How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe Part 8

"You look nervous," TAMMY says.

"This is a big day," I say to TAMMY.

We're going to meet an important man, the director of research at the Inst.i.tute of Conceptual Technology, a gleaming black building, behind gates, that sits on top of University Road, up the hill half a mile above town, where they worked on the hard problems. The big ones, like how to keep paradox from destroying the sci-fi world. They were the people my father aspired to be, this man in particular, they lived the lives he longed for, they drove up to those gates every morning and checked with the security guard and showed their ID badges and the gates opened for them, and they drove behind them, up into the compound, the castle of secrets and ideas that only a hundred people in the world knew about, ideas that only a dozen people understood.

Today is the day, that one glorious day in my father's life. After waiting half a lifetime, half a career, his moment. Today is the day they come calling for him. They, the world, the outside inst.i.tutional world of money and technology and science fictional commerce. I remember the call. Sometime after our first wobbly orbit and before he was completely sure he knew what he was doing (or rather, before he realized he would never be completely sure about what he was doing), someone had taken notice. They found him, the military-industrial-narrative-entertainment complex, and they wanted to hear his idea. This is the day he has dreamed about, the day even I have dreamed of. This is the day that has hung over our house, in the air, for years, the cloud of a shared dream. If a lifetime in the end is remembered for a handful of days, this is one of them.

After his day of revelation in the garage, he had been back on the upswing, as a scientist, even as a burgeoning entrepreneur. Even as a husband. It was all moving up: meaning, success, our story. For a while here, it looked like we were going to make it. Whatever it is. Whatever making it is. He was going to make it, our family was, my mother and father were going to make it. The world was coming to him, finally. He had made a noise, and the world heard him, and the world was coming. And just as he had always imagined, it was coming with money. Or more accurately, the promise of money. More than money. Prestige. The promise of prestige and a sense of mystery about him, a sense of intellectual mystery that would surround him, inventor, pioneer, scientist. He imagined the prospect of seeing his name in trade journals, rivals and admirers whispering about what he was working on, his method of working, how he got his ideas. He imagined how the people at work would react when he quit, when a month after he quit they realized what they had let slip away, how they could never afford him now, how they had ignored him all those years, put him in the cubicle, let him inch upward, never seeing the quality of his ideas.

I am excited. I am hopeful. I know how this all turns out, what happens after today, and still I feel hopeful, looking at myself, remembering how it felt to feel that way. He talks about getting something nice for my mother, about wanting to get a bigger house for us.

We're meeting at a local park meeting at a local park, the one in the center of the good side of town, with good photorealistic gra.s.s and globally rendered ambient sunshine, the kind they only have in this part of the city. This side is where the private high school is, the school our school doesn't play any sports against, because the private school is too small. They don't even field a full football team. They have a debate team. In the student parking lot for the school, the cars are bigger, and nicer, and in that part of town the houses are bigger, the sidewalks cleaner, the air purer, the kind of upper-middle-SF neighborhood where the residents took pains to create a picturesque and manicured reality.

"He looks," TAMMY says, unsure of the word she is searching for.

"Happy."

"No," she says. "Not that."

So often on drives like this my father was auto-dislocated, there but not there. Early on, by the age of nine or maybe seven or even five, I could already see, had already developed the faculty of chronodiegetical observation, a sensitivity to times.p.a.ce auto-dislocation, to very subtle shifts in the manifold, the vector field of conscious attentiveness in the interior s.p.a.ce of our family car.

But on this day, this momentous day for him, I felt him fully there with me in our Ford LTD station wagon, not even embarra.s.sed about our car, which gave me, for just those few minutes, the ability to not be embarra.s.sed about it, either.

We arrive first, park in the spot nearest the baseball diamond, open the back of the station wagon.

Careful, he says, unclear if it's for me or to himself or to no one in particular.

In the time it took to pull in, park, and get out of the car, he's gone from happy to stressed out.

He is doing his jaw-clenching thing, really working it. It almost looks painful. We move the machine gingerly, taking little baby steps the whole way from the parking lot to the baseball diamond, which seems, under the powerful sunshine of this foreign neighborhood, like a near-infinite distance. Dad doesn't say anything, just grunts and walks a little too fast, and we have to stop twice because I'm losing my grip. We're standing there in the sun and I notice, maybe for the first time, that my father is a man. A human man. His physicality, his sweaty person-ness.

He has very black hair, a whole head's worth, more, thick and strong-looking and so black that it occurs to me, not then, but now, that he must actually dye it. My father is old. Not old, not even fifty, still strong in the forearms and calves and his back and on most days, he has more energy in his compact, half-century-old frame than I do in my brooding, sulky seventeen-year-old clothes hanger of a body. He parts his hair to the right and combs the sides back, and a trickle of sweat is edging downward from his hairline on the left side of his face, where his gla.s.ses, nearly square-framed (sort of a top-heavy trapezoid shape popular with engineers), gray and metallic, where the arm of his gla.s.ses presses against the skin of his temple, and I wonder why his gla.s.ses are fitted so tight, why he wouldn't have gotten a better pair, and I remember that he picked those off the rack at the store between the postal boxes pickup station and the ice cream place, and that he picked them because they were the cheapest frames and fully covered by insurance.

His skin is taut, good living, no drinking, little meat, mostly vegetables and rice and fish and a lot of exercise in the garage and the yard and around the house and just generally being a grinder, being the kind of person who sweats because he has to, not for fun, the only real vice a very occasional cigarette snuck in the backyard after I'd gone to bed. I caught him once, not on purpose, I was going to the fridge late one night and saw him sitting there in the backyard, in one of our white plastic lawn chairs, looking up at the sky, and he didn't even try to hide it, really, just put his hand down, but I could see the ribbon of smoke from behind him, rising and breaking up into a cloud by his head, he just looked at me and didn't smile, but didn't give me a face that he would normally give, it was like he'd taken off his father mask for the night and, for once, for just this moment, wasn't going to put it back on, was going to let me see him without it, and I saw a face I didn't recognize, crushed, drained, I saw defeat, I saw even a kind of resignation. But that isn't how he looks now.

The director pulls up in a Town Car. We're standing there, a little off the rubber, between the pitcher's mound and second base. My father is so nervous it almost looks like he wants me, a senior, a kid, a B student in physics, wants me to talk for him. The director is a balding man with a severe set of eye sockets and a neatly knotted tie, a big knot, the kind neither my father nor I ever seemed to be able to do, wide and dimpled and symmetrical. His shirt has cuffs that are a different color from the rest of the shirt, except for the collar. My father's shirt is b.u.t.toned up, he doesn't have a pocket protector, but he has his shirt tucked into brown slacks one-eighth of an inch too short for his five-foot, four-inch frame, he looks neat and competent and like a perfect engineer. The director extends his hand to my father, nods at me politely, and then, to my surprise, shakes my hand as well.

"We have some ideas," he says to my dad. "We have ideas about your idea." And I realize, uh-oh, before any of it has even started: none of this is going to work out. Just the way the man is talking, standing, his tie, his cuff-linked shirtsleeves, his clear, authoritative manner of speaking, the way he manages to treat my father with deference, with respect, while at the same time giving off the impression of doing us a favor, like he is the one who is offering us a chance, because he is. Like we are the b.u.mbling amateurs who have stumbled on a rare coin in a boot in our attic, or had the dumb luck to dig up a Precambrian fossil in our little backyard. All of our plans, our notebooks, our three-ring binders with the college-ruled eight-and-a-half-by-eleven composition paper, all of our one-centimeter-square light green graph paper, every open-ended project, what had it amounted to? Just one success, one partial success. Sure, we are here, this man came to see us, but in the grand scheme of things, we are minor. We are, but for one possible exception, failures. This man has patented world-changing technology, has created whole industries at his desk, in his lab, this man does more real science in a good month than we've done in almost ten years, has thrown away better ideas than the best we will ever come up with.

"He seems," TAMMY starts, still unsure of what she's thinking, and now watching, with her little pixilated face, as intently as I am.

And what had we done? We had plugged away, sc.r.a.p by sc.r.a.p, paper sc.r.a.p and metal sc.r.a.p, we had plied our trade, journeymen, not even a trade, we had our little hobby, and now we were a curiosity. That was it. We have still never gotten anything right. We are dreamers who have stuck around long enough to have one semi-interesting dream. This is not going to work out. I know it on some level. This is us, this is us in relation to the world. If I could draw it, it would look like my father and me very small, world very big, with a barrier between us and the world. We are too slow, too methodical, too square, too plodding. We are naive. This is how it has always gone with us.

This man, though, this man knows things. He is a gentleman, he makes me feel small, makes my father look small, makes our family seem tiny, in his formality, his politeness, his kindness, even. He can afford to be kind, he can afford something I have never experienced until now (something I will soon learn about at the university, where some of my upper-middle-cla.s.s cla.s.smates, with their strangely nice bedsheets and faster computers and discreetly expensive clothes tossed casually over the chair or in piles on the floor, so different from my prepressed, store-label khakis, folded in my half-empty drawer, how these cla.s.smates took me seriously, were nice to me in a way that got under my skin, how at ease they seemed, at ease in the science fictional world, in this science fictional country, how perfectly nice and respectful they were to me, asking me where I was from, and not meaning my parents, how they had etiquette and manners and even political sensitivities, and yet I could never put a word to it, to what bothered me about their niceness, an idea to it until, in freshman literature, second semester, I stumbled across the phrase n.o.blesse oblige, n.o.blesse oblige, and immediately flushed with embarra.s.sment right there in cla.s.s, blood hot in my temples and ears, flushed red in the face at the words, as if a joke, as if it were all a joke, one big joke on me and my dad for all these years, a joke I wish I'd learned long ago), this director of research, this man on top of the profession, he can afford to take us seriously. He has a kind of practical intelligence, savvy. My father and I lack resolve, self-confidence, the willingness to impose ourselves on others, on a situation, on a set of circ.u.mstances, to step on things, to willfully forget our deficiencies, we are too self-aware to turn off that nagging internal critic, editor, co-author, to suspend our understanding that we are trying to do what we really have no business doing. We aren't like the director. This man is someone for whom the world isn't a mystery. The world is a boulder, but it has levers and he knows when and where and how to apply just the right amount of force, and it moves for him, while my father and I, pushing up against it, don't have any angle, any torque, no grip or traction or leverage. My father thinks success must be in direct proportion to effort exerted. He doesn't know where or how to exert the least amount for the most gain, doesn't know where the secret b.u.t.tons are, the hidden doors, the golden keys. He thinks that, even if you have a great idea, there have to be trials and tribulations, errors and failures, a dark night of the soul, a slog, a time in the desert, a fallow period, a period of quiet, a period of silent and earnest and frustrated toiling before emerging, victorious, into the sunshine and acclaim. My father makes to-do lists, makes plans, makes business plans. This is how he starts, always with a blank sheet of graph paper. We make bullet points. We identify the key areas we need to research further. We try to figure out how to research those areas. We work in a vacuum. We work in his study. We ponder. We stare at our feet. We stare at the ceiling. We talk to each other, create a world, create a tiny, artificial, formal s.p.a.ce, on a blank sheet of paper, where we can imagine rules and principles and categories and ideas, all of which have absolutely nothing to do with the actual world out there. We don't actually do anything. He writes things down, he crosses them out, he goes back and starts again. The world has always felt just out of his reach. The world of commerce, of men taking advantage of situations, of compet.i.tion, of sharp practice and words and elbows and speed, a world that was too fast for him. And yet my father will never stop trying, my father will go on for years after this day, thinking that if he just reads another book, just figures out the key, the secret, the world, the world of science fiction with its promise and possibility, will open up to him, to us, for us. and immediately flushed with embarra.s.sment right there in cla.s.s, blood hot in my temples and ears, flushed red in the face at the words, as if a joke, as if it were all a joke, one big joke on me and my dad for all these years, a joke I wish I'd learned long ago), this director of research, this man on top of the profession, he can afford to take us seriously. He has a kind of practical intelligence, savvy. My father and I lack resolve, self-confidence, the willingness to impose ourselves on others, on a situation, on a set of circ.u.mstances, to step on things, to willfully forget our deficiencies, we are too self-aware to turn off that nagging internal critic, editor, co-author, to suspend our understanding that we are trying to do what we really have no business doing. We aren't like the director. This man is someone for whom the world isn't a mystery. The world is a boulder, but it has levers and he knows when and where and how to apply just the right amount of force, and it moves for him, while my father and I, pushing up against it, don't have any angle, any torque, no grip or traction or leverage. My father thinks success must be in direct proportion to effort exerted. He doesn't know where or how to exert the least amount for the most gain, doesn't know where the secret b.u.t.tons are, the hidden doors, the golden keys. He thinks that, even if you have a great idea, there have to be trials and tribulations, errors and failures, a dark night of the soul, a slog, a time in the desert, a fallow period, a period of quiet, a period of silent and earnest and frustrated toiling before emerging, victorious, into the sunshine and acclaim. My father makes to-do lists, makes plans, makes business plans. This is how he starts, always with a blank sheet of graph paper. We make bullet points. We identify the key areas we need to research further. We try to figure out how to research those areas. We work in a vacuum. We work in his study. We ponder. We stare at our feet. We stare at the ceiling. We talk to each other, create a world, create a tiny, artificial, formal s.p.a.ce, on a blank sheet of paper, where we can imagine rules and principles and categories and ideas, all of which have absolutely nothing to do with the actual world out there. We don't actually do anything. He writes things down, he crosses them out, he goes back and starts again. The world has always felt just out of his reach. The world of commerce, of men taking advantage of situations, of compet.i.tion, of sharp practice and words and elbows and speed, a world that was too fast for him. And yet my father will never stop trying, my father will go on for years after this day, thinking that if he just reads another book, just figures out the key, the secret, the world, the world of science fiction with its promise and possibility, will open up to him, to us, for us.

Could this be the time? Is this the day that happens? My father is talking slowly. The director asks him questions, looking at the machine, standing off to a distance, trying to study it while listening to my dad. I can't tell what he's thinking, it could be that he can already see some kind of problem, some wires crossed, misplaced, some fundamental flaw in its architecture. Or maybe he's just listening to my dad talk slowly, too slow, that's always been a problem for him, I've even tried to hint at it, and the way the director is looking at my dad, a little quizzically, a bit puzzled, patiently but like that patience will not last forever, it just seems impossible that we will actually pull this off. And yet, there he is, he's still asking questions and my dad is answering them and the director is nodding, and even smiling, even squinting his eyes trying to visualize something my father is saying to him, and somehow, even though I already know what is going to happen, I can't help feeling excited, I can see that my dad is feeling the same thing, too. If a lifetime in the end is remembered for a handful of days, this is one of them. This is a day when my father is everything he has always wanted to be. Everything I have always wanted him to be. Everything he normally isn't. But maybe this is who he really is, maybe we go through life never actually being ourselves, mostly never being ourselves. Maybe we spend most of our decades being someone else, avoiding ourselves, maybe a man is only himself, his true self, for a few days in his entire life.

As I watch my father talk about his project, our project, I stop recognizing him. He is saying the right things in the right way and now I am starting to feel ashamed for ever doubting him, for the way I had ducked my head at the director when he shook my hand in a gesture of unconscious, preemptive apology for taking up the man's time, which we presumably did not deserve. I feel ashamed of it, of myself, ashamed for all the head ducking I've done in my life, literal and otherwise, for the way I go through life apologizing for my father, for myself, for our family. I feel angry at myself for not having realized all this years ago, for all the wasted opportunities, avenues that I had looked down wistfully thinking, If only we were more prepared, more savvy, if only we had our acts together. If only we weren't ourselves, could somehow be better versions of our selves. I am angry at myself, realizing how many hundreds or thousands of instances in which my father must have looked at me, his son, looked in my eyes to see if I believed in him, if I had any more optimism than he did, if I saw the world just as he did, or if instead he had imparted his sadness and feeling of incompleteness on me. I have let him down. I have let him down countless times. I am seventeen years old, and even then I know that seventeen years old is not very old, but it is old enough to have disappointed him, old enough to have been able to help him, and then chosen not to, it is old enough to be a coward, to have not protected him when you could have, even should have. Seventeen years old is not old, but it is old enough to have hurt your father.

And now, here I am, feeling proud, feeling guilty about feeling proud, feeling stupid about feeling guilty about feeling proud because I should be in the moment, trying to help him, instead of wallowing in my own guilt over my belated and unearned and undeserved pride. My father explains his theory, which, to this day, I still wonder if he made up on the spot. He is doing it, he is pulling it off. I am his son. This man has asked to come see us, not the other way around, and we are worth his time.

"The acquisition of tensed information," my father explains, to both of us listening and possibly to himself as well, "that is the key here." How do we find out about information at a time other than our present? This was the key insight I had in my laboratory one night (me: you did?), while looking at my son working on the bench test (me: are you talking about me?).

The director breaks in to ask a question. What does any of this have to do with time travel?

A good question, my father counters, sounding uncharacteristically polished. The director is even more hooked. My father explains that humans, because of our memories, are good at perceiving intervals of time. That we all have some intuitive understanding of scope and scale and size and units and structure and sequence, an innate ability to organize and process information about such intervals.

"The key question of time travel," my father says, "is this: How do we know what it means to perceive an event as presently occurring, rather than as a memory of a past event? How can we tell present from past? And how do we move the infinitesimal window of the present through the viewfinder at such a constant rate? Why can we see a faraway snow-tipped mountain range, or a jet taking off, or the moon, or the sun, or stars, and not an event that took place a moment ago, let alone a month ago, a year, thirty-three years ago?"

The director is nodding and smiling and my father is smiling a little and I'm allowing myself a smile.

"Maybe it's because we need to be able to do so, for our survival. For food-gathering purposes, for outrunning the saber-toothed tiger, for jumping across jagged rocks in a rushing river, to care for our crying infant, we need to focus, we need to know what is going on now. That is to say, our physical ability to understand time has been honed by evolutionary pressures to select for traits useful for survival, in all aspects, and time perception is no exception or special case or even magical or mysterious case."

My father looks at me and smiles when he says this next part. "Which is where I started to have hope. If there is no absolute logical reason why we could not experience the past just like we experience the present, perhaps we can untrain, or perhaps retrain, ourselves to have such a capacity. Maybe some lobe in our brains, buried in a fold given over to language or calculation of differential survival rates or logic, maybe within that brain structure lies the long-dormant (for our species at least) ability to experience time in a different way."

The director here raises his eyebrows at the suggestion that my father seems to be making: time travel is not a technology built outside, with t.i.tanium and beryllium and argon and xenon and seaborgium, but rather it is a mental ability that can be cultivated.

"We have evolved to have current, temporally proximal beliefs about the world," my dad says, "which is to say local-scale accurate beliefs, but perhaps in this case, local-scale accuracy is not the only goal worthy of obtaining. We perceive the present, but we remember the past. The converse is not possible. We obviously cannot remember the present. Or can we? Deja vu. What does that feel like? It is the oddest experience, one everyone has had, one that is commonly described as a feeling of certainty that one has experienced just this exact experience before. Which in itself is quite strange, the idea that one could have an identical experience, down to the last detail, down to the internal qualia, the exact interior frame of mind, emotions, a frame of consciousness duplicated with startling exact.i.tude, that would be unsettling enough. And yet it's stranger than that."

And I know what he means. I'm standing here, on this baseball field. I have done this before, but not exactly.

"We experience the present and remember the past," Dad continues. "We can't remember the present, except what is deja vu but a memory of the present? And if we can remember the present, why can't we experience the past? What kind of machine is this? This machine, what my son and I have built, this is a perception engine, and it works in your mind as much as anywhere else."

TAMMY says she's figured it out, what that look is that my father has, and I tell her to shut up, because truly today for once in all of our days, it is going great, just great, really great, and for a brief moment at the top of the arc, we weigh nothing and it seems like maybe the arc wasn't an arc after all, but a straight shot, up to where we have been looking, not aiming, afraid to even admit our aim could ever be so high, but looking, secretly, at a different trajectory of life, and in that moment I think maybe we might have escaped the pull of our lives, of our story, of the chronodiegetic field, of the forces of physics in this science fictional universe, the path and shape and limitations, the constraints, invisible, intangible, but more real than anything, the parabolic track we are on, the equation floating next to our function, I think maybe my father has done it, and then slowly, over days and weeks and months, slowly over a year, and also all at once, in that hot moment at the park on the gra.s.s with the day brightening and the air heating up, I begin to realize that this feeling is a familiar one, one I have felt before.

"He looks like he already knows it won't work," TAMMY says, finally, just at the moment I see it, in his face, see what she's talking about, see that it's not the freedom of escape I am feeling, rather it's the weightlessness that is, in fact, the telltale sign of inescapability, that brief instant being the necessary top, the maximum, the defining characteristic of an arc, that weightlessness is really the last second, tenth of a second, the last few milliseconds we will enjoy as we start to come down from the top.

Failure is easy to measure. Failure is an event.

Harder to measure is insignificance. A nonevent. Insignificance creeps, it dawns, it gives you hope, then delusion, then one day, when you're not looking, it's there, at your front door, on your desk, in the mirror, or not, not any of that, it's the lack of all that. One day, when you are looking, it's not looking, no one is. You lie in your bed and realize that if you don't get out of bed and into the world today, it is very likely no one will even notice.

Hitting the peak of your life's trajectory is not the painful part. The painful day comes earlier, comes before things start going downhill, comes when things are still good, still pretty good, still just fine. It comes when you think you are still on your way up, but you can feel that the velocity isn't there anymore, the push behind you is gone, it's all inertia from here, it's all coasting, it's all momentum, and there will be more, there will be higher days, but for the first time, it's in sight. The top. The best day of your life. There it is. Not as high as you thought it was going to be, and earlier in your life, and also closer to where you are now, startling in its closeness. That there's a ceiling to this, there's a cap, there's a best-case scenario and you are living it right now. To see that look in your parents' faces at the dinner table at ten, and not recognize it, then to see it again at eighteen and recognize it as something to recognize, and then to see it at twenty-five and to recognize it for what it is.

The worst part of the drive back from the park was not that we didn't talk, that would have been okay, fine, that would have been better than what happened, which was my father pretending to be happy. He turned on the radio, he asked what song I wanted to listen to, he asked me about the song on the radio, he even tried, and this is the worst part, to sing along. I knew what was happening, but he kept it up for long enough and was singing and smiling all crazy enough that I wondered if he'd burst some pipe in his head, if the pressure and force of the crushing blow had damaged his own emotional machinery.

There's my dad, pretending to be okay, pretending he isn't reeling, hasn't just had the wind and life and fight knocked out of him, hasn't just had something inside of him, the last bit of anything delicate inside, smashed into a couple hundred tiny pieces.

I see myself staring straight ahead at the road, trying hard not to look over at my father, already replaying the events in my head.

"So," the director had said, "only one thing left to do. Fire it up."

My dad and I look at each other. As agreed, he's the one to get in. He takes off his suit jacket, hands it to me, and I lay it over my arm, hoping to impart some ceremony to the moment. My father has on short sleeves under his jacket, and if the director thinks it odd, he doesn't show it. Dad looks small in there, his shoulders a little slumped. He nods and I close the hatch.

I am watching my self thinking, We should have stayed in our garage We should have stayed in our garage. I am watching him think that and I am thinking it myself now. Why couldn't we have just stayed in there, in our laboratory, our s.p.a.ce. We should have stayed where we were safe. Maybe things would have been different, maybe the thing would have worked, the piece of junk, maybe I wouldn't have had to watch my father sweat and strain and stand there awkwardly, trying everything for what is probably eight, ten minutes but feels like my entire life. It is, it was, it has been my entire life, my father's life, too, those few eternal unending merciless minutes dragging and stretching on in silence, the director ever the gentleman, unwaveringly polite, which makes it worse, polite until the end, the etiquette of a situation like this unclear to me and to him, as we stand there for the awful duration of this stretch of time on what was supposed to have been the best, brightest-shining hour of my father's story, through the first phase of let me try this, it must be that, simple fix, to the heh heh, that's funny, this never happens in our lab (me knowing, and hoping the director doesn't know, even as we are failing, hoping that the director at least can't imagine what my father means when he says "our lab," our messy garage in our messy house, with our scribblings everywhere, our workshop with the random objects everywhere, a basketball, an old yearbook of mine, a rusted fork sitting on top of a tray full of a.s.sorted screws and nails and bolts, bad tools, bent and tired, decade-old oil stains under our LTD wagon, the cat's litter box stinking the whole place up), then on to the stage of oh what were we thinking that we could pull off something like this, the stage of self-questioning, asking me, Hey son, do you remember if I checked this or that, a stalling tactic, a misdirection, of me realizing then how good a man my father was and is, how, even in his worst moment, he would never, ever, in a million years blame me for something, even if it was my fault, not like this, not in front of this stranger, even if it was my fault, and who knows, it probably was, I wasn't half the scientist my father is or was, I never could have been, of me realizing my father would have never even thought about trying to pin it on me, though he could have, it would have been easy enough, and I wish I could freeze time right then and there forever, wish I could hold that knowledge forever, the realization that, even in the gut-turningly horrible awkwardness of that situation, the absolute low of all lows, in the most desperate minute of this hour of his greatest embarra.s.sment and unexplained bad luck and, yes, failure, even though he could be absent and fuzzy and unlocatable and clench his jaw at me and always be disappointed in me and use silence as a form of cruelty to me and my mother, despite all of that, my father would always protect me against the world, would always stand between the world and me, would always be a buffer, a protective covering, a box for me to hide in.

And then finally comes the last stage, we can almost go home now, in the hot car and then the cold garage and the even colder house, can almost go back into our box and hide, but not before a couple more minutes of head-scratching, my father actually standing there scratching his head with his hand, his small hand, strong and with well-defined veins, but still small, how the smallness of his hand, of his entire height just hit me, the image of him looking like an immigrant, like a bewildered new graduate student in front of the eminent professor, a small man with a small hand in a large foreign country, not so much scratching his head as just pushing his hand up against it, as in, Oh what's happened, oh why now, why like this, betrayed by his own invention, the anguished embarra.s.sment made that much worse by all of his soliloquy, by all of his grandstanding theoretical monologue that preceded it, and worst of all, because he has just finished explaining how his machine is an idea, is a device of the mind, this failing not being just a fluke, not just a piece of bad mechanical luck, but an actual failure of his own mind, his own concept. The silence is just unbearable now, and to make things worse, now kids are starting to appear at the edges of the diamond, parents pulling up with coolers, bags of bats, the slapping of mitts, the thwock of warm-up catch along the first-base line, people a little curious about what's going on, feeling the eyes on us.

A father and son run out toward right field, the dad with a ball and glove and the boy with his slightly undersized bat, not the standard Little League aluminum bat that the other kids have, that sends a ringing noise through the air, but a wooden bat, a Louisville Slugger tee-ball bat. I see him now, holding that bat, trotting out along the chalk line behind his dad, a jaunty step, he's proud of his dad, who looks like a real athlete, like he could have played two sports in college, he's looking around to see if the other kids are looking at him, but he's also a kid and he's taking it in, looking at the gra.s.s, squinting up at the sun, at the sky, stunned by the fullness of the day. Trying to absorb it all, hoping maybe time will stop right this instant, forever, and never start again. That this will be it, right here, on this field, that's all. I see myself at seventeen, already feeling nostalgia for being a kid his age, feeling the weight of all the bright Sat.u.r.days I spent in the dank garage instead of in this bath of sunlight and heat and blue and green, embarra.s.sed for how little I had lived, how little my father had lived, wondering if it was something I would pa.s.s on to my son. This was the big day for my dad and I had woken up that morning amazed at the rarity of a day like today, when we might come home champs, when we (my dad, me, our family) might get a win for once, but now, standing here looking at all of this, I remember how stupid I felt as I realized that for most of these kids, a day like this happened every weekend, that none of these kids thought of life that way, as a series of mostly b.u.mmer days with the occasional chance at getting a win against life against life. Who thinks that way? I was seventeen. Who thinks that way at seventeen?

They set up about fifty feet away from each other, two endpoints of a little fatherson axis, and the dad began lobbing slow overhand pitches to his son, and the boy would swing at them, hitting about one out of every six or seven, weak little grounders that dribbled back to his dad, that his dad would run up to and field as if they were hard hit, which made his son feel a little better, but also a lot worse. The kid was small, and I had been a small kid, and I remember what it was like. He looked like he was getting frustrated. He didn't have any bat speed, even for a kid his age. The bat was probably about three ounces too heavy.

But then, after about three dozen pitches and four or five d.i.n.ky glancing hits, the kid got ahold of one. The sound it made. It was a perfect sound. Crack. Clean off the sweet spot. Even as he was. .h.i.tting it, I don't think he believed it was happening. I remember thinking how much I wanted that to be my fatherson axis, how bad I wanted to be the one hitting that ball.

The kid's dad whipped his head around, as did all of the other kids, and their dads, and even the director. Everyone stopped and turned and watched the ball fly over his dad's head and then over the gra.s.s of the adjoining field, and then over the infield, and land, right on home plate of the other diamond. The kid had arms like wet noodles, didn't even really have shoulders yet. It had to have been 250 feet. I saw it happen and I'm seeing it again now and I still don't believe it happened.

The only person who hadn't watched it was my dad. I didn't know that then, but now, I see that. He just stands there, looking at our sad prototype, holding a vacuum tube in one hand and his other hand on his head, and looking like he knows it just slipped away. The director turns back from watching the kid, which was just the break he needed to stop my dad's awkward fumbling with the machine. There was a mumbled half apology about needing to get back to the office for a meeting, and a promise of perhaps continuing this at a later date which I now see as a courteous refusal of the director to acknowledge what had happened, but even then I knew, given me, given our family, that this was it, that there wouldn't be another chance, that this was the high point of our arc and from here, we were heading into unknown territory.

The fallout started the next morning. It must have taken a night for it to process, a few hours spent alone, stewing over it, replaying the memory over and over in his head, asking what if. It must have taken that time for the damage to register on his ego, on his sh.e.l.l, on his sense of purpose and navigation, on his physical body, even. He didn't get out of bed until ten, which was very late for him, about four and a half hours late for a Sunday morning, and when I saw him he looked sore, like he'd aged years in one night. My mother went to temple early and I was left in the house to wonder when he would get up and what it would be like when he did. He went into the bathroom and after a long shower and a long period of silence before and after, he emerged from there and walked into the kitchen just after noon. He didn't look at me, didn't ask where Mom was. We sat and ate noodles that she had cooked and left on the stove. He heated his up and then picked at them looking mildly repulsed. I asked him if he wanted me to heat up some soup. He didn't answer. After he ate, he put his plate in the sink and I heard him go down into the garage and I was thinking, just for a second, what if, and I was about to go join him when I heard the garage open and his car rumble out the driveway. He didn't come back until after I'd gone to sleep that night, and the next day, he went to work and we never talked about that day again.

(module )

from How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

conjectures, currently unproven but believed to be true That a moment has a thickness to it, a size.

That a moment is measurable. That there will be a finite number of moments in the history of the universe.

That there is no unique global time.

That chronodiegetics is a theory of the past tense, a theory of regret. That it is fundamentally a theory of limitations.

TAMMY makes a face at me I haven't seen before.

"What is that?" I say.

"I don't know. Your dad, I don't know."

"More complicated than I remember. Whatever. Let's keep moving."

"What are you even going to say? If you find him, what will you say?"

After the day at the park, the drifting got worse. It had started years earlier, when I was in seventh grade, or maybe it was the summer before seventh grade, at first just a few seconds at a time, hard to say if my mother even noticed, but before long it was impossible not to notice. By the time I entered high school, my father was regularly drifting five minutes into the past, and when he did that, none of us could talk to him. Well, we could, but he'd never hear us. He would say things to us, transmit the words into the viscous medium of our kitchen, and we wouldn't get the message right away, it took a while for the words and sound to reach us through the light and air thick with delay, with silence and tension, the air resistant to communication and understanding. And then we would answer, but he was already gone, had already moved on, out, away from us. We would try to answer, make meaning from these conversations, these bits of days, these bits of daily life being all we had by then, my mother and I, all we had left with him. We were losing him.

His invention may have been a failure, but his idea wasn't. As it turned out, and I wouldn't find this out until much later, there were twin projects. The director of the inst.i.tute had already gone to visit another inventor, not far from our town, actually about half an hour away on the peninsula, where sometimes my mom and I would go have a picnic if my dad was working on the weekend. The houses there had Spanish tile roofs and mailboxes with roofs, too, and little doors, and the driveways were circular, for receiving guests, I guess, and there was a small park that overlooked the ocean, and a swing set and even a cast-iron jungle gym, shaped like a rocket, for kids to crawl up into, a set of bent metal rods, curved perfectly and painted red and white and blue. This other inventor had had a very similar idea to my father's, the differences being mostly in execution, and the only real difference being that, on the day of his visit, his idea worked. That day in the park was my father's chance, our chance to be a part of it, but the director already had seen that the idea could work and didn't need to find a second diamond in the rough. That part of it would have hurt my father, I know, to know that it was possible for someone like him, a talented amateur, out in the sticks, a moonlighting cubicle worker, a wage-earner-by-day, inventor-by-night, to make it. It would have killed him to know that someone had done it, that all his work had been correct, all the work that he had dumped, a week after that day in the park, all the notebooks, in pieces, scattered and scribbled over hundreds of pages, on sc.r.a.ps, on Post-it notes, on index cards, in margins of books, on backs of envelopes taped and folded and crumpled and uncrumpled and crumpled again. It would have killed him to know that it hadn't been impossible, our dream, but that we got one chance only, just once in a lifetime, and we had lost it. And with that, our idea, our prototype was the one lost to history. My father would forever be the guy who did not get the credit, the one swallowed up, enveloped by obscurity, swept away and lost in time.

If I could tell him just one thing, wherever he is, pa.s.s him one message, it would be this: he had something. Something to his thoughts, his ideas, the papers in his notebooks, the work we did in the garage. Beyond just a purity to his ideas, a sincerity to his belief, a genuine curiosity, a determination that, if he just sat there long enough, thought hard enough, failed enough times, he'd find a way in. His idea was good enough, would have been good enough for the director, for the world, good enough to be a serious contribution to the field of fictional science, good enough for me, but I don't know where he is, and I have never been able to tell him this.

Here in the garage, where I watched him while he worked, twisting this, tightening that, and realized, not that I didn't know it, but saw more clearly that, fundamentally, my father is, was, has always been a sad man. Sadness was the driver, the motor of his invention, the engine of his creativity. The sadness was generational, acc.u.mulated like heavy elements in us, like we were large sea life, enormous ocean fish, swimming silent, collecting the sadness and moving through the deep with it, never stopping, always increasing the quant.i.ty in our bodies, always moving forward, never fully sleeping, eaters of sadness. Bite by bite, meal by meal, becoming made of sadness. Pa.s.sed down like an inheritance, a negative inheritance, a long line of poor, clever men, growing, over time, slightly less poor, and slightly more clever, but never wise.

I remember one late-December morning in my father's study, one of the last days of the year, felt like it was the end of something more. Not the best year, the family had seen better. Overnight the rain and winds had washed the sky and world of all haze and the early-morning light was even, perfect, the light of an artist's studio. I was nine years old and my mother had told me to ask my father to come have breakfast. The clock in the kitchen was ticking. It was a blue plastic circle with a white face, and standard black arrows pointing to hours and minutes and a thin red needle for the second hand, which made discrete movements, jumped from mark to mark in its circ.u.mnavigation, with a kind of abrupt yet soft bouncing motion, and a sound that always seemed louder than it should have been.

I called to my father a few times and, not hearing any response, walked down the hall, afraid of what I might find, not hearing a sound, and then, as I approached, I heard a m.u.f.fled noise, a sound I was certain I had never heard before, and as I peeked in through the mostly closed door of his small office, I saw, for the first time in my life, my father's eyes red and cheeks and chin wet with tears. He was looking at a picture of my grandfather, the one I never met, who died when I was six months old, who died on a different continent, an ocean away, poor and broken and missing his oldest son. I stood there in the hall, a few feet outside the threshold of my father's private study, watching him, looking at him framed by the door, while he looked at his own father, framed in the picture, the three of us, son, father, and grandfather, forming a melancholy axis, forming a chain, a regress, a bridge into the past.

TAMMY makes her face pretty and blows me a kiss on the cheek. Movie-star face, I call it. She hardly ever does it, and only if I'm being nice.

"What was that for?"

"I don't know. For being that kid."

The weeks pa.s.sed and the months pa.s.sed. The prototype sat in the garage. He'd moved it to the corner after we got back that afternoon, and covered it with a sheet. He and my mother started to fight more. My father continued to do his own research, on questions that got more and more specialized, and continued to publish his results in journals with t.i.tles more and more obscure. No one noticed anyway. That was the worst part: he understood that something was happening, that he was missing the big picture, even as he couldn't grasp exactly what it was or how or why. By the time I was twenty, a couple of years into college, I could already see him the way others did, I could switch between modes of viewing, sometimes as his son, other times not as his son but instead as someone looking at a prideful, intelligent, increasingly self-isolated man. A man drifting slowly into the past.

Then one day, he is back. It is a little more than three years after that day in the park. I hear him in the garage for hours, and into the night, and then every day for six weeks, the testing getting louder and louder. He is working on something else. Not a time machine. Something darker, more powerful. Science fiction, but not any kind I know of. He never asks me to come down there, never hints at what he is doing, although I know now that he was building the machine that would take him to that temple, and ultimately to wherever he is now.

In the garage, just where we had once built something together, now he is alone, building a different kind of box, one that will carry him away from us, from here, from this life.

TAMMY's crying again.

"Well that was a b.u.mmer," I say.

"I thought we were supposed to feel better after that," she says. "Learn something about him."

"I did," I say. "I understand that he left us. I understand about how much he cared for us, and it wasn't that much apparently."

I ask TAMMY what would it even mean? To find my father at this point, what would that mean?

a.s.sume a Desired Event EVf (son finds father). (son finds father).

There are two predicates (Son, Father) but neither one is the crucial a.s.sumption. The questionable piece of this picture is the operator "finds."

Running that through the Symbolic Operator, we find that finds finds means at least the following: eye contact, discomfort, silence, at least one true thing said, at least one false thing said, at least one overly dramatic and egregiously, recklessly hurtful thing said, and some sort of closed boundary, partial or full, on the emotional asymptote toward parabolic melancholy. means at least the following: eye contact, discomfort, silence, at least one true thing said, at least one false thing said, at least one overly dramatic and egregiously, recklessly hurtful thing said, and some sort of closed boundary, partial or full, on the emotional asymptote toward parabolic melancholy.

The odds of such a finding occurring are, based on a.s.sumptions of the length of a life, the coefficient of conversational friction, the tensile strength of the fatherson dynamical social-psychological fabric, and the size of the window of comprehension and dramatic coherence, approximately one time per seventy-eight point three years, subjectively experienced.

A life is about twenty-five thousand days, and a finding occurs about once every twenty-five thousand days.

In other words, once in a lifetime.

In other other words, there is a single day, a single conversation, a single moment in my father's life that I need to find. One time in all of our times together when I can make contact with him, on our divergent, discursive, wandering paths through memory, past tense, narration, and meditation.

Time travel was supposed to be fun, it was supposed to be about going to places and having a bunch of adventures. Not hovering over scenes from your own life as a detached observer. Not just lurching around from moment to random moment, and never even learning about those moments.

And now we're faced with a new problem: we are running out of book. Which is to say, we're running out of fuel. This loop has a preset length. It already happened, and it happened the way it happened, and any moment now, I'm going to find myself going back to Hangar 157 to get myself shot in the stomach.