An Exercise in Non-Sequentiality

This is another short story for my writing group, which is supposedly supposed to meet tonight. I chose the theme this time, which is "time travel," and this is what I wrote at the last minute. Its very much a rough draft, just me playing around with some ideas, but I'd like to revise it into an actual story once I figure out exactly where the heck I'm going with it.

An Exercise in Non-Sequentiality

“Three.”

The world goes dark, and suddenly I am everywhere.

I am feeling everything I have ever felt, seeing everything I have ever seen, all at once, all now. The entire span of my life is a moment, is this moment, is now.

I am an infant, I am cradled in the strong, young arms of my mother as she hums softly to me. I am safe and secure and satisfied. She is warm, and the light is dim. I am half-asleep, half listening to her heartbeat. I am wrapped in a soft wool blanket that rubs pleasantly against my smooth skin. I am also holding her hand at my father’s funeral, and kissing her cheek at my wedding. It is all now.

At the same time I am happy as I hold my first-born son in my arms. His face is red and tight, but he is sleeping. He is covered by a soft white blanket covered with blue cartoon animals. I am twenty-six, and I am wearing a large pin that says, “It’s a boy!” My wife sleeps on the hospital bed next to me. She is exhausted, but beautiful. My son is perfect, and I made him He is crying, he is calling me Daddy, he is teaching me to use the VCR, he is telling me he is gay. It is all now.

I am walking down the hallway of my house, in the dark. I am tripping, and I am on the floor. I am both at once. I am fighting a boy my age on the playground at school. He is teasing me, I am shouting at him. I have a black eye, my eye is fine, he is swinging his fist, he is my friend and shares his lunch with me.

I am also, at this same moment, sitting in a sparse room in the prison, listening to
a gray-haired man in tiny spectacles talk enthusiastically to me.

“Cause and effect,” says Dr. Verbek, “are an illusion. They are inventions of our minds to understand reality. We see reality in a limited sense, yes? We only see one moment of a time, then another, then another, in order. We see a ball thrown at a window, and because the ball hits the window, the glass breaks. Cause, effect.”

His mustache is wagging back and forth eagerly, like it does when he is excited about something he is thinking. He has to control himself to keep from speaking too quickly, and to use words that I understand.

“But imagine, Mr. Peters, imagine for sake of argument there is another kind of being, one that sees time unlike we do. Perhaps they see each moment of time in reverse order as us. To them it appears that the widow comes together from many pieces, then a ball moves away from it. They would interpret cause and effect differently than us, yes? They would see that ball emerges from the window because the window assembles. The window unbreaking could appear to them to be the cause, not the effect, do you see? Or imagine yet another being that sees all moments of time at once, instead of one at a time. To them it is impossible to determine which is the cause, and which is the effect. They don’t know what these things are. The ball is thrown, the window breaks. One does not cause the other, they both are, at the very same moment.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I am saying.

“No, of course not. No, to your mind it does not, because for you sense is cause, effect, second after second. For me too. But imagine with me, Mr. Peters. It is important, I beg of you. Imagine that cause and effect are merely interpretation of reality the way that we see it, and that to see reality and time in a different way cause and effect could be interpreted differently.”

I am trying to puzzle out what he is telling me. I am also saying, “I do,” to my wife, who looks radiant and beautiful and happy. Her dress glows celestially, she looks like a goddess. Our families are nearby, smiling and weeping for us. I am putting a ring on her finger, she is putting a ring on mine. We are kissing each other. We are also fighting, laughing, making love, and ignoring each other.

Right now, I am watching TV, ignoring all else. Right now, I am neglecting my family and I am taking them to Disneyland. My wife is shouting at me, and I am not even pretending to listen. At this moment, my wife is taking our three kids and five brown suitcases and leaving the house. We are in court, we are divorced, and we are getting married. We are leaving the kids with a babysitter and heading to Vegas. It is all now.

I am in divorce court, and I am in criminal court. I am found guilt of larceny, of laundering money from my company. I am sentenced to prison. I am meeting Dr. Verbek for the first time, I am volunteering to be a test subject in scientific experiments, I am hearing the rumor that subjects get better food. I am talking to the gray-haired doctor.

“Its great to imagine,” I am saying, “but what good does it do? We can’t see beyond our perception of reality. Its impossible to view reality and time any different than we do.”

“Yes! Good, you understand, Mr. Peters. You understand that we are limited. We only see space and time in one way. We cannot even see space and time as one, even though we know they are one, we still perceive them as two different phenomena, yes? We cannot expect to change our perception of time now, in the present, in each moment we are in. We cannot expect to change what we call reality, which exists outside of ourselves; after thousands of years of thinking and arguing, we can’t even agree on what reality is! But, we can, perhaps, change our reality that exists inside of us.”

I am making out with my prom date, I am eighteen. I have never kissed, I have kissed a thousand times. My body aches with desire, it is sleepy, it is hungry, it is satisfied and spent. My prom date is bored, I am taking her home, I am frustrated. I am asking her to prom, she is saying yes, I am elated. I am angry and hurt too. It is all now.

“What are you talking about?”

“We only exist in the moment, Mr. Peters. We are limited, as we said. We can only see now, and only right now. This is the only information our five senses can receive at one time.”

“But we remember the past.”

“Yes! Very good, Mr. Peters. But these memories, these images of the past, they are not reality, in one sense. They are not information being received by our body at this exact moment. But they are reality for us, yes? They are the reality on which we act, believe, make decisions, feel emotion. It is all based on this information in our minds which does not exist in the now, but to us it is reality. And we take these memories, and we interpret them according to the rules of sequentiality that we are familiar with. We see in them cause and effect. This determines our reality, the reality within us.”

I am twelve, and I am trying awkwardly to smoke a cigarette in our back yard. My mother is yelling at me, grounding me. I am ashamed. I am proud and confident too. My mother is weeping, she is calling out my father’s name. I am listening at her door.

A man is firing a gun. My father is bleeding. He is carrying me to bed, he is spanking me with tears in his eyes. He is dead, he is alive. He is buried in the ground.

“What I am saying to you, Mr. Peters, is that our memories, perhaps, can be interpreted in more than one possibility, you see? Cause and effect is an illusion, an interpretation. We imagined the possibility of a being that sees time non-sequentially – that is, outside the sequence with which we are familiar: A leads to B leads to C and so forth. Now imagine the possibility of interpreting our memories non-sequentially. Imagine, Mr. Peters!”

My wife and I are crying. We are looking through a glass window at a tiny blob of flesh. I hold her hand tightly. Our fourth child is two days old. Our fourth child stops breathing. All of our children are being born, all of them are children, are teenagers, are adults. My fourth child is a girl, her eyes seem half-open, half-closed. Her left hand is curled into a tiny fist. There are horrible plastic tubes coming out of her nose. She has her mother’s nose. Her head has the tiniest fuzz of light brown hair. The room smells sterile, unfeeling. The light is too bright, the background noise too loud. A man down the hallway is laughing. My wife sobs a prayer. My mouth is dry.

“The human mind, as you know, is an amazing instrument. It captures everything we see, touch, smell, or hear, or taste and it keeps it filed away inside our minds. Imagine that we can bring all those memories up into our conscious thought at will, in whatever order we like. Imagine that we can bring them all up at one time, all at once, or in reverse order, or whatever we like. We will then have simulated what it would be like to be unbound by our limits of time, to break free of sequentiality. We will be able to see memory interpreted by a different set of rules than the cause and effect that we know.

“Can you do that?” I ask.

“Yes, Mr. Peters. We can.”

A man is shouting, running wildly through a crowd of people. He is waving a gun. My father is pushing me, my father is chasing the man, he is throwing at baseball at me and I am trying feebly to catch it. I am six, watching him, and I am forty-six, taking money that isn’t mine. My father is hurt, he is dying, he is fine. The man is pointing a gun, he is firing. He is being arrested.

I am living. I am laughing, crying, breathing, eating, defecating, talking, kissing, working, listening, sleeping, playing. I am.

I am strapped onto a table in a bright, sterile room. Dr. Verbek is leaning over me. He is saying, “Very good, Mr. Peters. We will now begin phase two.”

And then he says it again. He releases me from the table and leaves the room. I get up and put on my prison uniform, then I leave. I meet with him from time to time in his office. Eventually, I am escorted out of the prison to a court. The court releases me and I go to work. I start giving money to my company, secretly, a little bit each day. Each day I grow less and less lonely, less and less desparate.

I go to court, and my wife is there. The judge marries us. We fight a lot, at first, but with every day that passes it is less. Our children love us and need us more every day. They grow smaller and more innocent, until they are so small we pack them carefully away inside my wife. We take my fourth child out of the ground. She starts to breathe and then we gently place her inside my wife, where she will be safe. We cry, because we are happy our daughter is safe now. Every day I kiss my wife more passionately, we make love more often until it seems we do nothing else. My last son, who was gay a long time ago, disappears. My wife and I love each other desperately. Eventually we have a big party celebrating the end of our time together. Our marriage is over, but we are both happy. She is dressed like a goddess.

We both head to college. I see her from time to time, and then eventually not at all. I spend my days forgetting how messed up the world is, and playing around with buddies. I attend a big ceremony celebrating entering high school, and my mother is so proud. I get younger and stronger. Every day I can run farther and faster. My mother gets younger too. Her wrinkles smooth out. My voice gets higher, my body hair all disappears. I become more innocent and naïve every day. I need my mother more and more. She begins to hold me, now and then, and then eventually all the time. I keep shrinking and shrinking until finally, one day, we take my father out of the ground, and to the hospital. We take him from the hospital to a park, where a man points a gun at him which pulls pieces of metal from his body, heals all his wounds. And my father takes me home, and we are a happy family.

Eventually I get so small that I cannot walk, or talk, and I rely on my parents to do everything. I do not worry about anything, or anybody. I am at peace with the world. One day we go to the hospital where I am gently placed inside my mother, where I am safe. And then, inside her, I slowly disappear until I am nothing.

It’s not a bad way to go.

And then suddenly, I am remembering my life in order from birth until now. Everything happens in reverse order, I get older and older and everything gets worse and worse. It is horrible, to watch things fall apart, to watch people die. I want to weep, but I move quickly through my life, quickly, catching up, returning to the sparse room in the prison where a gray-haired man in a lab-coat is leaning over me.

“Just relax, Mr. Peters.” He is saying, “Take a deep breath. I will begin the procedure on the count of three, do you understand?”

“Yes,” I am saying.

“One… Two…”