Q: A Novel (25 page)
Authors: Evan Mandery
“I asked for raspberry preserves,” he says. “This is raspberry jam.”
“Jam and preserves are the same,” says the waiter.
“No, they are not. By FDA regulation, preserves have a higher percentage of fruit content than jam.”
“Respectfully, sir, you are mistaken. The FDA treats jam and preserves as interchangeable. They each contain seeds and pulp. Jelly is distinct, but jam and preserves are the same.”
“Well, I want raspberry preserves.”
The waiter points to the jar. “By federal regulation, this is raspberry preserves.”
We leave and wander for another hour before we find another place. Miraculously, on Perry Street, a tiny bakery has fresh scones. They come with conserve.
“This is excellent,” says I-74. “The fruit content in conserve is even higher than in preserves.”
“I am glad you are happy.”
I-74 is dressed formally. He is wearing a morning coat and an ascot and looks like Beau Brummell has dressed him to watch the afternoon jumpers. Each and every customer who comes into the bakery, each and every one of whom is drunk, comments on the absurdity of his appearance. I-74 does not notice. He devours the scone then gets to the point.
“The guitar is a frivolous instrument.”
“I quite like it. I have gotten down the solo from ‘Sweet Home Alabama.’ I can channel Ed King.”
“In forty years, no one will remember either him or Lynyrd Skynyrd.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“It is true all the same.”
“Who will they remember?
“Prokofiev and Shostakovich and Hindemith.”
“Ah.”
“If you want to be remembered, you must play the cello. Any musician worth anything at all must play the cello.”
“Why does it matter to be remembered?”
A speckle of conserve on his chin, I-74 smiles at me as if I am a child. “My dear boy, when you get to be my age, you will see that this is the only thing that matters.”
Outside the Fort Greene
satellite of the Emanuel Feuermann Conservatory, on my way home from a lesson, I am confronted by I-80. Together we walk to the Orange Julius stand on Atlantic Avenue. It is years since I have been there. When I was a boy, my father sometimes would take me with him to Brooklyn Technical High School, where he was a teacher, and after classes ended we would head over to the stand. I remember I liked it almost as much as I liked going to school with him, which was quite a bit. The Julius does not disappoint. It is wonderful, rich and creamy. I have been told they put an egg inside the drink, but this is surely an urban legend. Whatever the recipe, it is delicious. I-80 relishes it as much as I do. He closes his eyes as he drinks, in apparent ecstasy.
When he has finished, he says, “The cello is stupid.”
“Why couldn’t you have told me that before I took nine months of lessons? They are very expensive and the practice is tedious. Why are you always so late?”
“Did you really believe this would be the path to your fame? Did you believe that, taking up the cello at thirty-five, you would someday surpass Casals or Ma or Mstislav Rostropovich?”
“No,” I say. “I have never even heard of Rostropovich.”
“You still don’t understand, do you? There is no certain path to fame or happiness. The best one can hope for is to attempt to understand the mystery of existence and attain some measure of inner peace.”
“How?”
“Through great books. Through the consolations of Boethius. From the wisdom of Wittgenstein, Dickens, and Proust. Therein lies your only hope for salvation.”
I am in the Reading Room
of the New York Public Library, where I sit for my daily dose of Proust, when I am approached by I-81. I almost do not recognize him. He is old, but he is supple and lithe and moves in ways unlike his predecessors. He beckons me outside. We walk behind the great library together, to Bryant Park, sit on a bench, and share a salty pretzel. It is rubbery and insipid.
“How goes the Proust?”
“It goes.”
“Like life.”
“Like life.”
We sit for a while, staring into the distance, at Sixth Avenue. Several pigeons wander by and we each toss bits of pretzel to them. The birds sniff at the crumbs, poke them with their beaks, then waddle away. We resume staring at the traffic.
“Why don’t you tell me what it is that you want?”
“Thank you for asking. It is rude to ask without invitation.”
“Well, I am inviting.”
“Thank you. You are most gracious.”
“You honor me by your presence.” This seems to be in the spirit of things.
“As you honor me.” He pauses, then gets to the point. “I would like you to devote yourself to the mastery of Zen. Proust is wonderful, but I do not believe it to be a path that leads to enlightenment.”
“Couldn’t you have told me this before I started
À la recherche du temps perdu
? I am halfway through
La prisonnière
. And you know I am reading it in the original French, so I first had to learn French.”
“I am sorry. I got here as soon as I could.”
I am fed up. “Why don’t you do it yourself?” I ask, nearly shouting. “Why do I have to give up Proust for Buddhism?
You
can study Buddhism. I am not stopping you. Why is it that every time you have some major epiphany, it is
my
life that has to change? If you want to swim, swim. If you want to learn the guitar, learn the guitar. If you want to meditate to find the path to enlightenment, go right ahead and do it.”
I expect the usual lecture: I have confused him with the others who have come before, but they are different people.
He
, of course, has never asked me for anything. But I-81 does not hector me. “It is not so simple,” he says soothingly. He is phlegmatic, unflappable. “I do meditate, and since I began I have discovered the One True Path. But I found it too late. I do not have the powers of concentration that are required to achieve real self-awareness. I cannot adequately quiet my mind. I believe that if I had begun this quest at a younger age, then I might have been able to achieve Nirvana.” He pauses. “If you understand the nature of my being here today, you know that I do not stand to benefit from this request. I am here only because I believe I can make your life better.”
I could use some meditation to decompress. I exhale, relax, say, “I understand.”
We sit together for a while longer, staring at the traffic and the pigeons searching for desirables. Buddhists can be quiet for a long time. It is refreshing.
A vendor pushes his lunch cart past us, and I-81 says, “I remember sitting here with Q on a day such as this, eating a hummus wrap and discussing the season’s zucchini crop.”
“That never happened,” I say.
“Oh,” he says, “it most certainly did.”
I am staring
at the wall of a limestone cave in the Badlands of South Dakota, when another me finds me. He is very old—far, far older than any of his predecessors. How old exactly I cannot tell. My eyes are not what they were.
I have been staring at the wall for a very long while. It has been years at least, perhaps decades. I am not sure how long exactly. One loses track of time when staring at a wall. You can get caught up in it, like a good baseball game.
I rise to greet him. I do not know why he is here and I do not ask. I am too happy to stretch my legs. He wraps me in a blanket and puts a reassuring arm around my shoulder.
“Have you learned anything?” he asks.
“Only that the cave is cold.”
“It’s enough. You should stop now.”
So I do.
W
hen time travel is discovered, I am not surprised. I saw it coming. Still, it inspires my awe. The headline is emblazoned across all six columns of the
New York Times
: “Scientists Conquer Time.” It is a red-letter day, one of the handful of moments in a life when people remember exactly where they were, like Kennedy’s assassination or the moon landing or the attack on the World Trade Center.
I am at my kitchen table eating oatmeal. I am old. I am not sure how it has happened, yet it has happened all the same. I recognize myself, but it is me and not me. I have lines around my eyes, ear hair that defies all grooming efforts, and an old-man paunch. My arthritic right knee is in a bad way. It has deteriorated progressively over the years. For the longest time, I continued to run despite the throbbing that would follow in the evening. But on my birthday, nine years ago, it simply hurt too much and I have not run since. Now it is an effort to get out of bed in the morning.
Truth is, of course, I saw this coming too.
The news does not have the impact it might have had if I were a younger man or if I had not foreseen it, but it has a substantial impact all the same. It is only natural, it seems to me, in light of the reality of time travel, to think about possibilities. And I have lots of time to think. When all the commotion was said and done, I taught elementary school and tried my hand at writing children’s books, the latter with little success. The kindergarteners filled some of the voids in my life, but I retired seven years ago after hanging on two years too long, truth be told. Teaching five-year-olds is more physically demanding than one might imagine. Now there are no more classes to teach or books to write. The well of creativity, if it ever existed, dried up long ago. No children or grandchildren, either mine or borrowed, inhabit my life. I have no one to dote on, nor anyone to dote on me.
I live in the same apartment in Morningside Heights. The neighborhood has gotten better and worse over the years, as neighborhoods do. It is on the upswing now, and that means good things for the park, which is flourishing. The nature preserve has been restored and birds are flocking to it. Sometimes I can catch a glimpse of one out of the corner of my living room window. I leave a plate of seeds on the windowsill, and from time to time, a cardinal or a sparrow comes to visit.
On Tuesdays, a doughty woman named Ellen from City Services for the Aged comes to the apartment. She does some shopping for me and cleans up a while. She likes sports, and when she’s done, we chat for a while about the Mets or the Yankees, or the Knicks in the winter. This is the highlight of my week. If the weather is nice, Ellen takes me out for a walk. But it is four flights down and four flights back up. To be completely honest, it is already more than either of us can handle, and my leg is not getting any better. Soon enough, I expect I will be shut in continually, until I am wheeled out of my flat once and for all.
So you understand why I find myself thinking about what might have been.
And what could be.
It proves surprisingly
daunting for scientists to demonstrate the authenticity of time travel. They are understandably loath to conduct tests upon humans at the outset, and people are dubious of the animal trials. This skepticism is reasonable with respect to the first experiment, in which a rat is sent back twenty thousand years to the last ice age. He is placed in the chronoambulator, the machine is turned on, and the rat miraculously disappears. One hour later he returns. By all accounts, he is very cold. But not everyone is satisfied. A clumsy illusionist with a refrigerator could accomplish as much. Accusations abound that it is a parlor trick, and better proof is demanded.
Scientists train a very special dog, a wonder dog really, a little beagle who is taught to find a lamb shank bone and bury it in the nearest field no matter where—and when—he is. They practice this with the beagle hundreds of times, until they are as confident as one can be with a puppy as coprincipal investigator, then shoot the dog back in time and hope for the best. Back in the present, the super beagle finds his bone in the middle of what had become the parking lot of a shopping mall. The osseous matter is exhumed, carbon dated to 1976, and time travel is proved. In New York City, the dog is feted with a ticker tape parade but, sadly, never heard from again.
I find myself thinking of that doggie all the time.
Time travel is
technology, like atomic power and self-adhesive stamps, the full potential of which is not immediately understood. Once the breakthrough is finally accepted, the reality of the possibilities it creates generates a mixture of hope and trepidation. Ultimately, though, as is so often the case with scientific innovation, neither man’s greatest dreams nor worst fears are realized.
In the beginning, much of the consternation in the scientific community concerns the ethical and practical consequences of changing the past. The practical fear is that even the smallest alteration of history may have substantial and possibly dire consequences for the future. This worry turns out to be overblown. The putative butterfly effect is conclusively disproven by a group of scientists in Leipzig. The team sends a bright green spicebush swallowtail back into the middle Triassic, all the while monitoring everybody and everything in Germany. Very little changes. Jurgen Beiderman, a cobbler from Sprockhövel, reports that his bicycle is missing. He is a creature of habit and rides the cycle to work every morning from his home in nearby Niederstuter. Fearful they have opened Pandora’s box, the scientists quickly investigate the disappearance, but the alarm is for nothing. Herr Beiderman has forgotten that his gear shift was stuck and so dropped the bicycle off at the repair shop in Bredenscheid, where it is waiting, the gears as good as new. The bicycle in question is displayed on the front page of the
Bild-Zeitung
, and the Leipzig team receives the Nobel Prize.
On the whole, time, as it turns out, is more resilient than people imagined. This is not to say efforts are not made to tweak the past to favor one party or another. They are, mostly by large corporations with the sort of resources required for an undertaking of this sort, and there are occasional successes. For example, one morning I wake up and find that the design of my coffee maker has changed. It looks like an hourglass with a plastic handle jutting from the neck and something resembling a Bunsen burner underneath. I call the manufacturer and am told by a customer service agent that this is a vacuum coffee brewer, which narrowly lost out to percolators in the battle for market dominance in the early twentieth century. But now, thanks to the tireless efforts of a phalanx of time-traveling salesmen, Sintrax vacuum coffee makers are the industry standard and no one has so much as heard of a percolator.
“But you just told me about it,” I say, after the agent finishes explaining the situation.
“An oversight,” she says. “Try the coffee.”
I do. It is very good.
On a second morning, Americans find themselves driving on the left-hand side of the road. On yet another, New Yorkers making the morning commute find themselves crossing the Hudson by blimp rather than ferry. On still another morning, the top line of the keyboard on my computer changes from QWERTY to DIHATENSOR and I have to relearn how to type. But most mornings nothing happens.
The Simpsons
are still on television. Democrats and Republicans are still fighting. Pie tastes as delicious as ever. When things do change, the world does not end. People are surprisingly adaptable.
Chronoambulation is also expensive,
particularly in the beginning, and since it is so difficult to make lasting changes it hardly seems worthwhile. This is part of the reason why many people do not try it and why it remains, at least for the first several years of its availability, principally the domain of corporate espionage. As time passes, the cost comes down. But it is still not relevant to the life of the average person. This is because it is not of use to most people.
Broadly speaking, one can imagine three possible reasons ordinary individuals might be attracted to time travel. The most obvious is tourism. Sadly, under the current restrictions of chronoambulation, the traveler can return only with what he left and nothing more. This means there can be no souvenirs or duty-free shops. Hence the tourist trade never really takes off.
The second obvious objective is to help one’s current lot. Many people try this, but things don’t always work out as planned. For example, my compadre Ard Koffman used his life savings to go back fifty years and let his younger self know who was going to win that year’s Kentucky Derby. He returned to our time expecting to be a rich man, but instead found himself almost penniless. Ard tore his apartment apart in an effort to figure out what went wrong. In the back of his bedroom closet, he found an envelope containing twenty thousand dollars of losing tickets from the 1992 Run for the Roses. Apparently, Ard’s younger self did not bet Lil E. Tee to win. Instead, to maximize his return, he paired the sure thing in exacta wagers with the other five favorites in the race. Unfortunately, a long shot named Casual Lies came in second, and since he never bet to win, all the parlays failed and thus the young Ard had nothing to show for the inside information.
Some people have better luck than Ard, but even the success stories are tainted. The people who succeed in telling their younger selves when to buy—and, equally importantly, when to sell—a stock, or convey a novel idea to themselves in a timely way, return to their present with great wealth but a profound sense of emptiness. Famously, Gus Santos, an elevator repairman from Toledo, had the good idea of travelling back to 1968 and Redmond, Washington. There, for four dollars an hour, he hired a pair of young men named Bill Gates and Paul Allen to write an operating system for personal computers. Needless to say, MicroSantos was a resounding success. Santos returned to his own time to find that he had become an extraordinarily wealthy man. But he remembered nothing of how he came into his wealth, had none of the satisfaction of the journey, as did Gates and Allen, who defected from MicroSantos, launched their own new company, and still ended up obscenely rich. Furthermore, Santos could not answer the most basic question about computers. The press, and even his own family, ridiculed him as a fraud, and several months later the first hundred billionaire in the history of humanity shot himself in the head.
Most recently, a coworker of mine at Rutherford Hayes Elementary used his entire pension to travel back in time and invested ten thousand dollars with a young newspaper delivery boy from Omaha, Nebraska, named Warren Buffett. The teenaged Buffett could not understand the basis of my colleague’s confidence in him but was all too happy to accept the money, which he used to buy a KoAloha ukulele, the Stradivarius of ukuleles, and to pursue his dream of playing professionally. This he achieved, and through the circuit of summer festivals and Omaha wine bars and, rarely but occasionally, private lessons, eked out enough to get by. He was deliriously happy with his life and thought often of the oddly dressed stranger who gave him his start so many years earlier.
The gross dissatisfaction
with time travel as a means of improving one’s own lot in life leaves many customers dissatisfied, and the creator of time travel, Professor Svetlana Yvgelnikov of the University of Irkutsk, becomes the object of public enmity, one of those innovators who is remembered in the end for the trouble they wrought rather than their brilliance, like J. Robert Oppenheimer, or Sir Isaac Newton each time someone is hit on the head with an apple. Professor Yvgelnikov takes it all personally, so much so that she decides to use her life savings to travel back in time and encourage her younger self not to invent time travel. The younger self appears persuaded, and is resolved to go to dental school and specialize in orthodontics, but Yvgelnikov returns to her own time to find that very little in her life has changed other than the fact that she is out $500,000 for the travel.
“Did you find this frustrating?” she is asked during an interview.
“
Da,
” she says. “Chronoambulation is quite dear, even with the ten-percent-off coupon I hold as inventor of the technology.”
“Does it bother you that comrade Ivan Demitovich now receives all the acclaim for inventing time travel?”
“Let him have it.”
“Is it odd that I know this fact? If the past has been changed, should it be known to me that you were the inventor of time travel in the past—or should I say the former past before it was revised?”
Comrade Yvgelnikov, a civil servant in the department of horse-driven carriages, rubs her chin thoughtfully. “The past has the most curious relationship with the present,” she says. “It is an entity unto itself, with its own past, current and future. Besides, much can happen between the time when things happen and the time when we look back upon these things that happened. For all we know, the rules of time travel may themselves be changing as a result of other people traveling back in time.”
“Isn’t this internally inconsistent?”
“Not at all. One must remember about entropy, comrade. According to the second law of thermodynamics, entropy cannot decrease; it is always increasing. In the simplest physicochemical processes, such as the expansion of a gas into a vacuum, the variable
S
represents entropy, the dispersal of the energized molecules into a greater volume than they occupied before the process. Conversely, the variable
Q
represents the amount of work that must be done to compress the gas to its initial volume. In other words, this is the work that must be done to reverse entropy.”
“So then there is hope for remedying some of the snags with chronoambulation and making things better.”
Yvgelnikov says nothing and an awkward pause ensues.
“Well?” says the interviewer.
“Well what?” asks Yvgelnikov.
“What is the answer?”
“I did not detect a question.”
