I HATE time travel stories. The people who dream them up have no idea. Think about it: in the average time travel story, we find one of two scenarios:
Option A.
The future is great.
Things are so good, people from the future come back to help us.
We’re too stupid to listen.
Option B.
The future is screwed.
Things are so bad, people from the future come back to stop us.
We’re too stupid to listen.
What never occurs to us is that people from the past might travel forward to fix the future—which, for them, is the present. It never occurs to us that the present is screwed and the future is only going to get worse. Someone needs to come and fix things, only they can’t be fixed. So if anyone invents a time machine, do us all a favor and send it back to the beginning.
Send it back to the garden and pull the plug.
*
My mistake was introducing Stella to my friends. This name, it has connotations: A Streetcar Named Desire. Some idiot at a bar screeching out an imitation of Brando thinking he might have a shot with the girl. But she despises Tennessee Williams. Stella’s father, anemic academic, named her after a sonnet sequence by that Elizabethan dandy, Sir Philip Sidney. Astrophil and Stella. Star-lover and Star. So my Stella was proud. Born to be the object of desire. Proud, but not aloof. What she possessed was an accessible hauteur.
“My family is very religious,” she said, “and I am, too. I believe in doing good. I believe in keeping pure. I believe I was meant for something more than all this.”
Her credo came at the end of a drawn-out fight. Conflict does wonders for her rhetoric. Her cheeks flush red like a heroine’s and her voice thickens, reminding me of the sound a cello makes when the bow drags slowly over the strings. Stella was a fine instrument.
We were discussing my friends—specifically Walt, who should never be allowed a third drink, should never be encouraged to do his Brando impersonation or to think a girl like Stella is in his league. Walt was an embarrassment in public, but I tolerated him. He was a genius. You had to make allowances.
“I won’t go to a place like that again,” Stella said. “I won’t expose myself to people like that.”
“Walt’s all right,” I told her. “And you weren’t exposing yourself.”
But how do you argue with the object of desire? By the time I left her place it was half past two and everything Walt had done was down to me.
*
His messages stacked up on the machine. The first one was angry and slurred. The second doleful. Then there were a couple of apologies that grew increasingly coherent as the morning approached. Walt was a sensitive guy after all. It was obvious from the recordings that as the effects of drink wore off, he remembered less and less of what had happened. By the second to last message, he just seemed baffled.
The final message caught my attention.
“I’ve had a breakthrough,” he whispered. “I was trying to brush my teeth and it just came to me. Call me ASAP.” He pronounced it ay-sap, and he was the only person I knew whose revelations came by means of oral hygiene.
When I called, the white noise machine was blasting in the background. Walt couldn’t think without that thing going. He said it canceled out environmental sounds and created a zone of auditory exclusion. I begged him to turn it down.
“It’s about time travel,” he said. “The breakthrough, I mean. Do your gums bleed when you floss? I was looking at the sink, at all this blood, and it hit me: they couldn’t have made it. They didn’t get far enough.”
“Who?”
“The future. They tried—you know they tried—but either one of two things happened. They discovered it was impossible, that’s option one. Or they—”
“Wait a second,” I said. “Shouldn’t you be talking about this in the future tense? How can you say they ‘discovered’ something if they haven’t even been born yet?”
“Who says they haven’t? They could be babies now. Or grown men. They could be older than us at this moment. How can we know? How can we have any idea?”
“I just mean, in the future, things will happen. They will discover that time travel is impossible.”
“They might, or they might not. That’s what I’m getting at.”
“I’m just saying, you don’t want to talk about the future in the past tense.”
I loved to needle him like this.
“Semantics. Are you listening or what?”
“Go ahead.”
“So either they will discover that time travel is impossible, option one. Or, option two, apocalypse.”
“Meaning?”
“End of the world. I mean, in all of human history, not a single person has ever traveled back in time. Not once. It should have happened by now. It should have happened from the beginning. If it hasn’t, then either it’s impossible, or the world was destroyed—will be destroyed—before the technology is developed.”
I said: “Obviously.”
“What?”
“Obviously. Walt, everybody knows that.”
The thing you have to realize is that a genius is only a genius in one area of life; in most others, he is worse off than the rest of us. Walt dreamed in code. He said code was the new reality. He was the only person I knew who was saving himself for virtual sex. His IQ shot through the roof but he was lousy with girls and gullible, so gullible. We should all have a genius friend just to torment.
“OK, OK,” he sputtered. “When you say, ‘everybody knows that,’ I think you’re not fully appreciating the point I’m making.”
“Well, aren’t you leaving something out?”
“Leaving what out?”
“Your—what do you call it?—hypothesis. Suppose the world doesn’t end. Suppose time travel simply isn’t possible. Or maybe it is, but people lose interest in it. Or it happens all the time and we don’t know it. Or the world doesn’t end but there’s another dark age and Tibetan monks on the edge of the planet save civilization by hand-copying lines of Linux.”
As I spoke, his breathing grew erratic. I was winding him up. After this, he would need hours in his fortress of solitude just to make himself a cup of coffee.
Before he hung up, Walt said, “That girl from last night. I’m sorry about that. Not sure exactly what I did, but I’m bubbling with regret.”
“I’ll tell her,” I said.
*
Only I didn’t. One step wrong with Stella was enough. After the debacle of the previous evening, which—in addition to Walt making a drunken pass at her—included a revival of Antonioni’s film L’Avventura (which Stella hated), Lucy Craddock’s knee-jerk diatribe against Bible-thumping Islamophobes and Hedley snatching Stella by the arm for an impromptu waltz through the bar, I decided to play it safe. I arrived on her doorstep armed with flowers and a Saturday itinerary in the park.
“You may think I’m intolerant,” she said, “but I didn’t care much for your circle.”
We found a splendid shade tree and spread our blanket just outside the orbit of its roots. Wicker basket, sandwiches—all that was missing was a dog and Frisbee, but Stella grew up without pets and said that animals made her nervous.
“What I think is that you’re beautiful.”
This had gone on for weeks now. It started at a coffee shop a block from my apartment. I saw her sitting alone, the only person reading in a roomful of clacking laptops. Mid-afternoon meetings between realtors and sales managers. Shoppers getting a second breath, purchases wedged between their ankles. And there was Stella, licking her fingers before she turned each page. It took me a while to figure out what she was reading: Harry Potter translated into Latin. That could mean only one thing. Stella was a Latin teacher. Who else could read a dead language?
I was wrong, it turned out. She was a student, an aspiring political scientist who read Latin as a hobby.
“My parents sent me to a school that taught Hebrew and Greek, so you could read Scripture in the original tongues,” Stella said. “Latin was an extra.”
She could wax on about the Bible, about foreign policy and about Marcus Aurelius and the extent to which his stoicism appealed to her. When she talked about home schooling and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, the light in her eyes captivated me. But it was during a long discourse on the death penalty, when she was explaining that deterrence was a non-issue and retribution a smoke-screen, that in a higher sense the virtue of an execution was the thing in itself, its value as expiation, that I began to think I was in love.
“You’re in love with her body,” Hedley assured me. “And there is much to love. Though I take it you have no first-hand knowledge of this?”
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Lucy Craddock added. “It isn’t her mind. Her dogma is loathsome.”
That day in the park I tried to shut these observations out. I also tried to forget about Walt. Not once did I contemplate the coming apocalypse or entertain the notion that any of the people around us—the old guy setting a jaunty pace with his cane, the couple in biking gear having lunch on the bench, the myriad of scabby kids tumbling off their skateboards—were time travelers from the future, taking a well-deserved break from setting the world right. I tried hard to think of Stella as just a pretty girl. A girl who might demand nothing more of me than happiness.
*
I’m a magnet for theorists. If you dwell in my circle, it’s as good as certain that you have some crackpot outlook on life. As a technical writer, I spend half my time with code heads who think their brainstorms are unique to them. I’m always being cornered by some tattooed visionary and told things like: the future is wireless. Staring into those wide eyes, I want to laugh. I want to point out the wireless phone in my pocket, the wireless internet connection throbbing through the suburban business loft. I want to tell them that radios used to be called wireless sets, that the past was wireless and the present is wireless, too. I want to tell them they are star-struck, but by mediocre stars.
The thing about visionaries is that they’re always looking in the wrong direction.
“You’re a kind of visionary,” Stella told me.
Reclining on her elbow, pulling long threads of her hair for inspection and then twisting them, Stella was indolent and elegant that Saturday afternoon.
“I’m shell shocked,” I said. “I am fed up with theories.”
“That’s a theory, too.”
Stella believed in absolutes. In her mind, the rest of us clung to nothing but skepticism and despair. She was just dying to reduce our mental worlds to absurdity.
“My theory,” I said, “is that people don’t know much, and they ought to be happy together if they can.”
Stella’s lips invited comparison to the texture of fruit, split open, veined, wet. When she smiled, you always took it as an invitation, though it mostly wasn’t. She granted my theory a smile so inviting that my head dipped forward to meet it, but she turned away.
“That’s my theory, too,” she said. “Part of it, anyway.”
“Is there anything else?”
She tilted her head, gazed up through the branches. “I think there is.”
“I love you,” I said.
“There are four kinds of love.”
Confused, I said, “I love you with all of them.”
Stella laughed and said, “You can’t.”
*
Walt wore blue flat-front polyester pants and a t-shirt that almost matched. On anyone else it might have been a fashion statement. I spotted him long before he saw us. Trudging awkwardly over the grass, he kept his eyes on the ground as if this unfamiliar organic flooring could not be trusted to hold him up. He was so removed from the world that he couldn’t be comfortable in it, just the opposite of Stella who, whatever was dreamt of in her philosophy, could lie nymph-like on the earth like she was born to it.
“Our moment is about to be spoiled,” I said.
She glanced over and took note of Walt with a moan. “Did you tell him where he could find us?”
“I don’t know how he did it. You want me to send him packing?”
Stella thought. “Be merciful.”
So when Walt finally stumbled across us, I invited him to sit, offered him a cold sandwich and some bottled water. He took them, grateful for something to keep his hands occupied.
“Stella,” he said formally. “I want to tell you that I am sorry. If I embarrassed—”
“It’s all right,” she said. And she touched him on the arm the way Titania might have stroked Nick Bottom, a graceful gesture from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
“Walt was telling me,” I said, trying to lighten the moment, “that the world will end before time travel comes into play.”
“Not exactly,” he said.
“Well, what was it exactly, then?” she asked, and Walt explained the whole idea to her in ludicrous detail, careful to state everything in the future tense.
I expected Stella to make a laughingstock of him. She had the power to do it and the beauty to make it sting for someone like Walt. Instead, she nodded appreciatively, taking it all in. It was a good imitation of genuine interest.
“You always dream about that, growing up,” she said. “What would it be like to go back in time?”
“You could change everything,” Walt said.
“You could rub out Hitler,” I added.
Stella waved this away with a lazy hand. “That’s the problem with men. You want to go back in time and fix things. I’d just like to visit. See what it was like. Taste the food.”
“But don’t drink the water,” I said.
Walt shook his head. “You could go back in time to verify things. See what really happened.”
“There’s a lot of money to be made checking history term papers,” I said.
The wind picked up, blowing Stella’s hair across her cheek. She brushed it back and said, “You could be there when Moses parts the Red Sea.”
“Or you could crash the Boston Tea Party.”
“What about the Sermon on the Mount?” Walt suggested. I was surprised that he had heard of such a thing—he’d never before given evidence of religious instruction.
Stella balked. “I’m like one of those old Hollywood movies, where you only see Jesus from a distance, or you see his feet but not his face. Just a shadow. I wouldn’t interrupt the real thing. It would seem sacrilegious.”
“Yeah,” Walt said, and I just stared.
“What did you come out here for anyway?” I asked.
This caught him out. He sputtered. “Just to say I was sorry.”
“Well, you’ve said it, so you have two options: either stay here and ruin a perfectly romantic picnic, or go and spread joy elsewhere.”
He left, but Stella called after him. “You’re not ruining anything.”
*
Here’s a theory for you. Why are love stories at the foundation of all civilization? The love of God for man. The love of man and woman. The love of parents and children. The love of enemies. Why does the story of two lovers matter? Why does anyone care? Stella said it all goes back to the garden of Eden, the original relationship. It was a threesome: God, Adam, Eve. It ended with two pairing off against the other, from intimacy to exclusion. Like Lancelot and Guinevere leaving Arthur back at the castle. All our stories, she said, are about trying to get that one story to go right again. Only they’re missing the third person in the equation—who, in her mind, was himself three persons.
“The final love story,” she said, “will be about a man and a woman and God.”
“We just lost our third wheel,” I told her, nodding in the direction of Walt’s departure.
“It’s funny,” she said. “He doesn’t believe in God. Maybe he doesn’t believe in anything. But he thinks the world is coming to an end. No to God, but yes to apocalypse. Me, on the other hand, I believe in God, and I can’t help feeling good about the world.”
To prove it, she stretched her arms up toward the branches.
“This is the optimism of faith?” I asked.
She regarded me playfully. “Or maybe I’m just in love.”
“In a doomed relationship, by your standards, since it’s only the two of us.”
“Is it? Not for me.”
And at that moment, it wasn’t for me, either. I could think of no hypothesis to justify the presence of this beautiful woman dancing around the subject of her love for me, apart from the existence of a God who is, first and foremost, merciful. Who takes an interest in those who take no interest in him.
*
In a different kind of story, Stella would have died that afternoon. She would have been hit by a car as we left the park, perhaps felled by a random bullet. My one chance at happiness lost before consummation.
But it wasn’t Stella I lost that day. It was Walt.
He left the park sometime before three and never made it back to his apartment. After a week passed, his landlord let me in and I searched through his stuff. But I couldn’t tell if anything was missing.
So Walt disappeared, and once I gave up there was no one left to look for him.
“Maybe,” Stella said, trying on yet another explanation, “maybe they needed him in the future and came back to get him.”
“You’re not serious.”
“No,” she admitted. “Maybe they had to take him out. Evil genius in the making.”
I laughed and said, “That isn’t funny.”
“I know it isn’t.” She laced her arm around mine. We sat on the couch in her apartment watching political chat shows with the volume turned down. We were not yet lovers, nor had the question of marriage arisen, but whatever was going to happen, it was close. I hadn’t seen the others—Lucy, Hedley, the crowd from the bar—in ages.
“No more speculation,” Stella said. “Let’s turn over a new leaf. Let’s live with the mystery.”
It was a declaration of love.
Copyright 2004-2005 :: The New Pantagruel 2.3.