[2014] The Time Traveler's Wife

by C. Sean McGee

  “The birth of a universe,” said John’s Nipple. “And like any universe, you fill your lives and your relationship with memories, some of them solid objects that you cling to and revolve about, and some of them dark invisible emotions that are unspoken and unseen, but are evidently there, only, for the moment, they are unprovable. And like any universe, after time, your love expands and expands until eventually, you become so distant from your beginning, that your love and your passion, it slows and cools.”

  “I want to feel that way again. I want to feel that love.”

  “Create another universe, a parallel plain or….”

  “Or what?”

  “Divide zero. Crumble the infinite fraction.”

  “Break up with her?”

  “No. Your universe would still exist. She would become a black hole, lurking in the back of your mind, ready to consume any new joy that you encounter. You must destroy the number line entirely. You must eradicate the fibers of her being from your heart and from your mind. Or….”

  “Or what?”

  “A parallel plain. Create a new universe. And feel love again.”

  “How?”

  “Have a child?” said John’s Nipple.

  John watched his wife gently crack an egg against the bowl and pull the shell apart with two fingers.

  “I wish she would break me like that,” he said to his learned nipple.

  When he walked into the kitchen, John saw Tracy leaning over the counter, playing solitaire on her computer as eggs bubbled and hissed in the pan beside her.

  “I don’t know why you play that,” he said.

  “You used to love Solitaire” she replied.

  “I just don’t see the point anymore. The game is already decided before you begin. Your only purpose is to flip the cards. That’s not playing, that’s participation. If the outcome is not in my hands, then what’s the point?”

  “I haven’t played it in ages. When I was young, I always chose the winning hand.”

  “That’s what I mean. What’s the point?”

  “It felt good to win once in a while, and like you’re saying, it was in my hands, it was my choice.”

  “I’m tired of knowing how everything will turn out.”

  “Did you wake up on the wrong side of the bed this morning?”

  “Tell me something about you,” John said, his voice sounding sterner, nearing on desperate and shaky, almost dangerous. “Tell me something you haven’t told me. A story, something about your family, about you, maybe a dumping or some stupid thing you did while drunk…..Anything, just something new, something you haven’t told me yet.”

  Tracy smiled.

  “Amor,” she said, “I already told you everything about me; everything.”

  “Is there really nothing? No stories? Nothing at all? No more depth? No more dimension? Are you telling me I know everything about you? Your desires, your secrets, your fears, your repressions, your doubts, and indecisions, your regrets….Everything?”

  “I told you everything my love, of course. Why, what did you keep from me?”

  She smiled playfully as she got up from the computer and walked through John, passing through his skin like a bitter chill on an icy morning.

  “Nothing,” John said flatly. “Nothing.”

  And he was right. He hadn’t kept a thing from her. They had, over the years, told each other everything; every dark and saucy secret and every deep seeded shame and regret. There wasn’t a piece of unturned soil in their marital terrain. Their universe was expansive indeed, but its very dimensions had been absolutely defined. There were no new areas to explore, there were no new shapes to take form. All that could be was.

  Their love offered nothing to unravel.

  Their love held no surprise.

  And all of a sudden, John felt his universe shrinking.

  “So all that’s left,” he said “is that one of us dies.”

  “I didn’t catch that, what was it?” she shouted from the other room.

  “Nothing,” John said. “Just talking to my nipple.”

  “You love her, you do. You wouldn’t feel this way, this mournful, if you didn’t. All dust settles eventually. You let the barnacles of complacent satisfaction cling themselves to your nerves.”

  “If knowing means forgetting, then strip me of my knowledge then unlearn me so I can discover it all again.”

  “Do you want to?” asked John’s Nipple. “You only need ask.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The man on the bus. He said that without his memories, he is someone else. I think what he meant is that a human is like a glass jar. Empty, it has no name and no defined purpose but once it’s filled with useful or useless junk, and once it’s left in a defined space, it assumes a purpose and an identity and if its contents are changed, so too are its identity and its purpose. Each person is a book and when they are born, their pages are as blank as their thoughts. They have no imagination and no title. The person’s memories fill those pages and define their identity and their purpose.”

  “So what? I tear out some pages, erase some memories and I change the story? But how?”

  “You’ve already started. The leaf; it wasn’t in the locket.”

  “You know where it went?”

  John’s Nipple smiled.

  “It never existed,” said John’s Nipple.

  “What do you mean?”

  “When we passed the Tyrannosaurus trees, you remembered when you were a boy. That memory was a chapter in your life. It was a memory of sense, one where all of the facts were clear and unchanging, one that had a feeling and a meaning, a definition, and a purpose. In your life, you have told that story a hundred maybe two hundred times, maybe more. You told it to Tracy when you first saw her, underneath that tree. You redefined that memory; an amendment to the original story, a redux of the original piece. The place was the same. The feeling was the same. Your words, as you dared to finally speak to this girl, were as nervous and jittery as your sweaty and shaking hands, that day when you decided to finally climb that tree. And the feeling, as you sat next to her as a young man, listening to her talk about her favorite bands and about the things that bugged her, was identical, as to when you were a young boy, sitting upon the highest branch, listening to the sounds that the world made, only at the height that you were. But today, when you called that memory, you met it with your adult cynicism and you painted it with your typical bored tirade. You reduced the tree and the girl to absolute insignificance. And now, you will never be able to tell the story the same way again. As such, the leaf, or your marker for that page, it doesn’t exist for this is no longer a chapter in your book. It is one of hundreds of thousands of forgotten stories, memories that influence, but do little to inspire. One can relive their story over and over again, but only as a metaphor for what is real and contextual in your life. But if you call a memory and it’s out of context, if the way you feel has now changed, you won’t just disregard the memory; you’ll sever it entirely.”

  “So if I relive these chapters in my life, if I rewrite then I can change how I feel about my present?”

  “You heard the man on the bus. You are a collection of your memories. Without them, you are someone else. Do you really want to take that risk?”

  “If I am someone else then I won’t feel about Tracy as I do now. If I am someone else then she will be someone else to me, and I to her. If I am nothing to her, if I play no villainous or heroic role in her story, if I haven’t polluted her mind with stories, then I can feel about her as I did, before that day at the tree. If I could feel that passion and that want and desire again for just a second, it would sustain me for the rest of my life.”

  “But if you are not you, why would she care?”

  “It has to be worth it. It has to be better than stewing here in this” John said, stuck for words. “This ordinary life.”

  “You could just buy her roses you know. Give her a massage every now and then. Think
about when she’s ready to finish for once. I’m just saying you know…” John’s Nipple said, apprehensively. “What you did or thought in the past is not as important as what you are about to do and how you feel, right now.”

  “Fuck you,” John said. “You want me to pierce you? I can’t go on like this, with this cold and stagnant love, with knowing how every day is going to be, planning for the future every day and living in a fucking world that is so god damn predictable that all those plans come true. I don’t want to live like that anymore. I don’t want to sit in a cubicle all day spending my creative milk on some faceless corporation, never seeing or tasting the product of my own imagination. I’m sick of it.”

  “Listen,” said John’s Nipple. “While we’re on the topic, cold hands,” it said bluntly. “If you’re gonna massage me, you know, warm up those tweaking digits of yours beforehand. It makes a difference.”

  “I’m sorry,” John said, feeling genuine remorse. “I didn’t know.”

  “It’s fine,” John’s Nipple said. “But if you could….”

  “Sure, of course. What about wearing mittens?”

  “Ummm,” John’s Nipple said, shaking its head. “Chafing.”

  “Oh, ok,” John said. “I’ll keep it in mind. I promise. Now, are you gonna help me?”

  “You’re sure you wanna do this?”

  “I want to feel that way again. I want to erase her from my story. Are you with me?”

  “Well, I am your nipple aren’t I?”

  If the Mouth is the Asshole of the Subconscious Mind, What then of the Sound of My Thoughts?

  By the time the guests arrived, John was busy rummaging through old records that had been collecting dust in a corner of the back room, between the cat’s litter trays and a stack of old wash cloths. He flicked through the cardboard covers manically, trying to remember the tune he had heard the girl in the elevator humming, only hours before. Whatever it was, it was here, in this pile of memories.

  “Everyone arrived” Tracy shouted, leaning from the kitchen door.

  “I’m coming, I’m coming. Just give me a second” John said.

  “That’s what you said a second ago” Tracy replied.

  John’s pressure was building, he wanted to break something.

  “I’ll be there in a second alright? Just... go be a gracious host or something” he said, speaking clearly, under the heaviness of his frustration.

  As he flicked through every cover, he felt small waves of familiarity, lapping at his conscious shore. They were landmarks, great weighted spikes that he had hammered into the asperous, rocky face of his youth, that which had given him footing and secured him should he ever fall, in the mountainous ascent from boy to man; from callow and inequitable expectation, to matured and dogged obligation.

  And though each of these colored and spritely titled spikes felt familiar, as he ran his fingers from corner to corner, they didn’t seem like sure footing, not as much as they had when he was a boy. But he knew whatever the hell that song was that the girl in the elevator was singing, it was in here, somewhere.

  And then he found it, near the end of the pile of warped and dusted vinyl, a record he hadn’t heard in a lifetime, since he was a young man, living life so differently than he did today; with more passion, with more exclamation, as if one day, his thoughts and his feelings and his ideas and his discoveries, as if they would account for something.

  The cover was different than he imagined it; the same but different.

  When he was younger, the images of human desolation and social disorder, and the scrawling illegible titles, they had more impact than they did now, and they stood out like a whore at a christening. Now, the images just looked poorly drawn and the scrawling writing, it wasn’t edgy or inauspicious; it was just annoying, no more artful or dimensional than a scuff mark on his shoe.

  John slowly lowered the needle, wincing as it scratched its way on the warped ends of the record. He had forgotten the sound that a vinyl made, the warm crackling and grating, like the sound of thunder rolling about worn tires as they slowly turned on a loose gravel road. And as he listened now, his first instinct was to rattle a wire or a cable or to hit at the back of the player, to fix that infernal, broken sound.

  It sounded nothing like he had imagined. The drums were less like pounding Howitzers and more like the rattling of copper coins on the inside of a crushed soda can. And the guitars, how he had once thought of them sounding like a mixture of gunfire and chainsaws, sounded like an elderly cat, crying for its supper.

  And he thought about his youth; about how he had draped himself in black jeans and black shirts - painted with oral obscenities of moral and social rebellion – and black steel capped boots, the kind that could kick through the hull of a container ship.

  He thought about his friends too and about how they trawled the streets each night in a sprawling net of vagrancy, looking for girls, fights, trouble, and purpose. And it seemed like back then, everything was so simple; so clear and defined; being a part of something important and having a voice where just being was all that mattered as if he was destined for something brilliant, even if he didn’t have the inspiration or the motivation to do so.

  As he pulled the vinyl from its plastic sleeve, he felt as empowered and in control as he had robed in black attire; taking the record, in careful exhilaration, from its cardboard case, much the same as how a junky might draw blood into their filthy yellow syringe or in how a priest might eye a young boy as he is passed his clerical collar. He could almost taste it on his lips and on his parched and aching throat.

  Then he thought about Tracy, and about how she was the contrary to all of that; how she was a bright burning sun to his infinite void like darkness. He remembered how, just as he loved to drown in this record, he loved just as much, to sit and listen to Tracy humming her silly folk songs, forgetting the words as she strummed on open chords.

  And he was washed with an emotion that was kind and colored white.

  But then, he thought of the girl in the elevator and the song that she was humming; that very same song. He didn’t know the name of it then and he didn’t know the name of it now, but it was the same song and the way he felt in the elevator hearing her hum – feeling tired, despondent and insignificant, that very same feeling attached itself to the memory of Tracy, sitting in the sun, strumming on her guitar and humming away as he, from within his circle of black clad rebellion, shivered at the sound of her trilling voice.

  But now, her voice sounded ordinary and shrill. Though she looked as she always had in that very memory, her image became polluted with how he thought of her now.

  And now the memory of her, it was cold and vacuous and it was colored black.

  “This is shit,” he said, throwing the cover across the floor and pulling the plug from the wall. “What the hell was I thinking listening to this crap? I was an idiot.”

  “You were young,” John’s Nipple said.

  “I was stupid. Everything I thought was stupid. All of it. Scrap it all” he shouted, digging his hands into the side of his head as the needle like pain ringed in the back of his mind, twisting and skewering and wrenching the memory from its place, and all those that were tethered to it; like all the times that he lay in bed after making love, with Tracy sprawled across his chest, listening to his beating heart and singing faintly, a song she would have only just made up, and with it, every memory and every dream that ever linked to the sound of her voice.

  And hundreds of thousands of memories of which were all so finely woven into the fabric of this one image of Tracy, sitting in the sunshine and humming that impossible to remember song, they too went careening into John’s cerebral void. As concrete pillars, they quickly turned to shifting sand and silted from his thoughts, being swept away by the storm of his matured discontent, to settle somewhere in the nether of his subconscious, where they would do little to bother or inspire.

  Then Tracy popped her head through the door. She was speaking dem
ented like, her eyes white, wide and maddening, and her hands urgently whisking at the air, as if there were some imaginary cord attached to John’s chest that she was pulling on, catching his conscious vessel and pulling it back to shore before it drifted over some reclusive and ungetatable horizon. She seemed angry, he could tell, by how crooked and jagged her teeth looked as her face and her lips and her tongue, all contorted into unwelcoming shapes and dimensions as they sought to form pointed words of prickly offense, the kind that, like a jabbing pointed finger, served to rile one from their still, tepid boredom into the very least they could do, to suffice their social obligation.

  “What are you saying?” John shouted, reading Tracy’s exclaiming face like some foreign journal. “I can’t hear you. I think something’s wrong. Are you speaking? Are you saying something?”

  It looked like Tracy was shouting now and she threw her hands in blasted forfeit before leaving the room and slamming the door so hard that it jarred shut.

  John dug his fingers into his ears, scratching at the yellow wax inside.

  “I’m deaf,” he said, hitting the side of his head as if he were clearing water. “I think I’m deaf. Oh god, I’m deaf.”

  “Shut up for a second” John’s Nipple said. “Can you hear me? Can you hear what I’m saying?”

  “Yeah. I can hear you. What the hell is happening?”

  “I don’t know what you’re on about. Explain to me your dilemma.”

  “Tracy. Her mouth was moving, but she didn’t say a thing. But I know she was speaking, or shouting or screaming or whatever. I could feel the vibrations of her voice. I could see them too, like distortions of light. I could see them, for just a second. What the hell is happening to me?”

  “Everything’s fine John. Just keep your shit together. People will think you’re crazy or something. They’ll lock us up. People act funny when they’re suspicious or scared.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, apologizing to his nipple.

  John rested his knee against the door and barged his shoulder, gripping the handle so that it wouldn’t fling back against the wall. As he walked out into the living room, his senses were overwhelmed with a furious buzz of people nattering, smoke billowing and lights flickering. The hallway was dark and choking and though his first instinct was to get down low and go, go, go; he kept walking towards the murky, diffusing glow of red and blue lights that painted an air of satyric debauchery. And as the smoke filled his watering eyes, John sighed, for her knew exactly how little dimension there was and would be, inside that room. He knew where everyone would be sitting, what kind of glasses they would be drinking from and in what common story was being told, which facial expression was being worn by whom.