by Charles Yu
They set up about fifty feet away from each other, two endpoints of a little father–son axis, and the dad began lobbing slow overhand pitches to his son, and the boy would swing at them, hitting about one out of every six or seven, weak little grounders that dribbled back to his dad, that his dad would run up to and field as if they were hard hit, which made his son feel a little better, but also a lot worse. The kid was small, and I had been a small kid, and I remember what it was like. He looked like he was getting frustrated. He didn’t have any bat speed, even for a kid his age. The bat was probably about three ounces too heavy.
But then, after about three dozen pitches and four or five dinky glancing hits, the kid got ahold of one. The sound it made. It was a perfect sound. Crack. Clean off the sweet spot. Even as he was hitting it, I don’t think he believed it was happening. I remember thinking how much I wanted that to be my father–son axis, how bad I wanted to be the one hitting that ball.
The kid’s dad whipped his head around, as did all of the other kids, and their dads, and even the director. Everyone stopped and turned and watched the ball fly over his dad’s head and then over the grass of the adjoining field, and then over the infield, and land, right on home plate of the other diamond. The kid had arms like wet noodles, didn’t even really have shoulders yet. It had to have been 250 feet. I saw it happen and I’m seeing it again now and I still don’t believe it happened.
The only person who hadn’t watched it was my dad. I didn’t know that then, but now, I see that. He just stands there, looking at our sad prototype, holding a vacuum tube in one hand and his other hand on his head, and looking like he knows it just slipped away. The director turns back from watching the kid, which was just the break he needed to stop my dad’s awkward fumbling with the machine. There was a mumbled half apology about needing to get back to the office for a meeting, and a promise of perhaps continuing this at a later date which I now see as a courteous refusal of the director to acknowledge what had happened, but even then I knew, given me, given our family, that this was it, that there wouldn’t be another chance, that this was the high point of our arc and from here, we were heading into unknown territory.
The fallout started the next morning. It must have taken a night for it to process, a few hours spent alone, stewing over it, replaying the memory over and over in his head, asking what if. It must have taken that time for the damage to register on his ego, on his shell, on his sense of purpose and navigation, on his physical body, even. He didn’t get out of bed until ten, which was very late for him, about four and a half hours late for a Sunday morning, and when I saw him he looked sore, like he’d aged years in one night. My mother went to temple early and I was left in the house to wonder when he would get up and what it would be like when he did. He went into the bathroom and after a long shower and a long period of silence before and after, he emerged from there and walked into the kitchen just after noon. He didn’t look at me, didn’t ask where Mom was. We sat and ate noodles that she had cooked and left on the stove. He heated his up and then picked at them looking mildly repulsed. I asked him if he wanted me to heat up some soup. He didn’t answer. After he ate, he put his plate in the sink and I heard him go down into the garage and I was thinking, just for a second, what if, and I was about to go join him when I heard the garage open and his car rumble out the driveway. He didn’t come back until after I’d gone to sleep that night, and the next day, he went to work and we never talked about that day again.
(module δ)
from How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
conjectures, currently unproven but believed to be true
That a moment has a thickness to it, a size.
That a moment is measurable. That there will be a finite number of moments in the history of the universe.
That there is no unique global time.
That chronodiegetics is a theory of the past tense, a theory of regret. That it is fundamentally a theory of limitations.
TAMMY makes a face at me I haven’t seen before.
“What is that?” I say.
“I don’t know. Your dad, I don’t know.”
“More complicated than I remember. Whatever. Let’s keep moving.”
“What are you even going to say? If you find him, what will you say?”
After the day at the park, the drifting got worse. It had started years earlier, when I was in seventh grade, or maybe it was the summer before seventh grade, at first just a few seconds at a time, hard to say if my mother even noticed, but before long it was impossible not to notice. By the time I entered high school, my father was regularly drifting five minutes into the past, and when he did that, none of us could talk to him. Well, we could, but he’d never hear us. He would say things to us, transmit the words into the viscous medium of our kitchen, and we wouldn’t get the message right away, it took a while for the words and sound to reach us through the light and air thick with delay, with silence and tension, the air resistant to communication and understanding. And then we would answer, but he was already gone, had already moved on, out, away from us. We would try to answer, make meaning from these conversations, these bits of days, these bits of daily life being all we had by then, my mother and I, all we had left with him. We were losing him.
His invention may have been a failure, but his idea wasn’t. As it turned out, and I wouldn’t find this out until much later, there were twin projects. The director of the institute had already gone to visit another inventor, not far from our town, actually about half an hour away on the peninsula, where sometimes my mom and I would go have a picnic if my dad was working on the weekend. The houses there had Spanish tile roofs and mailboxes with roofs, too, and little doors, and the driveways were circular, for receiving guests, I guess, and there was a small park that overlooked the ocean, and a swing set and even a cast-iron jungle gym, shaped like a rocket, for kids to crawl up into, a set of bent metal rods, curved perfectly and painted red and white and blue. This other inventor had had a very similar idea to my father’s, the differences being mostly in execution, and the only real difference being that, on the day of his visit, his idea worked. That day in the park was my father’s chance, our chance to be a part of it, but the director already had seen that the idea could work and didn’t need to find a second diamond in the rough. That part of it would have hurt my father, I know, to know that it was possible for someone like him, a talented amateur, out in the sticks, a moonlighting cubicle worker, a wage-earner-by-day, inventor-by-night, to make it. It would have killed him to know that someone had done it, that all his work had been correct, all the work that he had dumped, a week after that day in the park, all the notebooks, in pieces, scattered and scribbled over hundreds of pages, on scraps, on Post-it notes, on index cards, in margins of books, on backs of envelopes taped and folded and crumpled and uncrumpled and crumpled again. It would have killed him to know that it hadn’t been impossible, our dream, but that we got one chance only, just once in a lifetime, and we had lost it. And with that, our idea, our prototype was the one lost to history. My father would forever be the guy who did not get the credit, the one swallowed up, enveloped by obscurity, swept away and lost in time.
If I could tell him just one thing, wherever he is, pass him one message, it would be this: he had something. Something to his thoughts, his ideas, the papers in his notebooks, the work we did in the garage. Beyond just a purity to his ideas, a sincerity to his belief, a genuine curiosity, a determination that, if he just sat there long enough, thought hard enough, failed enough times, he’d find a way in. His idea was good enough, would have been good enough for the director, for the world, good enough to be a serious contribution to the field of fictional science, good enough for me, but I don’t know where he is, and I have never been able to tell him this.
Here in the garage, where I watched him while he worked, twisting this, tightening that, and realized, not that I didn’t know it, but saw more clearly that, fundamentally, my father is, was
, has always been a sad man. Sadness was the driver, the motor of his invention, the engine of his creativity. The sadness was generational, accumulated like heavy elements in us, like we were large sea life, enormous ocean fish, swimming silent, collecting the sadness and moving through the deep with it, never stopping, always increasing the quantity in our bodies, always moving forward, never fully sleeping, eaters of sadness. Bite by bite, meal by meal, becoming made of sadness. Passed down like an inheritance, a negative inheritance, a long line of poor, clever men, growing, over time, slightly less poor, and slightly more clever, but never wise.
I remember one late-December morning in my father’s study, one of the last days of the year, felt like it was the end of something more. Not the best year, the family had seen better. Overnight the rain and winds had washed the sky and world of all haze and the early-morning light was even, perfect, the light of an artist’s studio. I was nine years old and my mother had told me to ask my father to come have breakfast. The clock in the kitchen was ticking. It was a blue plastic circle with a white face, and standard black arrows pointing to hours and minutes and a thin red needle for the second hand, which made discrete movements, jumped from mark to mark in its circumnavigation, with a kind of abrupt yet soft bouncing motion, and a sound that always seemed louder than it should have been.
I called to my father a few times and, not hearing any response, walked down the hall, afraid of what I might find, not hearing a sound, and then, as I approached, I heard a muffled noise, a sound I was certain I had never heard before, and as I peeked in through the mostly closed door of his small office, I saw, for the first time in my life, my father’s eyes red and cheeks and chin wet with tears. He was looking at a picture of my grandfather, the one I never met, who died when I was six months old, who died on a different continent, an ocean away, poor and broken and missing his oldest son. I stood there in the hall, a few feet outside the threshold of my father’s private study, watching him, looking at him framed by the door, while he looked at his own father, framed in the picture, the three of us, son, father, and grandfather, forming a melancholy axis, forming a chain, a regress, a bridge into the past.
TAMMY makes her face pretty and blows me a kiss on the cheek. Movie-star face, I call it. She hardly ever does it, and only if I’m being nice.
“What was that for?”
“I don’t know. For being that kid.”
The weeks passed and the months passed. The prototype sat in the garage. He’d moved it to the corner after we got back that afternoon, and covered it with a sheet. He and my mother started to fight more. My father continued to do his own research, on questions that got more and more specialized, and continued to publish his results in journals with titles more and more obscure. No one noticed anyway. That was the worst part: he understood that something was happening, that he was missing the big picture, even as he couldn’t grasp exactly what it was or how or why. By the time I was twenty, a couple of years into college, I could already see him the way others did, I could switch between modes of viewing, sometimes as his son, other times not as his son but instead as someone looking at a prideful, intelligent, increasingly self-isolated man. A man drifting slowly into the past.
Then one day, he is back. It is a little more than three years after that day in the park. I hear him in the garage for hours, and into the night, and then every day for six weeks, the testing getting louder and louder. He is working on something else. Not a time machine. Something darker, more powerful. Science fiction, but not any kind I know of. He never asks me to come down there, never hints at what he is doing, although I know now that he was building the machine that would take him to that temple, and ultimately to wherever he is now.
In the garage, just where we had once built something together, now he is alone, building a different kind of box, one that will carry him away from us, from here, from this life.
TAMMY’s crying again.
“Well that was a bummer,” I say.
“I thought we were supposed to feel better after that,” she says. “Learn something about him.”
“I did,” I say. “I understand that he left us. I understand about how much he cared for us, and it wasn’t that much apparently.”
I ask TAMMY what would it even mean? To find my father at this point, what would that mean?
Assume a Desired Event EVf (son finds father).
There are two predicates (Son, Father) but neither one is the crucial assumption. The questionable piece of this picture is the operator “finds.”
Running that through the Symbolic Operator, we find that finds means at least the following: eye contact, discomfort, silence, at least one true thing said, at least one false thing said, at least one overly dramatic and egregiously, recklessly hurtful thing said, and some sort of closed boundary, partial or full, on the emotional asymptote toward parabolic melancholy.
The odds of such a finding occurring are, based on assumptions of the length of a life, the coefficient of conversational friction, the tensile strength of the father–son dynamical social-psychological fabric, and the size of the window of comprehension and dramatic coherence, approximately one time per seventy-eight point three years, subjectively experienced.
A life is about twenty-five thousand days, and a finding occurs about once every twenty-five thousand days.
In other words, once in a lifetime.
In other other words, there is a single day, a single conversation, a single moment in my father’s life that I need to find. One time in all of our times together when I can make contact with him, on our divergent, discursive, wandering paths through memory, past tense, narration, and meditation.
Time travel was supposed to be fun, it was supposed to be about going to places and having a bunch of adventures. Not hovering over scenes from your own life as a detached observer. Not just lurching around from moment to random moment, and never even learning about those moments.
And now we’re faced with a new problem: we are running out of book. Which is to say, we’re running out of fuel. This loop has a preset length. It already happened, and it happened the way it happened, and any moment now, I’m going to find myself going back to Hangar 157 to get myself shot in the stomach.
“That’s it,” TAMMY says.
I say, What’s it.
“When you shot yourself in the stomach, he was trying to tell you something.”
It’s all in the book. The book is the key.
TAMMY opens the panel and the TOAD pops out, and I see on the display that the story is still tracking, has been all along. Through the chronodiegetical principle of past tense/memory equivalence, we’ve been generating the narration of the text by traveling through these memories.
“Okay, hmmm,” I say. “It’s still just a book.”
Or maybe it’s not. I pull the book out of its encasement and, instead of trying to flip ahead (I learned that lesson the hard way), I feel around the edges, not sure exactly for what yet, but, aha, there it is, some kind of groove cut into the pages near the back of the book. I flip it open to find, at the bottom of page 201, a pocket, a little embedded envelope, like this:
I flip it open and pull out a key, just like I said, the book is the key, which I am grateful to have, even if it does seem a bit literal.
“A key!” TAMMY says.
“Nothing gets past you,” I say. The question is, a key for what?
Ed sighs and bites at his left haunch. He can hear in my tone when I’m being mean to TAMMY, and it’s his way of disapproving. I pat his head to get him to stop, then notice that he’s not biting his haunch, he’s gnawing on the box my mom gave me.
“Ed, you’re a genius,” TAMMY says. I don’t disagree.
The box has no seams or folds, was seemingly wrapped by some sort of magical elf, so I have to use a letter opener to stab at it a few times before getting a corner to tear off and because the paper keeps tearing off in bits, it’s slow going at first, but then, as I’m unwrapping it, the sha
pe and size and font of the partially uncovered lettering starts to remind me of something from a long time ago, and at the point I realize what that is, I am, for a moment, ten years old again, and my ten-year-old heart starts pounding like a jackhammer in my thirty-year-old body.
There is just enough room in here for me to lay out all the items from the kit, as best I can, on the flat surface of TAMMY’s main console.