“Law school is nefariously seductive,” he says. “They lure you into the profession with cases about freedom of speech, theories of jurisprudence, and the transport of fine cotton, and you think to yourself that it’s all about ideas and justice and that this is a very fine thing to do with a life, perhaps what you had always been meant to do. But your law school professors decline to mention the most complicating detail about what happens after you graduate from law school: you have to be a lawyer.

“At that point, you can forget about public policy and doing justice. The moment you receive your diploma you become a lackey, whose job is to sift through boxes of documents and research obscure points of law, and take calls at three in the morning on a Sunday from some client in China who can’t remember the time difference. And when he calls, you can’t say, ‘Who do you think you are, it’s three o’clock in the fucking morning!’ You say, ‘Yes sir, what do you need me to do and by when do you
need it?’

“The job is like a noose. Only you can’t kick the chair out from under you and end it in an instant. It gets progressively tighter, but incrementally and so slowly that you hardly notice the change, until one day you realize that you cannot breathe anymore and you ask yourself, how did this happen? You are choking on your life, and there’s no way out.”

I have no doubt that this sentiment is authentic. It confirms much of what I had believed about law school before I-77 persuaded me otherwise and jibes with the fears and reservations many of my law school classmates have expressed about their chosen path.

“What should I do instead?” I ask.

“You should see the world,” he says. “There is so very much to see and travel nourishes the soul.”

En route to Kathmandu,
another older version of myself strikes up a conversation. At first I do not notice myself sitting next to me, not even after he gleefully orders a Diet Coke with lime, but this is understandable. This version of me looks quite different from any that have come before. He is wearing a yellow fleece and thick dungarees. With his scraggy gray beard and a necklace of beads, he looks like an ordinary backpacker, only older. I think nothing of it when he begins chatting with me.

“What are you reading?”

“
Samaya Trasadi,
” I say. “It’s a Nepali novel.”

“If you like Saru Bhakta then you must try
Pagaal Basti
.”

I am surprised that someone is better versed in Bhakta than I am, and so I pay closer attention. Then I see who it is.

“Oh, it’s you.”

He smiles.

“How old?” I ask.

“Sixty.”

“You look quite good. Not a day over fifty-five.”

“Thank you.”

After that we don’t speak for a while. We cross the entirety of Turkey in silence. I appreciate that he shares my distaste for airplane conversation, particularly since I am near the end of the novel. The cabin service begins just as I finish the book. It consists of a sleeve of peanuts and an eight-ounce bottle of water. These are presented unceremoniously, thrown in the general direction of the passenger. After catching my ration I ask the unavoidable.

“Why are you here?”

“Must there be a reason? Couldn’t I just be on my way to Nepal?”

“Are you?”

“No.”

“Then why are you here?”

He rubs his beard. “I’d like you to turn back around and go home.”

I throw up my arms in frustration, forgetting the tray table is extended and losing some peanuts in the process. “Why now?” I ask, exasperated. “Why couldn’t you tell me not to go to Nepal before I purchased the nonrefundable ticket? For that matter, why couldn’t you tell me not to go to law school before I paid the tuition or not to write the Freud novel before I wrote almost the entire book or not to be funny before I had written all those short stories? It’s maddening. What do you even expect me to do now? We’re halfway to Kathmandu. I can’t just jump off the air-
plane.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I got here as soon as I could.”

“It’s really beyond the pale. Besides, I’ve always wanted to see Nepal. I was quite looking forward to it.”

We sit for a moment, and I assess the situation with the scattered peanuts. They have not fled far. I reach for one, but it is so difficult to maneuver in an airplane, particularly in coach, particularly in coach on a flight to Nepal, which is packed as tight as a sardine can, that it is simply not possible. I lament the lost nuts and barely notice when he quietly asks, “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why do you want to see Nepal?”

I hadn’t thought about this before. “I don’t know,” I say. “I suppose I just want to see everything. The last one said I should see the world.”

“What is this all about?” he asks. “What is the fascination with seeing everything? You can’t
really
see
everything
. And why is one thing better than any other anyway? You can go to the Galápagos Islands and see a giant tortoise or some finches, and everyone says how fascinating that is, but it’s not as if the Galápagos tortoise is any more complex or improbable than a box turtle. They’re the product of the same evolutionary forces. By the same logic, what’s so special about Darwin’s finches? Natural selection produced the common pigeon just as it produced those finches. True, you don’t see a finch or a tanager every day, but that’s because you don’t live in the Galápagos Islands. Furthermore, just because you don’t see them every day, why does that make the finches and tanagers any more interesting than the pigeon? Why do people have to schlep to Ecuador, lay over in Quito, pack into a boat, and cruise to the Galápagos to see a giant tortoise when they could observe its close brethren in the Bronx River? What is the basis of this drive to explore?”

I hadn’t thought about this before either. “It’s just a human instinct,” I suppose.

“Well, it’s silly. Maybe when humans were at a primitive stage, the desire to explore had some adaptive value. By diversifying habitats,
homo sapiens
could collectively hedge its bets against ecological disaster. That explanation is irrelevant now. We have plenty of viable places to live.”

“Maybe the experience of seeing things has intrinsic value. I-59 said that travel nourishes the soul.”

“I-59 was a moron. Take it from me. Seeing things has no intrinsic value. I have seen a lot, and after a while it’s all the same. There are lots of different kinds of birds, lots of different kinds of turtles, and lots of different kinds of people. At bottom, they’re all pretty much the same. The downside is that when all is said and done, you’ll have nothing to show for all that exploration. You’ll exert yourself a lot and see a few things, but what is that to show for a life?”

“I’ll have experiences.”

“Experiences are just a bunch of chemicals and neurotransmitters. Everyone has those. What makes one better than another?”

I get his point. It seems reasonable enough.

“So if I shouldn’t explore, what should I do then?”

“You need to find a meaningful relationship.”

I think my head will explode. “Are you kidding?” I say this a bit too loud, loud enough that I would have been shushed on an American flight. But on the flight to Kathmandu, music is blaring and children are running amok in the aisles. The atmosphere is chaotic and I am emboldened to a level of animation from which I would otherwise refrain.

“You have a lot of nerve coming here and saying this to me. You’re the very same person who came and told me to leave Q. I had a meaningful relationship, the most meaningful relationship of my life, and you ruined it. How dare you even sit next to me?” I spit this last question. It is rhetorical, but I-60 answers.

“You have me all wrong,” he says. “I never told you to leave Q.”

“What are you talking about. You’re sixty years old. My sixty-year-old self told me to leave Q.”

“I am a different sixty-year-old. The sixty-year-old who told you to leave Q was the older you based on having lived a life with her. I am an older you based on your decisions to leave Q, pursue Minnie Zuckerman, leave Minnie Zuckerman, start writing funny books, stop writing funny books, go to law school, leave law school, and go trekking in the Himalayas. I’m thirty years or so down that path.”

“So you’re not the first guy again?”

“No, no. Most certainly not.”

“In my internal nomenclature you have the same designation.”

“All the same, he is not me. Remember the chart on the tablecloth in the restaurant?”

“Yes.”

“So you’ll need to come up with an alternate label for me. How about I-60 mark two?”

“That sounds a bit like you’re a sixty-two-year-old version of myself.”

“Fair enough,” he says, rubbing his chin. After a moment, he has it. “How about I-60B?”

That seems about as clear as can be hoped for, and I accept it, though not without reservation. “Okay,” I say, “but this could get confusing.”

“Life is confusing,” says I-60B, and we sit in silence again.

I-60B resumes the
conversation as we fly over Afghanistan. “Look, when I say you need to find a meaningful relationship, I don’t necessarily mean romance. Romance would be nice, but I mean relationships in the broadest sense. You need to build friendships and professional associations and attachments to the community.”

It’s a fair point. Truth be told, I only have one friend. I have some companions and many friendly acquaintances, but only one person I can honestly call a friend. I have never been the sort of person to attend community board meetings or pop into bars for a drink. It just never seemed important.

“I take your point. But I don’t understand why it’s so urgent.”

He turns to face me, and I see the right side of his face for the first time. He has a large asymmetrical mole on his right cheek, almost certainly a melanoma, and unless medicine has made an unforeseen stride in the next thirty years, almost certainly fatal. It seems fair to surmise from his presence with me that cancer has not been cured in his time.