How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

by Charles Yu

anymore. Most of the time, anyway. I want to. I wish I could but unfortunately, it’s true: time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. If you’re not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw

I am transcribing a book that I have, in a sense, not yet written, and in another sense, have always written, and in another sense, am currently writing, and in another sense, am always writing, and in another sense, will never write.

My theory that every book is in part a comment upon its own writing gets an absurdly literal airing in this part.

This is a document that came from nowhere. This is a chunk of information created spontaneously out of nothing, filtered through my interpretation and memory.

Like so many other books, Charles.

There is a sense in which I am the author of this book, and a sense in which I am merely its first reader.

There is a sense in which this is true of every author of every book.

There is a sense in which I am pretty sure this makes no sense. I don’t know where this is going. I don’t know how it ends.

And here, if I've been getting a little annoyed by the on-the-noseness of this, I am flooded with sympathy.

From here, I can see what ten years looks like, what a lifetime looks like, spent inside that contraption, my personal mode of propulsion. I can see how I am always in perpetual motion through time, how I can never stop, obsessed with the past, projecting myself into the future, clutching at and always failing to grasp the wisp of now.

Living is a form of time travel. Time travel is a physical process. It has to be.

Everyone has a time machine. Everyone is a time machine. It’s just that most people’s machines are broken. The strangest and hardest kind of time travel is the unaided kind. People get stuck, people get looped. People get trapped. But we are all time machines.

He can afford to be kind, he can afford something I have never experienced until now (something I will soon learn about at the university, where some of my upper-middle-class classmates, with their strangely nice bedsheets and faster computers and discreetly expensive clothes tossed casually over the chair or in piles on the floor, so different from my prepressed, store-label khakis, folded in my half-empty drawer, how these classmates took me seriously, were nice to me in a way that got under my skin, how at ease they seemed, at ease in the science fictional world, in this science fictional country, how perfectly nice and respectful they were to me, asking me where I was from, and not meaning my parents, how they had etiquette and manners and even political sensitivities, and yet I could never put a word to it, to what bothered me about their niceness, an idea to it until, in freshman literature, second semester, I stumbled across the phrase noblesse oblige, and immediately flushed with embarrassment right there in class, blood hot in my temples and ears, flushed red in the face at the words, as if a joke, as if it were all a joke, one big joke on me and my dad for all these years, a joke I wish I’d learned long ago), this director of research, this man on top of the profession, he can afford to take us seriously.

We aren’t like the director. This man is someone for whom the world isn’t a mystery.

But maybe this is who he really is, maybe we go through life never actually being ourselves, mostly never being ourselves. Maybe we spend most of our decades being someone else, avoiding ourselves, maybe a man is only himself, his true self, for a few days in his entire life.

I feel ashamed of it, of myself, ashamed for all the head ducking I’ve done in my life, literal and otherwise, for the way I go through life apologizing for my father, for myself, for our family. I feel angry at myself for not having realized all this years ago, for all the wasted opportunities, avenues that I had looked down wistfully thinking, If only we were more prepared, more savvy, if only we had our acts together.

I am seventeen years old, and even then I know that seventeen years old is not very old, but it is old enough to have disappointed him, old enough to have been able to help him, and then chosen not to, it is old enough to be a coward, to have not protected him when you could have, even should have. Seventeen years old is not old, but it is old enough to have hurt your father.

Failure is easy to measure. Failure is an event. Harder to measure is insignificance. A nonevent. Insignificance creeps, it dawns, it gives you hope, then delusion, then one day, when you’re not looking, it’s there, at your front door, on your desk, in the mirror, or not, not any of that, it’s the lack of all that. One day, when you are looking, it’s not looking, no one is. You lie in your bed and realize that if you don’t get out of bed and into the world today, it is very likely no one will even notice.

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.

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.