—and the body that crumples to the floor is me.
Of course.
It was the jump-shock that killed him. Will kill me.
He was old. The oldest of them all. (But not so old as to be distinguishable from the rest. He could have been any of them. Us.)
There was silence in the room. Then a soft shadowed sigh, almost a sound of relief, as too many ancient lungs released their burden of breaths held too long.
They’d been expecting this, waiting for it — eagerly? — the curiosity of the morbid draws them again and again until the room is crowded with fearful old men. Each praying that, somehow, this time it won’t happen. And each terrified that it will.
And perhaps — perhaps each is most afraid that the next time he comes to this moment, he will not be a witness, but the guest of honor himself…
Two of the younger men (younger? They were older than I — or were they?) moved to the body. It was still warm. One of them clicked the belt open; the last setting on it was 5:30, March 16, 1975. (Meaningless, of course. He could have come from there, or it could have been a date held in storage. There was no way of knowing.)
They took charge efficiently, as if they had done this before. Many times before. (And in a way, they had.) They slung the body between them, tapped their belts and vanished.
“What’re they going to do with him?” I asked the Don in the business suit,
“Take him back to his own time, to a place where he can be buried.”
“Where?”
He shook his head. “Uh-uh. When the time comes youll know. Right now it wouldn’t be a good idea.”
“But the funeral—”
“Listen to me.” He gripped my arm firmly. “You cannot go to the funeral. None of us can.”
“But why?”
“There’ll be others there,” he said. “Others. A man should attend his own funeral only once. Do you understand?”
After I thought about it awhile, I guessed I did.
As for me…
I’m almost afraid to use the timebelt now.
But now I know who I am.
I guess I’ve known for some time. I’m not sure when I realized; it was a gradual dawning, not a sudden flash of aha. I just sort of slipped into it as if it had been waiting for me all my life. I’d been heading toward it without ever once stopping to consider how or why.
And even if I had, would it have changed anything?
I don’t think so.
At first I tried to ignore the events of August 23. I went back to the earlier days of the party, but burdened as I was with the knowledge of what lurked only a few weeks ahead, I could not recapture the mood. (And that was sensed by the others; I was shunned as being an irritable and temperamental old variant. Nor was I the only one; there were several of us. We put a damper on the party wherever we went.)
For a while I brooded by myself. For a while I was terribly scared. In fact, I still am.
I don’t want to die. But I’ve seen my own dead body. I’ve seen myself in the act of dying. Death comes black and hard, rushing down on me from the future, with no possible chance of escape. I wake up cold and shuddering in the middle of the night, and were it not for the fact that I am always there to hold and comfort myself, I would go mad. (And I still may do so — )
Uncle Jim once told me that a man must learn to live with he fact of his own mortality. A man must accept the fact of death.
But does that mean he must welcome it?
I’d thought that the measure of the success of any life form was its ability to survive in its ecological niche. But I’d been wrong. That doesn’t apply to individuals, not at all — only to a species as a whole.
If you want to think in terms of individuals, you have to qualify that statement. The measure of the success of any individual animal is based on its ability to survive long enough to reproduce. And care for the young until they are able to care for themselves.
I have met half that requirement. I’ve reproduced.
(It’s said that the only immortality a man can achieve is through his children. I understand that now.)
I went back to 1956 to bring up my son. He was right where I had left him.
I named him Daniel Jamieson Eakins, and I told him I was his uncle. His Uncle Jim.
Yes. That’s who I am.
In many ways, Danny is a great joy to me. I am learning as much from him as he is learning from me. He is a beautiful child and I relish every moment of his youth. I relive it by watching it. Sometimes I stand above his crib and just watch him sleep. I yearn to pick him up and hug him and tell him how much I love him — but I let him sleep. I must avoid smothering him. I must let him be his own man.
I yearn to leap ahead into the future and meet the young man he will become. It will be me, of course, starting all over again. Wondrously, I have come full circle. Once more I am in a timeline where I exist from birth to death. So I must avoid tangling it. I will try to live as. serially as possible for my child.
(No, that’s not entirely true. Several times I have bounced forward and observed him from a distance. But only from a distance.)
On occasion I still flee to the house in 1999. But I no longer do so desperately. I go only for short vacations. Very short. I know what awaits me there. But I also know that I will live to see my son reach manhood, so I am not as fearful as I once was. I know I have time; so death has lost its immediacy.
And the party has changed.too. The mood of it is no longer so morbid. Not even grim. Just quiet. Waiting. Yes, many of these men have come here to die. No — to await death in the company of others like themselves. They help each other. And that’s good. (I don’t need their help, not yet, so right now I can be objective about it. Maybe later, I won’t.)
So I’m relaxed. At ease with myself. Happy. Because I know who I am.
I’m Dan and Don and Diane and Donna.
And Uncle Jim too. And somewhere, Aunt Jane.
And little Danny. I diaper him; I powder his pink little fanny and wonder that my skin was ever that smooth. I clean up his messes. My messes. I’ve been doing that all my life. I’m my own mother and my own father. I’m the only person who exists in my world — but isn’t it that way for all of us? Me more than anyone.
How did this incredible circle get started?
(Or has it always existed? Could it have begun in the same way the timebelt began — in a world that I excised out of existence? In a place so far distant and so almostpossible that the traces of the might-have-been are buried completely in the already-is?)
Many years ago I pondered the reason for my own existence. (Why “me"? Why me as “me"? Why do I perceive myself — and why do I experience me as “me” and not somebody else? Why was I born at all? It could have been anyone!) It almost drove me mad. I had to have a meaning. I was sure I had to. Variants of me did go mad seeking that meaning — but only those of me who could accept the gift of life without questioning it too intensely would survive to find the answer.
I wrote in these pages that if there were an infinite number of variations of myself, then what meaning could any one of us have? I wondered about that then. I know the answer now. I know my answer.