by Amy Weiss
She nicks him with a curt remark. He shoots a spear tipped with betrayal straight through her. She strikes the match; he goes down in flames. Lovers learn a hundred ways to hurt, to scar—with weapons and with words (or the lack thereof). Their arsenals are plentiful, personal. They wage drawn-out wars and then reenact them. Yet even the most embittered will come to find themselves looking at one another through windows overflowing with flowers. Easily the woman and her husband could have turned enemies, what with all the wounds they had inflicted. Instead, they became each other’s doctor.
Here she is again in his arms in the future, in all futures, as though death had not disentangled them. Centuries pass, bodies pass, to no lasting effect. It is like being held by him as she falls asleep, separating during the night, and waking in the morning to discover herself once more in his embrace. To stay stubbornly in a dream and in a past is to close her eyes to the sunlight that lies in wait. Tomorrow, she now understands, is not a thing to escape from, to cast aside, to wish away. It is the thing you run toward, spinning, dancing, your arms outstretched with delight, never catching, always trying.
LESSON 8
Dotted Note
The old man says, “You have seen the past.”
“Yes,” the woman replies.
“You have seen the future.”
“Yes.”
“They have brought you some comfort.”
“Oh yes.”
“Good, now forget them both. They don’t exist. They never have.”
“There is one moment: now. Time implies more. There is no more. There is one place: here. You are here—now.” The old man pauses to consider the lake and all who occupy it. “How can time be an illusion, if you are inside it? How can the lake not be real if you are within its waters, and you are real? Or are you?”
He lifts his arms up and to the sides in a swoop of a motion, gathering the entirety of the lake and condensing it into a single droplet that rests on the palm of his hand. “Here is time,” he says, then lightly blows on the bead until it floats away, a bubble. “And there it goes. Yet here you still are, outside it, alive. How can that be?”
He spreads his arms wide and the lake appears before them again, as calm and clear as ever. Here; gone. Here; gone. The tide of time, drawing her into its depths, releasing her to rest on its shores, depositing its riches at her feet. The softly swelling wave that takes her nowhere, that takes her everywhere.
The woman stares into the bottomless waters that have held her husband, her child, her self. She looks into its face and sees her own: placid, eternal. It is not the enemy, not the thief, not the monster. It is merely that which lends her the six hundred million breaths of a life. She descends into it, and time surrounds her; she emerges and it evaporates from her. Were the old man to dissolve the lake once and for all, the birdlike creatures that dot its banks would not disappear along with it. They would simply sail away on those wings made of mercury and memory, their feathers growing streaked with silver and flecked with cloud as they flew off in formation toward some new nest.
But if time is no more permanent and no less delicate than a bubble afloat, then what of everything that’s experienced inside it? Is that, too, as fragile, as fleeting?
She swirls her finger in the water, thinking out loud. “Time is one of the things we come here to learn about, then.”
“Sure, if you’re a physicist.”
“It’s not an important lesson?”
“Less the lesson than the vehicle through which it is conveyed—the textbook, but not its subject.”
A lake of time, a book of words: the contents, he knows, are more important than the container. Both allow for alchemy. Both leave their fingerprints on the soul. A book belongs inside and beyond time and space. A reader can dip into its pages and swim in its words, put it down, walk away, come back to it years later, come back to it even after its author has died. It alters the consciousness and the heart, yet its effects do not vanish when its cover is closed, when it is returned to the shelf, when its events are purely fictional and never physical. The book itself may be destroyed, its words erased or struck from the page—but not from the reader. The material world is the same. Reality can disperse with the wave of the old man’s hand, the illumination of the woman’s mind. The medium comes and goes. The insight remains.
He says to her, “You think that there is one of you and many times. One stable, enduring self, and yesterday, next month, eight hundred years ago, August sixteenth, childhood, nine o’clock in the morning, autumn, 480 B.C. To you, time is a line—a timeline—that the same one person walks day after day, in the same one direction, from newborn to old and gray. What if, instead, there are many selves and one time? If the you of a few seconds ago and the you of a few seconds from now are two completely separate selves? The you of yesterday, the you of last autumn and the next, the you of eight hundred years ago, the you as a child and the you of old age: infinite you’s existing concurrently, developing simultaneously. Then there is no line, only a single plot point. And that one single point, that one dot, is limitless and contains all the immeasurable variations of you within it.”
As he speaks, something is happening to her eyes, for what they are seeing is no longer an elderly man but one whose wrinkles have smoothed, whose body has lengthened into that of a young adult and then compressed into that of a small boy. She blinks to bring him back into focus. He places his hand atop hers and says, “It’s all right. Let it go.”
Her question is earnest, her confusion profound. “If there is only the dot—which contains every life that I have ever lived and will ever live—and a billion of me exist all at once, then when was I born? And when do I die?”
The smile that he gives her is toothless and wide, the kind shared by babies and old men alike.
The old man waves his arms in front of the woman’s face, and once more she sees the steppes, the warrior, the blood. She moans. She cannot bear this again.
He is both sympathetic and insistent. “Change what you did.”
“I can’t change the past!”
“Says who?”
“Something that has already happened cannot be changed. That doesn’t make any sense.”
“In a timeline, it makes no sense. When everything is happening all at once, nothing could be easier. There is no past. You with the knife on the steppes, you with the mare by the lake, you with the patients in the war: they are all you right now. They are all you right now in the big dot. Touch one and you touch them all.” He bends to pick a pebble from the ground, then tosses it into the center of the lake. The ripple radiates outward in concentric circles, finally reaching her feet, as well as the bare feet of the warrior. His are clasped by a young mother and her child, who stare up at his knife, at his terrible grin.
The warrior’s hands hold the knife, the woman’s hold history: it feels just as heavy, just as dangerous. “What do I do?” she asks, and the old man says, “What do you want to do?”
Look at me, she commands the warrior, no closer to him than a thousand years, no farther than a thought. He turns around in bewilderment, unsure of the source of the voice. His eyes lock on hers and a sizzle runs through them both: the strange recognition of one’s own soul in the body of another. To her surprise, her greatest compassion is directed not toward the victims but toward someone else altogether. It will be all right, she tells him. We will be all right. You didn’t know any better, but you are learning. It occurs to her that some future self may be watching her lie in the grass as her house and husband burn, sending her the same mental message.
The warrior stops cold. Compassion? What is this thing which dulls his knife? He stares at the woman. Her eyes shine with the answer. He lays the weapon on the ground and backs away from the mother and child. The mother realizes what is happening, what is not happening. She clutches the child to her chest and off they run, mice escaping the talons of a hawk.
The woman witnessing this scene follows the mother in her m
ind. She sees the mother rush inside her home into the waiting arms of her spouse. Her words describe making death’s acquaintance. Her face tells the real story: All I could think of was you, of the wintry night of our first kiss, your lashes bejeweled with snowflakes, your touch turning me into spring.
Her spouse exhales his relief. The burden that lifts is indescribable, inaccessible, no longer his. When the warrior had emptied his wife’s and child’s bellies, his own had filled with hatred and despair. This time, the weapon set aside and the family unharmed, he will not have to swallow his resentment, will never know its sharp taste and how it slices the tongue. It is as if the woman is watching an artist stand before a pencil sketch, erasing portions of a picture she has made and, with a careful hand, drawing something more refined.
That mother becomes mother many times more. Her child and his siblings grow and swell with their own families and give birth to generations that throb with life and flourish and expand and spread across the land and spill over into the oceans and onto boats and into new continents and build thriving cities and civilizations and fill every last inch of the earth with the children of their children, all of whom are born from the moment when the warrior laid down his knife.
Touch one and you touch them all.
For the warrior, the moment is one not of birth but of death—the death of the warrior in him. A new part grows in its place. Now he knows of compassion, though not what to do with it. On whom can he test the concept? No one is around except a lonely saxaul tree, bloomless and bare. It will have to do. He tends to it, waters its soil, speaks to it of sunlight and shade. The tree has never known flowers. The warrior teaches it flowers. Under his care, its roots strengthen and multiply. It makes a forest of itself so that the animals can take shelter and the nomads can take wood. Compassion. The warrior has given it life; now it will return the favor unto him. It spots a hungry sparrow hiding in a shrub and drops its seeds to feed it. A seed swallowed cannot grow, but the tree is willing to forgo its own future for that of the warrior. Like the tree, the sparrow can offer him companionship. Unlike the tree, it can also offer him song.
The warrior has never seen such a bird before. He listens every morning for its concert. The two trade melodies, learn the rhythms of each other’s days. Bloodthirst turns into songthirst, the warrior into a musician.
The bird is new to wings. It has spent lifetimes as breezes and currents; now it must learn how to navigate them. One day it will fly with legs instead of feathers, and the wind that it once was will propel its hooves and whip through its mane. And the warrior, sitting on its back in the shape of a woman, will feel this wind too as it sweeps through her hair, as it weaves through her harp, playing the songs of the sparrow on its strings.
Compassion is not an act of goodwill but the cascade that the act creates.
The woman pictures the warrior not backing away from the mother and the child and the violent impulse. As she does, the sequence of events halts and reverses: entire generations lying fallow, a lonely spouse choking to death on a piece of anger lodged in his throat, the warrior knowing neither sparrow nor song. “What if I hadn’t killed them and instead raped the mother in front of her child, or stolen all that they owned, or just yelled at them and gone on my way? Would that have changed everything as well?”
“Not so radically,” the old man tells her, “for each of those actions is born of cruelty, and cruelty is cruelty, the degree being of less consequence than the substance itself. You don’t need to save or spare a life to create this chain reaction, though. It can begin with something as quiet as giving seeds to a hungry sparrow, or as easy as falling into the loving arms of your family.” The cascade, hearing his words, flows forward once more. He watches it with a wistful expression. “If only people understood how the earth turns on a kindness.”
The woman’s thoughts also flow ahead. She could lay down a knife and alter the course of a life. Could she do the same with a match? “If we can change what has been done, then I can catch the candle that burned down my house, or never light it at all.”
“Yes,” he says, “although you do not need to. There is a world in which you have already done those things. There is a world in which the power does not die, and no candle falls for you to catch. And in those worlds, your husband and daughter are very much alive.”
The old man kneels down and plucks a daisy from its bed of grass. Each petal surrounding the yellow heart—and to the woman, there seem to be multitudes—bears a single drop of dew.
“Make a decision,” he tells her, “and the universe splits in two. In one universe you have chosen the first option, in the other the second. Take an action in the daughter universes, and they too divide. All the universes occur at the same time, parallel and yet worlds apart. All of them result in unique outcomes—or maybe not. All of them are your reality, one no less than the other.”
The woman has seen firsthand how a world can splinter, how it can divide a life into loneliness, a wife into widow. The before and the after, the source and the shard. But to inhabit them both? It cannot happen. The original one, the one with the happiness, lies broken in too many pieces.
“Say that you are getting dressed one morning, and you put on a gold locket.” The old man removes a petal from the daisy and hands it to her. The dewdrop on it is like a crystal ball. Inside it, she watches herself fastening the clasp of the necklace. “Or you decide to wear nothing around your neck but perfume.” He gives her another petal, and in this one she sees that her throat is bare.
The woman returns them both to him. Two different universes? All that has changed is her jewelry.
“Look closer,” he says.
She examines the first petal. She sees herself wearing the locket, entering a market, waiting to purchase coriander and clove. The shopkeeper notices the gold on her neck. It makes his eyes gleam. “My grandmother wore a necklace like yours,” he says to her. “My grandfather gave it to her on the day they were wed. She kept a lock of his hair inside it, and one night, when she tucked me into bed, she let me touch it. It was the closest I ever came to holding him.” The woman lingers at the register, moved to be invited inside this memory. They share a smile. She thanks the shopkeeper, leaves the store, turns right, and heads toward home.
She turns her attention to the second petal. Now she is locket-less, entering the market, waiting to make her purchase. The shopkeeper nods at her, says nothing. She leaves the store and turns right, which happens, in this scenario, to be a few minutes earlier than it had been in the previous one, and which also happens to be the precise moment when a bus climbs the curb and pins her under its wheels.
“Rather dramatic way to make your point,” she huffs.
The old man laughs and hands her another petal.
She sees herself lying underneath the wheels. With enough effort, she could try to pull herself out from under them, but that would require more than she has. She gives up. Her life flows away along with her blood.
The woman throws the petal onto the grass. The mare, curious, sniffs the world tossed aside.
A petal: She tries to pull herself from under the bus. An ambulance arrives to finish the job. It whisks her into an operating room, where the surgeons sew her back together. Her health restored, she is discharged from the hospital. She walks out the main doors, a doctor walks in, they collide. The doctor helps her to her feet. He looks at her. He cannot look away. She doesn’t let go of his hand. They will marry, initiate each other into the secret society of love, die decades later after having mastered its countless mysteries.
Another petal: Her health restored, she is discharged from the hospital. She walks out the main doors, a doctor walks in, they collide. The doctor helps her to her feet. He looks at her. He looks away. “Watch where you’re going,” he mutters. She lets go of his hand.
A petal: The doctor who has passed love by moves to an isolated cabin in the country. Unconnected, unfulfilled, he does not know what to do with his empty hours, an
d so he fills them with liquor. He drinks himself to an early death.
Another petal: The doctor who has passed love by moves to an isolated cabin in the country. Unconnected, unfulfilled, he applies his empty hours to his work, and so he discovers the cure for cancer. Millions of people who wouldn’t otherwise exist now do.
A petal: A cancer patient does not receive the cure in time and dies.
Another petal: A cancer patient receives the cure in time and lives.
A petal: The patient who once had cancer and now does not gets dressed one morning and puts on a gold locket, or wears nothing around her neck but perfume.
For each petal the old man plucks, a new one immediately springs up in its place. The flower he holds is only one in a never-ending garland of daisy chains. He drapes them around the woman’s neck and her arms, covering her in the impossible blossoms. “That’s just what happens when you turn right. Had you turned left . . .” he says, and there are daisies, daisies everywhere, each petal one of innumerable worlds revolving around a shared sun.
“Many me’s, one time,” she replies, and her mind splits open alongside the universe.
The woman rests on the grass. The mare lies at her feet, the harp in her hands. She opens Music Lessons and reads, expecting to find a new piece to practice yet finding only a basic command:
PLAY A NOTE.
Play a note? she thinks. Before, she could barely wrap her mind and her fingers around the complicated melodies in the book, and now it has become a primer?