The Man Who Folded Himself

by David Gerrold

  The old men, their eyes were like holes in lampshade faces, but nothing glowed within. Their expressions were bleary. Uniform. Frightened.

  And there were so many of them. More and more; the room was filling up. This house, so often a happy place, was now a cloister house of the infirm. The laughter of youth had shaded into the garish cackling of senility. What had been a firm grip on life had degenerated into a plucking and desperate claw, scratching on the edge of terror.

  Who were these men—why could I not accept what I was seeing? And what drove them together here?

  How old am I? (And here is the fear—) I don’t know. I don’t know.

  Am I one of the tan faces or the pale ones? Does my skin hang in pale folds, bleached by age? (I touch my cheek hesitantly.)

  As the air pops! softly—

  —and the body that crumples to the floor is me.

  Of course.

  It was the jump-shock that killed him. Will kill me.

  He was old. The oldest of them all. (But not so old as to be distinguishable from the rest. He could have been any of them. Us.)

  There was silence in the room. Then a soft shadowed sigh, almost a sound of relief, as too many ancient lungs released their burden of breaths held too long.

  They’d been expecting this, waiting for it—eagerly?—the curiosity of the morbid draws them again and again until the room is crowded with fearful old men. Each praying that, somehow, this time it won’t happen. And each terrified that it will.

  And perhaps—perhaps each is most afraid that the next time he comes to this moment, he will not be a witness, but the guest of honor himself....

  Two of the younger men (younger? They were older than I—or were they?) moved to the body. It was still warm. One of them clicked the belt open; the last setting on it was 5:30, March 16, 2005. (Meaningless, of course. He could have come from there, or it could have been a date held in storage. There was no way of knowing.)

  They took charge efficiently, as if they had done this before. Many times before. (And in a way, they had.) They slung the body between them, tapped their belts and vanished.

  “What’re they going to do with him?” I asked the Don in the business suit.

  “Take him back to his own time, to a place where he can be buried.”

  “Where?”

  He shook his head. “Uh-uh. When the time comes you’ll know. Right now it wouldn’t be a good idea.”

  “But the funeral—”

  “Listen to me.” He gripped my arm firmly. “You cannot go to the funeral. None of us can.”

  “But why?”

  “There’ll be others there,” he said. “Others. A man should attend his own funeral only once. Do you understand?”

  After I thought about it awhile, I guessed I did.

  As for me. . . .

  I’m almost afraid to use the timebelt now.

  But now I know who I am.

  I guess I’ve known for some time. I’m not sure when I realized; it was a gradual dawning, not a sudden flash of ‘aha.’ I just sort of slipped into it as if it had been waiting for me all my life. I’d been heading toward it without ever once stopping to consider how or why.

  And even if I had, would it have changed anything?

  I don’t think so.

  At first I tried to ignore the events of August 23. I went back to the earlier days of the party, but burdened as I was with the knowledge of what lurked only a few weeks ahead, I could not recapture the mood. (And that was sensed by the others; I was shunned as being an irritable and temperamental old variant. Nor was I the only one; there were several of us. We put a damper on the party wherever we went.)

  For a while I brooded by myself. For a while I was terribly scared. In fact, I still am.

  I don’t want to die. But I’ve seen my own dead body. I’ve seen myself in the act of dying. Death comes black and hard, rushing down on me from the future, with no possible chance of escape. I wake up cold and shuddering in the middle of the night, and were it not for the fact that I am always there to hold and comfort myself, I would go mad. (And I still may do so—)

  Uncle Jim once told me that a man must learn to live with the fact of his own mortality. A man must accept the fact of death.

  But does that mean he must welcome it?

  I’d thought that the measure of the success of any life form was its ability to survive in its ecological niche. But I’d been wrong. That doesn’t apply to individuals, not at all—only to a species as a whole.

  If you want to think in terms of individuals, you have to qualify that statement. The measure of the success of any individual animal is based on its ability to survive long enough to reproduce. And care for the young until they are able to care for themselves.

  I have met half that requirement. I’ve reproduced.

  (It’s said that the only immortality a man can achieve is through his children. I understand that now.)

  I went back to 1984 to bring up my son. He was right where I had left him.

  I named him Daniel Jamieson Eakins, and I told him I was his uncle. His Uncle Jim.

  Yes. That’s who I am.

  In many ways, Danny is a great joy to me. I am learning as much from him as he is learning from me. He is a beautiful child and I relish every moment of his youth. I relive it by watching it. Sometimes I stand above his crib and just watch him sleep. I yearn to pick him up and hug him and tell how much I love him—but I let him sleep. I must avoid smothering him. I must let him be his own man.

  I yearn to leap ahead into the future and meet the young man he will become. It will be me, of course, starting all over again. Wondrously, I have come full circle. Once more I am in a timeline where I exist from birth to death. So I must avoid tangling it. I will try to live as serially as possible for my child.

  (No, that’s not entirely true. Several times I have bounced forward and observed him from a distance. But only from a distance.)

  On occasion I still flee to the house in 1999. But I no longer do so desperately. I go only for short vacations. Very short. I know what awaits me there. But I also know that I will live to see my son reach manhood, so I am not as fearful as I once was. I know I have time; so death has lost its immediacy.

  And the party has changed too. The mood of it is no longer so morbid. Not even grim. Just quiet. Waiting. Yes, many of these men have come here to die. No—to await death in the company of others like themselves. They help each other. And that’s good. (I don’t need their help, not yet, so right now I can be objective about it. Maybe later, I won’t.)

  So I’m relaxed. At ease with myself. Happy. Because I know who I am.

  I’m Dan and Don and Diane and Donna.

  And Uncle Jim too. And somewhere, Aunt Jane.

  And little Danny. I diaper him; I powder his pink little fanny and wonder that my skin was ever that smooth. I clean up his messes. My messes. I’ve been doing that all my life. I’m my own mother and my own father. I’m the only person who exists in my world—but isn’t it that way for all of us?

  Me more than anyone.

  How did this incredible circle get started?

  (Or has it always existed? Could it have begun in the same way the timebelt began—in a world that I excised out of existence? In a place so far distant and so almost-possible that the traces of the might-have-been are buried completely in the already-is?)

  Many years ago I pondered the reason for my own existence. (Why “me”? Why me as “me”? Why do I perceive myself—and why do I experience me as “me” and not someone else? Why was I born at all? It could have been anyone!) It almost drove me mad. I had to have a meaning. I was sure I had to. Variants of me did go mad seeking that meaning—but only those of me who could accept the gift of life without questioning it too intensely would survive to find the answer.

  I wrote in these pages that if there were an infinite number of variations of myself, then what meaning could any one of us have? I wondered about that then. I know the answer
now. I know my answer.

  I am the base line.

  I am the Danny from which all other Dannys will spring.

  I am a circle, complete unto itself. I have brought life into this world, and that life is me.

  And from this circle will spring an infinite number of tangents. All the other Dannys who have ever been and ever will be.

  Who the others are, what they are—that is for each of them to decide. But as for me, I know who I am. I am the center of it all.

  I am the end.

  I am the beginning.

  So, before it is over, I will have done it all and been it all.

  I will take the body back to the summer of 2005 and lay it gently in my bed, to be discovered in the morning by the maid. I will take his timebelt and put it in a box, wrap it up for my nephew and take it back a month to give it to my lawyer, Biggs-or-Briggs-orwhatever-his-name-is. I will leave Danny the legacy of . . . our life.

  Later I will go back in time and visit him again. This time, though, I will handle the situation properly. It’s not enough to just give him the timebelt after my death; I must visit him early in 2005 and explain to him how to use it wisely. Especially in the case of Diane.

  I’ve already spoken to the nineteen-year-old Danny once, but I felt I mishandled it, so I went back and talked myself out of it. Later I will try again. Perhaps a little earlier. May of 2005. Or April. (I must be careful though. Each time I change my mind about how to tell Danny, I have to go back earlier and earlier. That way I excise the later tracks, the incorrect ones. But I must be careful not to go back too early—I must give him a chance to mature. I think of the old Dan who went chasing after the young Diane. I must be careful, careful.)

  Perhaps I should just leave him this manuscript instead. These pages will tell the story better than I can.

  Maybe that would be the best way.

  There is just one last thing....

  What is it like to die?

  There is no Don to come back and tell me.

  And I’m scared.

  It’s the one thing I will have to face alone. Totally alone.

  There will be absolutely no foreknowledge.

  Nor will there be any hindknowledge. The terrible thing about death is that you don’t know you’ve died.

  —Or is that the terrible thing? Maybe that’s the blessing. It’s the jump-shock that will kill me. I know that. I will tap my belt twice—and I will cease to exist.

  Cease to exist.

  Cease to exist.

  The words echo in my head.

  Cease to exist.

  Until they lose all meaning.

  I try to imagine what it will be like.

  No more me.

  The end of Danny.

  The end.

  (What happens to the rest of the universe?)

  I am afraid of it more than anything else in my life. Absence of—

  —me.

  Dear Danny,

  Time travel is not immortality.

  It will allow you to experience all the possible variations of your life. But it is not an unlimited ticket.

  There will be an end.

  My body has not experienced its years in sequence. But it has experienced years. And it has aged. And my mind has been carried headlong with it—this lump of flesh travels through time its own way, in a way that no man has the power to change.

  I’ve had to learn to accept that, Danny, in order to find peace within my mind.

  My mind?

  Perhaps I’m not a mind at all. Perhaps I’m only a body pretending the vanity of being something more. Perhaps it’s only the fact that language, which allows me to manipulate symbols, ideas, and concepts, also provides the awareness of self that precedes the inevitable analysis.

  Hmm.

  I have spent a lifetime analyzing my life. Living it. And rewriting it to suit me.

  I once compared time travel to a subjective work of art. That was truer than I realized. I am the artist of time. I choose the scenes I wish to play. Even the last one.

  And that scares me too. Just a little.

  I don’t know when that body was coming from. It—he tapped the belt and came back to August 23. Thinking he was going to witness the arrival of himself. Thinking he was going to witness his death.

  Or maybe he was seeking it.

  I don’t know when that body came from. I don’t know when its starting point is/was/will be.

  I don’t know when I’m going to die. But I do know it will be soon. I admit it. I’m scared.

  But perhaps it will be a gentle way to go.

  I will never know what happened. I will never really know when. And I will die much as I lived—in the act of jumping across time. It will be a fitting way to go.

  Danny, you cannot avoid mortality. But you can choose your way of meeting it. And that is the most that any man can hope for.

  Live well, my son.

  Maybe this will be the last page. I think I should add something to “Uncle Jim’s” diary.

  Uncle Jim has given his life back to himself—that is, to me. Now that I know the directions in which I will go—no, can go—the decisions are mine.

  I need do none of the things that Uncle Jim has described. (In fact, some of them shock me beyond words.) Or I could do all of them—I may change as I grow older. The point is, I know what I am beginning if I put on this belt.

  I feel a strange empathy for that frightening old man. He was bizarre and perverse and lost. But he was me—and all those things he did and felt and wrote about echo profoundly in my own soul. I feel a terrible sadness at his loss, greater than I did before I knew who he was. And not just sadness; fear and horror too. I cannot be this person in this manuscript. This is too much to assimilate. Is this me? I am drawn to it and simultaneously repelled. It can’t be true.

  But I know it is.

  My god. What have I done to myself? What am I destined to do?

  I wish he were here now. I wish there were some way to reach him—punish him, scream at him, berate him. How dare he do this to me?

  And . . . at the same time, I want to hug him and thank him and tell him how much he means to me. Even though I know he knows—knew.

  I saw him in his coffin. I sat through his funeral. He’s dead. And he isn’t. I could go looking for him. . . .

  Should I?

  I want to reassure him. And be reassured by him. And—the tears roll down my cheeks. I’m crying for myself now more than him because now I know how truly isolated I really am. I am abandoned by the universe. There is no god who can save me.

  I am so alone I cannot bear the pain of it. Now I know how desperately isolated one human being can be. What have I done to deserve this?

  I will surely go mad.

  No. I will not.

  I can’t escape that way either.

  I know what choice I have. And it is no choice at all.

  The decision is mine.

  A world awaits me.

  The future beckons.

  All right, I accept.

  I am going to put on the belt.

  Author’s Note

  I’ve never made a secret of who I am, but I’ve never considered it important enough to discuss in public either. I’ve always felt that anyone who wants to talk about my private life is only demonstrating the paucity of his/her imagination when there are so many more important and exciting things to discuss.

  Sometimes, when a person’s sexuality is discussed, the humanity of the individual gets lost—subjugated to the sexual identity. We sometimes make the mistake of thinking that “gay” explains a person’s life. Most of the time, it doesn’t. “Gay” is an adjective, not a noun. It only describes one small part of a much larger reality. But any attempt to make this point, to recontextualize the use of the word, is doomed to failure, because it also serves to call attention to the issue or credibility. It ends up looking like rationalization and justification. Eventually people start wondering about the need to have this discussi
on.

  So let me start here: A few years ago, someone bawled me out for not going public with my identity. He argued that the hypothetical gay thirteen-year-old in Peoria needed positive role models. My response was that my friends, family, and colleagues knew. That was my definition of “out.” Going public was a political act—and I am not obligated to put my life, my career, my well-being, and my son’s well-being at the service of anyone else’s agenda. I had an agenda of my own—raising my son. Everything else was irrelevant, even my writing. (Which is why a certain long-awaited book has taken much longer than I ever expected it would.)

  For the record, my son is now 19, and he’s turned into a remarkable young man; I am enormously proud of him. I should also add that with gay adoptions now under fire by the ignorant, going public has become necessary—the lies must be refuted by the families who know—because unlike that hypothetical thirteen-year-old in Peoria, there are a lot of very real children in the foster care system who will never be adopted because of a critical shortage of qualified adoptive parents willing to take on the challenge of a special needs child. People who want to adopt (gay or straight) need to be encouraged—the children need them. My son once told me how he used to cry himself to sleep wishing for a dad. If gay parents can be part of the solution, it would be immoral, even criminal, to deny these children the opportunity to have loving parents.

  Ideally, I want to live in a world where sexual identity is irrelevant, where it makes no difference at all, where we do not judge people by who they love—where we celebrate the quality of love, not the form. We’re not there yet. But the way to get there is to live as if such a world is the right world to live in. I’m not ashamed of who I am, haven’t had that internalized dilemma for a long time; but I do admit that I sometimes wonder how much of my personal life I really want others to have access to. This may be true for a lot of writers. That’s the real irony of any writer pretending to be private, because what we do for a living is access our lives as source material for our stories. Ultimately every significant moment—traumatic, transforming, overwhelming—ends up in the books in one way or another. It’s all there, as much in the denial of the expression as in the expression itself.