How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

by Charles Yu

  But what if I were to skip forward? Just cut out all of this filler in the middle. After all, as my self told me, I am the author of this. Whatever it is. I am its author and its only reader.

  I want to know what happens. I want to know if I’ll ever get out of here. I want to know if I’ll ever see my father again. My mother again. I want to know if this is how my life will go, until it just ends.

  TAMMY says: not a good idea.

  TOAD says: not a good idea.

  I punch in the instruction: go to the last page.

  Not a good idea. Immediately after sending the instruction, I begin to feel a vibration, slight but detectable, of the walls of the TM-31.

  I hit a button and the hatch decompresses. I pop open the door. This is what I see:

  [this page intentionally left blank]

  And now the TM-31 starts to vibrate, at first gently, then more vigorously, like an unbalanced centrifuge. Indicator lights are blinking.

  TAMMY informs me, in a neutral but slightly concerned tone, that I have set the time machine on a noncomputable path.

  What was I thinking? Because, if I’m being honest, I’m not sure I would even know what I do with myself. Even if you could skip to the end of it all, what would I do the next day with my life that would be so different from all the days that came before? What miraculous change would I make, after getting out of this rut, what new kind of person would I choose to be that next day? And the next? And how about the day after, and all of the days after that?

  The TM-31 is shaking pretty good now. The tone of TAMMY’s voice has modulated from mild concern to slight alarm. What have I done? Oh, crap, duh. It’s Time Machine Circuitry 101. Overriding TOAD’s analysis algorithm has tripped the causal wiring between TOAD and TAMMY, which is something I wish I’d thought of a few minutes ago.

  (At this point, the vibration of the machine, up until now low and erratic, speeds up to what must be a resonant frequency, because the entire unit starts to rattle. The housing for the decoherence module comes loose and crashes to the floor, leaving the guts of the machine slightly exposed, the naked physicality of the thing, the purely material bits, the wiring and the diodes of the randomness generator left vulnerable to damage, to being overwhelmed with data, the data of the world, the datum that is the world, all the other data from all possible worlds, all the could-worlds and should-worlds and would-have-been-worlds, the kind of tiny hidden world only detectable with the ultra-high-sensitivity receptors set to the exact specifications necessary to perceive it.)

  Then: nothing.

  I wake up in an enormous Buddhist temple. I am standing in the vestibule of what appears to be the main hall. The air is cool and smells of incense. It is dark. The small amount of sunlight coming through the space underneath and between the doors feels like an intrusion into this rarefied place.

  There are no clocks in here.

  Two wooden railings separate the vestibule from the main room. Between the railings is an opening, and to either side, people have left their shoes. There are small blue slippers available, into which I slip my tube-socked feet. The insides of the slippers are cool on the tops of my toes and the outside edges of my feet.

  Among all of the slippers, I see a pair of worn brown men’s dress shoes, which look vaguely familiar.

  I’m standing just at the edge of the large rectangle that makes up the main space of the room, at the end of what feels like two square miles of deep burgundy carpet. Three Buddha statues sit at the far end of the room, raised up on platforms, looking over my head, out toward infinity. Not looking, I suppose, but seeing.

  On the left and on the right are doors into side rooms, each one dedicated to a subsidiary higher being, specialized Buddhas: the Buddha of Familial Relations, the Buddha of Safe Passage, the Buddha of Everlasting Memory. Other than the statues in front, and a few other ancillary statues by their feet, and a few pictures on the walls, there is nothing in the room. No material objects, and a deep pile carpet that I am half sinking into, half floating on top of, slippers that add to the sensation of being immersed into the room, not touching anything, yet deeply embedded into it, almost snuggled into the fabric of it, as if my self, the self, were dissolving right into the universal solvent, pure and clear and odorless and tasteless and invisible and weightless, neither gas nor liquid nor solid yet all three. As if I were an incense stick incrementally burning off, first into smoke, and then becoming a part of the room. My thoughts, normally bunched together, wrapped in gauze, insistent, urgent, impatient, one moment to the next, living in what I now realize is, in essence, a constant state of emergency (as if my evolutionary instincts of fight or flight have gone haywire, leading me to spend each morning, noon, and evening in a low-grade but absolutely never-ceasing muted form of panic), those rushed and ragged thoughts are now falling away, one by one, revealing themselves for what they are: the same thought over and over again. And once revealed for what they are, these hollow thoughts, these impostors, non-thoughts masquerading as thoughts, memes, viruses, signals fired off, white noise generated by my brain, they are gone.

  And it is quiet. Quiet in a way I have never experienced before. As if quiet were a substance, and it were thick, as if that substance were now in my head, filling it like a viscous fluid, some kind of gel. Desire is suffering. A simple equation, and a nice catchphrase. But flipped around, it is more troubling: suffering is desire. Not a unidirectional arrow, not causal, as in, desire leads to suffering. Desire is suffering, and therefore, by axiom, suffering is desire. Ting. A bell rings. I look around for the ringer. A nun, a monk, anyone. But no one seems to have rung the bell. It rang itself. Ting. Ting. Ting. The sound is clarifying, purifying, even. It erases every thought from the room, wipes the slate clean. I had been polluting the room with my ideas and they are all gone. And in front of me, I am, for some reason, unsurprised to see my mother, or at least some version of her, standing at the front of the room, just off the center, incense held at the very end, with each hand, between the index and the middle fingers, and hands raised to her forehead, slightly bent at the waist.

  My mother, short and compact, the version I knew, my actual mother, was capable of the most unguarded, undisguised love of anyone I ever met. At some point in my loneliness, in the TM-31, I lost my capacity for embarrassment, but my mother never had that capacity in the first place. She would ask for your love in that voice of hers, loud and plangent and raw and seemingly infinite in its neediness, her voice so naked and small and open. It was almost reckless how vulnerable she allowed herself to be; you couldn’t help but hate her for doing that to herself, and at the same time hate yourself for giving in to it, and underneath all of that, despite your hate for her, couldn’t help but love her. She was not the best person, or the most giving, or the kindest or the most understanding or the most wise. She was jealous and quick to anger and rash and profoundly depressed for my entire life, had been that way since the age of eleven, when her brother had been stillborn, had a life without duration, an open and closed end on the tiny rectangular gravestone, and then when her own mother had died, two days later, of complications, medically, but really, of grief. My mother spent a lifetime grieving and yet she still loved my father with all of her heart: all of it. It was a structure and a vector and a power source that could be directed toward nearly any target even remotely worthy. All of her heart, a meaningless phrase, but correct and precise, too. She used her heart to love him, not her head, and not her words and not her thoughts or ideas or feelings or any other vehicle or object or device people use to deliver love or love-like things. She used her heart, as a physical transmitter of love, and what came out of it was no more voluntary than gravity or time or time travel or the laws of fictional science itself.

  My mother finishes her kneeling, and places her incense into a large ceramic urn filled with the accumulated ashes of a thousand, a million, a hundred million earlier sandalwood incense sticks, the dust of past events collected there and made tangible. She pi
erces the ash pile, fine, talcum-like, soft gray powder, slides her own incense stick down into it, in a perfect vertical, and appears to consider it for an instant, a thin marker, flimsy and direct, an axis, a conduit for prayer, an object and a process that will turn itself from a material thing into the dust around it, transform into visible and invisible substances, will convert itself into heat and smoke to fill the room. The present incense will become the very stuff that props itself up, and allows other, future incense to stand vertically, for a time, each current incense unable to stand alone, only able to perform its function with the help of all other past incense, like time itself, supporting the present moment, as it itself turns into past, each burning stick transmitting the prayers sent through it, releasing the prayers contained within it, nothing but a transitory vehicle for its contents, and then releasing itself into the air, leaving behind only the burnt odor, the haze and residue of uncollectible memory, and at the same time becoming part of the air itself, the very air that allows the present to burn, to combust, to slowly work itself down into nothingness.

  She turns to me, and I see at once that this woman is exactly like my mother, but she is not my mother. She is The Woman My Mother Should Have Been.

  She is not a could have been. Could have beens are women who are not exactly like my mother. For any given mother, for any given person, there are many could have beens, maybe an infinite number.

  No, this woman standing in front of me is something else, she is the one and only Woman My Mother Should Have Been, and I have found her. Looking for my father, I have found this woman, I have traveled, chronogrammatically, out of the ordinary tense axes and into this place, into the subjunctive mode.

  This woman turns to me, and she doesn’t smile, doesn’t really have any emotion in her face at all. This Woman My Mother Should Have Been is like the Platonic ideal of my mother, I realize, and yet at the same time the idea of that angers me. Who made this place? Who is to say that my mother, exactly as she is, my mother-in-fact, isn’t the exact perfect version of herself? This woman in front of me, her face clear of any inner turmoil, her face a calm pool of cool water, of equanimity or beatitude or blissful calm. Like my real mother, this woman is a Buddhist, but she follows the teachings, she has spent countless time studying and meditating, slowing her own thoughts down. She has freed herself from her own box, her own tightly circular mental loop, her cycles of highs and lows, anxiety and mania and delayed grief and depression, and in doing so she has become some kind of bodhisattva, has found the peace that my mother always looked for. She is what I knew was always possible for my mom, if all that light inside her could find its way out.

  I am standing in front of a complete stranger, a woman whom I have never met, a woman whom I never could have met, in any possible world, through any possible combination of events and chance happenings. A pure hypothetical.

  “Do I know you?” she says.

  This is my mother.

  This is not my mother.

  A bell rings.

  Ting.

  I remember where I’ve seen those shoes before.

  They belonged to my father. Was this where he was? When he was down in the garage by himself, is this what he was building? A machine to take him here?

  There are no clocks in this room, because there’s no time in this room, because of what this room, this place, this temple is. My mother back on fictional Earth is trapped in a time loop of her own choosing and this woman is her opposite; this Woman My Mother Should Have Been is here now and forever and always and never in this temple of nontemporality.

  The room, previously stationary, now feels like it is spinning and vibrating. What is this? Where is this? Is this even a room at all? Am I actually inside of some kind of structure my father built? Am I inside some kind of construct?

  The Woman My Mother Should Have Been turns to me, and now she doesn’t have such a pleasant look on her face.

  “Should you be here?” she says, and I’m about as scared as I can be of a sixty-year-old woman who looks exactly like my mom. What I had perceived as beatific calm has curdled into something sinister, the dead eyes of a prisoner, not a person but an idea of a person, trapped in a temple for all time.

  “Just tell me something,” I say. “Is he here?”

  “Once. A long time ago.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is that he didn’t get what he wanted. He thought I was what he wanted, and he just kept saying sorry, over and over again, that this wasn’t how he thought it would be, that he had to go.”

  Her features now soften, ever so slightly, and seemingly without moving a muscle, her aspect has transformed from sinister to forlorn.

  “Will you be my family? Will you stay with me here?”

  And I’m running, as cruel as it seems, I’m not about to be trapped in this place for eternity with a creepy version of my mother, not really my mother, an abandoned idea, who doesn’t have a heart, but is lonely nonetheless. I sincerely hope she finds someone, that she leaves this temple someday and finds some other subjunctively ideal person to spend eternity with, but I’ve got my own mother to take care of, a flesh-and-blood mother, an imperfect but present tense mother and maybe it’s just a rationalization, but for the first time in a while, I am reminded that I am needed, I have obligations to people, as a son, as a guy who fixes time machines, a guy who gets people out of their bad situations. Even if it seems like a dumb back office job and I don’t get paid well, people are counting on me, Mom and Phil, and TAMMY and Ed, and if I hadn’t gotten a kick in the butt, hadn’t run into myself and then shot myself and then opened the book and tried to skip ahead, I might not have ended up here, and seen this, and realized that, in my own way, this is what I was headed for, a life in some dead quiet airless construct my dad built, free-floating in space. I was headed for an entire life spent alone, pitying myself for not being more, ignoring all those people who actually ask me to be more, because they see it in me. I’m running for a door, any door, the door in the northeast corner to the temple. It’s locked. I grab the knob and shake as hard as I can. It feels very wrong to do this, in a temple, in a place of silent contemplation, but I think I need to kick the door down. I kick it hard, with the entire bottom of my foot, stomping it, just below the doorknob. This is no ordinary wooden door. Play by the rules, dummy. Who said that? Ting. Do I have to spell it out for you? Okay, who is messing with me? Ting. Buddha? The Buddha’s talking to me? No one is talking to me. I’m talking to myself. I’m not where I think I am. I am somewhere else. This isn’t real, but it isn’t fake, either. This is not a pleasant universe anymore. Ting.

  Then I remember: the book is the key. That’s what I said to myself. I was giving myself a clue I knew I would need. That’s got to be it, right? The book will tell me how to get out of here. I bet there’s a secret door! This is so cool! I figured it out! I’m so smart! It’s like my very own adventure story. It’s even kind of science fictional.

  The only problem is that the TM-31 is nowhere to be found. I guess I’m not so smart. I am kind of an idiot. I didn’t travel through time to get to this temple. This isn’t the past or the future tense, it’s the subjunctive. That’s why my time machine isn’t here.

  I cut through the altar area, crossing in front of the large Buddhas, knocking over the huge bowl of incense dust, and now a loose canopy of dust is billowing over the room, and I knock over the stand holding the bell, and that releases a piercing super-Ting that cuts right through my eardrums into the center of my head. In the now ash-darkened room, the haze of incense-past literally clouding my vision, I fumble around and try the other door. Locked. It’s hard to breathe, I’m coughing, I’m covering my mouth trying not to suffocate, but this soot is filling my nostrils, my lungs. I don’t even want to think about where my fake mom is, somewhere behind me, slow-walking like zombies do in the movies. I try kicking this door, try slamming my body into it. Nothing, not even the slightest movement. I’m scare
d. I’m scared in a Buddhist temple? Maybe the least scary kind of place imaginable? What am I so scared of? Being trapped here? Wanting to stay here? Nothing? Nothingness? Whatever it is, I need to get out. Okay, think. Think. I am an idiot. This is no ordinary wooden door. This is not a physical door at all. It’s metaphysical. This is a time barrier or a logic barrier or some other type of barrier that I am not going to be able to break through with my foot or my shoulder. This is a box I am in. I’ve been getting into and out of boxes all my life. I say box way too much. Even the idea of a box has become a kind of box for me, a barrier against trying to find another word for it, another device. This room I am in was made by my father, is a construct of a life he imagined. He built it with willpower, with the potential energy of forty years of frustration. This place, in here, is nothing but a frame of abstraction surrounding empty space and the sublimated intentions of my father. But when he got here, he realized he wanted out. Is that why I’m here now? Did he want to show me this? Is that why I’m in a time loop? Is he asking me to come find him? And as I’m thinking this, ramming my shoulder into the door, it just flies open, and I fly through it, out into nothingness, and then I’m falling and screaming and crying a little bit but mostly just screaming and falling and falling and falling.

  Now where am I?

  You’re in the interstitial matrix that fills up the space between stories.

  Who said that?

  You did.

  I did? Wait, who am I?

  You’re you.

  Oh, good. Thanks. Seriously, where are we?

  We’re in a shuttle. I’m taking you back to where you were in story space.

  (This isn’t the TM-31. I’m in some other kind of vehicle. Larger. More room and air and light. The interior is clean, all white and black ceramic. Like Apple designed a spaceship.)