failure on the part of myselves to remember to flush. I stood before a sink with a perpetually running faucet and splashed water over my face and hair for the second time that night. I watched a face I ought to have recognized emerge in the mirror.
The movies started after midnight. Time-travel pictures, both small-budget films and blockbusters, all of them laughable for one reason or another. I watched them in the crowded ballroom, which would quiet down when they started, projected on the wall, the cracks of the plaster adding depth to films that otherwise lacked any. The time travel depicted wasspectacular or dangerous. Nothing like time travel actually was in my experience, as banal as moving from one room to the next, watching ice melt, as banal as becoming hungry again, catching a cold, noticing a recession of hairline, a growth of nails, hair, paunch. Time travel was a simple slide sideways instead of forward. It was, I’d discovered when the raft had first hummed to life, no different, in any notable way, from doing nothing. We forget, I think, that we are born to travel through time, to trip into the next moment over the bump of the present, to keep looking over our shoulder to find that bump, understand it, and in doing so trip over the next. And on. And on.
No matter how often I saw some of the films—and no doubt the alcohol helped lubricate the humor—the serious foibles of the travelers, the difficulties they endured in their adventures, never ceased to be absurd. Depictions of traveling through time as if it could be an experience in itself. As if a brain designed to perceive only slow forward progression could magically decipher backward travel, as if color and swirling images, glimpses of moments happened or about to happen danced in a kaleidoscope. As if there were anything but darkness and the roar of blood in your ears, as if there were anything different from the normal panic of living. And so I laughed year after year at the movie heroes, their dangers and discoveries. Threats always came from outside, and in monstrous form. Obstacles appeared as questions of timing, not choice. Logical inconsistencies abounded. How could they not? I laughed most at these, as I do now at my own. Only now do I realize that logical inconsistencies are what allow for us to travel in time in the first place, keep us tripping forwardor—like me—sometimes backward or sideways. I was blind to my own illogic and still am, though now by choice. Sometimes to discover a solution is to forget the problem.
Now I entered the ballroom and found an unfamiliar scene.
The room was divided into two groups. The Elders sat as near to the projected image as they could, the bottom of the film on the wall fuzzy with their hair as they reached across one another for popcorn. Behind them circled the Youngsters, rattling like disturbed sparrows. Their number had grown, and behind me came the slap of sneakers on hardwood as more arrived. From the ages of six to perhaps twenty-six, there must have been a hundred. More. Multiples of every age stood in clumps, fought one another over cookies and candy, crunched popcorn underfoot, nudged one another as older Youngsters squealed past. Only the really small ones, the six- and seven-year-olds, seemed worried or frightened. I tried to see if I could spot the youngest one, the one who’d witnessed my “death” in such a shattering way, but couldn’t locate him in their crowds. More children ran past me and found themselves. The noise was unnerving.
“Don’t just stand there,” said a voice beside me. Yellow placed a hand on my shoulder. “They’ve been looking for you ever since they heard you weren’t really dead. Get with the others. At the center.” His face was dirty and his sweater torn. His mouth was bleeding.
“What happened to you?”
“I got jumped. They wanted information.” He nodded toward the children. “It’s not safe to be by yourself any longer. Get with the
The movies started after midnight. Time-travel pictures, both small-budget films and blockbusters, all of them laughable for one reason or another. I watched them in the crowded ballroom, which would quiet down when they started, projected on the wall, the cracks of the plaster adding depth to films that otherwise lacked any. The time travel depicted wasspectacular or dangerous. Nothing like time travel actually was in my experience, as banal as moving from one room to the next, watching ice melt, as banal as becoming hungry again, catching a cold, noticing a recession of hairline, a growth of nails, hair, paunch. Time travel was a simple slide sideways instead of forward. It was, I’d discovered when the raft had first hummed to life, no different, in any notable way, from doing nothing. We forget, I think, that we are born to travel through time, to trip into the next moment over the bump of the present, to keep looking over our shoulder to find that bump, understand it, and in doing so trip over the next. And on. And on.
No matter how often I saw some of the films—and no doubt the alcohol helped lubricate the humor—the serious foibles of the travelers, the difficulties they endured in their adventures, never ceased to be absurd. Depictions of traveling through time as if it could be an experience in itself. As if a brain designed to perceive only slow forward progression could magically decipher backward travel, as if color and swirling images, glimpses of moments happened or about to happen danced in a kaleidoscope. As if there were anything but darkness and the roar of blood in your ears, as if there were anything different from the normal panic of living. And so I laughed year after year at the movie heroes, their dangers and discoveries. Threats always came from outside, and in monstrous form. Obstacles appeared as questions of timing, not choice. Logical inconsistencies abounded. How could they not? I laughed most at these, as I do now at my own. Only now do I realize that logical inconsistencies are what allow for us to travel in time in the first place, keep us tripping forwardor—like me—sometimes backward or sideways. I was blind to my own illogic and still am, though now by choice. Sometimes to discover a solution is to forget the problem.
Now I entered the ballroom and found an unfamiliar scene.
The room was divided into two groups. The Elders sat as near to the projected image as they could, the bottom of the film on the wall fuzzy with their hair as they reached across one another for popcorn. Behind them circled the Youngsters, rattling like disturbed sparrows. Their number had grown, and behind me came the slap of sneakers on hardwood as more arrived. From the ages of six to perhaps twenty-six, there must have been a hundred. More. Multiples of every age stood in clumps, fought one another over cookies and candy, crunched popcorn underfoot, nudged one another as older Youngsters squealed past. Only the really small ones, the six- and seven-year-olds, seemed worried or frightened. I tried to see if I could spot the youngest one, the one who’d witnessed my “death” in such a shattering way, but couldn’t locate him in their crowds. More children ran past me and found themselves. The noise was unnerving.
“Don’t just stand there,” said a voice beside me. Yellow placed a hand on my shoulder. “They’ve been looking for you ever since they heard you weren’t really dead. Get with the others. At the center.” His face was dirty and his sweater torn. His mouth was bleeding.
“What happened to you?”
“I got jumped. They wanted information.” He nodded toward the children. “It’s not safe to be by yourself any longer. Get with the
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