Ricochet Joe

by Dean Koontz

“My grandma Dulcie says we

know we’re finally getting a little wisdom when we’re able to see that even loss can be beautiful if it makes us love more the things we haven’t lost.”

“Everything in the universe was once condensed into something smaller than a pea. Which is why, thirteen billion years after the big bang, atoms at one end of the universe still have an eerie connection with atoms at the other end of the universe. Set up the same experiment in a lab in Los Angeles and one in Boston, run them simultaneously, and events in one lab instantly affect the outcome in the other lab three thousand miles away. It’s called ‘spooky effects at a distance.’”

“Time,” Joe reminded her. “Getting to it. In some way not easily comprehended, every place in the universe is the same place, so that some physicists think what we perceive as distance is a misperception, an illusion that we require to make sense of it all.”

“We’re as confused about time as we are about distance. We think time flows from the past through the present to the future. But time doesn’t flow. All time—past, present, future—existed in the first instant of the universe’s creation. Textbooks will tell you so. Time is not a river. It’s an invisible ocean encompassing the universe, with tides that run in all directions simultaneously.”

“My watch,” Joe said, hoping to quiet his heart and stop the floor from moving. “Time only goes forward on my watch.” “Clocks are human inventions. We made them to measure time as we need to perceive it in order to function as we do. Watches and clocks measure our perception of time, not time itself.”

“We grow old and die,” ...

“Time is ours to use,” she said. “But we fail to understand it, and so we ride it always in one direction, straight to the grave.”

“There are some scientists who believe that the universe is in fact an infinite number of parallel universes, and that perhaps we never die. If the forward motion of time is only our perception and not true, then perhaps when we appear to age and die, we actually continue in a parallel universe . . . and so on and on.”

“All time—past, present, future—existed in the instant the universe came into being, but also in all the infinite number of universes that exist alongside one another. Time is one big ocean encompassing all those possible worlds. And so for those who truly understand time and the uses to which it can be put, not only the past and future can be visited, but so can universes floating far, far away from theirs in the sea of time.”

But the heart is deceitful above all things. Theologians agreed on that issue, as did most philosophers, and if such a view of the human condition hadn’t been widely held, there would have been less Shakespeare to celebrate and no TV dramas whatsoever. For

Men are often made stupid by love. She meant that a woman’s charms could distract men from truths that the charms might cloak, that men could fall in love with love as easily as could any woman.

Grandma had a cruder aphorism related to the first: Men too often think with their little head instead of their big one.

Whatever task you’ve taken, whatever fight you’re facing, you must bring to it nothing less than everything you’ve got, or otherwise you’ll fail for sure and always wonder what might have been if only you had given your all.

you knew you were getting a little wisdom when you were able to see that even loss could be beautiful if it made you love more the things that hadn’t been lost. Portia had been lost to him, but not to death, and the lesser loss was one that he could survive.