Q: A Love Story

Q: A Love Story Evan Mandery In a gripping tale of time travel and true love, a successful writer meets his future self, who advises him not to marry Q, the love of his life.Would you give up the love of your life on the advice of a stranger?A picturesque love story begins at the cinema when our hero – an unacclaimed writer, unorthodox professor and unmistakeable New Yorker – first meets Q, his one everlasting love. Over the following weeks, in the rowboats of Central Park, on the miniature golf courses of Lower Manhattan, under a pear tree in Q’s own inner-city Eden, their miraculous romance accelerates and blossoms.Nothing, it seems – not even the hostilities of Q’s father or the impending destruction of Q’s garden – can disturb the lovers, or obstruct their advancing wedding. They are destined to be together.Until one day a man claiming to be our hero’s future self tells him he must leave Q.In Q, Evan Mandery has fashioned an epic love story on quantum foundations. The novel wears its philosophical and narrative sophistication lightly: with exuberant, direct and witty prose, Mandery brings an essayist’s poise to this fabulous romance. And, finally, Q has an ending that will melt even the darkest heart. Q A Novel Evan Mandery Dedication For V, my Q Epigraph What is the point of this story? What information pertains? The thought that life could be better Is woven indelibly into our hearts and our brains. PAUL SIMON, “TRAIN IN THE DISTANCE” Contents Cover (#ulink_d77a121f-ac99-510a-b01e-3d02159bc55f) Title Page Dedication Epigraph Prologue Fair Book One Good Chapter One In the aftermath of the publication of my novel, Time’s… Chapter Two It is no easy matter to arrange a table at… Chapter Three I order a porcini mushroom tart as a starter and… Chapter Four By this time, Q and I are far along in… Chapter Five After the ominous admonition that I must not wed Q,… Chapter Six I harbor suspicions, intensified by this conversation at the end… Chapter Seven You have been following me.” I-60 says this directly, matter-of-factly,… Chapter Eight To me this is all a dream, the worst of… Chapter Nine During the weeks following our dinner at La Grenouille and… Chapter Ten On the last Wednesday of November, Q drags herself out… Chapter Eleven Even by her lofty standards, Joan Deveril has outdone herself… Chapter Twelve Tristan Handy seems out of time. He rises as he… Book Two Better Chapter Thirteen The Monday following the fateful Thanksgiving dinner, I move out… Chapter Fourteen Getting a table at Jean-Georges is challenging. Getting a table… Chapter Fifteen Freud woke gently, the rising sun streaming in off the… Chapter Sixteen The courtship of Minnie Zuckerman begins in earnest over fondue. Chapter Seventeen I am shocked when I-50 tells me his age. He… Chapter Eighteen In Frewin Court, off Cornmarket Street, the Oxford Union was… Chapter Nineteen The morning after I finish writing the Spencer-Freud debate chapter,… Chapter Twenty In 2024, John Henry Adams won the Pulitzer Prize for… Chapter Twenty-One I-77 is quick to condemn my short story about the… Chapter Twenty-Two The decision to attend law school sits fine with me. Chapter Twenty-Three Back home in New York, I begin a concerted program… Book Three Best Chapter Twenty-Four When time travel is discovered, I am not surprised. I… Chapter Twenty-Five Even after the prices come down, time travel is expensive,… Chapter Twenty-Six The bus to Rhinebeck wends its way up the Taconic… Acknowledgments Other Books by Evan Mandery Copyright About the Publisher Prologue FAIR Q’ Quentina Elizabeth Deveril, is the love of my life. We meet for the first time by chance at the movies, a double feature at the Angelika: Casablanca and Play It Again, Sam. It is ten o’clock on a Monday morning. Only three people are in the theater: Q, me, and a gentleman in the back who is noisily indulging himself. This would be disturbing but understandable if it were to Ingrid Bergman, but it is during Play It Again, Sam and he repeatedly mutters, “Oh, Grover.” I am repulsed but in larger measure confused, as is Q. This is what brings us together. She looks back at the man several times, and in so doing our eyes meet. She suppresses an infectious giggle, which gets me, and I, like she, spend the second half of the movie fending off hysterics. We are bonded. After the film, we chat in the lobby like old friends. “What was that?” she asks. I don’t know,” I say. “Did he mean Grover from Sesame Street?” “Are there even any other Grovers?” “There’s Grover Cleveland.” “Was he attractive?” “I don’t think so.” “Was anybody in the 1890s attractive?” “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” “It serves me right for coming to a movie on a Monday morning,” Q says. Then she thinks about the full implication of this reflection and looks at me suspiciously. “What about you? Do you just hang out in movie theaters with jossers all day or do you have a job?” “I am gainfully employed. I am a professor and a writer,” I explain. “I am working on a novel right now. Usually I write in the mornings. But I can never sleep on Sunday nights, so I always end up being tired and blocked on Monday mornings. Sometimes I come here to kill time.” Q explains that she cannot sleep on Sunday nights either. This becomes the first of many, many things we learn that we have in common. “I’m Q,” she says, extending her hand—her long, angular, seductive hand. “Your parents must have been quite parsimonious.” She laughs. “I am formally Quentina Elizabeth Deveril, but everyone calls me Q.” “Then I shall call you Q.” “It should be easy for you to remember, even in your tired state.” “The funny thing is, this inability to sleep on Sunday nights is entirely vestigial. Back in graduate school, when I was trying to finish my dissertation while teaching three classes at the same time, I never knew how I could get through a week. That would get me nervous, so it was understandable that I couldn’t sleep. But now I set my own schedule. I write whenever I want, and I am only teaching one class this semester, which meets on Thursdays. I have no pressure on me to speak of, and even still I cannot sleep on Sunday nights.” “Perhaps it is something universal about Mondays, because the same thing is true for me too. I have nothing to make me nervous about the week. I love my job, and furthermore, I have Mondays off.” “Maybe it is just ingrained in us when we’re kids,” I say. “Or maybe there are tiny tears in the fabric of the universe that rupture on Sunday evenings and the weight of time and existence presses down on the head of every sleeping boy and girl. And then these benevolent creatures, which resemble tiny kangaroos, like the ones from that island off the coast of Australia, work diligently overnight to repair the ruptures, and in the morning everything is okay.” “You mean like wallabies?” “Like wallabies, only smaller and a million times better.” I nod. “You have quite an imagination. What do you do?” “Mostly I dream. But on the weekends,” she adds, with the faintest hint of mischief, “I work at the organic farm stand in Union Square.” On the following Saturday, I visit the farmer’s market in Union Square. It is one of those top ten days of the year: no humidity, cloud-free, sunshine streaming—the sort that graces New York only in April and October. It seems as if the entire city is groggily waking at once from its hibernation and is gathering here, at the sprawling souk, to greet the spring. It takes some time to find Q. Finally, I spot her stand. It is nestled between the entrance to the Lexington Avenue subway and a small merry-go-round. Q is selling a loaf of organic banana bread to an elderly lady. She makes me wait while the woman pays her. Q is in a playful mood. “Can I help you, sir?” “Yes,” I say, clearing my throat to sound official. “I should like to purchase some pears. I understand that yours are the most succulent and delicious in the district.” “Indeed they are, sir. What kind would you like?” At this point I drop the fa?ade, and in my normal street voice say, “I didn’t know there was more than one kind of pear.” “Are you serious?” “Please don’t make fun of me.” Q restrains herself, as she did in the theater, but I can see that she is amused by my ignorance. It is surely embarrassing. I know that there are many kinds of apples, but somehow it has not occurred to me that pears are similarly diversified. The only ones I have ever eaten were canned in syrup, for dessert at my Nana Be’s house. To the extent that I ever considered the issue, I thought pears were pears in the same way that pork is pork. Q thus has every right to laugh. She does not, though. Instead she takes me by the hand and leads me closer to the fruit stand. This is infinitely better. “We have Bartlett, Anjou, Bosc, and Bradford pears. Also Asian pears, Chinese whites, and Siberians. What is your pleasure?” “I’ll take the Bosc,” I say. “I have always admired their persistence against Spanish oppressors and the fierce individuality of their language and people.” “Those are the Basques,” says Q. “These are the Bosc.” “Well, then, I’ll take whatever is the juiciest and most succulent.” “That would be the Anjou.” “Then the Anjou I shall have.” “How many?” “Three,” I say. Q puts the three pears in a bag, thanks me for my purchase, and with a warm smile turns to help the next customer. I am uncertain about the proper next step, but only briefly. When I return home and open the bag, I see that in addition to the pears Q has included a card with her phone number. On our first date we rent rowboats in Central Park. It is mostly a blur. We begin chatting, and soon enough the afternoon melts into the evening and the evening to morning. We do not kiss or touch. It is all conversation. We make lists. Greatest Game-Show Hosts of All Time. She picks Alex Trebek, an estimable choice, but too safe for her in my view. I advance the often-overlooked Bert Convy. We find common ground in Chuck Woolery. Best Sit-Com Theme Songs. I propose Mister Ed, which she validates as worthy, but puts forward Maude, which I cannot help but agree is superior. I tell her the little-known fact that there were three theme songs to Alice, and she is impressed that I know the lyrics to each of them, as well as the complete biography of Vic Tabak. We make eerie connections. During the discussion of Top Frozen Dinners, I fear she will say Salisbury steak or some other Swanson TV dinner, but no, she says Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese and I exclaim “Me too!” and tell her that when my parents went out on Saturday nights, I would bake a Stouffer’s tray in the toaster oven, brown bread crumbs on top, and enjoy the macaroni and cheese while watching a Love Boat–Fantasy Island doubleheader, hoping Barbi Benton would appear as a special guest. We discover that we favor the same knish (the Gabila), the same pizza (Patsy’s, but only the original one up in East Harlem, which still fires its ovens with coal), the same Roald Dahl children’s books (especially James and the Giant Peach). We both think the best place to watch the sun set over the city is from the bluffs of Fort Tryon Park, overlooking the Cloisters, both think H&H bagels are better than Tal’s, both think that Times Square had more character with the prostitutes. One after the other: the same, the same, the same. We sing together a euphonic and euphoric chorus of agreement, our voices and spirits rising higher and higher, until, inevitably, we discuss the greatest vice president of all time and exclaim in gleeful, climactic unison “Al Gore! Al Gore! Al Gore!” It is magical. I escort Q home to her apartment at Allen and Rivington in the Lower East Side, buy her flowers from a street vendor, and happily accept a good-night kiss on the cheek. Then I glide home, six miles to my apartment on Riverside Drive, feet never touching the ground, dizzy. Already I am completely full of her. For our second date I suggest miniature golf. Q agrees and proposes an overlooked course that sits on the shore of the Hudson River. The establishment is troubled. It has transferred ownership four times in the last three years, and in each instance gone under. Recently it has been redesigned yet again and is being operated on a not-for-profit basis by the Neo-Marxist Society of Lower Manhattan, itself struggling. The membership rolls of the NMSLM have been dwindling over the past twenty years. Q explains that the new board of directors thinks the miniature golf course can help refill the organization’s depleted coffers and will be just the thing to make communism seem relevant to the youth of New York. They are also considering producing a rap album, tentatively titled, “Red and Not Dead.” Q is enthusiastic about the proposed date and claims on our walk along Houston Street to be an accomplished miniature golfer. I am skeptical. When we arrive at the course, I am saddened to see that though it is another beautiful spring Saturday in the city, the course is almost empty. I don’t care one way or the other about the Neo-Marxist Society of Lower Manhattan, but I am a great friend of the game of miniature golf. The good news is that Q and I are able to walk right up to the starter’s booth. It is attended by an overstuffed man with a graying communist mustache who is reading a newspaper. He is wearing a T-shirt that has been machine-washed to translucence and reads: CHE NOW MORE THAN EVER The sign above the starter’s booth has been partially painted over, ineptly, so it is possible to see that it once said: GREEN FEE: $10 PER PLAYER The second line has been whited out and re-lettered, so that the sign now says: GREEN FEE: BASED ON ABILITY TO PAY I hand the starter twenty dollars and receive two putters and two red balls. “Sorry,” I say. “These balls are both red.” “They’re all red,” he says. “How do you tell them apart?” I ask, but it is no use. He has already returned to his copy of the Daily Leader. The first hole is a hammer and sickle, requiring an accurate stroke up the median of the mallet, and true to her word, Q is adept with the short stick. She finds the gap between two wooden blocks, which threaten to divert errant shots into the desolate territories of the sickle, and makes herself an easy deuce. I match her with a competent but uninspired par. The second hole is a Scylla-and-Charybdis design, a carryover from the original course, which has rather uncomfortably been squeezed into the communist motif. One route to the hole is through a narrow loop de loop, putatively in the shape of Stalin’s tongue; the other requires a precise shot up and over a steep ramp—balls struck too meekly will be redeposited at the feet of the player; balls struck too boldly will sail past the hole and land, with a one-stroke penalty, in a murky pond bearing the macabre label “Lenin’s Bladder.” Undaunted, Q takes the daring route over the ramp and nearly holes her putt. On the sixth, the windmill hole, she times it perfectly, her ball rolling through at the precise moment Trotsky’s legs spread akimbo, and finds the cup for an ace. Q squeals in glee. Q’s play inspires my own. On the tenth, I make my own hole in one, a double banker around Castro’s beard, and the game is on. On the fourteenth, I draw even in the match, with an improbable hole out through a chute in the mouth of Eugene V. Debs. Q responds by nailing a birdie into Engels’s left eye. We come to the seventeenth hole, a double-decker of Chinese communists, dead even. The hole demands a precise tee shot between miniature statutes of Deng Xiaopeng and Lin Biao in order to find a direct chute to the lower deck. Fail to find this tunnel to the lower level and the golfer’s ball falls down the side of a ramp and is deposited in a cul-de-sac, guarded by the brooding presence of Jiang Qing, whose relief stares accusatorily at the giant replica of Mao, which presides over all action at the penultimate hole. Q capably caroms her ball off Deng, holes out on the lower deck for her two, and watches anxiously as I take my turn. I strike my putt slightly off center and for a moment it appears as if the ball will not reach Deng and Lin—but it does, and hangs tantalizingly on the edge of the chute. Q is breathless, as am I, until the ball falls finally and makes its clattering way to the lower level. Unlike Q’s ball, however, mine does not merely tumble onto the lower level in strategic position; it continues forward and climactically drops into the cup for a magnificent ace and definitive control of the match. I walk down the Staircase of One Thousand Golfing Heroes, grinning all the while, and bend over to triumphantly collect my ball from the hole. Then I rise and hit my head squarely on Mao’s bronzed groin. This experience is painful (quite) and disappointing (we never get to play the eighteenth hole and thus miss our chance to win a free game by hitting the ball into Kropotkin’s nose), but not without its charms: Q takes me home in a cab, tucks me into bed, and kisses me on the head. This makes all the pain miraculously disappear. The next day, Q calls to check on me. On the phone, she tells me that date number three will be special. This is apparent when she collects me at my apartment. When I answer the door, she is wearing a simple sundress with a white carnation pinned into her shining hair, a mixture of red and brown. She looks like a hippie girl, though no hippie ever looked quite like this. She is radiant. “I am going to take you to my favorite place in the city,” she says, and takes me by the hand. I am happy to be led. We descend into the bowels of New York, catch the 2 train, change for the 1, and disembark at Chambers Street. It is early on a Wednesday morning; the streets are a-bustle with men and women in gray suits and black over-the-knee skirts hurrying to their office jobs. I, on the other hand, am unencumbered. I feel playful. “Are we going to the Stock Exchange?” I ask. “You work in an organic market on weekends, but you’re a broker during the week, right? You’re going to take me on a tour of the trading floor. What do you trade—stocks, futures, commodities? I bet you’re in metals. Let me guess: you trade copper and tin contracts on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Oh, happy day!” I buttonhole a gentleman passerby, a businessman freshly outfitted at the Barneys seasonal sale. “The woman I am seeing trades copper futures. Can you believe my good fortune? She is that beautiful and a commodities trader!” Q smiles and puts a finger to her lips, but I can see that she is amused. As the man I accosted recedes into our wake, Q pulls me closer, entwines her arm with my own, and leads me down Church Street. I am flummoxed. This is the kingdom of Corporate America, heart of the realm of the modern faceless feudal overlords who drive the economic engine of the ship of state, their domain guarded by giant sentries, skyscrapers, colossuses of steel and concrete dwarfing the peons below. It is no place for a flower child. But here we are, passing the worldwide headquarters of Moody’s Financial Services, and now the rebuilt 7 World Trade Center, and now the reconstruction of the towers, and now, just across the street, Century 21, the department store where I have had great success with T-shirts and belts, which can be quite dear. Somehow, Century 21 has withstood not one terrorist attack but two, as if to say to the fundamentalist Muslims, you have thrown your very best at us, twice, and still we are here, defiantly outfitting your mortal enemies, the Sons of Capitalism, with Hanes and Fruit of the Loom at surprisingly reasonable prices: God bless America! And now the Marriott, and now the hot dog stand on the corner of Liberty, of which I have partaken once, during a tenth-grade field trip to the Stock Exchange with Mr. Henderson, and became so violently ill that the doctors suspected I may have contracted botulism, and now passing a Tibetan selling yak wool sweaters off a blanket, and now turning left on Thames, and now entering, behind an old building that vaguely resembles the Woolworth, a dark alley that smells of what can only be wino-urine. And now I am completely confused. “What?” I say, but Q puts her hand over my mouth. “Wait,” she says, and like a trusting puppy I am led down the dank passageway. We pass some sacks of garbage, and a one-eyed alley cat lapping at some sour milk, and arrive, finally, at a tall iron fence, the sort that guards cemeteries in slasher flicks. “This is creepy,” I say. “Wait,” she says again and opens the gate, which plays its role to perfection and creaks in protest. Q takes my hand and leads me inside. I look around. “Can I cook?” she says, “or can I cook?” It is a garden—that is the only word for it—but what a garden! The gate is covered on the inside by a thick, reaching ivy, as is the entirety of the fence surrounding the conservatory. This vine keeps the heat and moisture from escaping. The atmosphere feels different. It is slightly humid, faintly reminiscent of a rain forest, and at least twenty degrees warmer than the ambient temperature on the streets of the city. When Q closes the door behind us, the current of clammy alley air is sealed behind us, and it is as if we have entered another world, an—I don’t dare say it, it will sound clich?d, but it is the only word on my mind—Eden. Here are apple trees, pullulating with swollen fruit. Q nods in approval and I administer to a branch the gentlest of taps. A compliant apple falls into my greedy hands. I bite in. The fruit is succulent, ambrosial. Here is a vegetable garden—orderly rows of broccoli, squash, yams, three kinds of onions, carrots, asparagus, parsnips, and what I think is okra. Here is an herb garden—redolent with rosemary and thyme, basil and sage, mint and rue, borage already in full flower. I have the sudden urge to make a salad. Here are apricots. Here plums. Here, somehow, avocados. Dirt pathways, well manicured, wend their way through the garden. One path leads to a pepper farm. Q tells me that ninety-seven varieties are in the ground. Another path leads to a dwarf Japanese holly that has been mounted on stone. Yet another path ends at a Zen waterfall. I have endless questions for Q. With skyscrapers encroaching on every side, how does enough light get in to sustain the garden? Who built it? When? Who owns it now? How could its existence have been kept a secret? Why is it so warm? Why is it not overrun by city idiots, ruined like everything else? How is this miracle possible? Q answers in the best way possible. She sits me down at the base of a pear tree—a pear tree in the middle of Manhattan!—kisses me passionately, and, oh God oh God, am I in love. Book One Chapter ONE In the aftermath of the publication of my novel, Time’s Broken Arrow (Ick Press; 1,550 copies sold), a counterhistorical exploration of the unexplored potentialities of a full William Henry Harrison presidency, I experience a liberal’s phantasmagoria, what might be described as a Walter Mitty–esque flight of fancy if Thurber’s Mitty, dreamer of conquest on the battlefield and adroitness in the surgery, had aspired instead to acceptance among the intellectual elite of New York City, more specifically the Upper West Side, the sort who on a Sunday jaunt for bagels buy the latest Pynchon on remainder from the street vendor outside of Zabar’s, thumb it on the way home while munching an everything, and have the very best intentions of reading it. I am on National Public Radio. It is putatively something of an honor because they do not often have novelists, except Salman Rushdie for whom NPR has always had a soft spot, but I know better. A friend of mine, a lawyer, has called in a favor from the host, whom he has helped settle some parking tickets. It is an undeserved and hence tainted tribute, but the moderator gives me the full NPR treatment all the same. He has read my opus cover to cover and asks me serious questions about several of the important issues raised in the book, including Harrison’s mistreatment of the Native Americans, problematic support for slavery in the Indiana Territory, and legendary fondness for pork products. “Which was his favorite?” he asks. “The brat,” I say. “I have never had a brat.” “That is too bad.” “Is it like the knock?” “No, it is much better.” “I find that hard to believe.” “It is nevertheless true,” I say. “It is the best of the wursts.” The Fantasia for Clavichord in C Minor begins playing in the background, signaling the end of the interview. “I am afraid we are out of time,” says the host. “Is this not always the case? Just as things are getting interesting, time runs out.” “It is always so,” I say, whereupon I am ushered out of the studio to the music of C. P. E. Bach. The following morning my book is reviewed in the New York Times. To be fair, it is not a review per se. Rather, it is an oblique reference to my novel in a less than favorable discourse on the new Stephen King novel. Specifically, the critic writes, “The new King is frivolous claptrap, utterly predictable, surprising only for its persistent tediousness and the suddenness with which the author’s once discerning ear for a story has, as if touched by Medusa herself, turned to stone. The novel’s feeble effort at extrapolating from a counterhistorical premise as a means of commenting on modern society compares favorably only with the other drivel of this sort—I dare not call it a genre lest it encourage anyone to waste more time on such endeavors—including the profoundly inept Time’s Broken Arrow, surely one of the worst novels of the year.” My publicist calls around nine o’clock and merrily inquires whether I have seen the mention in the morning’s paper. I say that I have. “It’s a coup of a placement,” she says. “Do you know how difficult it is for a first-time novelist to get a mention in the Times?” “A coup? She called my book one of the worst novels of the year. It isn’t even a review of my book. It’s just a gratuitous slight. It’s actually the worst review I have ever read, and she says my book is even worse still.” “Don’t be such a Gloomy Gus,” says the perky publicist before she hangs up. “You know, any publicity is good publicity.” I wonder about this. It seems too convenient. Surely a plumber would not stand before a customer and a burst pipe, wrench in hand, sewage seeping onto the carpet, and proudly proclaim, “Any plumbing is good plumbing.” I am out with Q at a restaurant in the Village. She is wearing her beauty casually, as she always does, draped like a comfortable sweater. She is full of life. The light from the flickering tea candle on the table reflects gently off her glowing face, and one can see the aura around her. She is glorious. The tables are close together, virtually on top of one another. We are near enough to our neighbors that either Q or I could reach out and take the salt from their table without fully extending our arms. It is a couple. They are talking about us. I am so full of Q that I do not notice. She, though, is distracted. “You two are in love,” the man says finally. “Yes, we are,” says Q. “It is lovely to see.” “Thank you,” she says. The woman, presumably the man’s wife, continues to stare at us. This goes on through the end of the main course, and dessert, and even after the second cup of coffee has been poured. At last she says, “You’re that novelist guy, aren’t you?” “Yes,” I say, beaming. “Wait a second, wait a second,” she says. “Don’t tell me.” I smile. “Let me guess. I know. I know.” She snaps her fingers and points: “John Grisham!” she cries. “Yes,” I say. “Yes, I am.” The Colbert Report has me as a guest. I am excited about the appearance. I have not seen the show, but my agent says it is popular with the sort of people who might read my book and, she says, the host is quite funny. She knows this will appeal to me, as it does. I am something of an amateur comedian, and as I wait for the show to begin, I envision snappy repartee. In the green room, they have put out fruit. The spread consists of cantaloupe and honeydew and watermelon. I do not care for honeydew, but I respect it as a melon. The cantaloupe is luscious. The watermelon, however, is less impressive. It is a cheap crop, grown in China, and seems to me to have no place on a corporate fruit plate. I make a mental note to talk to one of the staff about this. Approximately fifteen minutes before showtime, a production assistant enters the room and gives me some brief instructions. In a few minutes, they will take me onto the stage, where I will sit on the set until the interview begins. I will be on following a segment called “The Word.” Colbert will introduce me, and then she says—this is unusual—he will run over to greet me. Unfortunately, I either do not hear or do not understand this last instruction. I think she says that I should run over to meet him. I am not sure why I get this wrong. I think most likely I just hear what I want to hear. I am a runner, and I conclude this will be a unique opportunity to demonstrate to a national audience my unique combination of speed and humor. I suppose I get caught up in all that. Approximately twenty minutes into the show Colbert introduces me. He says, “My guest this evening is the author of the new novel, Time’s Broken Arrow, which the New York Times has praised as unique and singular.” He graciously omits the following word from the review—“bad.” He says, “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome …” At the sound of my name, I lower my head and break into a sprint. As I round the corner of the set, I see Colbert. He is merely in a light jog—he does this every night—but it is too late for either of us to stop. I make a last-ditch effort to veer to the left, but he turns in the same direction, and I strike him squarely in the head. Even as he is injured, he is supremely self-possessed and funny. As he falls to the ground, he says, “Et tu? So fall Colbert.” He is concussed. Colbert is done for the night, so the episode is concluded with a backup interview, which the show keeps in the can in case of emergency. The guest is Ted Koppel, reminiscing about his time in the White House press corps. He covered Nixon and was there for the trip to China. Following Nixon’s visit to the Great Wall, Koppel asked Nixon what he thought about the experience. Koppel relates the president’s reply in a surprisingly good Nixon, with just a hint of his own sultry baritone. “Let it be said,” says Koppel-as-Nixon, “that this was and shall be for all time, a truly great wall.” The audience howls. The ratings are strong. Rather than reschedule my appearance, the producers decide to invite back Koppel. I am invited to the 92nd Street Y, as part of its “Lox and Talks” series, focusing on young Jewish writers. I am worried. The event is set for a Tuesday at lunch, and I will have no reliable supporters on hand. Q is out of town for the week at the Northeast Organic Farming Association annual convention. None of my friends can take the time from work. Even my mother, who reliably attends all of my readings, cannot make it because of a conflicting pedicure appointment. I am uncomfortable—for good luck Q has bought me new pants, which are itchy—and nervous: I expect an empty room. But the room is not vacant. Not at all. It is brimming with alter kakers, a gaggle of old ladies sipping coffee and munching coffee cake and kibitzing about dental surgery. It is not exactly my target audience, as they say in the ad biz, but I am elated all the same. Here are real human beings gathered to hear my work. I take the stage and open to my favorite chapter—the one where Secretary of State Daniel Webster uses his rhetorical gifts to cajole President-elect Harrison into wearing a coat at his inauguration—and begin reading with verve. “I must prove that I am the same man who triumphed at Tippecanoe,” protests the president-elect. “You are sixty-eight years old. You will catch a cold and die.” Webster had a rich and musical voice, which I do my best to imitate. I am good but not great at impressions. I hold out hope that Jim Dale will voice the book on tape. “You are extremely persuasive,” says Harrison. “So I am told,” says Daniel Webster. Harrison dons an overcoat and the rest, as they say, is history. Fake history, but history all the same. I see immediately that the old ladies are disappointed. It is not even what I have written, my mere speaking seems to dishearten them. I press on, but they continue to fidget in their seats and whisper to one another. One woman makes an ordeal of opening an ancient sucking candy. Another sighs a giant sigh. I stop reading and ask, “What is wrong?” “You are very nasal,” says a woman in the front. “Do you have a cold?” asks another. “I am fine.” “Well, you should have some chicken soup anyway.” “I do not like chicken soup.” “You would like mine. It is the best.” “Is my voice the issue?” “Yes, we are surprised to hear you speaking.” “You have never heard someone with a nasal voice?” “No, we are surprised to hear you speaking at all.” “It is a reading after all.” “We came to hear Marcel Marceau read from Bip in a Book. You are not he.” An official from the Y standing in the back hears the exchange. She explains that the rare video of one of the few readings Marceau gave before his death is being shown in the next room. Slowly, the old ladies file out. One woman remains to whom I ascribe the noblest and most empathic virtues of humanity. No doubt she too has stumbled into the wrong room. But she recognizes how vulnerable a writer makes himself when he puts his work out to the world. Even if this reading was not her first choice, as an act of basic human dignity, she perceives a duty to stay. I, in turn, am grateful for her and read with even more zeal than before. I become apprehensive, however, when she fails to perk up at Harrison’s mention of reviving the Bank of the United States, and downright suspicious when she does not so much as chuckle at Martin Van Buren’s snoring during the second hour of the inaugural. I take a close look at her and conclude that she is either asleep or, as appears to be the case upon further reflection, dead. Hastily, I finish the chapter and head for the door. I want to make a quick exit from the Y and the yet-to-be-discovered corpse, but I also need to pee and I decide to make a stop at the bathroom. Here I meet Steve Martin, who is having a pee of his own at the adjacent urinal. It is a coincidence, but the sort of chance encounter that happens more often when one travels in the circle of celebrities. Martin will be performing banjo at the end of the week, as part of a bluegrass festival at the Y, and he is here for a rehearsal. His banjo case is on the ground between his feet. I fumble a bit as I get started. It’s the new slacks. “Usually I wear pleated pants,” I explain to Martin, “but my girlfriend bought me flat fronts for this occasion.” He does not look up. “She couldn’t be here today,” I explain further. “She is at the Northeast Organic Farming Association annual convention in Hartford.” “I see,” says Martin. “I have just finished reading from my novel. Perhaps you have heard of it? It is called Time’s Broken Arrow.” Martin shakes his head. “I was very much influenced by Picasso at the Lapin Agile,” I say. “I think you are right that all great works, whether of art or scientific genius, are of equal merit and share the same mysterious origin. I just love the scene where Picasso’s art dealer asks the waitress whether Pablo has been to the bar and Germaine says, ‘Not yet,’ as if she knows what is going to happen in the future. I bet you get that all the time.” “More often people prefer scenes involving the main characters.” Martin does not look up as he says this. He is concentrating. “I also love the way you make time fungible and everything arbitrary. When Einstein shows up at the wrong bar and explains there’s just as much chance of his date wandering into the Lapin Agile as at the place they made up to meet because she thinks as he does, it’s just hilarious. It’s a brilliant play. I bet you get that all the time, too.” “More often people prefer the movies,” he says. “I enjoy your movies, too. My favorite is The Jerk, before you got all serious with The Spanish Prisoner and Shopgirl. I love the scene where Navin Johnson sees himself in the phone book and is so excited to see his name in print. I like Mamet as much as the next guy, but that’s just classic.” “That seems a bit incongruous.” It’s true. It is. I hadn’t thought about it before. I watch as he fixes himself. “I had broccoli for lunch,” he says. I tell this story the next day to Charlie Rose on the air and he is delighted. More accurately I perceive that he is delighted. In fact he has fallen asleep and, by coincidence, stirred during my telling of the Steve Martin story. I mistake this for delight. Following my successful appearance on Charlie Rose, I am invited to speak at the Gramercy Park Great Books and Carrot Cake Society. The director sends me a historical pamphlet, from which I learn that the club has paid host to many of the great writers and thinkers of the day, including Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein, S. J. Perelman, the Kinseys, and a young Norman Mailer. Reading between the lines, it appears the society was, in its day, a den of iniquity. I have high expectations for the evening, and am further buoyed when Q accepts my invitation to come along. At the appointed time, we are greeted at the door to number 7A, 32 Gramercy Park South, by the director of the society, Shmuley Garbus, who ushers us inside the apartment. It smells of matzo brie and Bengay. The average age in the group is eighty-seven. Three of the seven remaining members of the society are on artificial oxygen. None are ambulatory. When I finally perform my piece, it becomes the second time in a week that people fall asleep at my readings. In my defense, four of the seven people here are asleep before I begin. Happily, no one expires. The carrot cake is surprisingly disappointing. Garbus, a spry eighty-three, explains that Rose Lipschutz used to bake for the meetings, but she got the gout, and then, sadly, the shingles. So they use frozen cake now. Frozen carrot cake can be quite good. Sara Lee’s product, from its distinguished line of premium layer cakes, is particularly delicious, with a moist cream cheese frosting that tastes as fresh and rich as anything produced in a bakery. And it is reasonable too, only $3.99 for the twelve-ounce cake, or $5.99 for the super-sized twenty-four-ounce cake, which serves between eight and twelve guests. But this isn’t Sara Lee. It is from the A&P, which is problematic since there has not been an A&P in Manhattan in more than twenty years. “Wow,” I say to Garbus. “A&P carrot cake. I haven’t seen the A&P in ages.” “This is all Rose’s doing,” Garbus explains. “They had a sale down at the A&P on Lexington Avenue, and Rose, who was so devoted to the society that she wanted it to go on forever, went to the supermarket specifically with us in mind and stocked up.” “When was that?” asks Q. “Nineteen eighty-seven,” he says. The future of the carrot cake is assured, at least for the short term. At the end of the evening, I see Garbus wrap in aluminum foil the uneaten part of the carrot cake, which is the bulk of it, since many of the members are lactose intolerant. He places the remainder back in the freezer. On Garbus’s plastic-covered sofa, as Q and I finish our tea, we are approached by Helen Rosenberg, of the publishing Rosenbergs, who once famously put out a collection of Albert Shanker’s pencil sketches. The teachers’ union gave my father a copy for his retirement. “I couldn’t help but notice how much in love the two of you are.” Q and I smile and squeeze one another’s hands. “You must be proud of him.” “I am,” says Q. Mischievously, Helen asks me, “When are you going to put a ring on that beautiful finger of hers?” “As if she would ever have me,” I say playfully, but the truth is, the ring has been ordered, and I have a grand plan for how to propose. “If you need a jeweler, I recommend my daughter,” Helen says, handing me a business card. It amazes me that a jeweler has a business card, though I don’t know why one shouldn’t. I have more legitimate cause to be further amazed that the card belongs to the same person who sold me Q’s engagement ring just two weeks earlier. It is the sort of thing that brings home to one the interconnectedness of life, and I am in these months of semi-fame more sensitive to these linkages than ever. I am contacted by all kinds of people and have all sorts of random meetings, as my universe becomes bigger than it has ever been before. I eagerly anticipate the tiny and large surprises that each morning brings. And the days never disappoint, in particular the one on which I receive a note asking me to arrange a table for dinner the following evening at Jean-Georges. Of all the remarkable chance encounters, this is the most remarkable and exciting of all, because I can tell from the unmistakable handwriting that this note is from, of all people, myself. Chapter TWO It is no easy matter to arrange a table at Jean-Georges, even at lunch. It is a popular spot for people on their way to the theater or the New York City Opera or the Philharmonic. I call and ask for a table for the next day. The woman on the phone says that nothing is available. I say who I am. “The novelist,” I explain. “I am meeting myself for an early supper.” “We cannot accommodate the two of you,” she says, “though we do have a table available in early March.” It is September. “I don’t think that will work,” I say. “Well,” the reservationist says firmly. “That’s the best we can do.” I let the matter drop with her. Instead I telephone my best friend, Ard Koffman, who is a big shot at American Express, which has deals with a lot of these fancy restaurants. Ard has the Amex concierge call the Jean-Georges reservationist and the table is secured. I am grateful for his help, but it is frustrating that the process is not more egalitarian and the reservationists more accommodating. I know that the people who make the bookings at Jean-Georges refer to themselves as reservationists, and that they are not to be challenged lightly, because I have eaten there once before, during Restaurant Week. For seven days each year, during the hottest part of August, several of the fancy restaurants in New York City offer a cheap lunch to lure the few people who aren’t in the Hamptons out of their air-conditioned offices and apartments. In 1992, the first year of the promotion, lunch cost $19.92. It has gone up a penny each year since. One summer, several years ago, I decided to take my mother to Jean-Georges for lunch. When I called to make the booking, the receptionist switched me to a person whom she identified as a reservationist. “Is that really a word?” I asked when the person to whom I was transferred answered the phone. “What’s that?” “Reservationist.” “You just used it, so it must be.” “Just because someone uses a word doesn’t make it a word,” I say. “Besides, I only said it because the woman who transferred me to you used it.” “What is it, then … a fruit?” “It’s not a word unless it’s in the dictionary.” “That seems very narrow-minded of you.” “All the same.” “Well, someone who receives visitors is a receptionist. So I am a reservationist. You should look it up in your dictionary.” “It won’t be there.” “You might be surprised.” What doesn’t surprise me is that when I arrive for lunch, two months later, I am seated with my mother at the table nearest the men’s room. I ask to be moved, but the maitre d’, no doubt in cahoots with the reservationist, perfunctorily says, “That would not be possible.” For whatever it is worth, I look up “reservationist” in the dictionary and it is not a word. I do learn, though, that “reserpine” is a yellowish powder, isolated from the roots of the rauwolfia plant, which is used as a tranquilizer. I since have yet to have occasion to use this word in conversation, but I am still hopeful. At first glance, twenty dollars for lunch at a five-star restaurant seems like a great deal, and a penny per year is unquestionably a modest rate of inflation, but what they don’t tell you about Restaurant Week is that nothing is included with the lunch other than the entr?e. My mother and I made the mistake of ordering drinks (Diet Coke with lemon for me; club soda with lemon for my mother), sharing a dessert (a sliver of chocolate torte), and ordering coffee (decaffeinated). When the check arrived, I learned that a Diet Coke at Jean-Georges costs $5.75. It isn’t even a big Diet Coke. It is mostly ice, and on the day I ate there with my mother, they gave me a lime instead of a lemon, as if they taste at all the same. When I asked the waiter to correct the error, he said, “That would not be possible.” Everything at the restaurant is miniaturized. Even the entr?e—we each had pan-seared scallops in a cabernet reduction—though concededly delicious, was alarmingly small. I figured I would need to get a sandwich after lunch, which would have been within my budget if I had spent only the forty dollars I had expected to spend on the meal. But after the soft drinks, the dessert, and the coffee were added in—and tax and tip, which somehow slipped my mind—lunch came out to more than one hundred dollars. As I leave the apartment, telling Q that I am off to meet a friend, I can’t help but wonder how much dinner is going to run. I have a thing about being late so I get to the restaurant a few minutes before six o’clock. I am not surprised to find that I have already arrived. I am seated on a sofa in the vestibule reading a Philip Roth novel that I immediately recognize has not yet been written. I say hello softly and my future self rises to meet me. I am disappointed by how I—the older I, that is—look. I do not look terrible, but I do not look spectacular either. I am particularly dismayed that my body proves susceptible to some ravages of age from which I thought I would be immune. I understand that I will grow old, of course, but I exercise quite regularly and eat right, and like to believe that I will be able to keep my weight down until my knees give out and maybe even for some time after that. But here I am, not much more than sixty, I think, and already I have something of a paunch. I am also a bit jowly. This is alarming. I am, furthermore, not as well groomed as I am now. We are each dressed in a blue oxford and khaki pants, but the older me’s collar is worn past a point that I would now allow. I note that collars have grown wider again, presuming of course that I am continuing to keep up with fashion trends. This strikes me as a change for the worse, but of course styles will come and go. In other subtle ways, I have allowed myself to deteriorate further. I have a few coarse ear hairs that require frequent attention; these have been allowed to have their way. My nails could use a clipping. I have psoriasis in some spots. It is manageable, but I note that this is not being tended to either: my hands are dry and flaky. It is me and not me. I do not consider myself extraordinarily vain. I look at myself in the mirror when I shave or after I get back from the gym, but I do not spend all that much time examining the vessel in which I reside. Still, I know myself well enough. What is most disturbing about this future version of me is that it is obvious, at least to me, that I am deeply and profoundly sad. “Shall we go to our table?” I ask. “That sounds fine,” says older me, and we present ourselves to the maitre d’, who finds our name in the reservation book. “I’ll be happy to take your coats,” he says. I see a disgruntled look on my older face as he hands the coat over to the captain. I am peeved myself and reluctantly relinquish my own. Mine is a thin, cotton autumn jacket—the weather has not turned too cool yet. The jacket could easily rest on the back of my chair. Nor is it an expensive coat. I purchased it for forty dollars or so, on sale at Filene’s Basement. If it were to get stained, life would not end. And it most decidedly will not get in anyone’s way. Still, they require that the coat be checked. This service is putatively free, and if it really were, I might not mind so much. But at the end of the meal, when the coat is delivered, there is the obligation of tipping the coat check person. I never know how much to give. On the one hand, I generally feel bad for coat check people. They have to stand for hours in a dreary closet, which in nightclubs is always in the basement and too close to the bathroom. The patrons are often drunk, and they always have just one more thing, a hat or gloves that can just go in the sleeves but are inevitably mislaid, or a bulky handbag, or, too often, something unreasonable, like a humidifier, which I once saw someone check on a Saturday night. All this to collect a tin of dollar bills. The job seems like a raw deal and the attendants have my empathy. On the other hand, it is a service that I neither need nor want and to which I therefore, as a matter of principle, demur. I feel this way about many services. I do not mind paying a blacksmith or a gastroenterologist because I cannot make horseshoes or perform colonoscopies myself. I am, however, perfectly capable of draping my jacket over the back of a chair. I am highly capable, too, of parking my car in a lot. I do not need someone to drive it from the front door to a spot fifty feet away, at a cost of two or three dollars. Nor do I need someone to wash my clubs with a towel after a round of golf—setting me back five dollars for two minutes work on his part. I am particularly uncomfortable with the concept of the bathroom attendant. This person provides no direct assistance, of course, and it makes me uncomfortable to have someone squirt soap in my hands and offer me a towel. I do not use any of the sundries spread across the counters of upscale bathrooms. I do not use cologne, I do not groom myself in public bathrooms and thus do not require aftershave lotion or styling gel, and I would never consider, not even for a second, taking a sucking candy or a stick of gum from a tray near a row of urinals. The cost can mount up. It gets particularly expensive when one does not have small bills and thus faces the Hobson’s choice of either leaving an absurdly big tip or rummaging through the collection plate for change. In this situation I will usually just hold it in, although on more than one occasion, I have paid five bucks for a pee. Inevitably, this is later a source of regret. I see that the older version of myself feels precisely as I do about the coat, and a bond is forged between us. “What do you tip for a coat?” asks older me. “Two dollars?” I say. “You?” “Ten dollars.” “Jesus.” “Inflation is a bitch.” I nod. All of this is depressing, but it seems silly to allow it to spoil the meal, and I resolve to enjoy myself. It is a nice table, much nicer than the one that I had with my mother years before, and far away from the men’s room. I try to recall whether the restaurant maintains a bathroom attendant on duty. I think that it does and resolve, therefore, to limit myself to one Diet Coke. After we sit down, I ask about the Roth novel. “It is a Zuckerman story, set late in his life, in a hospice in fact.” “I thought he was done with Zuckerman, after Exit Ghost.” “He cannot resist Zuckerman. He came back to him one more time.” “Is the book good?” “Brilliant,” says older me. “It is about the loneliness of death and, ultimately, the impossibility of making peace with one’s life. It is, I think, the defining book of our generation.” I nod. I say, “One writer to another, it is funny how writers keep coming back to the same themes.” Older me says, “One writer to another, you don’t know the half of it.” He asks, “How is Q?” She is obviously on his mind. “She is magnificent,” I say. The older me nods. “The garden is having some problems. There is a developer who wants to build on the land. He has money and political support. Q and her colleagues are worried. But other than this, she is as wonderful as ever—beautiful, brilliant, principled.” The older me nods again. I have the sense he doesn’t say very much. “I have been wearing flat-front pants, at her suggestion. I am wearing a pair she bought me right now. I don’t know how I feel about them. They are unquestionably stylish and thinning, but I feel uncomfortable without the pleats. Sometimes I almost feel as if I’m naked. Q says no one needs all that material hanging around. She’s undoubtedly right, but I have been doing things the same way for a very long time, and it’s hard to change. You know what I mean?” Older me nods once more. He says, “If I have my dates straight, you and Q moved in together not long ago.” “Yes, into a one-bedroom on Mercer Street.” “How are you enjoying the East Village?” “It’s quite a change. I feel a bit out of place, but I think it’s good for me.” “I’m sure it is. And you were recently engaged, yes?” This makes me smile. “About six months ago,” I say. “I proposed to her at the Museum of Natural History under the giant whale. She’s loved the whale since she was a child. Free Willy was her favorite movie. So I took her to see the frogs exhibit, and when we were done, we went downstairs and I got down on my knee to propose, and before I could pull out the ring, a little boy came over to me and gave me a quarter. He thought I was a beggar. Then everyone was watching, and I asked her to marry me, and she said yes and kissed me, and the people watching from the balcony began to applaud. It was the happiest day of my life.” Finally I catch myself. Obviously I don’t need to tell him all this. “Sorry,” I say. “I lost myself for a moment.” “Don’t worry about it.” He smiles. “But it was a little girl, not a little boy.” “What’s that?” “The child who thought you were a beggar was a little girl, not a little boy.” “I’m quite sure it was a boy. He was wearing a SpongeBob SquarePants T-shirt and plaid shorts.” “He was wearing a SpongeBob SquarePants T-shirt and plaid shorts, but it was a little girl, not a little boy.” I find his insistence astonishing. This is ancient history to him, but fresh in my mind. How could he possibly think that he remembers better than I do? If I were more thin-skinned, I might even find it insulting. “I’m quite sure of what I remember.” “I’m sure you are, but all the same.” The waiter comes over to take our order, and I think to myself, this is going to be an ordeal. Chapter THREE I order a porcini mushroom tart as a starter and black sea bass with Sicilian pistachio crust, wilted spinach, and pistachio oil. Older me asks for a bowl of soup and a lemonade. The waiter sneers. I am annoyed myself. “Is that all you’re going to order?” I ask after the waiter leaves. “Time travel doesn’t agree with the appetite.” “Why did we come here then?” “Restaurants come and go,” older me says, “and I have not lived in New York for many years. This is one of the few places I remembered with confidence.” “A lemonade goes for six bucks here,” I say. “In my time that would be a bargain.” “Everything is relative, I suppose.” Older me nods. “When does time travel become possible?” “In twenty years or so from now,” he says. “It is quite some time after that before it becomes accessible to the public, and even then it is very expensive.” “How does it work?” “I have no idea. You just go into a big box and walk out in a different time.” “How do you get back?” “You carry this thing with you. It’s like an amulet.” Older me takes the object out of his pocket and shows me. It resembles a heart-shaped locket. “When you want to go home, you go back to the place where you arrived. The time travel device senses the amulet and returns you to your own time. It’s as simple as that.” “But how does it work?” “What do you mean?” “How does it actually work? Upon what principle does it operate?” Older me raises his eyebrow. “Do I have some background in physics about which I have forgotten?” “No,” I say. “I just don’t think it’s a good idea to get into a time machine without some basic understanding of how it works.” “Well, I’m here, aren’t I? That suggests that it does work.” “Is it enough to know that it works without knowing how?” “Isn’t it?” “I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem very prudent.” “Is it really any different,” older me asks, “than getting in an airplane?” This point is fair enough. I fly in airplanes all the time without any idea how they work. I mean, I have seen birds fly and I have held my hand out the window while driving on a highway and felt the lift when I arch it upward and the drag when I point it downward. This is called Bernoulli’s principle. But I could never derive Bernoulli’s principle on my own. Nor could I build a mechanical wing or a jet propulsion engine. Even if someone built a jet propulsion engine for me, I could not operate it, not to save my life. That I get in an airplane and emerge in San Francisco or Sydney or wherever is, from my standpoint, a miracle. I have thought many times about how utterly dependent I am on things that are complete mysteries to me. I routinely use cars, airplanes, and computers without any idea how they work. I suppose I could do without them. But I could not do without water and I don’t know how to get that either. I perhaps could dig a well, but it would be luck whether I dug it in the right place, and, frankly, I am not confident that I could get the water up if I were fortunate enough to find it. I suppose that in a pinch I could grow some beets. The miraculous services society provides to me—food, clean water, electric lights—are the very opposite of coat checks and valet parking. The human mind is itself a miraculous machine. I am writing right now, but I have no idea how this is happening. I know that my brain is composed of a cerebrum, a cerebellum, and a medulla oblongata, but these are just words. I know that electrical impulses are involved somehow, but that is about the extent of my understanding of the mechanics. And while I at least have an intuition as to how an airplane works, I really have none with respect to my brain. Frankly, lots of what appears on my computer screen is as much a surprise to me as it is to you. I certainly never expected over my oatmeal and English muffin this morning to be writing about Bernoulli’s principle today. For that matter, I have no idea why I like English muffins. But I do. Older me says, “This place is nicer than I remember.” “That’s because the last time we sat next to the bathroom.” “That’s right,” he says. “The damn reservationist. Have you taken Q here yet?” “No.” “She would love the porcini mushroom tart.” “Of course. It is her favorite.” “How is Mom?” “She’s great,” I say. “Please tell her that I say hello and send my love.” This request makes me worry about my mother. I do not know precisely how much older this me with whom I am having dinner is, but he has at least twenty-five years on me, I expect. I want to know that my mother is safe and happy, but I sense something ominous in his voice. It also could be nothing. The fact is that I am a worrier. I worry about all sorts of things—some regarding me and many not. With respect to me, I worry, for example, that when I finally have the money to buy a hybrid car the waiting list will be years long or that hybrids will have gone the way of the wonderful electric car. I worry too about whether Indian families are contaminating the Ganges River by setting their dead afloat upon it, whether Brazil will cut down what is left of the Amazon rain forest, and whether Bill Gates will ever be able to get roads built in Africa. I worry about antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis, Asian long-horned beetles, and global warming. And, of course, I worry about my mother. I do not know why I am a worrier any more than I know why I like English muffins. Many people don’t worry about anything. Q has the ideal balance, and only worries about truly important matters, like her family and preserving magical urban gardens. I expect that the reason I worry about so many things has much to do with the reasons why I write. The essential quality of a writer is empathy. It is the ability to view a situation from the standpoint of another living creature and to feel what it would feel. This is also the essential quality of a worrier. He sees no distinction between what happens to him and what happens to someone else. Nor does he see a distinction between what is and what could be. A she-dog with a warm home and soft-pillow doggie bed is stolen from her master and brought to a farm where dogs are raised for meat. The bitch dogs are impregnated and placed in tiny crates. The she-dog feels her puppies licking at her, but cannot turn to lick the faces of the children nursing at her teats. This deprives her of satisfying the most basic maternal instinct. She is depressed and confused and dies a lonely, meaningless death. The writer does not need to have experienced a loss of this kind to write this story. He can put himself in the shoes of that she-dog and feel the sense of loss and pointlessness that she would feel; he can channel her frustration and anger. And it is of no consolation to the worrier that puppy dogs are not seized from their homes and raised in this way—they very well could be, as evidenced by the way man uses chickens and pigs for his eggs and meat. The worrier does not even find comfort in the fact that he is a man and not a dog. He could be a dog and suffering in this particular way. The possibility of this is all that matters. At this moment in my life I am worried about whether I will succeed as a writer. I have managed to get my first novel published, but I hope to expand my audience beyond yentas, elderly liberals, and moribund baking societies. Someday, perhaps, more people will attend my reading than a showing of a videotape of a mime reading from his memoir. I am at that uncertain point in a writer’s career where he wonders whether he will be noticed or whether his book is fated for the ninety-nine-cent remainder shelf, its tattered carcass to be used as a doorjamb at the 7-Eleven. Being a student of history does not help. I know how difficult it is to get something of quality published. I know that Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time was turned down twenty-nine times, that Ayn Rand was told The Fountainhead was badly written and its hero unsympathetic, that Emily Dickinson only managed to publish seven poems during her lifetime. I know that an editor of the San Francisco Examiner told Rudyard Kipling, “I’m sorry, but you just don’t know how to use the English language.” A reviewer rejected The Diary of Anne Frank because, he said, “The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the curiosity level.” To Poe, a reviewer wrote, “Readers in this country have a decided and strong preference for works in which a single and connected story occupies the entire volume.” To Melville, regarding Moby-Dick: “This story is long and rather old-fashioned.” To Faulkner: “Good God, I can’t publish this.” Diet books are published with impunity, but Orwell was told of Animal Farm, “It is impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.A.” And of Lolita, Nabokov was informed, “This is overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian. The whole thing is an unsure cross between hideous reality and improbable fantasy. I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.” So I am worried. Most immediately, I am worried about what I will write next and whether it will get published. Now I must acknowledge that in a very important sense its success would make no difference. It would not diminish my angst. Even if the next novel succeeds, I will imagine and drift into the state of misery and failure that I would experience in the absence of success. Just as I do not need the actual triumph to imagine the euphoria of a bestseller, so too I do not require utter failure to dwell in the emotional realm of the undiscovered, unappreciated writer. Furthermore, it is not as if the stories that I have told and want to tell have any particular significance. They are just a few among the infinite stories that could and will be told—some to be imagined and shared, some to be lived, some to be dreamed and forgotten. So, why worry? But this is how it is with worriers. It is a compulsion. I am even worried about worrying. Abundant empirical evidence suggests that worrying can adversely affect health and digestion. This really worries me. I’d like to get some relief, and the future me could provide it, if only he would tell me where my writing career is headed and how my mother is doing. I want to ask, but I worry that doing so will have problematic, if not disastrous, consequences for the universe. Most of what I know about the ethics and implications of time travel comes from Star Trek, in particular the classic episode “The City on the Edge of Forever,” written by Harlan Ellison and starring Joan Collins as Edith Keeler, the saintly operator of a soup kitchen in lower Manhattan. In the episode, Dr. McCoy jumps through a time portal and changes history by saving Ms. Keeler from a car accident. Her life spared, Keeler leads a prominent pacifist movement, earns an audience with FDR, and delays America’s entry into the war. This gives Hitler the edge he needs. Germany develops the first atomic bomb and history is changed. In the new time line, the Nazis win and the development of space travel and the flush toilet are substantially delayed. It is then up to Kirk and Spock to go back and set everything straight, which they do, but not without considerable heartache. I fear that if I ask the wrong sort of question I may have the same sort of butterfly effect on history. I like flush toilets, and I can take or leave Joan Collins, but no one likes the Nazis. I think I have a way to finesse the problem, though. “How does the writing go?” I ask. I regard this question as strategic and clever. I am asking what he is doing, as opposed to what he has done, thereby avoiding an intertemporal catastrophe. “You mean do we have any success?” The ruse is exposed. “I suppose,” I say with trepidation. “Not as much as you hope,” older me says. “But not as little as you fear.” I look around the room. This is a direct enough answer, but history does not appear to be changed. I notice that my Diet Coke has a lime in it and not lemon as I asked. This could be a change since I did not pay careful attention to the fruit when the drink was delivered. It’s possible the waiter got it right and history has been altered. But, all things being equal, I think it is more likely the waiter made a mistake and history has remained the same. I am not sure why waiters think lemons and limes are interchangeable, but they do. The fabric of the universe apparently intact, I am emboldened to ask another question. “What are you writing now?” My eyes betray me. They drop to the table. When they do not meet mine, I know that this means I am either about to lie or to deliver bad news. “I don’t write anymore,” older me says. If the sad expression and laconic answers to my questions had not told me before, I know now that something has gone wrong, terribly wrong with my life. For me writing, like worrying, is a compulsion. The desire to express myself to others, to write, is an integral and irrepressible component of who I am. I cannot imagine not doing it. Something horrible has happened. The waiter arrives. The porcini tart is redolent and seductive, but I need to know then and there what the problem is. This is also how it is with worriers. We fret about so much that is beyond our control that when something manageable comes within our gravity we feel an irresistible urge to put a chokehold on it and pull it close. “What is it?” I ask. “What have you come to tell me?” Older me smiles thinly, no doubt because he recognizes my passion as his own. He remembers the need to get to the heart of every matter without delay. His sad eyes look down to the soup and then to me. “It is Q,” he says. “You must not marry Q.” Chapter FOUR By this time, Q and I are far along in the preparations for our wedding. All of the major arrangements have been made—the reception hall, the choice of entr?e, the entertainment. The vows have been written, compromises struck on how present God shall be and which God to choose. The honeymoon will be in Barcelona with a side trip to Pamplona to watch the running. Only trifling matters remain such as coordinating the flowers for the centerpieces with the boutonni?res of the groomsmen and the music to be played at the reception. The wedding is to be held in Lenox, Massachusetts. The Deverils are New Yorkers through and through—lifelong Manhattanites—but they have summered for the entirety of Q’s existence at their home on the Stockbridge Bowl, in the heart of the Berkshires, with the appropriate subscriptions to Tanglewood and Jacob’s Pillow. We are to be married at the inn where John and Joan Deveril stayed on their first visit to the Berkshires more than twenty-five years ago. It is intimated at a celebration-of-the-engagement dinner during an alcohol-induced, way-too-much-information moment that Q was conceived at this inn. Lenox is neither Q’s first choice for the wedding nor mine. All of our friends are New Yorkers and we would prefer, all things being equal, to have a city wedding, preferably on the Lower East Side, where Q and I have settled together. But John Deveril is a powerful and obstinate man. His construction company is the eighth largest in the country and, as he eagerly tells anyone who will listen, responsible for two of the ten tallest buildings in Manhattan. More relevantly, Q is utterly devoted to John, and he is quite wedded (pardon) to the idea of a Berkshires marriage. He thinks it will lend symmetry to his daughter’s life. All things considered, it seems best to let him have his way. I joke to Q that we should arrange funeral plots for ourselves in Great Barrington. She finds this quite funny. Mr. Deveril’s mulishness is nowhere more evident than in the discussion of the music to be played at the wedding. A swing band will provide the bulk of the entertainment, but a DJ is retained to entertain during the band’s rest breaks and offer something for the younger set. For the unlucky disc jockey, John Deveril prepares an extensive array of directives. These guidelines, seventeen pages in all, contain a small set of favored songs, including the Foundations’ “Build Me Up Buttercup,” the Mysterians’ “Ninety-Six Tears,” and anything by Jerry Lee Lewis; a list of disfavored songs, which includes anything by anyone whose sexuality is ambiguous or otherwise in question—thus ruling out Elton John, David Bowie, and Prince (despite my argument that the secondary premise is faulty); any music by any artist who has ever broadcast an antipatriotic message—thereby excluding, to my great dismay, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, and Green Day; any song written between the years 1980 and 1992; and a final list of songs, appended as Appendix A to the personal services contract between the DJ and the Deverils, the playing of any of which results in irrevocable termination of the agreement and triggers a legal claim for damages by the Deverils against the disc jockey, said damages liquidated in the amount of $100,000. For further emphasis, as if any is required, at the top of Appendix A, Mr. Deveril handwrites: “Play these songs and die.” The list includes the Chicken Dance, the Electric Slide, and anything by Madonna, Neil Diamond, and Fleetwood Mac. I happen to like Fleetwood Mac and Neil Diamond. As far as I can tell, John Deveril has nothing against either artist’s music. Rather, he has a long memory and recalls that Bill Clinton used “Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow)” as the theme song for his campaign in 1992 and that Mike Dukakis used “America” during his race in 1988. John hates all Democrats, but he has a special loathing for Clinton and Dukakis. I get it with respect to the Chicken Dance and the Electric Slide, and even with respect to Clinton, but the virulent loathing of Dukakis is excessive. It seems to me Dukakis paid a steep price for his concededly ill-advised photo-op in the M1 Abrams tank. The later newspaper photographs in the 1990s of Dukakis walking across the streets of Boston to his professor’s office at Northeastern were a bit more poignant than I could handle. Now one hardly hears of him or Kitty at all. I feel protective. Of course, I am not fool enough to admit my affection for Michael Dukakis to John Deveril. Instead I point out the unfairness of the association with Neil Diamond, whom I greatly admire. I’d like “Cracklin’ Rosie” to be played at the reception. One evening, at a dinner with Q and her parents to discuss wedding plans, I sheepishly raise the issue. “You know Neil Diamond never actually sang ‘America’ at a Dukakis event,” I say timidly. “Actually, he never sang for Dukakis at all. Furthermore, according to federal campaign contribution reports, he never gave any money to Dukakis.” At this point, John looks up from his meat. “Well, if he didn’t want the song played, he could have called up the campaign and told them not to play it, right?” “I suppose.” “I mean they wouldn’t have played it against his wishes. They wouldn’t have played it if Neil Diamond had called the newspapers and said, ‘Dukakis is a moron, and Bentsen too.’ The campaign wouldn’t have played the song then, right?” “Right.” “So it was a choice.” “I guess.” “Just like Dukakis could have chosen to shave those eyebrows, right?” “Right,” I say quietly, and that’s the end of that. The truth is, I also like Bill Clinton, but I raise no objection to excluding Fleetwood Mac on the basis of its tenuous connection to the philandering former president. Neither do I protest the venison that will be served at dinner, or the tulips that have been ordered for the reception hall despite my allergist’s strict instructions to the contrary, or the presidential look-alikes (needless to say, all Republicans) who have been hired to mingle with the crowd and sit at the dinner tables corresponding to their numerical order in the presidency. It is objectionable enough to have people resembling Nixon and Ford and Bush (forty-one; John Deveril has no tolerance for forty-three) circulating among the crowd, but I wonder, as a purely practical matter, what the people seated at tables 19 and 34 will have to talk about at dinner with doppelgangers of Chester Arthur and John Deveril’s favorite president, Calvin Coolidge. This is all quite different than the wedding I envision. In mine, we are married by a Scientologist on the eighteenth hole of a miniature golf course. The minister reminds me that girls need “clothes and food and tender happiness and frills: a pan, a comb, perhaps a cat.” I am asked to provide them all. Q is told that “young men are free and may forget” their promises. Our guests look on in horror. Then the ruse is revealed. A simple civil service follows. We exchange vows that we have written ourselves. Glasses of Yoo-hoo are poured, a toast is made, and the bottle of chocolate drink is broken with a cry of “Mazel tov!” Rickshaws take our friends to a nearby bowling alley, where they are immediately outfitted with rental shoes and given the happy news that they can bowl as much as they like for free. Professional bowler Nelson Burton Jr. has been retained for the day to give lessons in bowling and the mambo. Q and I make a grand entrance as a klezmer band plays the Outback Steakhouse theme song, my favorite. We have our first dance to John Parr’s “Naughty Naughty.” People bowl and shoot pool. They play darts and video games, and eat popcorn and miniature hot dogs. For a few hours, our friends forget that they are adults. They stay long into the night, drunk on Miller Lite and chocolate cake, and sit Indian-style on the lanes telling stories about Q and me, many of which we have never heard about each other before, including the surprising fact that Q had a poster of Brian Austin Green over her bed until she was twenty-four. It is a magical evening. I nevertheless raise no objection to the wedding plans because I am on tenuous ground with John Deveril. I believe he thinks Q could do better. No one ever says this, of course. Q certainly does not. But I believe it all the same. This is confirmed for me, shortly before my older self’s arrival. One day John and I are left alone in the bar of the Red Lion Inn. Q and her mother are meeting in a conference room with Mr. Cheuk Soo, the florist, or “floral engineer,” as he calls himself. It is at least the sixth such meeting. Each is a mind-numbing exegesis on color, aroma, and feng shui. Mr. Soo seems to have an opinion about everything. Somehow he has become passionately committed to the position that if Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” is played there can be no hyacinth in the bouquet or that if hyacinth is used in the bouquet, then the Mendelssohn cannot be played. “But purple must be present,” says Joan Deveril. “Purple is not the problem per se,” says Cheuk Soo. “What about lisianthus? Could we use lisianthus?” “Nooooo,” cries Mr. Soo, in obvious pain. “Bell-shaped flowers are so dipolar.” Q’s mother solemnly nods her head in agreement. “Of course,” she says. “Dipolarity will not do.” I am staring out the window, watching tourists wander around Stockbridge, daydreaming, as I do throughout most of these sessions, but this arouses me. “It’s not a word!” I scream silently. “Dipolarity is not a word!” I know better than to say this aloud. It will only lead to a disquisition on dipolarity, and I will be trapped in the conference room even longer than I otherwise would be. Instead, I resume staring at the pedestrians on Main Street. “What about vanda?” says Mr. Soo, as if he has had an epiphany. “It is a rare orchid. It might be just the thing.” He shows them a picture. “It is so elegant,” says Joan. “It has a very strong qi,” Soo adds. “You are a genius,” says Joan. “Now what to accent it with?” Q asks, “How about irises?” “Nooooooo,” cries Mr. Soo, his pain returned. “The bouquets will block and we will have sha qi for sure.” “That will not do,” Joan Deveril says quietly. “Sha qi is very bad.” So it goes. When Q tells me that we are returning to the Red Lion for yet another meeting, I am incredulous. It hardly seems possible after all this time that anything could be left to discuss. I put this to Q. “We are reconsidering the centerpieces,” she says. As far as I can tell, Q, her mother, and Mr. Soo have debated the composition of the centerpieces with Jesuitical precision. When I ask what is at issue, Q says they are considering topiaries and all the implications of that. “What’s a topiary?” I ask. Q reacts as if I am a biology student who, during the review session for the final exam, asks, “What is a cell?” It is embarrassing, but the happy consequence is that I am excused from subsequent meetings with Mr. Soo. At no point has there even been the pretense that John Deveril could be placed in the same room with a floral engineer. So it comes to pass that John Deveril and I are left alone to share a drink in the basement bar of the Red Lion. I order a tomato juice. He orders a double Glenlivet. As the bartender pours, it occurs to me that this is the first time I have ever been alone with Q’s father. I have not even the faintest idea where to find common ground. John takes a hearty sip of the scotch. I can’t drink scotch without wincing, but he downs it like a man, savors it, stares into the glass as he stirs the residual. He is a professional. “Rough day?” I ask. “Like you wouldn’t believe,” he says. It is the rare moment in which John Deveril lets down his guard with me. In fact it is the only moment in which he has ever let down his guard with me. “Want to talk?” John turns to me. The look on his face is in equal measure indignant and quizzical. He is put off by my question, of that there can be no doubt. He is not the sort of man who talks, and certainly not to me; it is effrontery for me to presume otherwise. But I think he searches his memory and sees that he has invited my advance. This is confusing to him. He is also not the sort of man to invite others into his life, and, for a moment, he appears paralyzed. He wonders why he has slipped in this way. Then, to his surprise and mine, he talks. Perhaps it is the scotch, perhaps it is the spirit of the wedding, perhaps it is the bond we have formed through our innumerable visits in support of the women we love to florists and tailors and caterers, with the associated stays on the well-appointed man couches. Or maybe he just needs to talk. Whatever the reason, he does. “I’m about to get started on the most important project of my career. It’s a huge, mixed-use building with high-end retail, residential, and office space. We have a Fortune 100 company signed on as an anchor tenant. The architectural plans are fantastic. Everything is in place. It’ll make me millions when it’s done. But we can’t get the fucking land.” “What’s the problem?” “The fucking communists, the fucking tree huggers, the fucking Democrats—that’s what’s the problem. They don’t give a shit about what I do. As far as they are concerned, the environmental surveys should take twenty years and cost ten million dollars. “Then, after the studies are done you should have to spend another ten million on lawyers so you can argue about the impact a new building will have on some snot-nosed beaver three hundred miles away. The environmentalists don’t give a shit whether people have a place to live—especially rich people. For all the pinkos care, the rich can live in boxes—just so long as they recycle the boxes when they die. And whatever you do, don’t try to give them money. Heaven forbid you suggest resolving a dispute by offering them compensation—the sanctimonious assholes look at you as if you’re the devil himself. No, no, no, it’s far fucking better to litigate the issue for a decade or two. This way the lawyers get rich and nobody gets what they want. That’s much fucking better.” “Could you go to your city councilman or congressman?” I ask. “The politicians?” He laughs. “Don’t get me fucking started about the fucking politicians. They are so paralyzed by the idea of offending even a single voter that they indulge every one of those wackos, every single fucking one of them. Because that’s what the left does—it coddles. That’s its MO. Instead of telling people that life is hard and that not everyone can have exactly what they want, instead of telling them that sometimes choices have to be made, they preach that everyone is equal and equally entitled. Everything is possible! That’s what they tell them. Everyone can go to college. Everyone can have a job. Everyone can have health care.” He is staring at his drink throughout most of this. Now he turns to me again. “Then when people come against the real world, against the cruel, harsh reality of it all, and see that choices have to be made, that the government cannot do everything for everyone, do you know who they blame? The rich people. Not life, not God, and sure as heck not themselves. No, they blame the fucking rich people for standing between them and everything to which they have come to believe they are entitled. That’s the true fucking legacy of the Democratic-liberal establishment to America, and their personal gift to me.” John snorts and looks back to his glass. Finally, he catches himself and remembers who I am. We have never discussed politics before, but just as I do not need him to verbalize his disapproval of me to know that it is true, I do not need him to tell me that he believes teachers are generally liberals and writers are communists, and I, of course, am both. He has simply forgotten himself once more. At least in this instance, his prejudice is well-founded. Even though I have never told John so, I am a liberal. We return to sitting in silence. He orders another Glenlivet, surveys it even more closely than the first, and we wait for the women to finish with Mr. Soo. Finally he asks, “How is your work going?” He pauses briefly after “your” and places a subtle derisive emphasis on “work” to make it clear he does not think either my job as an assistant professor at City University or my gig writing novels satisfies the definition of the word. I tell him anyway. “I am writing a short story for 9PM Magazine. It’s sort of a sequel to my novel. It begins after William Henry Harrison leaves office. He is minister to Gran Colombia and while there joins a backgammon club where he meets Simon Bolivar. They develop a friendship and over time engage in an erudite debate about democracy and the proper use of the doubling cube.” “What’s 9PM Magazine?” asks John. “Oh, it’s a mixed-media online journal.” “Sounds great,” he says. “I’m sure both people who read your story will love it.” “Thanks.” “Have you considered turning it into a movie that no one will see?” “No,” I say quietly, and think to myself that John Deveril is a hateful man. Part of me wants to take this up with Q, to have her validate my view and side with me in this incipient in-law struggle. But I know she is utterly devoted to him. This has been demonstrated in innumerable ways—by the look on her face when she sees him, by the reverence with which she speaks of his work, by the way she includes him in every detail of the wedding preparations. I wonder how this can be so. As far as I can tell, they share no values. He is on the far right of the political spectrum; she is on the left. He is a business tycoon; she tills the soil. He lives a material life; she lives a life of ideas. And, more potentially divisive than any of that, at his core, John Deveril is a nasty, bitter man. How can father and daughter be so close? No sooner do I wonder this than I have my answer. Joan and Q walk into the bar and he is transformed. He pops out of his seat. The whiskey is forgotten. His visage, which has been a knot of tension and anger, relaxes. Q glows when she sees him, and it is as if her energy beams its way through his body, bouncing its way off this muscle and that organ, and now he is himself aglow. I barely recognize him. “How did it go?” he asks, full of hope. “Great,” says Q. “Simply great. We found just the right fern for the topiaries.” “Magnificent,” says John. “Simply magnificent.” “And what have you boys been up to?” asks Q mischievously. John grasps my shoulder with a warm, firm hand. “Your brilliant fianc? has just been telling me about his new short story.” This sentiment cannot possibly be genuine, but it sounds as if it is, each and every word. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” asks Q. Her sincerity, of course, is beyond question. “It’s genius,” says John. “Simply genius.” He supportively kneads my shoulder. This gesture cannot be sincere, and yet it also appears to be so. I detect no derision from him, nor any suspicion of sarcasm from Q. I see no indication of winks or nods or tacit understandings of any kind. It all appears to be real. Only two plausible hypotheses can be stated. One is that she does not see him for who he is. This is possible. Perhaps John’s kind treatment of me is part of his ruse. Perhaps he is deceiving Q. Perhaps he understands that it will not do to openly disapprove of the man who will marry his daughter. He will think of me what he likes and treat me as he will in private, but for the sake of appearances, he will maintain the pretense of affection for me. This could be true. But I think the second possibility is more likely: she makes him a better man. If anyone could do it, surely Q could. Basking in the effulgence of her approval would warm even the coldest soul, and she has a special radiance for John Deveril. No man could resist that. No man could dare to disappoint that creature. Indeed, as they speak with one another I see that she does not regard him as loathsome in any way. She does not treat him gingerly, placate him, or dance around his temper. She treats him like a dear father, one whom she loves beyond words. Watching their interaction, I conclusively reject the first hypothesis. She is not deceived. She has not blinded herself to the true nature of her father. She does not see it because he is not this person with her. Whether I am right or wrong, no good could come of standing between these two. If it is a deception, then she will resent me for exposing it. If it is reality, then I am lucky to be permitted into her life, because this bond is special and strong. Q and I are heading back to New York and we say our good-byes. Joan kisses us each on the cheek. John gives his daughter a kiss and a bear hug. He shakes my hand and wishes me a safe trip. Q kisses me and whispers, “Let’s get ice cream for the road.” I feel my anger slip away. The truth is, none of it matters. Not John Deveril’s judgment of me, not the prohibition against Neil Diamond, not the allergic flowers. None of it. Only her love. Chapter FIVE After the ominous admonition that I must not wed Q, I pepper myself with questions—why? what goes wrong? how could this possibly happen?—but I am unwilling to pursue the conversation. I insist that these answers must wait, that it is enough for one evening to learn that time travel is possible, that a glass of lemonade costs more than six dollars, and that Roth has written yet another Zuckerman novel. I suggest that we meet again two nights later and, for our second t?te-?-t?te, propose Chef David Bouley’s legendary eponymous eatery in TriBeCa. Now when I say that “I” propose that we meet at Bouley, I mean specifically that my future self proposes that we meet at Bouley. I—the real-time me—would much rather eat at a diner. The nomenclature has become confusing, even in my own mind. Sometimes I think of the visitor as “I,” other times as “older me,” other times as an utter stranger. It appears to depend on whether I am finding him sympathetic or annoying. I am utterly inconsistent. To avoid further confusion, I propose hereafter to reserve the use of the simple pronoun “I” for references to myself in the present moment (which, of course, is long past by the time you are reading this) and to designate the future version of myself as I-60. As occasions present where additional pronouns are required, I shall refer to I-60 as “he,” unless the story takes a substantial and unexpected twist. I adopt these conventions with two reservations. The first is whether this nomenclature embraces a meaningful conception of self. In the past, I jointly taught a class on the history of justice with Phil Arnowitz, a former attorney who used to litigate death penalty cases before becoming an academic. On the first day of class, he would present to students the curious case of Hugo, a heartless serial killer who, while being escorted to the electric chair, is struck on the head by a falling brick. Hugo is taken to the hospital and lapses into a coma. When he wakes up—forty years later—Hugo is a changed man. He is sweet and docile and has no recollection of his murderous rampage. When told of his crimes, Hugo is incredulous and apologetic. A team of neurologists examine Hugo and determine that he has suffered damage to the frontal lobe of his brain, which has caused his amnesia and permanently changed his formerly aggressive personality. The doctors unanimously agree that Hugo now poses no threat to society. Professor Arnowitz dramatically asks, “Should Hugo still be electrocuted?” Most of the students say yes: he committed the crime, he should pay. This was originally my answer too. But who is “he”? asks Arnowitz. The man society proposes to execute is forty years older than the man who committed the crime. Hugo is organically different, has a changed disposition, and is genuinely contrite. How does it make sense to think of him as the same person who committed the crime? I ask the same question here. I-60 is not exactly I, and I am not exactly I-60, but we do have the same name and occupy the same corporeal space, which, as in the case of Hugo, makes things more than a little bit confusing. The second reservation is that the convention may cause substantial confusion with references to certain highways. Hereafter, where major freeways are involved in the story, I shall refer to these routes by their full Christian names, thus avoiding confusion between, for example, the road from Florida to Maine, Interstate 95, and my ninety-five-year-old self. Whether we are the same person or not, I-60 has developed some expensive tastes. My friend Ard again pulls some strings and is able to arrange a table at Bouley. I-60 arrives precisely on time, as I do, and is wearing a checkered oxford shirt and khaki pants, as am I. He orders chicken consomm? and a seltzer with lime, which would be free at the diner, but at Bouley costs an astonishing $7.50. “So no doubt you want to know what happened,” he says, “or from your perspective, what is going to happen.” “Of course,” I say. My heart is racing. “Well, then, I should tell you.” He takes a sip of seltzer and sucks on the lime. It is a repulsive habit, and I wonder when this begins. “The wedding comes off well,” he says. “It is not the wedding that you imagine for yourself—there are no professional bowlers among the guests, and Miller Lite is not served—but for a rich WASP affair, it is refreshingly homey. You and Q write your own vows, debut to a cha-cha, and hold hands for the entire day. Everyone remarks how much in love the two of you are. “The capon is free-range, the product of an eleventh-hour compromise with John Deveril. His position is that any wedding of his daughter will feature roosters. Q is reluctant to challenge him, but she, of course, is averse to causing any kind of suffering, and you take up the issue on her behalf. One week before the event, you find a farm that caponizes its chickens using hormones, allows the birds to roam free, and kills them humanely. John calls this “gay capon,” but he accepts the settlement. Q does too. Mostly, she is happy that her father is happy. “The entr?e is one of several potential powder kegs, and John Deveril is like a dry match on the day of the wedding, flitting about the reception looking for a reason to go off. But somehow, impossibly, nothing ignites. John even leaves satisfied with the disc jockey, who pleases him by playing a prolonged set of ZZ Top songs.” “Why ZZ Top?” “They’re Republicans.” “I had no idea.” I-60 nods. He says, “The only real disaster occurs when your Aunt Sadie spills tomato juice on her dress, and even this is not as bad as it might have been. The waiter comes quickly with seltzer. The blouse is lost but the dress is preserved. Sadie is satisfied, if not happy, which really is about as much as one can ever hope for with Sadie.” I nod. This rings true. Sadie is difficult. I-60 sucks the lime then continues. “On Q’s whim, you make a late change and honeymoon in the Gal?pagos. You set sail from Valparaiso, Chile, on a catamaran, which takes you to visit the main islands of the archipelago, and then deposits you at an eco-resort on Isabela. It is a magical place. You spend three weeks there, long enough to befriend a giant tortoise and a Gal?pagos penguin who rides on his back. They come by each morning for breakfast and return again in the evening to sit by the fire and exchange stories. The tortoise says little, but he is old and wise and his presence is nurturing. The penguin is chattier. Q cries when the time comes to leave; the tortoise and penguin also are unmistakably sad. But life goes on, and when one lives for hundreds of years, as does your tortoise friend, he must learn to adapt. Q does, and so do you. “Back home, you buy a small loft in TriBeCa, which Q fills in an economical and environmentally friendly manner with midcentury modern furniture, all Swedish and all constructed with sustainably forested wood. You have an energy-efficient espresso maker, a low-water toilet, and maintain a compost bin under the kitchen sink. Q adorns the walls with prints of Monet and Matisse, and, though you harbored doubts about the apartment, in no time at all it feels like home. Together, you and Q live the modestly indulgent, culturally sensitive bohemian life of the postmodern liberal—you read the Times online, bicycle to the Cloisters Museum, and flush only out of necessity. On the windowsill Q maintains a flourishing herb garden. In the evenings you watch old movies and eat vegetarian takeout.” I-60 pauses, and sucks the lime yet again. “Your second novel is a modest success,” he says. “It is neither bestseller material nor enough to make you rich, but you develop a small but loyal following, enough to ensure that your third book sells. This response is more than enough to keep you fulfilled and engaged in your writing. Q abandons professional gardening but turns to teaching ecology and conservation at the New School, which she finds satisfying. You and she have a constructive existence and are each intellectually engaged, both individually and with one another.” “That all sounds quite nice,” I say. “It is,” says I-60. “It is a very good life. This is the happy part of the story.” The sucking on the lime really bothers me. It would be one thing if I-60 just did it once or twice, but this is not the case. He repeatedly pulls the slice out of his drink, sucks it, spits it back into the seltzer, and then smacks his lips three times in succession. I could probably tolerate this were it not for the lip smacking. This is over the top, and why three times? I have no idea when and where this behavior originates. I am far from a perfect person, but I surely have no habit as annoying as this. Even the choice of lime bothers me. I am committed to lemon in my drinks and have been for years. The trouble with lime is not the taste—this I could take or leave—it is the social statement made by ordering it. Lime is an affected fruit. Asking for it is not out of place at the fancy eateries I-60 seems to favor. In the real world, however, it raises eyebrows. Joe the Plumber doesn’t order lime with his drink, of that one can be sure, and no diner serves lime with a Diet Coke. I suppose it’s possible that I-60’s palate has evolved, but even still, he knows how invested I am in lemons. It’s a real statement he is making, and I don’t like it one bit. This is still the happy part of the story, but I nevertheless experience I-60 as exceedingly unpleasant. “Experience” is a Q word, one of several that seep into my vocabulary. Pre-Q, I would simply have said “Bob is annoying” or something analogously direct, but post-Q I recognize the gross difference between the putatively objective claim that someone is something and a more humble, affirmation-of-the-subjective-experience-of-reality-type assertion, such as, “I perceive Bob as having certain characteristics that any reasonable person would find excruciatingly annoying.” Q picked up the term in a sociology course, “Deconstruction of Post-Modern Society,” which she tells me about on our sixth date, after we see The Seventh Seal at a Bergman festival at Lincoln Center. The gist of the course—shorthanding here through the Nietzsche and Heidegger—is that meaning is entirely subjective and life pointless. The syllabus piloted the students on a grim march through the dense thicket of deconstruction literature, including the entire oeuvre of the legendary French philosopher Jacques Derrida, whose work could be comprehended by no more than a dozen living humans, excluding, apparently, Derrida himself, who, when asked to define “deconstruction”—a term he had coined—said, “I have no simple and formalizable response to this question.” All that could be said conclusively was what deconstruction was not. The professor, Bella Luponi, a languid, phlegmatic type who had taken twenty-seven years to finish his dissertation, devoted each session of the course to disposing of a different thing that deconstruction might potentially be. Proceeding thusly, Professor Luponi established that deconstruction is neither an analysis nor a critique. It is also not a method, an act, an operation, a philosophy, a social movement, a revolution, a religion, an article of faith, an anthropological fact, a moral code, an ethic, an idea, a concept, a whim, a verb, a noun, or, properly speaking, a synonym for “destruction.” At the start of the last class before Thanksgiving, one of Q’s friends left a nectarine on the professor’s desk. Luponi entered the near-empty lecture hall and obligingly asked, “What’s this?” “It’s a nectarine,” said Q’s friend. “Is deconstruction a nectarine?” “Heavens, no,” said Luponi. “Well, that’s the last thing I could come up with,” the student said. Then he picked up his nectarine and left the class forever. In the last days of the semester Professor Luponi argued that deconstruction is best understood as a type of analysis, in the sense of the word that Freud employs, and that the interpretation of words and experiences says as much about the listener as about the speaker. It was during this lecture that Q resolved to become an organic gardener. As I-60 continues with his Shangri-la tale of newlywed progressives in love, an engaging narrative of L?vi-Strauss reading groups and gluten-free vegan dinner parties, I feel what is at first a pang of resentment in my stomach, which swells into a more palpable aversion, and finally bursts into genuine loathing. This occurs shortly after I-60 delivers the news that he is, and thus I am or will be, the father of a beautiful baby boy. “You and Q name the baby after yourselves,” he says. “Quentin Evangeline Junior. This is not an act of hubris; it is solely for his nickname, QE II.” This is ostensibly happy news, but I-60 relates this part of the story solemnly, and I can tell from his manner that this event, for better or worse, is the transformative moment of my unlived life. I know it cannot be good and brace for the worst. The mere prospect of grief in my future life unnerves me. I don’t like pain, whether it’s mine or anyone else’s. I cried at the end of Titanic. Instead of simply telling me what happens, however, I-60 proposes that we meet for yet a third time, at La Grenouille no less, for him to deliver the third chapter in the never-ending tale of How My Life Went Horribly Wrong. I understand this is serious business, and that he has traveled a long way, but I am annoyed all the same. I will now be out for three dinners. Needless to say, when the bill arrives I-60 does not make so much as a gesture in its direction. This is particularly frustrating because, presuming even a modest rate of inflation, the check, which represents more than two days of my salary, would cost someone spending 2040 dollars something like ten bucks. “Perhaps if this is going to be a semiregular thing,” I say as I reach for the check, “we could undertake to share the damage. I imagine you have some recollection of what a young professor earns.” “Not much, that’s for sure. And you ain’t getting rich from your novels.” “Well, then?” “You know what our mother used to say,” I-60 says, smiling. “It all comes from the same pishka.” “Seriously,” I say. “This is the second time we have had dinner together and now there is going to be a third meal. I really don’t make very much, as you recall, and money is very tight. Q and I are trying to save as much as we can. Her parents are covering the wedding, but we don’t want to rely on them for anything more than that. We’re trying to save for our honeymoon and for an apartment. I certainly don’t have enough spare money to be eating meals at Bouley and Jean-Georges.” I cast him a serious look. “It would be great if you could help me out.” At this suggestion, I-60 grows solemn himself. “Time travel is still in its infancy,” he says. “Many of the practical and philosophical issues surrounding it are yet unexplored. What we do know is that it is highly problematic, potentially cataclysmic, for physical objects from one period to come into contact with the same physical object in another time line.” “So it’s okay for you to come back and talk with me, but if our watches were to encounter one another, that would be a problem.” “Yes.” “That makes no sense.” “The universe is arbitrary. Just look at Jeff Goldblum.” This doesn’t sit right with me and I let him know. “Hold on a second,” I say. “Money is fungible. The value of a dollar is a concept, not an object.” “Unfortunately, the only form of money I possess is currency, which is physical. And since I can’t very well put dollar bills from the future into circulation, I’m stuck with a few old dollar bills, which I happened to save from my own past. I need to use these sparingly. If one of these were to come into contact with itself …” He shakes his head at this prospect and quietly says, “It’s just not a chance worth taking.” “So I guess I’m stuck with the tab.” “I guess,” says I-60. “Unless you can get them to accept a postdated check.” He laughs heartily at this, as I hand the waiter my credit card. “That’s funny,” I say, though my experience of it is quite different. Chapter SIX I harbor suspicions, intensified by this conversation at the end of our meal at Bouley, that my putative arrival from the future may be an elaborate ruse. Several things don’t fit. There’s the lime sucking, of course, and the persistent refusal to pay. But what makes me most wary is the gratuitous shot at Jeff Goldblum. Tastes change. I didn’t like coffee or fish when I was a kid, but I do now. It’s possible my predilection for lime evolves over time. I-60’s frugality is credible. The animosity for Jeff Goldblum, however, is utterly implausible. I like Jeff Goldblum. I did not happen to care for The Fly, but I very much enjoyed Igby Goes Down and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Furthermore, Goldblum had a small role in Annie Hall, my favorite movie ever. When Alvy Singer and Annie Hall go to the party at Tony Lacey’s Hollywood home, Goldblum is the man saying into the telephone, “I forgot my mantra.” This alone gives him a perpetual pass in my book. I am thus distrustful of I-60. I suspect he is not genuine and that this whole thing is a hoax. Concededly, I am not sure what the point of this would be. I theorize that it could be an elaborate practical joke or a credit card scam, though creating a fictitious future self just to secure access to my American Express seems a bit extreme. If I were being honest, I would admit that my suspicions about the authenticity of I-60 are really part and parcel of a more general, long-suppressed skepticism about the authenticity of life itself. This doubt originates in high school. My parents move from Brooklyn to Long Island the summer after ninth grade and I am forced to change schools. I don’t know anyone at the new school. I spend most of tenth grade trying to make friends, with limited luck, and trying to meet girls, with no success at all. Then, miraculously, on the last day of school, Amy Weiss and Rebecca Perlstein independently invite me to go to the beach. I glide home only to notice that my psoriasis has become enflamed. I cannot imagine how anything like this could happen by coincidence and conclude that everyone around me, including my friends and parents, are automatons, characters in the play that is my life. I begin to note similarities in appearance between ostensibly unrelated individuals like Mr. Mudwinder, my calculus teacher, and the guy who gives out the shoes at the local bowling alley. Some figures appear to be recycled. The boy who delivers our Newsday bears a close resemblance to one of my old camp counselors. The guy who runs the hot dog cart outside our high school looks eerily like my second cousin Zelda’s first husband. From this evidence I conclude that the Grand Manipulator has only a finite number of robot models at his disposal. I only waver from my complete conviction in this belief when I read, many years later, that a quarter of the planet is descended from Genghis Khan. Still, I think my hypothesis is just as likely to be true as not. Often when I walk to school or work, I wave to the imaginary audience that I envision to be observing my life. I am enormously disappointed when these metaphysical anxieties later become, more or less, the plot of The Truman Show. This suggests that I am not the only person to wonder about the possibility of a contrived existence. Sure enough, as I enter university and my intellectual horizons broaden, I learn that this idea has occurred to many people, including Ludwig Wittgenstein, Woody Allen, Kurt Vonnegut, and Bob Barker. At first blush, it seems implausible that if life had indeed been orchestrated as an elaborate deception of me, that the planet would be sprinkled with philosophers, satirists, and game show hosts asking the very same sort of questions that I myself am asking. Upon further reflection, though, I conclude that this might itself be part of the deception, the sort of misdirection that the shrewdest of puppeteers would employ. So, over the course of my young adulthood, I search unceasingly for examples of inconsistencies that could expose the fraud. I scrutinize the comments of my friends to see whether they reveal facts that they could not have known, search for bargains that are too good to be true, and, of course, keep a sharp eye out for recurrences of the visage of my calculus teacher, Mr. Mudwinder. I find no hard evidence to support my suspicions but nevertheless remain leery. Optimists confuse me. How could Evel Knievel and Amelia Earhart think for even a moment that they would make it? People with religious conviction make no sense to me whatsoever, except the Baptists, who seem resigned to enduring the worst that life has to offer. I am especially mistrustful of other Christians, particularly Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and those insufferable Quakers, who maintain an unrelenting faith in the positive direction of life that seems, to me at least, fundamentally incompatible with independent, rational thought. It was with this sensibility and experience, call it expertise if you will, that I set out to evaluate I-60’s authenticity and investigate the possible fraud. Following our dinner at Bouley, I clandestinely follow I-60 to his hotel and determine that he is staying at the W. This is further cause for suspicion. W’s are swanky, and the one in midtown is as nice as they come. How can I-60 afford such luxurious accommodations on what he professes to be a limited budget? Standing on Forty-ninth Street, off the side entrance of the hotel, I develop a plan to resolve my doubts about I-60 one way or the other once and for all. The following morning, I rise early and return to the W. It is not a teaching day, and I am free. I stand again on the corner of Forty-ninth and Lexington and wait for I-60. He emerges just after seven thirty, on his way for a run. After he jogs off, I enter the hotel lobby and tell the concierge that I have forgotten my key. He asks for identification. I hand him my driver’s license. Fortunately he does not scrutinize the photograph. He simply hands me a plastic key card. “You have to forgive me,” I say, “but I have also forgotten my room number.” “Room 609,” he says. “Make a right turn after exiting the elevator.” I head up to the room and take a quick spin through I-60’s things. Nothing is out of the ordinary. He has traveled light. Aside from the running outfit, which he is wearing now, he has packed two sets of clothes: two pairs of socks, two pairs of underwear, two shirts, and two pairs of pants, one nice, one casual. The new trousers are unfamiliar to me, but the latter pair I know. These are my favorite pants, have been for years. My grandfather used to wear brown corduroys, so I have always had a thing for them, and this pair from Eddie Bauer fit just right from the very first day. These are the pants I put on when I want to feel better after a rough day or when I am settling in to watch a big game or when I am about to do something difficult or important. I am wearing them now. His are more faded than mine. The cuffs have frayed, and the waist button has been sewn on too many times, perhaps let out a little bit over the years. But it is undeniable that these are my pants. Suddenly, I become conscious of the time. Who knows how long a sixty-year-old can run? I take a look out the window, note that the room faces Lexington Avenue, and make a quick exit from the room. Downstairs, I walk out the side door and across the street to the Marriott, where I inquire about a room. I tell the desk clerk that I would like a unit facing Lexington Avenue. They can accommodate me, he says, though check-in will not be possible until later in the afternoon. This is fine; I don’t intend to check in until the next morning, but the room is expensive, which gives me pause. Happily I am able to use frequent-flier miles and redeem a coupon for a second night. I book the room, return home, and wait for Q. She is frazzled when she gets home from work. The battle for survival of the garden has become more serious, she tells me. The prospective developer is asking the city to take the property on which the garden sits by eminent domain so that the massive skyscraper can be erected. “The mayor will never go for that,” I say. “He may,” says Q. “We still don’t know the true identity of this developer, but whoever it is, he or she has good connections. Our initial calls to city councilors were discouraging. The project has political momentum.” “What are you going to do?” “I don’t know. We’re starting to have meetings about it.” “Good.” “Can you help?” “I’d be happy to do whatever I can.” “Thank you,” she says, as she gives me a kiss. “It means a lot to have your support.” I tell Q that a good friend of mine from high school is visiting from out of town. “We’re going to spend the day together tomorrow and have dinner in the evening. I might be home a bit late.” I might not be so understanding of Q spending a night on the town with a mysterious friend, but she simply says, “Fine” and “Have fun” and returns to reading her copy of Keepin’ It Relleno: The Complete Guide to Chili Pepper Farming and Organic Political Advocacy. Nothing bothers Q. She is undemanding and generous and accepting of others, qualities to which I cannot relate. In the morning, around six o’clock, after Q has left for the garden, I head over to the Marriott. I take with me a pair of binoculars, which Joan Deveril bought me for a night at the opera after learning that I did not have my own. They are tiny, but super high-powered. The room is nice enough. A free copy of the Times is waiting for me. The coffee maker is serviceable and the mattress is not horrible. But it is nothing compared to I-60’s room at the W, which has a state-of-the-art coffee maker and Egyptian cotton sheets on the bed. Using my binoculars, I can see his luxurious accommodations across the street quite clearly. I again wonder how he has afforded the room. As he wakes up, however, my suspicions notwithstanding, what I see is unmistakably me. He is up early himself; it is still not yet seven. Again he goes for a run. The stiff knee that bothers me when I wake up has deteriorated. It takes ten minutes of stretching for him to get himself out of bed. He cannot lift his knees to put on his running shorts. Instead he sits on a chair and reaches forward to pull the shorts up over his feet. It is an ordeal. When he goes downstairs, I do the same, and trail him from a safe distance. He walks from the hotel to Central Park and then jogs my favorite route—once around the pond, up past the Hallett Nature Sanctuary, across Seventy-second Street, over Bow Bridge into the ramble, a loop around the lake, then south past the sheep meadow and the Heckscher Ballfields, and finally back home. I feel pangs of sadness as I jog behind him. His gait—my gait—which was once effective, perhaps even graceful, has become a lurching series of stumbles. He is slow, gets winded, stops to watch some teenagers play softball. He is in no hurry. He is an old man. After the run, he walks back to the hotel and retreats to his room, as I do to mine. Through the binoculars, I see him shower and dress for the day. He is not meeting anyone as far as I can tell, but still he takes extra care with his appearance. He shaves and irons his shirt. The baggage limit on travel from the future is apparently generous enough to allow him to pack a nose-hair trimmer, which I failed to notice while rummaging through his things. I-60 spends a few minutes grooming his nose, then a few more tending to his ear. When he leaves his room, he looks better than when I met him. Travel can be brutal on appearances or, perhaps, he is feeling more optimistic. On the street he buys a bagel, checks out the toys in the window at FAO Schwartz, walks to the Metropolitan Museum, where he spends a while with the impressionists. He takes another long, slow walk home, back through the park, where he buys a pretzel, wistfully watches a pair of young lovers paddle a rowboat, lingers by some frolicking dogs, and reads the descriptions of the trees. He is killing time. I suspect I am to blame for this. I have made this necessary by telling him, at Bouley, that I cannot meet again for several days. I have papers to grade, I say, and a reading in Greenwich, Connecticut. In truth I have neither papers to grade nor a reading to attend. I want to buy time to scrutinize him. He sees through the lie, I am sure. How could I ever deceive him? I bet he even remembers the true date of the Greenwich reading, which was several months ago. But he does not call me on it. This would be awkward. Instead he spends the time wandering the streets of the city. Perhaps he does not mind. Perhaps it is a pleasure to spend a few days in the New York of his youth. Or perhaps he is past the point of feeling much of anything. In the evening, when he has exercised himself to the point that he knows he will be able to sleep, he returns to his hotel and I return to mine. In his room, he takes off the clothes of the day and dons the brown corduroys. A little after six o’clock, he leafs through the room service menu and places an order. Twenty minutes later it arrives. Through the binoculars, I can see that the meal is a veggie burger with tomato and onion and a side of sweet potato fries. This is more to my own taste. I-60 sits in a lounge chair and eats the supper in front of the television set. At seven o’clock he watches Seinfeld, at seven thirty The Simpsons. I wonder how many times he has seen each of these episodes. Perhaps hundreds; I have seen them each dozens of times myself. I can see him anticipating the laugh lines, as am I. It is the monorail episode of The Simpsons, a classic. As Lyle Lanley sings to the town meeting, we mouth the words with him in unison. At eight o’clock, I-60 tunes in for the Mets game. I turn on the set in my own room and listen. Pelfrey is pitching, which is always dicey, and Davis is sitting out with a wrenched knee. Sure enough the Mets fall behind. When Reyes fails to run out a pop-up, which is dropped, I-60 waves his hand in disgust. Around ten, he walks to the vending machines and buys himself a package of Oreos and a small container of skim milk. I-60 eats his dessert while watching the end of the game. When the cookies and the Mets are finished off, he licks his teeth clean for a few minutes, then brushes them. In bed, he begins to doze while watching a rerun of The Office. Before he nods off, though, he kisses two framed photographs, which he has placed on the bedside table. One he sets back down. The other he clutches while he finally falls asleep, having either forgotten to change out of his corduroy pants or chosen not to. As I run home to meet Q, it occurs to me, happily, that these pants from different time lines have come into contact with one another without any apparent disruption to the fabric of existence. It occurs to me then, too, less happily, that the man wearing these pants, this sad, tired man who likes veggie burgers and soft pretzels and cookies, who wanders the city watching lovers and puppies and falls asleep dreaming of his family, is unequivocally, unambiguously, and unmistakably, me. Chapter SEVEN You have been following me.” I-60 says this directly, matter-of-factly, across our table at La Grenouille, on Fifty-third and Park, where we have gathered for Meal Number Three, a late lunch. I understand from his tone that it is pointless to deny the claim. “It is nothing personal, I assure you.” “What, then?” “These are major life decisions I am facing. I need to be confident of your authenticity.” “And you doubt this?” “I suppose not,” I answer sheepishly. “I’m not sure. I’m not sure about anything at this point.” “Would you like me to relate to you the details of your first romantic experience with Becky Goldstein? Would you like me to describe the comic book you wrote in first grade in which the Muppets of Sesame Street had secret lives as superheroes, and Ernie and Bert possessed the special power to clean at faster-than-light speed? Would you like me to discuss the state of your bunions?” “None of that will be necessary,” I say. These are all embarrassing matters, none more so than the Becky Goldstein incident. “Well, then,” I-60 says. “I think you owe me something of an apology.” This gets my dander up. “I owe you an apology?” “I take it you think otherwise.” “You ask for meals to be arranged at the finest restaurants in the city, order seven-dollar soft drinks, and don’t so much as lift a finger to pay the check.” “How ungrateful is this?” I-60 asks no one in particular. “Do you seriously think that I have come from thirty years in the future to mooch a few good meals off you? I am here for the gravest of reasons, to change the course of your life, so that you can be spared the pain that I have endured. Money is irrelevant. I would very much like to treat you to dinner, but it is simply not possible.” “Why is this again?” “I explained to you already. We are not allowed to carry much cash.” “And that is because?” “There were incidents, abuses. People traveled back in time to take advantage of sales or shop at outlet stores.” “And yet you told me that time travel is quite expensive?” “It is, but the savings at wholesalers are staggering, and our dollar goes so far in your time. When the money started flowing backward, the financial markets went haywire. Restrictions had to be established.” “So what you told me about the consequences of physical objects from different time periods coming into contact with one another was a lie? You and I are physical objects from different time periods. I suppose that should have been a tip-off.” Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/evan-mandery/q-a-love-story/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. 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