And there are still other differences. Disturbing ones.
There are places where my skin is the wrong color, or my eyes the wrong shape. And there is one time in the future when I am the wrong sex.
There are places where people’s faces are — different.
I can witness.
I cannot participate.
But witnessing is enough: I have seen more of history than any other human being. I have timeskimmed and timestopped and my journeys have been voyages of mystery and adventure.
There is much that I don’t understand. There are things that are incomprehensible to one who is not of the era and the culture.
But still — the proper study of humanity is humanity itself.
History is not just old news.
It’s people. It’s the ebb and flow of life. It’s the sound of bells and horns, the stamp of boots in the street, the flapping of banners in the wind, the smell of smoke and flowers. It’s bread and trains and newspapers. It’s the acrid smell of the herd, and the press of the crowd. It’s surprise and glory and fear. It’s confusion, panic, and disaster—
—and above all, history is triumph!
It is the triumph of individuals creating, designing, building, changing, challenging — never quitting. It is the continual victory of the intellect over the animal; the unquenchable vitality of life! Passion overwhelms despair and humanity goes on; sometimes seething, sometimes dirty, sometimes even unspeakably evil.
But always — despite the setbacks — the direction is always upward.
If I must taste the bitterness, it is worth it; because I have also shared the dreams.
And the promise.
I have seen its fulfillment.
I know the truth and the destiny of the human race.
It is a proud and lonely thing to be a man.
This part, I think, may be the hardest to record.
It was inevitable, I suppose, that it happen, but it has caused me to do some serious thinking. About myself. About Dan. About Don.
When Uncle Jim died, I thought my life would be changed, and I worried about the directions it might take. When I thought I had eliminated myself by a timebelt paradox, I realized how much I feared dying — I realized how much I needed to be Dan to my Don and Don to my Dan.
But this—
—this makes me question the shape of my whole life.
What am I? Who am I?
What am I doing to myself?
Have I made a wrong decision? Am I moving in a strange and terrible direction?
I wish I knew.
It started — when? Yesterday evening? Time is funny when you don’t live it linearly. When I get tired, I sleep, I flip forward or backward to the nearest nighttime and climb into bed.
If I’m not tired, and it’s night, I flash to day and go to the beach. Or I jump to winter and go skiing. I stay as long as I want, or as short as I want. I stay for weeks or only a few minutes. I’m not a slave to the clock — nor even to the seasons.
What I mean is, I’m no longer living in a straight line.
I bounce back and forth through the days like a temporal Ping-Pong ball. I don’t even know how old I am anymore. I think I’ve passed my twentieth birthday, but I’m not sure.
It’s strange…
Time used to be a flowing river. I sailed down it and watched the shores sweep past: here, a warm summer evening, ice tinkling in lemonade glasses; there, a cool fall morning, dead leaves crunching underfoot and my breath in frosty puffs. Time was a slowly shifting panorama along the river bank. I was a leaf in the water. I was carried helplessly along, a victim of the current.
Now I’m out of the river and standing on the bank. I am the motion and time is the observer. No longer a victim, I am the cause. All of time is laid out before me like a table, no longer a moving entity, but a vast and mutable landscape. I can leap to any point on it at will. Would I like a nice summer day? Yes, there’s a pleasant one. Am I in the mood for a fall morning? Ah, that’s nice. I don’t have to wait for the river to carry me to a place where I might be able to find that moment — I can go exactly to it.
No moment can ever escape me. I’ve chased twi-
light and captured dawn. I’ve conquered day and tamed the night. I can live as I choose because I am the master of time.
I laugh to think of it. Time is an everlasting smorgasbord — and I am the gourmet, picking here, choosing there, discarding this unnecessary bit of tripe and taking an extra piece of filet instead.
But even this temporal mobility, no matter how unlimited it is, does not keep me from arbitrarily dividing things into “day” and “night.” It must be a human thing to want to divide eternity into bite-sized chunks. It’s easier to digest. So no matter how many jumps I make, anything that happened before my last sleep happened “yesterday,” and everything since I woke up (and until I go to sleep again) is part of my “today.” Some of my “todays” have spanned a thousand years. And “tomorrow” comes not with the dawn, but with my next awakening.
I think I’m still on a twenty-four-hour life cycle, but I can’t be sure. If I add a few extra hours to my “day” so as to enjoy the beach a little longer, I find my body tends to obey the local time, not mine. Perhaps humanity is unconsciously geared to the sun. At least, it seems that way. I don’t get tired until after the world gets dark. (But like I said before, I’m not sure how old I am anymore. I’ve lost track.)
Anyway. What I’m getting to is that this happened “yesterday.”
Don and I were listening to Beethoven. (The original Beethoven. I had gotten a recorder from 2050, a multichannel device capable of greater fidelity than anything known in 1975, and had taped all eleven of the master’s symphonies. Yes. All eleven.)
We had spent the day swimming — skinny-dipping actually (it’s strange to watch your own nude body from a distance), and now we were resting up before dinner. I have this mansion in the hills overlooking the San Fernando Valley; the view is spectacular. All fields and orchards. Even the bedroom has a picture window.
It was dusk. The sun was just dipping behind the hills to the west. It was large and orange through the haze. Don had turned on the stereo and collapsed exhaustedly on the bed (a king-size water bed) without even toweling off.
I didn’t think anything of it. I was tired too. I made an attempt to dry myself off, then lay down beside him. (I’d gotten into a very bad habit with Don — with Dan — with myself. I’d discovered I didn’t like being alone. Even when I sleep, I need the assurance of knowing there’s somebody next to me. So more and more I found myself climbing into bed with one or more versions of myself. Sometimes there’s a lot of horseplay and giggling. What did I want? Did I know? Is that why I did it? It extends to other things too. I won’t swim alone. And several times we’ve showered together, ostensibly so we could scrub each other’s back.)
We were both stretched out naked on the water bed, just staring at the ceiling and listening to the Pastoral Symphony, that part near the beginning where it goes “pah-rump-pah-pah, rump-pah-pah… ” (You know, where Disney’s joyous trumpets announce a cascade of happy unicorns.)
It was a good tiredness. Languorous. I was floating oh so pleasantly and the light show on the ceiling was swirling in red and pink and purple, shifting to blue and white.
I’d been getting strange vibrations from Don all day.
I wasn’t sure why. (Or perhaps I hadn’t wanted to admit — ) He kept looking at me oddly. His glance kept meeting mine and he seemed to be smiling about some inner secret, but he wouldn’t say what it was. He touched me a lot too. There had been a lot of clowning around in the pool, and once I thought he had been about to — (I must have sensed it earlier, I must have; but I must have also been refusing to recognize it.)