Woodstock

(This is an excerpt--the first chapter really--from a larger story I've been working on.  It has been very challenging and even a little frustrating.  I bit off a lot to chew.  I was hoping that maybe some feedback might reignite my passion and dedication to the project.)

            “Why aren’t you naked, Bob?” said Seraphim, her manner slow and deliberate.

            “Huh?”  Bob snapped to attention.  Her smooth brown areoles had hypnotized him.

“Your clothes, man, you should lose your clothes.”  She knew he was staring at her bare breasts, but that didn’t bother her.  Although Seraphim had only known Bob a few hours, she trusted him completely, just as she trusted everyone she met at the festival—like one massive, happy family.

“I’d love to, darlin’, but I have something I don’t want to lose track of.”  It was partly true.  He was also embarrassed by his doughy, middle-aged physique.

                Seraphim wove a sprig of hemlock into Bob’s shaggy  brown hair.   Her own auburn curls were salted with clusters of the dainty poisonous flower.

                “Lost in our clothes,” said a naked young man sitting beside Seraphim.  Two tabs of acid had dilated his pupils to the size of tack-heads. 

“What’s that, Billy?” Bob said smiling.  The things people said while on psychedelics always amused him.

The boy looked at Bob.  “We are lost in our clothes,” he said without a hint jocularity.  “Clothing is like a series of caves we lose ourselves in day after day.  It—,” he tried to continue, but couldn’t.  A wave of LSD washed over him, and his eyes dove deep into space.

“What were you gonna say, Billy?” He said, in an attempt to bring the boy back from the ether.   

Billy looked at Bob and laughed, loudly and abruptly.  “I don't know.  I’m sorry, man.  I’m peaking, hard.”  He stared over Bob’s shoulder intently.

“I know.  I can see your mind branching out in a thousand directions at once.”

“Exactly, man!”

Bob chuckled.

“Does anyone want to go hear some music?” said Seraphim.

“I don’t know,” replied Bob.  “I’m a little nervous.”

“Is it the mescaline?”

“No.  It's not that.”

“Nervous, nervous, nervous,” Billy chanted.  “Nerves,” he carefully enunciated the word as if examining each of its letters.

The mescaline made Bob want to verbalize everything he felt, but he thought better than to state his fear plainly.  He took a moment to formulate an explanation. 

“I feel like I’ve been here before, numerous times throughout history.”

The two said nothing.  They watched him with undivided attention. 

“It’s like I know I’ll love Woodstock so much that I’ll be able to return to it again and again throughout the rest of my life.”

“Groovy,” said Seraphim.  Wonder shown in her bright green eyes.

“It is, but that would mean there are dozens of me’s from different times roaming around the festival.  I’m nervous I’ll run into myself.”

“Why does that make you nervous, man?  I’d love to hang with myself.”  Billy could barely finish the sentence before breaking into a fit of giggles.

“I’m afraid that if I come in contact with another version of myself,” he paused, “we’ll annihilate each other at the subatomic level.”

Billy and Seraphim looked at each other gravely and then burst into laughter. 

“I like you, Bob.  You are out there,” Seraphim said with a smile.

“I think I’m just going to hang back from the stage, but I’ll walk you up to the edge of the crowd,” he said, opening and closing his hands. 

“Groovy.”

As the trio headed up a hill Bob threw a few psilocybin mushrooms into his mouth.  He washed their stale, earthen taste off his tongue with a can of warm Utica Club beer.  “Two stems, one cap—stand back,” he said to himself.

Fanning out below the crest of the hill was a sea of hundreds of thousands of people.  To Bob, in his drug-addled state, it looked like a massive bowl of colorful cereal teeming in frothing milk.  The beginning of Motherless Child by Sweetwater was drifting from the stage in the distance.   As they neared a drum circle Bob thought he caught a glimpse of himself, bare-chested, dancing with a plump blond woman in an emerald green sundress with gold trim. 

His heart sped up and his breathing grew shallow.  “Hey, let’s listen to these cats jam!” said Bob, leading Billy and Seraphim toward the drum circle.  “Keep it together.  Everything’s okay,” he whispered to himself through a gritted smile.  “I think you’re actually doing quite well—totally fine.”

They followed Bob’s lead and plopped themselves on the grass at the edge of the circle.  Billy and Seraphim’s nakedness prompted nothing more than an affirming smile from one of the conga players. 

Bob's nerves were calmed by the entrancing beat of the hand-drums. 

Seraphim leaned toward him.  “Are you a Bob from the future or are you a Bob from the present?” she said with coy smile.

“Can you keep a secret?”

She winked.

Bob spoke softly so that only she could hear him over the clamor.  “I’m a Bob from the future.”

“Batteries,” Billy suddenly blurted out.  They looked at him curiously.  His face wore the expression of someone who had just discovered the answer to a very big problem.

Seraphim looked back at Bob.  “If you’re from the future, then what song plays next?”

“It’ll be Look Out followed by For Pete’s Sake.”

They looked toward the stage and waited.  After Motherless Child ended Sweetwater began playing Look Out.  Seraphim quickly turned to Bob, her mouth agape with amazement.  He closed his eyes and smiled and nodded.

She leaned in and kissed him.

“What was that for?” asked Bob, his cheeks flushing lightly.

“That was your prize.”

“You’re so beautiful,” he said, scanning her up and down, breathing in her being.  Bob ran his fingers through an unadorned ringlet of hair.  Despite the warm air a shiver relayed through his body.  “I love you," he concluded.

Seraphim closed her eyes and smiled.  “I love you too.”  She stood up and took his hand.  “Let’s go back to my tent.”

“You and Billy aren’t, um…?” said Bob as he rose to his feet.

“It’s cool,” she said definitively as she led him away from the group.

Bob looked back toward the circle.  Billy smiled and waved.  Surprised, Bob waved back.

As they neared Seraphim’s campsite a canvas door-flap unzipped, and a young woman with coarse black hair stepped out of a beige tent.  A tail of smoke followed her.  She held out her palm and a hand grasped it.  Bob froze at the sight of the man who followed from the tent.

“Is that me?” he whispered to Seraphim, hoping it was a drug-induced hallucination.

She answered with a gasp. 

The woman from the tent look confused.  “Do you have a twin brother, Bob?” she asked the man she had just smoked a joint with.

“Yes,” both Bob’s replied simultaneously. 

The dark-haired girl approached Bob and Seraphim.  “Wow, you two look so similar.  It’s trippy.”

“Yeah, that’s what everyone says,” said the second Bob.  “Could you excuse us for one second, darlin’?  I have to talk to my brother for a hot minute.”

She nodded.  As the dark-haired woman headed down the aisle of tents, the Bob’s looked each other up and down.  Two identical beings—the only difference was their clothing and the superficial signs of self-inflicted chemical abuse.   

When the other woman was out of earshot Seraphim blurted out, “I can’t believe you two are the same person!”

“She knows,” said Bob prime.

“Probably not the best idea,” replied second Bob.

“I was vague.  I didn’t think I’d be running into myself to prove it.”

“Far out,” said Seraphim.  She touched second Bob’s face to be certain he was real. 

“I think we’ve just about maxed-out Woodstock,” said Bob 2.  “Maybe one of us should go home.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

Silence.

Second Bob spoke first.  “The oldest should go.  What year are you from?”

“I’m from 2011.  You?”  Bob 1 was certain he’d get to stay.  He had no memory of this ever happening, which meant that the second Bob had to be older.

“I’m from 2010.”

“What!  No way?” 

Second Bob shook his head.

“But I don’t remember any of this.”

Second Bob smiled.  “I’m not surprised.  I am on a ton of stuff right now.”  He laughed.  “I think I may have erased all our memories from the past month in one day.”

“Why does the oldest have to leave?” said Bob 1, not ready to concede Seraphim to the natural order of time.

“Because you’re the one that can cause the most damage to our history.  Since you’re older, I’m not altering our past by interacting with you, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t altering your past by interacting with me.  This exchange could change you, possibly for the better, but possibly for the worst.  We shouldn’t chance it.”

Bob 1 sighed, defeated by his own logic.  “You’re right—we’re right.  I’ll go.”

There was a look of disappointment on Seraphim’s face.  “I don’t want you to leave me, Bob.”

“Well, I’m not exactly leaving.”  He nodded at the second version of himself.  “I mean, I am still here, technically.”

Seraphim looked at the other version of him, slightly suspicious.  “I guess so.”  She shook her head.  “This is so gnarly.”

Second Bob walked up to Seraphim and put his arm around her.  He went to touch first Bob's shoulder.  Before Bob 1 could move out of the way, Bob 2 grazed his t-shirt.  
First Bob winced, fearing his atomic annihilation, but nothing happened.  As Bob 1 exhaled his counterpart looked at him curiously.  Then he smiled and nodded.
“I’m sorry.  Chalk this up to the perils of time travel," said second Bob.

When Seraphim turned back, the Bob she had first met was gone, as if he had vanished into air.  She looked at the remaining Bob, reticent to embrace him.

“It’s me, darlin’,” said Bob.  “It’s still me.”

After reconciling the moment, she took him by the hand and led him to Billy’s tent.

They lay on an unfolded sleeping bag, sharing a fat joint.  Bob was now naked as well.  
"Why didn't you and the older Bob annihilate each other when you touched his shoulder?" said Seraphim
"Oh, that," laughed Bob.  "That's been disproved."
"But wouldn't the other Bob have known that?"
“Can I tell you a secret, Sera?”

“Of course,” Seraphim replied as she ran her fingers through Bob’s chest hair.  She had never been intimate with a man who was so much older than she was.

“I’m actually from 2013,” he croaked through a mouthful of smoke.

She sat up and looked at him warily.  “But you said the Bob from 2011 was older than you.”

“I know.  I guess I lied,” he took a hit and then coughed up a lungful of smoke, “to myself.”

“But why would you do that?”  She was not pleased.  Her trust was beginning to fray at the edges.

“It’s not anything I ever thought I would do to myself.  All I know is that an older version of me pulled the same trick two years ago.  I felt cheated, so I did the same thing.” 

Seraphim stared at Bob, a look of mistrust on her freckled face.

“Look, I’m not a villain.  I met you two years ago, and I loved you then as much as I do now, but for some reason the future me stole you… from me.  I had to get this back.”

“But why would you ever do that?”

“I guess I enjoyed being with you so much that I just had to relive the moment,” he paused, “at the expense of the first moment.”

“This is so trippy,” she said.

“I know, darlin’, and I'm sorry.” 

She lay back and thought for a moment. “So I imagine that at one point I must have made love to the younger you.”

“You would think.”

“Then at what point would the older versions of you decide to start stealing me from your younger self?”

Bob exhaled a ring of pot smoke.  He stared wide-eyed at the undulating halo as it rose slowly overhead.  “Maybe I never made the decision.  Maybe it’s always been this way, infinitely.”  With a wave of his hand the smoke dispersed.  “Causal loops are funky.”

Tourists

A blank notebook page stares at me from atop a cheap wooden table—pressboard cloaked in wood wrapping paper.  The café is filled with uncomfortable economy furniture, like the set of an old television show, or a terrarium. 

            The blank page intimidates me like a gang of teenagers loitering on a street corner.  I have to pass in order to reach my destination.  One step at a time—begin with the title: The Curmudgeon.  After all, before Tolstoy love and war was just a bunch of words. 

            I put pen to page, ready to scribble the first passage, but the woman sitting to my left is staring at me.  When I turn to catch her she quickly looks away.  She’s trying to see what I’m writing.  She must be one of them—a tourist.  New York City is loaded with tourists.  I’ll have to keep my notebook covered so she can’t steal a look at the beginning of greatness.

            A voice speaks to me.  Greatness?  All you have is a pretentious title, it says. 

            It is rather pretentious, isn’t it?  Where did I even hear the word curmudgeon?  I once read that when you learn a new word you’ll hear it three times that day.  No, no, I won’t listen.  I can use curmudgeon, I’m allowed.  

            Moving on—the first sentence.  I have come to an intersection that forks into a thousand roads, and only one of them is the right path.  One has to be very careful when starting a story—one has to be very careful, always. 

A man at the counter looks to his girlfriend and points at me.  “See, there he is,” he whispers to her.  “This is how he used to write—in a café just like normal people.”

These damn tourists—they make me so angry.  I can’t write with so many of them gawking, examining me like I’m a zoo specimen.   Tomorrow’s paparazzi—don’t they know how dangerous it is to come here?  They could change everything!  They could damage my fate.  I should scare them back to whenever they came from.

The man looks down at his watch, which isn’t a normal watch.  He’s checking to see how much time he has left here—how much he paid for—or maybe he’s communicating with someone back home.  I hope it’s worth jeopardizing my career, fool. 

Even if I had the ability to visit Mark Twain, I wouldn’t.  If I wanted to learn about him I’d visit his home in Hartford, Connecticut and pay for the damn tour like everybody else.  These people think their rich blood is above the laws of physics.  Something is going to go irrevocably afoul and then we’ll see how much longer they keep up these little historical vacations. 

I ignore them—act like I’m ignorant of what they’re really doing here, as they stupidly think I am—and get back to my writing.

After a lifetime of change, the curmudgeon, who was not always so miserly, came to the realization that he hadn’t needed a whole lot of money or a true love to be happy in life, rather he required a modest degree of comfort and a single intimate relation to which he could express his emotions.  Emotion being a mercurial energy, it was necessary to have someone close to him so that he could exhaust it in the positive form of affection, before it could transmute into negative forms such as anger, despair, or fear.  However, his best and only friend had recently passed away, taking with him the curmudgeon’s only emotional outlet.  For several months he had stayed cooped up in his stifling apartment, and the emotional alchemy was already well underway.

I’m about to start the next paragraph when the eyeballs of the woman sitting next to me fall out of her head.  They land on the table silent and stiff, like two small bags of sand.  I act as if I don’t notice.  The woman didn’t even flinch when it happened.  Maybe she has a prosthetic head.  Perhaps she was decapitated in her time by a flying car and, medicine and travel being so advanced in the future, paramedics were able to arrive on the scene and save her brain.  Now she has a prosthetic head in which her mind is cradled, controlling the rest of her body through transmitters and microchips.  It looks so real.

I look at the other patrons.  No one else seems to notice.  Maybe these kinds of prosthetics are common in the future.  What a wondrous world these tourists come from!  And yet with so many advancements, my writing remains timeless to them.

Her eyes expand and then contract, slinking across the table like quick, fat inchworms.  The sight of such grotesquery makes me gasp.  I know what she’s up to.  It isn’t enough to come back and treat the past as if it were a two-bit museum, but to try to steal my work?  I move the notebook to my right side. 

Oh no, I lost track of her crawling eyes!

As I turn from side to side trying to see where the little buggers slid off to, the woman speaks to me.

“Are you alright?”  She inquires, the center of her jaw rising and falling like that of a ventriloquist’s dummy.

I’m hesitant to respond.  Is this a trick?  “Alright?”    

Her eyes are back in their sockets.  Her prosthetic skull must house small spring-wound spools wrapped with a fine wire invisible to the naked eye.  She must have pressed a button, probably at the base of her head, snapping her slithering scouts back into place like the ruler of a tape measure. 

“You’ve been muttering to yourself since you sat down.  Do you need help?”

“I’m sure you’d like that,” I say to her sarcastically.  “Why don’t I just dictate my story and you can write it down for me?” 

She says nothing.  She just stares at me, feigning puzzlement. 

“You wish, lady.”

She gives me that look and turns back to whatever farce she was originally pretending to be consumed by.  She’ll probably return to her own time now that she knows I’ve figured her out, but someone else will come back in her place.  Someone always does.

Too many intrusions—I have to focus on writing.  This story will be my magnum opus, I know it.  My arm doesn’t feel right.  The weight of it is straining my shoulder.  I raise my hands and discover that my right arm is a shriveled mirror version of my left. How can I be expected to write when one arm is so much smaller than the other?

The brass bell on the door rings as a young boy enters the café.  He turns his head to me and smiles broadly, elated at having found his mark.  I bet his teacher is having him write a research paper about me.  He must be the son of some rich politician—maybe 20^th generation Vanderbilt—to have the means to come back here to study my life for a measly homework assignment.

A child shouldn’t be too hard to evade, despite the fact that children from the future are much more cunning than the children of today.  Still, he is just a child. 

I press the ballpoint of my pen to the page.  I must finish the story if I’m to be published. 

The couple at the counter is talking excitedly.  The gesture of picking up my pen having stirred them. 

“Quiet,” I tell them, “or I’ll rip those things off your wrists and send you tumbling through time like a sphere in a pinball machine.”

The couple feigns surprise.  Everyone looks surprised.  They never expect anyone to speak up to them.  Pompous future people—think they’re so much smarter than us, the denizens of this hillbilly epoch.  Now they see that we people of the past are not so primitive and meek.  Most of the tourists look at me with disdain and then go back to half-ignoring me, as if I’m the one disrupting their lives. 

Before they go back in time I bet their travel agent makes them sign a contract stating that no matter what happens, they mustn’t own up to the rouse, and they mustn’t bet on horses.  Otherwise the past would be in serious trouble.  That’s why none of them have ever admitted that they were time tourists before, no matter how persuasive I was.

I need to go somewhere else to write.  There are too many time tourists here.  They may try to stop me if I attempt to leave.  I scan the room, guaranteeing that everyone averts their eyes.  When no one is watching me, I hurl my coffee cup across the room.  It shatters against the wall.  As everyone looks to the source of the noise I run out of the café, knocking a chair over as I flee.

Around the corner I catch my breath, my back against the brick wall. I wish I could go to the library to write, but I can’t after what happened last time—probably not for at least a year or so.  Hopefully by then they’ll have forgotten my face.  I would lock myself in my room, but it’s too hard to write at home—too many knickknacks to distract—too many arguments about doctors and pills.  I’ll have to settle for the park instead.    

People in the park pass by and glance at me curiously.  I ignore them and try to think of what the curmudgeon should do next, but it’s so hard to write when one arm is so much smaller than the other.

Murdering Grandpa and Other Time Travel Workarounds

(This is a piece I wrote for Medium.com a few months ago.  I'm rather proud of it.  For those of you who are unfamiliar, Medium.com is a lovely website where anyone can post articles about nearly anything.  I recommend you check it out.)

Time travel is always fun to think about. Who wouldn't want to go back in time to do things differently? You could make money with your knowledge of the future, put the moves on that girl you were too afraid to talk to, or murder your grandfather for no real reason. (Bear with me.) But according to scientists backwards time travel is not as straight-forward as one might think. I’m not talking about altering the past in a way that could drastically affect the future a la Ray Bradbury. In fact if I had to weigh what I stand to gain financially against the possibility of damaging the time continuum resulting in an alternate future where, let’s say, the United States is a communist country or the Keurig was never invented, I would probably throw caution to the wind and go for the money.

I’m referring to what scientists call the grandfather paradox. The theory goes like this: Imagine you travel back in time to find your grandfather before he met your grandmother. Unbeknownst to you, one of the side-effects of time travel is a thirst for blood, and you decide to shoot your grandfather, killing him instantly. By murdering your grandfather he could never have met your grandmother. They couldn't have conceived your mother, and she in turn couldn't have conceived you.

But wait, if you were never born, that means you couldn't have gone back in time to kill your grandfather to begin with. But… then that means your grandpa would have fathered your mother, she would still mother you, and then you would be able to kill your grandfather. But that means…. Uh oh—time paradox. The laws of physics breakdown, time and the universe unravel, and life ceases to exist all because you had to indulge some twisted desire to kill your pop-pop, of all people.

The grandfather paradox is a simple, albeit morbid, paradigm designed to illustrate the inherent problem with backwards time travel. The idea has given rise to a few different theories.

1) Chronology Protection Conjecture

The chronology protection conjecture theorized by Stephen Hawking asserts that the physics of this universe govern in such a way that backwards time travel isn't allowed, and so the grandfather paradox, valid as it is, becomes nothing more than a thought experiment.

Hawking does admit that if space-time could be folded enough, backward time travel might be possible, but he adds that warping space-time to the extent required may result in a blast of energy strong enough to destroy the time traveler, and possibly a large portion of space-time itself. I suppose the latter theory supports the idea that pieces of your corpse could travel backwards in time, but, aside from scaring the shit out of some random in the past, it’s of little use.

2) Self-Consistency Principle

The self-consistency principle, posited by Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov, theorizes that the laws of physics do allow backwards time travel. However, they will not allow a time traveler to change the past in any significant way. Touching again on your senicide festish, let’s say I gave you a time machine. Could you use it to leap back in time to “take care of” your grandfather? No of course not. I know this because you’re currently alive. If you were going to destroy grandpa, then it would have happened already, and you wouldn't be here. The self-consistency principal claims that, even if you went back and tried, nature would prevent you from causing any real damage. Your gun would jam, or you would trip on a rock and knock yourself unconscious, etc….

To illustrate the point using a different, although only slightly less macabre, example let’s say a scientist created a time machine to go back and stop the Hindenburg from exploding. If the scientist were able to save the Hindenburg, then what would have been the motivation to create a time machine in the first place? Novikov argues that the past is fixed and nature won’t allow it to be tampered with. Now that isn't saying you couldn't go back to 1942 to drink a Coke and have a look around, but it is saying that you couldn't back to 1942 to drink a Coke and then somehow prevent the Holocaust from occurring.

Novikov’s theory is more fun than Hawking’s, but it’s still too safe. It permits you to travel back in time, but it essentially renders you impotent once you get there, and, knowing you, you won’t be happy until your hands are stained with the crimson blood of your grandfather, which brings us to the third theory.

3) The Many-Worlds Interpretation

This is the cool one. Backwards time travel is explained using the many-worlds interpretation (MWI). For the uninitiated, the MWI is a quantum theory stating that all possible pasts and futures exist in parallel universes, e.g., if you’re just some dude sitting at a desk in this universe, you are a cross-dressing bankruptcy lawyer in another. In another universe you are missing your left foot and in another your car has a standard transmission instead of an automatic, and on and on.

This third theory claims that whenever you jump back in time the universe splits. The resultant universe follows its own separate timeline. Meaning your actions would affect the past of this new universe, but not the past of the universe you came from. This new universe should be similar enough that you could still buy shares of Berkshire Hathaway and, barring an attempt on your part to assassinate Warren Buffet (he is pretty grandfather-like), the company in the parallel universe would probably thrive like it has in your origin universe. You could also blow your grandfather away without any consequence to your existence, relatively speaking anyway. Your alternate universe self couldn't be born (assuming he even would have been—maybe grandpa’s gay in this universe). But, hey, there can be only one.

Sounds like the best deal, doesn't it? Well, aside from all the murder and retrograde abortions anyway. There is one hitch of course. No matter how similar this parallel universe would be to your own, it still wouldn't be your universe. Sure you’d get to off grandpa, but he wouldn't really be your grandpa, and your friends, family, and lovers wouldn't really be your friends, family, and lovers. Your loved ones would be back in the universe you abandoned in favor of wealth and familial homicide. Should that nagging thought get the better of you, it wouldn't matter. Any attempt to time travel back to your starting point would only lead you to the future of the alternate universe you created. You’d be stranded. It’s something to think about the next time you get the urge to act out the movie Terminator with your dear old granddad.