Warning: Short Fiction Ahead.
I think; some people get stuck in a past that never happened.
The ‘dot com’ I started with my student loan went bust in 1999. I sunk a lot of money into a Super Bowl commercial. Unfortunately the audience for online book auctions just wasn’t watching prime time football.
The investment didn’t yield conversion. I was bankrupt.
With no money for a going-out-of-business-party we ended up at The Bean Traders on 7th. I didn’t want to go home but no one wanted to hang out with the woman who just ruined their life. I apologized a lot.
The party thinned out quickly.
Frank, this nebbish programmer I had ignored since hiring, kept me company. He was blah-blahing about hindsight and the edit/undo option when they kicked us out.
I pretended to live in his direction. When we got to his apartment I invited myself up for sex.
I liked his optimism and he had nice teeth. We moved in together. I wouldn’t say we were in love but we made a pretty good team.
Frank found a job programming y2k date changes for nonessential software. By the time I started looking for startup capital to finance my next venture; 9/11 threw the whole market into flux. 2.0 was the new thing and content delivery was king.
I was out of my element. I retreated further.
It’d been almost 5 years since I held a job. YouTube sold to Google and Yahoo bought Flickr. I had those ideas when I was younger but convinced myself out of it. I wasn’t that clever anymore.
I researched other investment opportunities on line and met a guy. We exchanged phone numbers and got together for coffee at The Bean Trader’s on 7th. We laughed about reruns, his big family and the weather. We were in his bed together before I realized Frank would get home from work before me.
But he wasn’t there. He didn’t come home that night and I didn’t hear from him all week. I was certain he caught me, that he’d left. The thought was surprisingly uncomfortable.
It wasn’t long before my paranoia had me snooping through what he left behind. Frank kept a cluttered desk full of computer junk in what would have been our second bedroom. It became his personal space littered with notes and equations, endless lines of java script and binary, times and dates… A cell phone wired to a crown of electrodes was carelessly dropped under the desk.
I concocted a twisted scenario in which Frank, enraged over my romantic indiscretion, built his edit/undo machine to go back and prevent me from ever being born. The self induced panic attack was short lived. What I was describing was impossible.
Incredulous; I boxed up everything and piled it in the hall closet. I pretended the last 5 years didn’t happen and took a job as a museum tour guide. That’s where I met Kevin. He was a physicist. We took things slow.
After a picnic at the shore I ask his professional opinion on time travel. It was the sexiest thing a woman ever said to him.
Kevin says all time happens at once so there is no going back. You’d just be creating a deviant time line; one that would zap itself out of existence eventually.
When Kevin fell asleep in the bed I used to share with Frank, I decided to conduct an experiment of my own.
The crown of electrodes fit loose on my head. I hit the redial on the cell phone remote and felt a slight static shock. The phone’s LCD read ‘connected’ but nothing happened. After several frustrating and humiliating minutes of wearing this silly hat I tossed it all back in the closet.
On my way to bed I became very dehydrated. I turned back towards the kitchen and noticed I wasn’t standing in my hallway anymore. No sooner had I scanned my surroundings I found my pajamas replaced with jeans and my over all demeanor loose and sloppy. I was drunk. I was waking up drunk and standing in the middle of a sentence.
This was the Bean Traders 1999, our going out of business bash.
I stopped dead in my apology to Dirk Reid, the ad sales guy. This was insane I was there, this was then. Dirk pretended not to be devastated about losing his job and moved on when I froze up.
It was all too much to handle and I bolted. Never slept with Frank.
He came to see me the next day. He knew something was up because history hadn’t repeated itself. This was my Frank, the Frank that left me months ago.
Frank wanted to come back and save my business. He programed his machine to see all of time at once but it could only dial back as far as its own conception. In other words; Frank could only travel as far as the night he thought the thing up – The night I lost my company – The night we got together.
He was still pretty into me. All this had just happened for him. I had to explain that I’d gone on living my life for almost five months. I had another boyfriend. I had a job finally. Frank was still stuck in our future’s past. It was a weird conversation.
Everything was weird.
On the day we should have been falling into a relationship I went home alone. Exhausted from the ‘trip’ I fell asleep soon as my head hit the pillow… but then; morning. It was a very fast eight hours.
I didn’t call Frank. I was pretty used to not having him in my life at this point. Instead I made a list of everything I could remember about the next seven years; anything that might give me an advantage. People pray for this everyday. They ask Jesus for a second chance and I actually had one.
Writing letters to investors I bought bandwidth, server space and employed the services of two young programmers still in university. Describing the function and iconography of YouTube; I paid them to invent it for me.
It was almost identical. I got rid of the comments though. Sorry. YouTube commenters were the worst. We sold out to Google a little sooner than the original and for a little less but I was tired of working.
I moved to a penthouse in New York, took a job as a consultant, put on a few pounds and got new friends. I lost track of Frank. I assumed he’d show up to give me shit after I stole YouTube but I never heard from him.
I started suffering black outs. I’d lose hours or days at a time, a whole week once. People around me didn’t seem to notice but I had certainly come unhinged from time. The more incredibly different this new time line became from the original the more unstable it grew. I tried to remember more of what Kevin said. I looked him up at the Institute and called him but it was before he’d actually thought up the theory he told me before… or later.
See, it’s confusing. The human brain isn’t meant to withstand time displacement.
I do remember Kevin saying this new time line would probably explode that I’d probably die or… I don’t know. I started a search for Frank. I thought I could get him to build another time machine so we could go back, again and do things the way we did them the first time and easily slip back into our future and go about our lives. It would stink to give up all my fame and fortune but it beat being dead.
It wasn’t hard to find Frank with all my money. He moved to
Noticing my blackouts had stopped since finding Frank I dragged him back to the East Coast with me. Exploiting my connections with Google I spoke with some of the greatest minds in physics, computer language and theoretical parascience. Crap. Dead ends.
I adopted Frank’s philosophy. I started keeping myself doped to the eyeballs. Prescriptions mostly. Grown up drugs. It was hard to talk to people cause I knew they were all going to die. I felt pretty bad about being the reason their universe was going to end.
All of this reminded me of the Super Bowl commercial incidentally. It was a parody of that old Twilight Zone where the guy survives the end of the world and he can finally just sit around reading books. Then, in a twist of cruel fate he breaks his glasses. I wished for a time proof bomb shelter.
Frank liked the idea but said he wouldn’t know how to begin even conceptualizing one and we didn’t have much time left. The day I cheated on Frank – the day he first traveled back and created this divergent time line – was barely a week away.
To celebrate we skipped The Bean Traders and hit the bar this time. Percs, booze, pot, x, Oxy – I tried to get my hands on some acid tabs too, I’d never tried acid.
I pretended not to be as drunk as I was and slept with Frank. Didn’t feel like being alone at the end. I think there was a little guilt left over from cheating on him not to mention ending the universe by trying to change the past. He was just happy to get laid. I liked his optimism. Once upon a time we made a pretty good team.
The world and I assume all of existence ended with a hollow, baritone pop. Not being of that time line but stuck there when it ended I appear trapped in some eternally blank existence without form or direction. No way to tell how long it’s been, lost track of Frank, harder and harder to remember how I got here.
I think…
I think; some people get stuck in a past that never happened.
