Q: A Novel (6 page)

At this suggestion, I-60 grows solemn himself. “Time travel is still in its infancy,” he says. “Many of the practical and philosophical issues surrounding it are yet unexplored. What we do know is that it is highly problematic, potentially cataclysmic, for physical objects from one period to come into contact with the same physical object in another time line.”

“So it’s okay for you to come back and talk with me, but if our watches were to encounter one another, that would be a problem.”

“Yes.”

“That makes no sense.”

“The universe is arbitrary. Just look at Jeff Goldblum.”

This doesn’t sit right with me and I let him know. “Hold on a second,” I say. “Money is fungible. The value of a dollar is a concept, not an object.”

“Unfortunately, the only form of money I possess is currency, which is physical. And since I can’t very well put dollar bills from the future into circulation, I’m stuck with a few old dollar bills, which I happened to save from my own past. I need to use these sparingly. If one of these were to come into contact with itself . . .” He shakes his head at this prospect and quietly says, “It’s just not a chance worth taking.”

“So I guess I’m stuck with the tab.”

“I guess,” says I-60. “Unless you can get them to accept a postdated check.”

He laughs heartily at this, as I hand the waiter my credit card.

“That’s funny,” I say, though my experience of it is quite different.

Chapter Six

I
harbor suspicions, intensified by this conversation at the end of our meal at Bouley, that my putative arrival from the future may be an elaborate ruse. Several things don’t fit. There’s the lime sucking, of course, and the persistent refusal to pay. But what makes me most wary is the gratuitous shot at Jeff Goldblum. Tastes change. I didn’t like coffee or fish when I was a kid, but I do now. It’s possible my predilection for lime evolves over time. I-60’s frugality is credible. The animosity for Jeff Goldblum, however, is utterly implausible.

I like Jeff Goldblum. I did not happen to care for
The Fly
, but
I very much enjoyed
Igby Goes Down
and
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
. Furthermore, Goldblum had a small role in
Annie Hall
, my favorite movie ever. When Alvy Singer and Annie Hall go to the party at Tony Lacey’s Hollywood home, Goldblum is the man saying into the telephone, “I forgot my mantra.” This alone gives him a perpetual pass in my book. I am thus distrustful of I-60. I suspect he is not genuine and that this whole thing is a
hoax.

Concededly, I am not sure what the point of this would be. I theorize that it could be an elaborate practical joke or a credit card scam, though creating a fictitious future self just to secure access to my American Express seems a bit extreme. If I were being honest, I would admit that my suspicions about the authenticity of I-60 are really part and parcel of a more general, long-suppressed skepticism about the authenticity of life itself.

This doubt originates
in high school. My parents move from Brooklyn to Long Island the summer after ninth grade and I am forced to change schools. I don’t know anyone at the new school. I spend most of tenth grade trying to make friends, with limited luck, and trying to meet girls, with no success at all. Then, miraculously, on the last day of school, Amy Weiss and Rebecca Perlstein independently invite me to go to the beach. I glide home only to notice that my psoriasis has become enflamed. I cannot imagine how anything like this could happen by coincidence and conclude that everyone around me, including my friends and parents, are automatons, characters in the play that is my life.

I begin to note similarities in appearance between ostensibly unrelated individuals like Mr. Mudwinder, my calculus teacher, and the guy who gives out the shoes at the local bowling alley. Some figures appear to be recycled. The boy who delivers our
Newsday
bears a close resemblance to one of my old camp counselors. The guy who runs the hot dog cart outside our high school looks eerily like my second cousin Zelda’s first husband. From this evidence I conclude that the Grand Manipulator has only a finite number of robot models at his disposal. I only waver from my complete conviction in this belief when I read, many years later, that a quarter of the planet is descended from Genghis Khan. Still, I think my hypothesis is just as likely to be true as not. Often when I walk to school or work, I wave to the imaginary audience that I envision to be observing my life.

I am enormously disappointed when these metaphysical anxieties later become, more or less, the plot of
The Truman Show
. This suggests that I am not the only person to wonder about the possibility of a contrived existence. Sure enough, as I enter university and my intellectual horizons broaden, I learn that this idea has occurred to many people, including Ludwig Wittgenstein, Woody Allen, Kurt Vonnegut, and Bob Barker. At first blush, it seems implausible that if life had indeed been orchestrated as an elaborate deception of me, that the planet would be sprinkled with philosophers, satirists, and game show hosts asking the very same sort of questions that I myself am asking. Upon further reflection, though, I conclude that this might itself be part of the deception, the sort of misdirection that the shrewdest of puppeteers would employ.

So, over the course of my young adulthood, I search unceasingly for examples of inconsistencies that could expose the fraud. I scrutinize the comments of my friends to see whether they reveal facts that they could not have known, search for bargains that are too good to be true, and, of course, keep a sharp eye out for recurrences of the visage of my calculus teacher, Mr. Mudwinder.

I find no hard evidence to support my suspicions but nevertheless remain leery. Optimists confuse me. How could Evel Knievel and Amelia Earhart think for even a moment that they would make it? People with religious conviction make no sense to me whatsoever, except the Baptists, who seem resigned to enduring the worst that life has to offer. I am especially mistrustful of other Christians, particularly Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and those insufferable Quakers, who maintain an unrelenting faith in the positive direction of life that seems, to me at least, fundamentally incompatible with independent, rational thought.

It was with this
sensibility
and experience, call it expertise if you will, that I set out to evaluate I-60’s authenticity and investigate the possible fraud. Following our dinner at Bouley, I clandestinely follow I-60 to his hotel and determine that he is staying at the
W
. This is further cause for suspicion.
W
’s are swanky, and the one in midtown is as nice as they come. How can I-60 afford such luxurious accommodations on what he professes to be a limited budget? Standing on Forty-ninth Street, off the side entrance of the hotel, I develop a plan to resolve my doubts about I-60 one way or the other once and for all.

The following morning, I rise early and return to the
W
. It is not a teaching day, and I am free. I stand again on the corner of Forty-ninth and Lexington and wait for I-60. He emerges just after seven thirty, on his way for a run. After he jogs off, I enter the hotel lobby and tell the concierge that I have forgotten my key. He asks for identification. I hand him my driver’s license. Fortunately he does not scrutinize the photograph. He simply hands me a plastic key card.

“You have to forgive me,” I say, “but I have also forgotten my room number.”

“Room 609,” he says. “Make a right turn after exiting the elevator.”

I head up to the room and take a quick spin through I-60’s things. Nothing is out of the ordinary. He has traveled light. Aside from the running outfit, which he is wearing now, he has packed two sets of clothes: two pairs of socks, two pairs of underwear, two shirts, and two pairs of pants, one nice, one casual.

The new trousers are unfamiliar to me, but the latter pair I know. These are my favorite pants, have been for years. My grandfather used to wear brown corduroys, so I have always had a thing for them, and this pair from Eddie Bauer fit just right from the very first day. These are the pants I put on when I want to feel better after a rough day or when I am settling in to watch a big game or when I am about to do something difficult or important.

I am wearing them now.

His are more faded than mine. The cuffs have frayed, and the waist button has been sewn on too many times, perhaps let out a little bit over the years. But it is undeniable that these are my pants.

Suddenly, I become conscious of the time. Who knows how long a sixty-year-old can run? I take a look out the window, note that the room faces Lexington Avenue, and make a quick exit from the room. Downstairs, I walk out the side door and across the street to the Marriott, where I inquire about a room. I tell the desk clerk that I would like a unit facing Lexington Avenue. They can accommodate me, he says, though check-in will not be possible until later in the afternoon. This is fine; I don’t intend to check in until the next morning, but the room is expensive, which gives me pause. Happily I am able to use frequent-flier miles and redeem a coupon for a second night. I book the room, return home, and wait for Q.

She is frazzled when she gets home from work. The battle for survival of the garden has become more serious, she tells me. The prospective developer is asking the city to take the property on which the garden sits by eminent domain so that the massive skyscraper can be erected.

“The mayor will never go for that,” I say.

“He may,” says Q. “We still don’t know the true identity of this developer, but whoever it is, he or she has good connections. Our initial calls to city councilors were discouraging. The project has political momentum.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. We’re starting to have meetings about it.”

“Good.”

“Can you help?”

“I’d be happy to do whatever I can.”

“Thank you,” she says, as she gives me a kiss. “It means a lot to have your support.”

I tell Q that a good friend of mine from high school is visiting from out of town. “We’re going to spend the day together tomorrow and have dinner in the evening. I might be home a bit
late.”

I might not be so understanding of Q spending a night on the town with a mysterious friend, but she simply says, “Fine” and “Have fun” and returns to reading her copy of
Keepin’ It Relleno: The Complete Guide to Chili Pepper Farming and Organic Political Advocacy
.

Nothing bothers Q. She is undemanding and generous and accepting of others, qualities to which I cannot relate.

In the morning,
around six o’clock, after Q has left for the garden, I head over to the Marriott. I take with me a pair of binoculars, which Joan Deveril bought me for a night at the opera after learning that I did not have my own. They are tiny, but super high-powered.

The room is nice enough. A free copy of the
Times
is waiting for me. The coffee maker is serviceable and the mattress is not horrible. But it is nothing compared to I-60’s room at the
W
, which has a state-of-the-art coffee maker and Egyptian cotton sheets on the bed. Using my binoculars, I can see his luxurious accommodations across the street quite clearly. I again wonder how he has afforded the room.

As he wakes up, however, my suspicions notwithstanding, what I see is unmistakably me. He is up early himself; it is still not yet seven. Again he goes for a run. The stiff knee that bothers me when I wake up has deteriorated. It takes ten minutes of stretching for him to get himself out of bed. He cannot lift his knees to put on his running shorts. Instead he sits on a chair and reaches forward to pull the shorts up over his feet. It is an ordeal.

When he goes downstairs, I do the same, and trail him from a safe distance. He walks from the hotel to Central Park and then jogs my favorite route—once around the pond, up past the Hallett Nature Sanctuary, across Seventy-second Street, over Bow Bridge into the ramble, a loop around the lake, then south past the sheep meadow and the Heckscher Ballfields, and finally back home. I feel pangs of sadness as I jog behind him. His gait—my gait—which was once effective, perhaps even graceful, has become a lurching series of stumbles. He is slow, gets winded, stops to watch some teenagers play softball. He is in no hurry. He is an old man.

After the run, he walks back to the hotel and retreats to his room, as I do to mine. Through the binoculars, I see him shower and dress for the day. He is not meeting anyone as far as I can tell, but still he takes extra care with his appearance. He shaves and irons his shirt. The baggage limit on travel from the future is apparently generous enough to allow him to pack a nose-hair trimmer, which I failed to notice while rummaging through his things. I-60 spends a few minutes grooming his nose, then a few more tending to his ear. When he leaves his room, he looks better than when I met him. Travel can be brutal on appearances or, perhaps, he is feeling more optimistic.

On the street he buys a bagel, checks out the toys in the window at FAO Schwartz, walks to the Metropolitan Museum, where he spends a while with the impressionists. He takes another long, slow walk home, back through the park, where he buys a pretzel, wistfully watches a pair of young lovers paddle a rowboat, lingers by some frolicking dogs, and reads the descriptions of the trees.

He is killing time. I suspect I am to blame for this. I have made this necessary by telling him, at Bouley, that I cannot meet again for several days. I have papers to grade, I say, and a reading in Greenwich, Connecticut. In truth I have neither papers to grade nor a reading to attend. I want to buy time to scrutinize him. He sees through the lie, I am sure. How could I ever deceive him? I bet he even remembers the true date of the Greenwich reading, which was several months ago. But he does not call me on it. This would be awkward. Instead he spends the time wandering the streets of the city. Perhaps he does not mind. Perhaps it is a pleasure to spend a few days in the New York of his youth. Or perhaps he is past the point of feeling much of anything.

In the evening, when he has exercised himself to the point that he knows he will be able to sleep, he returns to his hotel and I return to mine. In his room, he takes off the clothes of the day and dons the brown corduroys. A little after six o’clock, he leafs through the room service menu and places an order. Twenty minutes later it arrives. Through the binoculars, I can see that the meal is a veggie burger with tomato and onion and a side of sweet potato fries. This is more to my own taste.

I-60 sits in a lounge chair and eats the supper in front of the television set. At seven o’clock he watches
Seinfeld
, at seven thirty
The Simpsons
. I wonder how many times
he
has seen each of these episodes. Perhaps hundreds; I have seen them each dozens of times myself. I can see him anticipating the laugh lines, as am I. It is the monorail episode of
The Simpsons
, a classic. As Lyle Lanley sings to the town meeting, we mouth the words with him in unison. At eight o’clock, I-60 tunes in for the Mets game. I turn on the set in my own room and listen. Pelfrey is pitching, which is always dicey, and Davis is sitting out with a wrenched knee. Sure enough the Mets fall behind. When Reyes fails to run out a pop-up, which is dropped, I-60 waves his hand in disgust. Around ten, he walks to the vending machines and buys himself a package of Oreos and a small container of skim milk. I-60 eats his dessert while watching the end of the game. When the cookies and the Mets are finished off, he licks his teeth clean for a few minutes, then brushes them.