Less (Arthur Less, #1)

by Andrew Sean Greer

“Am I too old to meet someone, Robert?” Robert sits up slightly, his mood shifting back to merrymaking. “Are you too old? Listen to you. I was watching a television show about science the other day. That’s the kind of nice-old-man thing I do now. I’m very harmless these days. It was about time travel. And they had a scientist on saying that if it were possible, you’d have to build one time machine now. And build another one years later. Then you could go back and forth. A sort of time tunnel. But here’s the thing, Arthur. You could never go any further back than the invention of that first machine. Which I think is really a blow to the imagination. I took it pretty hard.” Arthur says, “We can never kill Hitler.” “But you know it’s like that already. When you meet people. You meet them, say, when they’re thirty, and you can never really imagine them any younger than that. You’ve seen pictures of me, Arthur, you’ve seen me at twenty.” “You were a handsome guy.” “But really, really, you can’t imagine me any younger than my forties, can you?” “Sure, I can.” “You can picture it. But you can’t quite imagine it. You can’t go back any further. It’s against the laws of physics.” “You’re getting too excited.” “Arthur, I look at you, and I still see that boy on the beach with the red toenails. Not at first, but my eyes adjust. I see that twenty-one-year-old boy in Mexico. I see that young man in a hotel room in Rome. I see the young writer holding his first book. I look at you, and y...