by Anthology
Hennesey scratched his jaw. “The quantum foam, is it? And that would be an Australian beer?”
“No. I mean the timelessness that came ‘before’ the Big Bang. We call it the quantum foam.”
O’Daugherty drew a fresh·mug and set it down with a flourish before the man. “Sure and it is worth the price of a good pint to hear what connection there might be between the Big Bang and Doc Mooney’s jawbone.”
Doc protested again, “It’s not my jawbone,” but no one paid him any heed.
“Well,” said the man, “not to the jawbone, but to the disappearance of the jawbone.” He seemed hesitant and a little sad. For a moment, he managed to make even Hennesey look cheerful. Then he sighed and picked up the mug. “It’s like this,” he said.
“My name is Owen FitzHugh. I am a physicist at the university, but my hobby has always been the oddities of the Universe. Quirks, as well as quarks, as a colleague of mine has remarked . . .
“One of these quirks is what I call ‘phantom recollections’ and ‘causeless objects.’ Non-Thomistic events, if you must have a fine philosophical name for it. Have you ever looked in vain, as your friend here, for an object you clearly recall having placed in a certain spot? Or, conversely, found small objects for which you cannot account? Or recalled telephone numbers or appointments that turned out not to exist?”
“I had a key on my key chain, once,” said Maura Lafferty, “that I did not recognize and that fit no lock that I own. I still have no idea where it came from.”
“I had a date one time with Bridey Lynch,” said Danny, “but when I called on her, she had no recollection of it.”
Doc made an evil grin. “Why, there is no mystery at all in that.”
FitzHugh nodded. “They are usually small objects or bits of information, these anomalies of mine. Usually, when we notice them at all, we ascribe them to a faulty recollection; but I’m a natural contrarian. I wondered: What if it is the Universe, and not ourselves, that sometimes forgets.”
Danny and Doc flanked the poor man with a bookend of skeptical looks. Danny, I was sure, believed in God’s Infallible Memory; while Doc reasoned from the predictability of Natural Law. Still their thoughts had come to rest in the same place. Himself shifted his apron and cocked his head in interest. “Now what might that mean?”
“History is contingent,” said FitzHugh.
Himself nodded. “Aye, so it is.” But Danny scratched his head. “If it is, I’ve never caught it.” Doc leaned past the unfortunate physicist once more.
“He said ‘contingent,’ not ‘contagious.’ ”
FitzHugh looked at Danny. “I should have said that history is a chain of cause-and-effect,” he said. “One event leads to others, and then to still others. Often, great events hinge on small occurrences.”
Wilson Cartwright, a history professor at the University, spoke up from the booth behind FitzHugh. “That’s gospel truth. In 1862, a Confederate courier lost a copy of Lee’s troop dispositions. Two Union foragers found them and McClellan managed—barely—to win the battle of Antietam, which gave Lincoln the opportunity to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. And when the news of the Proclamation reached England, the cabinet reversed its decision to intervene on the Confederate side. In consequence of which . . .” He lifted his drink in salute to the bar. “. . . my great-grandpappy became a free man.”
Hennesey nodded. “Da met me Ma in the same way. Another small chance—though the outcome was not so momentous as war and freedom. He was on the run—. This was during the Troubles, when the Big Fella and the Long Fella had their row—bad cess to ‘em both—and Da, he found himself in on the wrong side. O’Daugherty, you know what I’m speakin’ of, and enough has been said about that. Da took himself to the Waterford hills and, finding himself at a crossroads, tossed a coin. The shilling sent him to Ballinahinch, where me ol’ Gran was keeping a pub in those days and Ma waited tables. Now Da was not the man to pass a pub without a drop of the creature, so he stopped and . . .” The man’s long, doughy face turned a deep red. “. . . here I am. Had the shilling read tails, he was a dead man, for his enemies were waiting down the other road. As it was, what with one thing and another . . .” And he pointed with his drooping chin to the photograph on the wall opposite, where a far younger Hennesey and O’Daugherty stood side by side in black-and-white, stern-faced splendor, arms crossed and legs akimbo before the newly opened Irish Pub.
Doc Mooney raised his pint. “I have always thought you an unlikely man, Hennesey.”
“But that’s just the point,” FitzHugh said. “Everything is unlikely . . . and therefore fragile.”
“ ‘Fragile,’ ” said Himself. “A curious word.”
“Fragile,” said FitzHugh with an affirmative nod. “Because the slightest bump and . . . you see, the quantum foam is subject to sudden, spontaneous disturbances. These create ‘probability waves’ in the continuum that propagate down the time stream creating a new past. The old past is obliterated. As it was in the beginning, is not, and never more shall be.”
Himself scowled a bit at the altered quotation, but Danny Mulloney brightened, which is always a bad sign. “Do you mean to say,” he said. “Do you mean to say that all those dinosaur fossils and such might have been put in the ground only a few thousand years ago?”
FitzHugh blinked and looked thoughtful. “Certainly, it’s conceivable,” he said slowly. “Yes. Suppose that evolution originally followed a different course—perhaps those strange Burgess Shale creatures I’ve read of won out over our own familiar phyla, and after a time strange things stalked the Earth of sixty million years ago—things that never held the promise of man. Then, a bubble bursts in the foam and a probability wave ripples down the timeline—and now dinosaurs leave their bones in the mud instead of things with no names. So, yes, in one sense, this new past could have been laid down a few thousand years ago; but in another sense, once it had been laid down, it had always been there.”
Danny pursed his lips, for I do not think he had envisioned a different evolution when he raised his question. Meanwhile, a ripple of wisely nodding heads showed the incomprehension propagating around the oval bar. FitzHugh noticed and said, “Perhaps a sketch will clear it up.” He seized a napkin and immediately began to doodle on it. Sitting as I was on the far side, I could not see what he sketched and Hennesey, noting my frustration, waved me inside the Sacred Oval. “Here,” he said, handing me a bar apron. “ ’Tis a busy night and we can use the help.” Then he set off to the front end of the bar to tend to the raging thirst there.
Tying the apron, I stepped across in time to hear FitzHugh say, “This was the continuum in its original state.” I glanced at the napkin and saw he had written:
“Then, a quantum disturbance alters event A to event A*. A stray chronon—a quantum of time—emitted from the foam, strikes like a billiard ball.” He turned to Dr. Cartwright, who had left his booth to stand behind him. “Perhaps your Confederate courier, Wilson, doesn’t drop his packet.” He held up the napkin again.
The big historian looked thoughtful, and nodded. Maura Lafferty, who had also joined the little group at the back end of the bar, leaned over the man’s shoulder. “Why did you add the ‘D’?”
“Oh, time doesn’t stop just because there is a bit of redecorating going on,” FitzHugh said. “The present is . . . call it the ‘bow wave’ of the Big Bang, plowing through formlessness and leaving time in its wake. But behind it is coming the ‘bow wave’ of the new version, altering all the original consequences of A. When the wave front reaches B, event B ‘unhappens.’ Something else—call it G—happens instead.”
“Why G?” Danny asked, frowning over the sketch. “Why not call it B?”
“It doesn’t matter what he calls it, ye spalpeen,” said Doc Mooney.
FitzHugh grimaced. “Actually, it does. I don’t want to imply that B happens differently—because it might not happen at all.”
Cartwright bobbed his head. “That’s right. If
McClellan hadn’t intercepted Lee’s orders, it wouldn’t have changed the outcome of Antietam. There wouldn’t have been a battle at Antietam. McClellan only attacked there because he had Lee’s orders. Without them, there would have been a different battle at some other time and place.”
I scratched my head. “So why didn’t you alter C, D and E?”
“Because the wave front hasn’t ‘caught up’ to them yet.” He busied himself at the napkin. “Here, this is then next quantum of time, the next parasecond.”
“You’ll notice that the original causal chain is still propagating itself, and event E has led to event F. But the revision is catching up. Change waves move faster than one second per second—just as water moves faster down a channel already dug than it does across virgin ground—but you really need two different kinds of time to talk about it intelligently. Eventually, the change wave reaches the present, merges into the original Big Bang wave, and the revision is complete.” He held the napkin up one last time.
“Even our memories are reconfigured,” he said. “The right ripple and . . . who knows? We might be sitting here discussing Lee’s victory.”
“You might be,” said Cartwright dryly.
Doc Mooney rubbed his chin and frowned. “I see a problem,” he said. He spoke with a chuckle, as if he suspected his leg of being pulled. “If our memories are reconfigured, how could we possibly know the past was ever different?”
The shadow passed over FitzHugh’s face once more. “Normally . . . we wouldn’t.”
Doc Mooney slapped his forehead. “Now, I am an old fool. I had started to put the jawbone into my jacket pocket, then I laid it back on my desk.” Defiance flashed. “And it has been sitting back there in the lab, all along,” he insisted.
FitzHugh nodded with solemn fish-eyes. “Yes. Though perhaps not ‘all along.’ If at the very moment you laid the jawbone on the bar, a change wave ‘caught up’ with the present, you would have for a bare instant two conflicting memories. A fragment of the original memory can survive and you sit here at ‘L’ remembering a bit of ‘F,’ instead of ‘K.’ The French have a word for it . . .” He snapped his fingers, searching for the word.
“Merde?” suggested Doc innocently.
“Déjà vu?” said Maura.
FitzHugh shook his head. “No. Déjà vu is when the change wave does not affect your own personal history, so instead of a fossil memory, you have an instant of remembering the same thing twice.” He looked at each of us, and it seemed to me that his eyes held immeasurable loneliness in them. “That’s why these phantom memories almost always involve trivia.” He shrugged, looked off at the corner. “Only an idle fancy. Who can say?”
Himself lifted FitzHugh’s now-empty mug and cradled it in his hands. He gave the physicist an intent look. “Almost always,” he said, with a suggestive pause at the end.
FitzHugh shook his head and gestured at the mug. “Another, please.”
“Perhaps,” said Himself, “it would be better if you let it pour out instead of in.”
(“What’s he mean?” Danny asked. “Wisht,” said Doc.)
Someone put “The Reconciliation Reel” on the juke box and FitzHugh winced as the wild skirling of whistles and fiddles filled the room. Some of the old neighborhood shouted Hoo! and began to clap their hands. “You’ll think I’m a fool. Deluded.”
Himself shrugged. “Does it matter if we do?”
“Sure,” said Doc Mooney, “we all think that Danny here is a deluded fool; but that doesn’t stop me from buying him a beer now and then.”
Danny, who could be quick on the uptake when the stakes were high, held his mug out to me and said, “You heard him.”
Sure, it is not often that Doc is hoist by his own petard, but he had the good grace to accept it cheerfully. While I filled Danny’s mug, FitzHugh looked on some inner place in his soul.
“You see,” FitzHugh said finally, “the brain stores memories both holographically and associatively. Because the memory is a hologram, one may recapture the entirety from a surviving fragment; and because they are ‘filed’ associatively, one recovered memory may lead to others. These shards of overwritten memories lie embedded in our minds like junk genes in our DNA, an explanation perhaps for stories of ‘past lives’; for false memory syndrome; or for inexplicable fugues or personality changes or . . . Or . . .” He paused again and shuddered. “Ah, God, what have I done?”
“Something,” O’Daugherty suggested, “that needs a hearing.”
“From the likes of you?”
Himself took no offense. “From the likes of us,” he agreed, “or the likes of Father McDevitt.”
FitzHugh bowed his head. There had been fear in his eye, and sorrow, and despair. I wondered what odd confession we were about to hear, and ourselves with no power to bind or loose. Maura placed a hand on his arm. “Go on,” she urged. Cartwright rumbled something encouraging and Danny had God’s grace to keep his mouth shut.
Finally, FitzHugh drew a shuddering breath and blew it out through pursed lips. “A man cannot be responsible for something that never happened, can he?”
Himself shrugged. “Responsibility is a rare thing in any case: a bastard child, often denied.”
“It started with a dream,” FitzHugh said.
“Such things often do. And end there, too.”
“I’m not married,” FitzHugh said. “I never have been. There have been women from time to time, and we get along well enough; but there was never one to settle down with. Always it was too early to wed; until it became too late.”
“It’s never too late,” O’Daugherty said, “when the right one comes along.”
FitzHugh’s smile was faint. “That’s the very problem, you see. It may be that she did, once. But . . .” Melancholy closed his face again and he inhaled a long, slow breath. “I live alone in a house in the middle of the block over by Thirteenth Street. It’s a little large for my needs and the neighborhood is not the best, but the price was right and I enjoy the puttering. There is a parlor, a dining room and kitchen, plus two bedrooms, one of which I use as an office. From the kitchen, a stairway leads to a rough, unfinished basement.
“Recently, I began to have a recurring dream. It always starts the same way. I walk through my kitchen to the back stairwell and go down, not to my own basement, but to another house entirely, where I walk past empty bedrooms, then a kitchen with dishes piled in the sink and a greasy patina to the stove, coming at last to a parlor containing comfortable, out-of-style furniture. There are large windows on two of the walls and, in the corner, a front door. The whole of it has such an air of dust and neglect and familiarity and long abandonment that I often find myself reduced inexplicably to tears when I awake.”
“It was your subconscious,” said Doc, “playing with that unfinished basement.”
FitzHugh gave a brief shake of the head. “I thought that, too; at first. Only . . . Well, the first few dreams, that was all. Just a silent walk through an empty house accompanied by a feeling of loss, as if I had had these disused rooms all along, but had forgotten about them. Once, I reached the front door before waking up, and stepped outside. An ordinary-looking neighborhood, but no place I’ve ever seen. The house sat on a slight rise on a corner lot. Not much traffic. If I had to guess, I would say a residential neighborhood in a medium-big city, but somewhere off the major thoroughfares. I travel a great deal, going to conferences and such, but I have never identified that city.”
He looked deeply into his ale while the rest of us waited. “The dream had a curious air to it. It felt like a memory more than a dream. Maybe it was the dirty dishes in the sink, or the out-of-date furniture in the parlor.” Another quirky smile. “If a dream-world, why so drab and ordinary a one?”
I left the group to answer an urgent call at the front end of the bar, where a shortage of brew threatened several collegians with imminent dehydration. When I returned to the discussion, FitzHugh was answering some question of Doc Mooney’s.
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br /> “. . . so the more I thought about it and puzzled over it, the more real it grew in my mind. I remembered things I never actually saw in the dream. It seemed to me that the sink ought to have separate hot and cold water faucets. And that upstairs there would be an office and a sewing room and another bedroom. So you see, the details had the texture of memory. How could I remember those things unless they were real?”
Doc pulled the squint-eye like he always does. I think he still suspected some elaborate joke at his expense. “Imagination can be as detailed as memory. Your dream left blanks and you began to fill them in.”
FitzHugh nodded. “That’s an answer I yearn for. If only I could embrace it.”
“What happened next?” Himself prompted. “There must be more to it than you’ve told to account for such a melancholy.”
The physicist drew a deep breath. “One evening, reading at home, I became acutely aware of the silence. Now I am a man that likes his solitude and his peace and quiet; but just for a moment the silence seemed wrong, and I wondered, What’s he up to?”
“Who?” asked Danny. “What was who up to?”
FitzHugh shook his head. “I didn’t know, then. But I glanced at the ceiling as I wondered, even though there is nothing up there but a crawlspace and storage. And then I heard a woman’s voice.”
“A woman, was it?” said Himself. “And saying what?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t make out the words, only the tone of voice. I knew that I had been addressed, and inexplicably my heart both soared and sank. I can’t explain it any other way. It was as if I had been yearning for that voice and dreading it, all at once.
“Well,” he continued, “associative memory means that one recovered memory can lead to others; and having found a fragment of one hologram, other fragments began to surface in my mind. I had only to close my eyes and imagine the phantom house. With each return, it became more real, and the conviction grew that I had lived there at one time, and not alone. Voices—there were two of them—grew more distinct. Often angry, but not always. Once, I’m embarrassed to say, whispering a sexual invitation. And then, one day, I saw her.”