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Moments of exhilaration from knowing they were the only two people in the world fighting to save it.
What must that have been like for her, reliving a relationship from the beginning, with all the knowledge of its weaknesses and strengths, before it even started?
Landscapes and emotions in a constant state of flux, and yet a twisted logic to it all—the way a dream makes sense only when you’re inside it.
sitting at that bar in Portland as Helena climbed onto the stool beside him for the third time in their odd, recursive existence.
They’re extrapolations of the Schwarzschild solution, an equation that defines what the radius of an object must be, based upon its mass, in order to form a singularity. That singularity then forms an Einstein-Rosen wormhole that can, in theory, instantaneously connect far-flung regions of space, and even time.
He pulls out his cell phone to call her, trying to remember her number, and realizes that it can’t possibly be the same on this timeline. He has no way to contact her, and the helplessness of that knowledge is almost more than he can bear in this moment, thoughts tearing through his mind—
And a glimmer of joy rides through him at the possibility that she lives, and the hope that, in this next reality, even if only for a moment, he will be with her again.
She says, “I’m afraid that when your memories of the last timeline come, you’re going to feel like I abandoned you. Like I betrayed you. I didn’t spend the last timeline with you, but it’s not because I didn’t love or need you. I hope you can hear that. I just wanted you to live a life without the end of the world looming, and I hope it was a good one. I hope you found love. I didn’t. Every day I missed you. Every day I needed you. I was more lonely than I’ve ever been in my many lives.” “I’m sure you did what you needed to do. I know this is infinitely harder for you than it is for me.”
In this moment, he is a man without memory, and the sense of being adrift in time is a crushing, existential horror. Like waking from a troubled sleep, when the lines between reality and dreams are still murky and you’re calling out to ghosts.
“This timeline—before my mind started to fracture—was the best of them all. Of my very long life. Do you remember that trip we took—I think it was during our first life together—to see the emperor penguins migrate? Remember how we fell in love with this continent? The way it makes you feel like you’re the only people in the world? Kind of appropriate, no?”
Before her mind broke completely, they had two good years, which they lived free from the burden of trying to stop the world from remembering. They lived those years simply and quietly. Walks on the icecap to see the Aurora Australis. Games, movies, and cooking down here on the main level. The occasional trip to New Zealand’s South Island or Patagonia. Just being together. A thousand small moments, but enough to have made life worth living.
“But my moment feels just as real to me as yours does to you. Are they both real? Is it only our consciousness that makes it so? I can imagine you sitting there in four years, even though you’re right beside me in this moment, in my moment, and I feel like I can reach through the camera and touch you. I wish I could. I’ve experienced over two hundred years, and at the end of it all, I think Slade was right. It’s just a product of our evolution the way we experience reality and time from moment to moment. How we differentiate between past, present, and future. But we’re intelligent enough to be
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Helena says, “ ‘Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.’ Einstein said that about his friend Michele Besso. Lovely, isn’t it? I think he was right.”
“I would say it was worth it to accidentally build a world-destroying chair because it brought you into my life, but that’s probably bad form. If you wake up on April 16, 2019, and the world somehow doesn’t remember and implode, I hope you’ll go on without me and live an amazing life. Seek your happiness. You found it with me, which means it’s attainable. If the world remembers, we did what we could, and if you feel alone at the end, Barry, know that I’m with you. Maybe not in your moment. But I am in this one. My heart.”
Lately, he’s been reading the great philosophers and physicists. Plato to Aristotle. From Newton’s absolute time to Einstein’s relativistic. One truth seems to be surfacing from the cacophony of theories and philosophies—no one has a clue. Saint Augustine said it perfectly back in the fourth century: “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”
Perhaps memory is fundamental, the thing from which time emerges.
It seems impossible, sitting out here all alone in the perfect stillness, that the rest of the world is going to pieces. Stranger still that it’s all because of a chair accidentally created by the woman he loves.
Meteors streak the sky, and the Southern Lights have just begun to dance on the horizon—a flickering ribbon of green and yellow.
Looking into space from Antarctica feels like looking into space from space. On a night like this—no wind, no weather, no moon—the smear of the Milky Way looks more like a celestial fire, brimming with colors you’d never see from anyplace else on Earth.
But when Barry looks into the night sky, he’s seeing stars whose light took a year, or a hundred, or a million to reach him. The telescopes that peer into deep space are looking at ten-billion-year-old light from stars that coalesced just after the universe began.
The timeline he’s on is the original, and he’s accelerating upstream against the river of his life, crashing through forgotten moments, understanding finally that memory is all he’s made of.
For so many lifetimes, he lived in a state of perpetual regret, returning obsessively and destructively to better times, to moments he wished he could change. Most of those lives he lived staring into the rearview mirror. Until Helena.
The thought comes almost like a prayer—I don’t want to look back anymore. I’m ready to accept that my existence will sometimes contain pain. No more trying to escape, either through nostalgia or a memory chair. They’re both the same fucking thing. Life with a cheat code isn’t life. Our existence isn’t something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain. That’s what it is to be human—the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.
