How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe Part 9

"That's it," TAMMY says.

I say, What's it.

"When you shot yourself in the stomach, he was trying to tell you something."

It's all in the book. The book is the key.

TAMMY opens the panel and the TOAD pops out, and I see on the display that the story is still tracking, has been all along. Through the chronodiegetical principle of past tense/memory equivalence, we've been generating the narration of the text by traveling through these memories.

"Okay, hmmm," I say. "It's still just a book."

Or maybe it's not. I pull the book out of its encas.e.m.e.nt and, instead of trying to flip ahead (I learned that lesson the hard way), I feel around the edges, not sure exactly for what yet, but, aha, there it is, some kind of groove cut into the pages near the back of the book. I flip it open to find, at the bottom of page 201, a pocket, a little embedded envelope, like this:

I flip it open and pull out a key, just like I said, the book is the key, which I am grateful to have, even if it does seem a bit literal.

"A key!" TAMMY says.

"Nothing gets past you," I say. The question is, a key for what?

Ed sighs and bites at his left haunch. He can hear in my tone when I'm being mean to TAMMY, and it's his way of disapproving. I pat his head to get him to stop, then notice that he's not biting his haunch, he's gnawing on the box my mom gave me.

"Ed, you're a genius," TAMMY says. I don't disagree.

The box has no seams or folds, was seemingly wrapped by some sort of magical elf, so I have to use a letter opener to stab at it a few times before getting a corner to tear off and because the paper keeps tearing off in bits, it's slow going at first, but then, as I'm unwrapping it, the shape and size and font of the partially uncovered lettering starts to remind me of something from a long time ago, and at the point I realize what that is, I am, for a moment, ten years old again, and my ten-year-old heart starts pounding like a jackhammer in my thirty-year-old body.

There is just enough room in here for me to lay out all the items from the kit, as best I can, on the flat surface of TAMMY's main console.

The lettering on the box top is just how I imagined it looked from the ad in the back of the comic book, slightly fuzzy red-orange block letters, all-caps, blazoned across the top in a sans serif font:

I set the box top off to the side, facing up, and check off the items one by one against the picture on the box. There's the plastic knife and the Chrono-Adventurer patch, just as I remember, and a map of the terrain and a decoder that is a pair of concentric cardboard disks fastened together concentrically, so that the disks can be turned around relative to each other inside their plastic casing such that if the larger circle, with the encrypted letter, is lined up with the smaller circle, with the decoded letter, a secret message can be sent or translated to a fellow Chrono-Adventurer in the field. There's also a lot of filler, items that, not surprisingly, weren't advertised, like an eraserless No. 4 pencil (labeled s.p.a.cE PENCIL s.p.a.cE PENCIL), and a protractor (labeled MOON APPROACH ANGLE TRIGONOMETRIC DEVICE MOON APPROACH ANGLE TRIGONOMETRIC DEVICE), and a little notepad with five sheets of paper, which apparently counts as five items toward the total, cheats, really, cheap items that a ten-year-old me would have found half lame and half still-pretty-cool and possibly endowed with some kind of secret technological features just by virtue of their inclusion in the kit.

I count all seventeen items, look at them spread out, separate from one another, just objects lying there. A bit of a letdown from what I'd hoped for, but then again, I am thirty years old. My father was such a practical man, and this kit no doubt seemed silly to him, which makes the fact that he bought it mean that much more to me. Laid out like this, the contents of the kit remind me of times in our garage laboratory workshop, our version of the director's fancy research inst.i.tute on the hill, our makeshift center for fatherson studies filled with dollar items from the plastic bins at the hardware store. Maybe this is what he wanted me to see. Maybe looking at these items himself, he came to some kind of acceptance himself of why we never made it, the destined-to-fail nature of our little future enterprise. Still, it's hard to believe that he got this kit just so I might someday think back about our work together.

I look inside the empty box and notice something I hadn't seen before. What I had thought was a cardboard structure to hold the packed items in place is really a little box within the box, a compartment someone had built into the box, with a keyhole on the side.

"The key from the book!" I exclaim, like a boy detective.

"Nothing gets past you," TAMMY says.

"I don't remember you downloading the sarcasm upgrade."

"There are a lot of things you don't know about me," she says, and I feel like a jerk, because it's true.

"Well, are you just going to stand there until it's time to go back and get shot in the stomach, or are you going to stick that key in there?"

The key fits, thank goodness, because otherwise I'd have been all out of ideas, and I open up the secret compartment to find the eighteenth item.

"What is it?" TAMMY asks.

"A diorama."

It's a little scene, in three dimensions, a miniature version of our family kitchen. He'd taken care to make it proportionally correct. Not only were the height and length of the room to scale, but the depth as well, and it was that third dimension that brought it to life, made the illusion complete. The whole kitchen could fit in the palm of my hand, but it seemed that no important detail was missing. For dinner plates he'd used circles of paper, collected from inside the three-hole punch, glued onto tiny pieces of card stock and then affixed to the miniature kitchen table. There was a miniature refrigerator, and even a miniature calendar, a word-of-the-day calendar with a new science term each day. He hadn't re-created the word of the day, which would have been too small to read, but he had made a little date, April 14. I remember the year we had that calendar I was in fifth grade, which was 1986.

He hadn't made people, too difficult, and maybe that was the point. We weren't there anymore, in the room where we spent all those nights, quiet, tense dinners, the occasional good nights when my parents would tease each other, which always made me feel awkward, and weird, the scene of so many of their epic screaming matches. The kitchen is empty, had been for some time.

"Look," TAMMY says. "The clock."

Inside the miniature kitchen, my father had built a tiny replica of the blue circular clock that hung above the door to the backyard. A tiny working clock. It had an hour hand and a minute hand and a ticking second hand, just like the one we had at home. At that moment, in the diorama kitchen, the time was seven fourteen and about twenty seconds.

The calendar. The working clock. My father is sending a message. He's telling me where he is.

"TAMMY," I say, just starting to feel it, some kind of answer, like a cracked egg, slowly spreading on the top of my head and dripping down all sides of my face. Is this why I'm in the loop? Was it a coincidence that I spent almost a decade drifting, with no tense, with no clock, and the very next day after reentering the world, I got trapped in a time loop? Was it a coincidence that this message from my father, in the form of a miniature kitchen scene, was delivered to me on that very same day?

"TAMMY," I say again.

"I get it," she says.

How many times have I gone around this loop, refusing to move forward? How much of my life have I spent cycling through these events, trying to learn from them, attempting to decipher the meaning of this tableau in front of me, this cross section of our kitchen in that house, this little model of this room in our home, the site of all of those good times and not-so-good times. What is this called, what I am doing, to myself, to my life, this wallowing, this pondering, this rolling over and over in the same places of my memory, wearing them thin, wearing them out? Why don't I ever learn? Why don't I ever do anything different?

Do I always open the package too late?

Is the loop always the same?

Will I ever figure it out in time, early enough to actually do something about it?

Of course I do. Of course it is. Of course I won't.

"We have to go there. Now."

I say this to TAMMY, trying to sound as authoritative as I can, but I already know the answers to my questions, already know what she's going to tell me.

"I wish we could," she says, sounding really b.u.mmed, "but the fact is, we didn't."

I look up from the diorama and see what she means. We're circling over the present moment in Hangar 157, banking our descent into eleven forty-seven a.m., where another me, earlier-me, is waiting his turn to do this, to do all of this, all over again.

(module )

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

theorems, miscellaneous At some point in your life, this statement will be true: Tomorrow you will lose everything forever.

When it happens, this is what happens: I shoot myself.

He's waiting for me. Down there. The man who is going to kill me. The man I once was.

I know it happens, already happened to me, and yet, somehow, I have to stop it. I know, I know, I can't. But it's different when it's happening to you.

We're in the approach.

TAMMY arranges her pixels into a sad-faced clock.

11:46:00.

I have one minute left.

Feels like a month, maybe, but if you told me it was less, I'd believe you, and if you told me it was more, I would believe that, too.

I ask TAMMY to calculate the diameter of our path.

"I'm sorry?" she says, and I say I'm sorry, too, for everything and for not being better to her and all that good stuff. The fact that I'm in my last minute of life is making me mushy.

"No," she says. "Not I'm sorry like I'm always sorry. I'm sorry as in I don't understand your question."

"Let me rephrase that," I say. "Objectively speaking, how long were we in the loop?"

"I'm afraid I still don't know what you mean."

TAMMY makes a confused-face clock.

11:46:20.

"What is your problem?" I say. "It's a simple question. How long has it been since we left?"

"The answer to the question of how long it has been since we left," she says, "is that we haven't left yet."

"Oh my G.o.d," I say. "You're right."

"You shot yourself, and then you jumped into the machine at eleven forty-seven a.m. that day. From there, you tried to skip ahead, go into the future, but when you did that, you encountered nothingness. There was no future. You hadn't been there yet. And you still haven't. Instead, you got shunted off into that temple, which is completely outside of time, and then your zombie mom gave you the creeps and you spazzed out."

"I didn't spaz out."

"You did, and then you got shuttled back into time, into the fatherson memory axis. Which is the past. Which means."

"Which means."

"Which means."

"Which means what?"

"Sorry, I had too many programs running. Which means that, from the point in time at which you shot yourself, you haven't actually ever moved forward. Not one second. Not one moment."

Holy Mother of Ursula K. Le Guin. She's right again.

"But I've aged, haven't I? Haven't I? Don't I have some way of proving it? Five o'clock shadow?" I inspect my face in the mirror.

"Have you eaten anything since jumping in here?"

I think about this for a second. "I guess not," I say. "But wait, aha. I've talked to people!"

"Yeah? So?"

"So talking takes time."

"Who have you talked to?"

"My zombie mom."

"Not a real person. Also, exists on a plane outside of temporal existence."

"Shuttle guy."

"Doesn't exist in time."

"My dad."

"Those were memories. Not events. Also, that's the past. We're trying to figure out if you've moved at all into the future."

Right. Hmm.

"I've been jabbering away with you."

"I'm a computer program. We talk fast. Plus, more important, you talked to me inside this TM-Thirty-one. Which we've already established never moved forward in time after eleven forty-seven."

"I talked to Phil."

"Also a computer program. And again, you talked to him while inside this box."