The Time Travel Chronicles (47 page)

Dave saved Danny a scolding by taking the baton.  “I always wanted to climb Everest,” he said.

“You and everybody else,” Marty said.  “So listen, you’re traveling along a high mountain pass–”

“Are there Sherpa with me?” Dave asked.

“Sure.”

“I always imagined that when I climb Everest I’d have a bunch of Sherpa with me.”

Marty snapped, “Do you want to hear this or not?”

“Yeah.  Sorry.” Dave said and then smiled dopily.

Danny couldn’t keep a straight face.  A lungful of pot smoke burst out of his mouth with a spray of spittle, and the three of us began to giggle.  Marty joined in when he caught on that he was the butt of the joke.  He pretended to ease up, but that pissed-off glint in his eyes and painfully hammered smile betrayed him.  Marty always wanted to come off as laid back but he was too tightly wound.

“So you start across the bridge,” he said, “and a hooded figure with a strange watch on his wrist blocks your way.”

“Hooded?” I asked.  “Like Death?”

“He’s not Death.”

“Then why is he hooded?”

“I don’t know why he’s hooded, I guess it makes the riddle more ominous.”  Marty was so easy to get worked up.  “Anyway, you have to cross the bridge because the crevice is too steep to travel down, and to go around, you’d have to go back down and around the mountain.”

“So you have to cross the bridge?”

“You have to cross, right.  But the hooded figure tells you that he’ll only let you cross if you can ask him a question to which he does not know the answer.  Now, the time traveler can go forward and backward in time at will, whenever he wants.”

“Time traveler?”

“The hooded figure is a time traveler, that’s what the strange watch on his wrist is all about.  He can go back and forth, and you can only ask one question.”

“Well,” I said, “if he’s a time traveler he’ll know the answer to most everything, won’t he?”

Now this is the point where we would usually start trying to solve the paradox.  With obvious stuff like
How could the time traveler know the color of my underwear
or
What happens when I get to the other side?
  But Dave must have figured Marty was getting at something.  “You’re talking about Kalachakra,” he said.

Marty nodded.

Now it should surprise you that Dave of all people said that.  Why?  Because back then Dave wasn’t a monk, he looked more like a frat kid – clean-cut, the baseball cap, white t-shirt.  He was least likely to be the guy heading an Ashram in Phoenix today.  But Dave had been practicing meditation for a year by then, would sit in his room, legs crisscross applesauce, drool dripping down his chin.  So when Danny asked him what Kalachakra was, Dave was all over it.

“It’s the wheel of time, man.”

Yeah, he really said
man
.  And then he pulled a hit from the bong.  We were in college.  Anyway.  After he blew out a billowy white cloud of stinky smoke, he went on to say, “It’s Tibetan, you’re in the present, but there can’t be a present without a past and a future.  So you’re there too.  Time is like a wheel.”

At that moment, I thought what he said was stoner talk, nothing more.  Armchair philosophy.  So I said, “Riiight,” all drawn out, and reached for the bong.

“No, serious.  That’s how the Dalai Lama can see if a person that is good right now is really a bad person or vice versa.”

“What?” Danny asked.

“He can see the future and the past and the present, all at the same time.  He’s nonlinear.”

“Like outside of time?”

“Exactly,” Marty said.  “It’s outside of time. What if I told you guys I’ve found a way to do it?”

“Do what?”

“Step outside of time.  See the slices of past, present, and future at will.”

“Time travel?”

“Yeah.  Time travel.”

“It’s possible,” Dave added, “but very tantric, takes lifetimes to learn.  I mean, the Dalai Lama is centuries old.”

Marty shrugged his forehead, all sure of himself.  “I found a shortcut.”

It was my turn to take a long pull from the bong and I about choked up a lung.  You see, Marty worked in the psych lab below the science building, and they did all kinds of messed up stuff down in that basement.  Mice, mazes, and shit like that.  The last time he lured us down there he talked us into eating a bunch of shrooms and then locked each of us in a deprivation tank.

I tried to bellow out a plea, “Don’t tell me this involves the tanks?” but all that came out were some hisses and a ton of smoke.

“No,” Marty said.  “Of course not.”

An hour later, we were in the forgotten back corner of the science building’s basement, next to the deprivation tanks.  Marty’s office was actually the storage area behind the animal pens and sweetly smelled of shredded paper and rat piss.  Marty’s TA-ship involved administering a cornucopia of pure grade chemical cocktails to the rats and monkeys and log what happened next.  He walked a lot of the good stuff out the door, which was cool at the time.  I mean he had access to government grade shit.  Phenomenal.

Dave was into it.  He went right to work cranking open the warm water faucets to four of the five metal tanks that lined the back wall and Danny and I began dumping in the large plastic bags of Epsom salts. These weren’t the new age float tanks they have at the spa today, no, these were the old school metal boxes that they used to test out the effects of sensory deprivation way, way back.  True government-sponsored chaos.

Danny pulled his t-shirt over his head and then asked the magic question, “So what are we supposed to do for this to work?”

“Just free your mind,” Dave said.  “And it will all become clear.”  Then he heaved a bag of salt into a tank.

“Free my mind?” I said.  “That last time I was in this thing I fell asleep and had a nightmare that I was being suffocated by tentacles.”

“Use a koan,” Dave said.

“No,” Marty said.  “This isn’t a
one hand clapping
kind of thing.”  He went over to the desk against the side wall, slid open the pencil drawer, and removed a yellow Pokémon keychain.

Danny scrunched his nose in delight.  “That’s Pikachu,” he said, then added in a high voice, “Pika, Pika, Pikachu.”

Marty forced a grin back and then put the key into the tall beige plastic cabinet next to the desk.

“That’s your security system?” Dave asked.  “A key in the drawer next to the cabinet.”

“I only lock it to keep the door closed,” Marty said.  “It swings open otherwise.”

The cabinet was stocked with lab supplies.  Beakers, scales, rows of white plastic jars lined up by same color lid.  Smaller cabinets filled the two chest-high shelves.  Marty opened a drawer to one of those.

“We’re not doing shrooms again are we?” I asked.  “That’s what brought on those tentacles.”  A chill ran down my neck as I again thought of a hundred little slimy tendrils encircling my arms and legs, the tips tickling.  Ugh.  I shuddered.

“No shrooms,” Marty said.  He held up four vials.

“Is that the liquid LSD you had last summer?”

“No,” he said, handing one to each of us.  “This is totally different.”

“You’re taking one too?  Aren’t you going to keep watch?”

“Nobody is coming around.  This’ll be fine.”

I guess that was enough for us because we each swilled one.

“This tastes like battery acid,” I said.  “Whadja mix in here?  Aluminum?”

“Well there’s some psilocybin–”

“Oh man!” I said.  “You said no mushrooms.”

“Just a trace.  It’s mostly diatomic molecules.”

“What?  What are you trying to do?  Kill us?”

“No.  It’s cool, relax, oxygen is a diatomic molecule.”

“Liquid oxygen?”

“No, I was just saying that oxygen is diatomic.  That’s iodine and hydrogen coated in zinc.”

“What?”

“It’s cool, really.  They wouldn’t let me give it to the animals otherwise.”

“Right,” Dave nodded.

How Marty thought that was a selling point I don’t know, but he had a way of talking people into whatever.  “They’re little nanobots,” he said, “they’re like five micrometers thick.  Nothing, really.”

“Really,” I asked.  “You’re sure.”

“Yeah, they’re medical.  The real deal.  They’re designed to deliver a medical payload.  In this case, diatomic molecules.”

“And what do they do?”

“The diatomic molecules produce a rapid phonon reaction.  They’ll slightly shift your perceivable spectrum.”

“How’s that?”

“With the DMT.”

“You put DMT in here?”

“No, no.  They leverage your own biological DMT to produce the phonon reaction, along with the slight quantum mechanical oscillations of the diatomic molecules, the
diatomic quantum flop
.”

“Like when you die?” Dave said.  “And your whole life flashes before you.”

“Right.  Your brain floods with DMT and you see a white light, or whatever else.”

“You are trying to kill us,” I said.

“You came up with this?” Danny asked.

“I found some old files on DMT experiments and what the subjects had to say.  And then, like serendipity someone came up with this for the monkeys, and it sort of came to me, like a eureka moment, getting off on our own DMT.  So I swiped some for us.”

“How long before this kicks in?”

“It’s time released.  It will take them a good fifteen minutes to get where they need to go.  But it’s a good trip.  You’ll see.”

And it must have been, because a shudder amped up from the base of my skull and for a second my scalp felt like it was peeling away, and I realized, even though I was still talking to Marty, that I’d already been in the tank and out again.  The conversation I was having was déjà vu, but at the same time I was already into tomorrow, and back to earlier in the evening walking up Marty’s porch, looking at the huge Om symbol on the psychedelic tapestry that curtained his window.  And then I was gazing up at their ceiling of colored Christmas lights through a cloud of pot smoke.  Dave squealing, “Pika, Pika, Pikachu,” and Marty saying, “It’s all about the trip across the bridge, the
diatomic quantum flop
.”

* * *

It was crazy because there was a four-day stint that all happened in the same slice.  I mean I saw myself going about my business but not in a linear way.  I saw the whole period at once, a blur of scenes overlapping with more tentacles and a few flying eels thrown in.  It was too much to take in.

Then I came down.

My mind chilled back to the present, began to process the world around me as it was designed to, one frame at a time.  I thought that was it—that was the trip.  It was over the course of the next two days that the result of our little experiment became clear.
 
It was two days of déjà vu, the tentacles and eels from the initial vision were gone, they’d only been there at the peak, but everything else, knowing what people were going to say, knowing what was going to happen next, every instant a repeat of the tank.

But that wasn’t the most eerie part.  The wild thing was that it was like we were acting on privileged information, that by somehow knowing what was going to happen, we had changed the future.  I mean things happened the same as I saw them, but they never should have went that way.

Danny Wong was the first to act on it.  And we knew he would be because we saw him tell us about it, and it played out just like he said.  The night after the tanks was Friday.  Danny worked a shift at his parent’s restaurant, Wong’s Wok.  There was only one of them then, not the chain Danny runs today, but I’ll get back to that.  Marty and I were at his place with Dave when Danny came home.  It was after midnight.  He had a box of that delicious Wong’s crispy lo mein, and just like I saw in the tank, he threw a fat wad of cash on the table.

We repeated the conversation the four of us already knew word for word.

“Those guys have a serious addiction,” he said.  We knew who he was talking about.

“The Chinese guys in the kitchen didn’t hold back.  They kept doubling the pot.”

Marty asked, “You were gambling?”

It was like an echo.

The other three of us answered at the same time.  “High-low.”

And then our eyes met and I remember asking myself if that had happened the same way as we saw it, the three of us saying the words at the same time.  I guess it had.  It must’ve.

“Yeah,” Danny said slowly.  “High-low, and I knew what the card was going to be each time.  I’d still be there but I cleaned them out.  The further I went the more they threw into the pot.”

Marty’s face went blank.  And we knew what he would say next.

“No,” I said.  But then he said it anyway.

“We have to go back to the tanks.”

“This is a fluke,” I said.  “Just because he saw it happening doesn’t mean he affected it.  How do you know he wasn’t supposed to win anyway?”