Variables Known and Unknowable
11:28 PM
Sadness overwhelms you, like on those mornings when you wake to find the bed across from yours made and empty, and then remember all at once why. You sit up, tears stinging your eyes, to discover her leaning against the front bumper of the Datsun. You wipe the wetness from your cheeks as relief gives way to embarrassment, but by the time you are out of the car there is only anger.
She is staring up at the nearest parking light where a halo of bugs frantically orbits the yellow bulb. At the sound of the door closing behind you, she turns to watch you approach. The look on her face is tender and terrible all at once and you have to lower your eyes to keep your temper intact. “Where were you?” you ask, noting the knapsack strapped across her chest and the boots on her feet.
“Getting some air.”
“You were going to leave me?” You realize this sounds more like an accusation than a question.
Her laugh is quick and humorless. “Well, I didn’t get very far, did I?”
“Give me another,” you say, holding out your hand.
Her gaze returns to the parking light. “No.”
“Give it to me.”
She shakes her head. “I can’t do this, Matt.”
“Do what?” You take another step toward her. “Finish what you started?”
She whips her head in your direction. “Fuck you,” she says, pushing herself up from the hood of the car. “I’m not your fucking lolabunny.” She takes a step back. “You want a nurse?” Her chin juts in the direction of the emergency room. “Try the fucking hospital.”
“Fuck you,” you say, moving toward her. “You did this to me.”
“No.” She steps between two of the cars in the adjacent row, continuing to move away from you. “I warned you,” she says, entering the next aisle of cars, “I tried to stop you.”
“Where are you going?”
“Anywhere but here,” she says, turning her back to you and holding her middle finger up in farewell.
“Give it to me, Jai, or—” You rush toward her, grab the shoulder of her sweater, and spin her around. But when she raises both arms defensively over her face, you immediately release her. “Jai, I—”
She lowers her arms, hands balled into fists. “Or what?” she asks, the fear in her eyes narrowing to anger. “Or you’ll just take it?”
Your stomach twists with shame. “No, I—”
“Are you going to hit me now?” She shoves you in the chest with both hands. “Try it,” she shouts. “Try to hit me!”
You hold up your hands, palms out. “Jai, please.”
“Mr. Nice Guy?” She shoves you again, hard enough that you have to step back to keep from falling. “Mr. Polite, Mr. Gentle, Mr. Vulnerable,” she says, pushing you a third time. “Until you don’t get what you want, right? And then you think you can just take it!” She swings at you, hitting you twice in the face before you have time to defend yourself.
“Jai, stop it!”
“You’re just like the rest of them,” she sobs, tears running down her cheeks. “All of them!” She continues to attack, pummeling you around the head and shoulders as you attempt to shield your face from her fists. “No matter how much I give, you keep taking and taking and taking!”
You catch her by one wrist, then the other, pulling her to you. The moment your bodies collide, she stops struggling and collapses against you. You release her wrists and hold her in a tight embrace to keep the both of you on your feet. “I’m sorry,” you whisper, mouth pressed to her ear. “Please, don’t go.”
She doesn’t respond, but gradually nestles into your encircling arms with her head on your chest and the soft stubble of her scalp soothing your bruised cheek. She lets you hold her like this in the middle of the hospital parking lot for a long moment before taking a shuddering breath and lifting her head. “I’m dead, Matt,” she says, looking up at you. “Understand? And I don’t want to spend the final minutes of my life watching you destroy yours.”
“Dead? What are you talking about? You’re right here.”
Gently, she pushes away from you. “He took everything from me, everything.”
“Who took everything?” you ask, arms awkwardly hanging at your sides.
“But he doesn’t get this,” she says, putting her hands to her chest. “Not anymore. I took it from him, just like I took all his shit.”
“I don’t understand.”
She crosses her arms and looks past you into the distance. “My boyfriend, he’s a hop-head, okay? A bounce dealer. I stole his blues, all of them, and swallowed as many as I could. I’m dead because I took too many, I went too far.” Her gaze shifts back to you. “It’s only a matter of time.”
“How do you know?” In all the stories you’ve read, time travelers return from hundreds, thousands, even millions of years in the past.
“Advanced Natural Mechanics,” she says, as if this is explanation enough. “It’s called expungement, you know, erasure, because you can’t preexist.”
A car turns into the aisle, momentarily blinding you with its headlights. You take Jai by the sleeve and pull her with you out of the way.
“You’re right,” you say, once the car is gone. “I don’t understand. Explain it to me.”
In the Datsun again, Jai raises her seat, and you do the same. You sit facing her with your back to the door. She mirrors you, pressing her knees against yours. “Okay,” she says. “Where do I start?”
“After I…” You want to tell her about Jennifer, but now doesn’t seem like the right time. “Before, you know, the first time I bounced, you said there was nothing I could do to change what I saw. You said it wasn’t my past, but Jai, it obviously was.”
She nods her head thoughtfully. “Earlier today, maybe a choice you made, some random event, a little bit of both, variables known and unknowable, as Mr. Sanjay used to say, led to you being here right now in this car with me.” Her voice takes on a teacherly cadence, not unlike your biology instructor Mr. Douglas. “The same applies to the Matt you saw in the desert. Other choices, other events beyond his control, resulted in a different outcome.”
“So, going back in time alters that outcome, right? Changes everything, you know, like the butterfly effect.”
Her eyes narrow. “The butterfly effect?”
“In this story, a guy travels millions of years into the past, accidentally kills a butterfly, and returns to a different present.”
“Oh yeah,” she says, “The Bradbury Fallacy, named after that sci-fi short with the dinosaur hunters.”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
“No.” She shrugs. “That can’t happen.”
“Why not?”
“Because time is not a single line,” she says, holding her hands out like she’s gripping a large rope. “Think of time like a bunch of strings, side by side, like a giant fiber optics cable.”
“A fiber what?”
“Okay,” she waves her hands like she’s scattering thoughts. “Forget that. New analogy. Imagine the flow of time is like thousands of trains, all side by side and moving in the same direction.” She holds her forearm horizontally in front of her. “When you take a blue, when you bounce, it’s like jumping into the air from one of those speeding trains. Jump high enough and you’ll come down somewhere farther back, the past, if you will.” She demonstrates by having the index finger of her other hand move in a slow-motion arc from the tips of her fingers to the bend of her elbow. “Only, it’s not the same train. What you’re really doing is jumping onto another, nearly identical train following a nearly identical path.” She lowers her hands. “You with me?”
“I think so.”
“Okay, but here’s the rest of the analogy. You’re tied to a bungee-cord. Wait, do you have bungee-cords?”
“Yeah, people jump off bridges with them.”
“Exactly. Well, the cord is always connected to the original train, the original multiverse. When your jump ends, you are pulled back to where you started.” She reenacts the finger jump in reverse. “Always.”
“Well, how many, you know, multiverse trains are there?”
“Two, three?” She shrugs. “Jillions? It depends. Variables known and unknowable.”
“Still, shouldn’t it at least be possible to land on your own train?”
“Look, I only know what I know.”
“So, what you do on the other trains doesn’t matter?”
“Oh, it matters. It matters a whole fucking lot, just not to you.”
You think about the Matt you accosted at school, and the one you terrified upstairs in that abandoned house.
“When the technology was first discovered, of course it changed everything. They called it a temporal arms race. It was the end of the world.” She leans back, shoulders slumped, looking at you and past you at the same time. “I remember, I was in the fifth grade. People were afraid to go to sleep because of the chance they’d wake up and everything would be different. As the powers of the world began to realize its limitations though, things calmed down. I mean, what a disappointment, huh? Everything that could be stolen or enslaved couldn’t be brought back, and anything gained through manipulation or exploitation had to stay behind. As far as world domination was concerned, the shit was useless. By then, the isotope was being mass-produced in labs all over the world, illegally of course, for whatever that’s worth.”
Her hands disappear into the sleeves of her sweater. “Everything is for sale, Matt,” she says, staring at the slumped ovals of her empty cuffs as if wondering where her fingers went. “Good, evil, right, wrong, kindness, cruelty, all for sale. People spend their lives trying to go back and fix their mistakes or relive what they believe were their best moments. It never works. They spread their discontent across the multiverse, fuck over countless versions of themselves.” Her gaze edges toward you, locks in. “People are sick, Matt, selfish, cruel, disgusting. We do the worst things, commit the most horrendous crimes, because we never have to face our victims, because we’ll always get away with it.”
“Doesn’t sound like a very nice place, your world.”
“It’s not.” She continues to stare at you, eyes tracing your features, until her gaze comes to rest somewhere on the left side of your face. “Oh fuck,” she says. “Did I do that?”
“What?”
She bends forward. “Come here.” Her hands reemerge to take hold of the front of your shirt and pull you toward her. She leans in and kisses you gently on the cheek just below your eye. Her lips are cool against the wounded heat of your skin. Then she does the same to the brow of your right eye, the tip of your nose, and finally your mouth. “Better?” she asks, settling back against the door.
You manage to nod. “What if you aren’t dead?” you ask. “What if you just can’t go back? Maybe you’re stuck here. That wouldn’t be so bad, would it?”
“You’d like that wouldn’t you?”
You reach over and slide your hand beneath hers. “I guess I could get used to having you around.”
“What would I do?” she asks, lacing her fingers between yours.
“For starters, you could take my science teacher’s job.”
She smiles. “For starters, huh? That sounds fun. Where would I live?”
You shrug. “With me, of course.”
“Yeah.” She stifles a smile. “I doubt your parents will be very enthusiastic about taking in some homeless, twenty-year-old, college dropout. Where will I sleep?”
There’s an extra bed in my room, you almost say, when the thought stops you cold, and you instantly hate yourself for thinking it. “There’s always the couch?”
“Hum,” she replies, giving your fingers a squeeze. “How old did you say you were?”
“Almost sixteen.”
She’s watching you again like she’s reading your thoughts. “What makes you so sad, Matt?”
“Sad?” You shake your head. “Me?”
“I think so, yeah.”
You shrug, stare at her fingers intertwined with yours, trace the edge of her thumbnail with your own.
“You have good friends,” she finally says. “I don’t think the little one likes me, though.”
“Eric? He’s just protective.”
“Yeah, I can see that.” She smiles at you, more with her eyes than her mouth. “Thank you, Matt, for everything.”
“Why does it feel like you’re saying goodbye?”
“I’m just tired, I guess. Really tired. Can I ask you for something?”
“Of course.”
“If I close my eyes, maybe fall asleep for a little while, will you just hold me?”
“Okay.”
“Put your seat back and make room for me.”
When you do as she asks, she climbs over to your side of the car and lies down along-side of you with her shoulder tucked beneath your armpit and her head resting on your chest. “This, okay?” you ask.
She rolls halfway on top of you, slides one leg over both of yours, and nestles into your embrace. “It’s perfect.”
It is, you think, perfect, even with the door’s armrest digging into your back and your left arm beginning to grow numb. You could stay just like this for a very long time.
After a while, her breathing becomes shallower and her body rests more heavily on yours. You inhale the clean, earthy smell of her, like rain on leaves, and something sweet, vanilla and coconut. It reminds you of summer, and you are struck with the distinct memory of one sleepless night in July, lying on your back and waiting for the air conditioner to cycle on, your sunburnt skin too hot for covers, and then that moment, the hesitation of electricity, the far-off hum of the compressor, and finally, the blanket of cool air flowing over your body and soothing you to sleep.
TO BE CONTINUED!
This story is a work in progress — I’m writing it as fast as I can! More episodes in this thread coming soon. While you are waiting, feel free to return to the beginning: if you make different choices you will get a different story.
I would love to hear from you!
THE MISADVENTURES OF MATTHEW VAN DER BOOT is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and places are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental … no matter how many times you ask.