WE ARE ALWAYS getting knocked around. That way. This way.
Pushed this way, flying off that way. When we bump into something, we
are sent flying. At least, that's what I believe. The only way we can stand
right where we are is because we are subject to forces coming at us from all
directions, willy-nilly. And the reason our bodies don't buckle under all this
pressure is something I learned in school a long time ago. It's because
inside our bodies are all kinds of things trying to push their way out. At the
bottom of the gravity well, the layer of atmosphere above us does not stave
our heads in, and that is the reason.
Of course, there is also an actual reason why I have come to believe this.
Of course, we had been that way for a long time without ever thinking we
even needed some kind of a reason, still able to believe in something, till at
some point we got to now, where most things seem to have had no reason
for a long time, and I think this must actually be something quite special.
Rita is a completely unmanageable young girl. None of us knows what to
do with her. Things are especially bad when she is in the backyard. She
casually pulls the revolver from her belt and…Bang! Not that she is aiming
my way or anything; she just fires away without a target. Her house is
surrounded by rusty steel plates, and of course anything that can be broken
is broken. The only things left unbroken are things that can't be broken, and
they just sit there.
It is a half mile to the nearest neighbor's. All the locals know about her
habits, and they steer clear of her place, because she is from someplace else.
People from someplace else have no place here.
So, no problem, right? think Rita's family members, but they are the only
ones who think so. The situation is both very obvious and very
problematical.
Because she is shooting all the time, she is really good at it. There are
many boys in the neighborhood—men actually—who torment Rita and
have holes in their pants, very close to their testicles, as a result. No one
could figure out how Rita knew just where those men's testicles were, when
they hardly even knew themselves.
Among the girls in the area, there is a legend—that many believe to be
true—that Rita once shot a cockroach that had nested for years behind her
uncle's testicles, but we all know that no such creature could live in such a
place. If it could, we would all be secretly keeping pet scarab beetles or
praying mantises there where we could play with them.
"There is a reason why Rita is so crazy," James said once, giving me a
five-dollar coin. "In her head," he says, pointing to his own temple.
"There's a bullet buried in there." And having said that, his body shook a
little, as if he had just finished micturating.
I responded that there was nobody alive with a bullet lodged in their
head, to which he responded that's exactly what's so fantastic about it,
turning red in the face.
I believe James to be the smartest guy in this neighborhood, or maybe
even the smartest guy in North America, but for two weeks now he has had
the world's worst crush on Rita. Now, even I know you can't get apples
from oranges, but this guy is the worst. If you could extract the smarts there
wouldn't be anything left of him. But he was still the smartest guy for two
hundred miles around, no doubt about it.
"So what if she does have a bullet in her head?" I asked. "Some-time it
must have got there somehow. How else could it be?"
Jay looked at me with a bored expression on his face.
"It's been there since she was born," he said seriously. I couldn't be sure
if he was teasing me or what, so I just patted him on the shoulder. Jay
turned and got hold of me, wrapped his right arm around my middle, and
threw me down. I offered no resistance and tumbled to the grass, landing
spread-eagled.
"Huh?" I said.
1"Huh what?" he said back. And repeating this scintillating dialogue, back
and forth, we got into it, just repeating "Huh" at each other, heatedly. Jay
was just trying to get his "hypothesis" across.
"Your 'hypothesis'?!" I yelled back. "From now on anybody who uses a
word like 'hypothesis' to me, I'm just going to call you 'Mess,' cause your
name 'James' is really 'Jay-Mess'! And then I will call you 'Messed-Up'!"
As I sat there being reborn as a "mess-up" machine, Jay sat down next to
me and wrapped his arms around his knees and told me how much he liked
Rita. He had told me the same thing just the day before, and if I may say so,
he had also said it just two minutes before that. He had probably said it a
thousand times since he started feeling that way, but I didn't mind. A
thousand times in two weeks might be too much though.
"If my hypothesis is correct, though…" he just kept repeating.
"Knock it off already about your hypothesis," I grumbled as I got up. I
never heard of a hypothesis that ever convinced a girl to do anything. Jay
was too smart to ever hit on a girl. Some hypothesis, huh?
"If my hypothesis is correct…" he said again, proudly.
With nothing better to do than stand there and listen, I realized Jay
seemed to be sobbing.
Hmmm, people who go on about their hypotheses, it seems, really have
some pretty extraordinary capacities. James was the kind of guy who
wouldn't ordinarily shed a tear even if hornets stung him on the butt.
Although I do have a tendency to exaggerate.
"Rita," Jay would say, "is shooting her bullets at the day after tomorrow."
He said it like he was sure of it.
That's the way it is. No target, that's just the way it is.
"Of course that's not what I meant," Jay would say without even looking
this way. "Rita's just having a shooting match with somebody in the
future," he went on.
That inference, or delusion, that he drew did not particularly move me.
Let me put this plainly: I don't understand.
"Well, first, let us assume…" Jay said in preface. "Rita has a bullet in her
head. William Smith Clark has testified to this."
I didn't put much faith in that old Civil War doctor, who ended up as a
statue in Japan, forever pointing to some far horizon, as if trying to instruct
his lost sheep. Come to think of it, I don't think doctors are very trustworthy
at all.
"Next, let us assume that bullet has been in Rita's head ever since she
was born. I heard that from her aunt, so I'm sure it's true.
"There can only be one conclusion!" Jay said, jumping to his feet. I don't
know why, but he was pointing at the sky.
I said, "When Rita was still in her mother's womb, her mother was shot!"
Jay cut a gallant figure, but I would have to dash some cold water on
him. He held that pose for some time, and I watched as the arm pointing
high in the sky gradually bent back toward the ground.
"Maybe so," he said.
Jay made a complicated face as he thought. There was a right way to
enter a house. Most people think it is proper etiquette to open the door
before entering. I'm pretty sure it's not too smart to open the door after
entering. Even scarier if it's bullets we're talking about.
"What other possible way could there be?" I asked Jay.
Adding insult to injury, with a lonely look on his face, Jay said,
"Someone in the future shot Rita. For better or worse, that bullet lodged in
her skull. But from the recoil, Rita is, even now, being pushed backward in
time, back into her mother's belly."
Hmmm, I thought, waving at Jay to go on if he wished to continue in this
vein.
"Here's what I think. From the very start, Rita came from some direction
or other. But then for some reason, somebody shot at her from the future,
and now her path has been turned back in the direction of the past. And that
is why, in reaction to that, she is now heading back in time, back in the
direction of her mother's tummy."
I stared at him, my mouth wide open. Not because I was so impressed.
Just because I could absolutely not believe he was saying that. What did a
kid have to eat to grow up thinking things like that? I knew Jay liked corn
flakes, and starting tomorrow I was never going to eat them again. And I
would skip the yogurt too. Actually, I think it's kind of funny that people
even think of corn flakes as food.
Jay pointed his index finger straight at my open mouth and said, "This is
where it starts to get interesting.
"As of right now, the time that we are in, she hasn't been shot yet. She
has no experience of having been shot. She is just a girl with a bullet in her
head.
"The reason why she keeps shooting all over the place is this: She will be
okay as long as she shoots the person who is going to shoot her before she
herself gets shot. Relative to her, he should be in the future, so she should
just keep shooting at the future. Luckily, bullets normally move in the
direction of the future. Or at least, it's easier than shooting at the past."
He's got a point there, I thought. He might be a pretty smart guy, but
really he's a complete idiot. And there has only ever been one way to deal
with idiots. Just go along with whatever they say, or you'll regret it.
"And what if she succeeds in killing that 'sniper in the future'?"
"I hope she does," he said, nodding pompously.
"So, what's going to happen to the bullet in her head?"
"There are different ways of thinking about that. One possibility is that it
will just stay there like it was nothing at all. What I think is more likely,
though, is that the past will be changed so that the bullet in her head just
disappears. She was born wherever it is that she was born, and at some
point that could go all meta-time and turn out that way. But of course, we
won't know what's really going to happen until it happens."
"I can't really imagine what happened the instant she was shot."
"Probably…" Jay started to say, thinking, his index finger propped
against his temple. Then he took his finger away, along a line that would
pierce his head, but moving away. "We should be able to see it this way. A
bullet is flying out of Rita's head, in the wrong direction, and enters the
muzzle of the sniper's gun, going backward the whole way. Then it enters
the muzzle, and the magazine turns the wrong way, and the hammer goes
up."
I was having trouble with this.
"But, I mean, if Rita has a bullet in her head, it must be because she got
shot, right?"
"But the thing that could change that would be…" Jay responded, going
to pieces again, "my role, because I am in love with her!"
My good friend has a crush on a strange girl. This seems a bit odd to me,
but that's love for you. It's just something that happens, but when it's your
best friend you start to make some really bizarre and twisted
rationalizations about what is happening. Of course, if you really want to
know what is going on in Rita's crazy head, you'd be better off asking Rita
herself. I'm sure it wouldn't be some story about a bullet from the future.
You might even say the only important question was whether or not Rita
even likes Jay.
Ever since Jay finished explaining his "hypothesis" and burst into tears,
I've been wondering just that. What does Rita say? Jay turned bright red,
grabbed a fistful of grass and tossed it aside, and ran away, so I never found
out the details. But there is no reason to think anyone could ever ask
anything so directly of a guy whose thoughts were so tangled. He might
even be thinking he should take a knife and cut Rita's skull open, just to be
sure.
So, resigning myself to the possibility of sacrificing a testicle, I decided
to call on Rita at her house. Two would be too much, but one I could
probably live without, for my good friend's sake. I just thought of Rita as a
girl whose head was screwed on the wrong way, but I was pretty sure I
could count on her not to do anything so stupid as to shoot off both my
testicles.
The Rita who greeted me at the door, far from being the kind of person
who would threaten to tear me a new asshole if I didn't leave right away,
invited me politely, even demurely, into the living room. Somehow there
was a poor meshing, like a loosened spring, in the air. I could not relax, as if
while holding a watch with the back removed someone had told me to do a
backflip.
As I sat there, shifting my weight on the seat from one butt cheek to the
other, wondering how to start this conversation, Rita came back in with tea.
She set a cup before me, her thumb stuck in it, and said, "I heard."
"Heard what?" I asked.
"From James," she went on, looking straight back at me.
I had not anticipated this, and I was flustered. Which story, exactly, had
Jay told her? The highly colorful tale that he was in love with her? Or the
fantastically colorless tale that she was moving backward through time? Or
had he come and danced before her and blabbed that I was the one in love
with her? At the thought that the last of these ideas was actually the most
likely, a chill ran down my spine. I had the feeling this was going to cost me
more than just one testicle.
"It's true," she said, hanging her head.
I couldn't figure out which of the possibilities she might mean.
"The reason I shoot recklessly is just as James suspects."
Immediately upon hearing those words, the cry that arose in my heart
was, I did it! I'm going to live! And in that spirit, I adjusted my posture in
my seat, and as Rita's words spread through my brain, I somehow slid
halfway out of my chair. Mr. Messed-Up. That's no way to get a girl to like
you.
As I struggled to crawl back up out of the chair, I rummaged desperately
through my brain for the right words, the words she would want to hear, the
words that would keep her from shooting me on the spot.
"What I mean to say is, that's it, I mean, you're it!"
To be honest, I was completely unnerved. Rita gave the chair a good
yank and left me sprawling on the floor. It took me a while to pull myself
together again and stand up straight.
"I didn't realize there was someone else who shared the same conclusion
as me." I thought Jay was the smartest guy in the Western Hemisphere, but
how was I to know the smartest girl in the Western Hemisphere would be
right in the same neighborhood? What an idiot this one is!
"So, what I want is for you to tell Jay that on, let's say, this Friday, how
would he like to come to dinner at my house?"
That super-syllogistic sentence completely failed to penetrate my
awareness. What was the need for a dinner party at Rita's haunted house,
where everything was heaps of shards, dripping with unidentified fluids?
Knitting my brow, propping my index fingers on my temples, I
concentrated with all my might. When I lifted my head, thinking I had
failed the quiz, right in front of me was Rita's face, her cheeks bright red.
What could it be? This marvel of a girl, who could accurately and
repeatedly shoot holes in the acorns in a woodpecker's hoard, was in love
with someone.
If I could just figure out who, that person would get shot full of holes. So
who was going to get that hornet's nest? Jay was.
Realizing my own stupidity, I pounded my forehead with the palm of my
hand. Of course it was Jay. The smartest guy on the planet. For me an
auspicious realization, for Jay a killing blow. I would have to keep a close
eye on her, but thoughts of praise for Rita coursed through my head: the
bitch had really worked things out, etc., etc. No reason he wouldn't show up
to dinner, I guarantee it. If it seems like he's not going to show up, but then
finally he does, I guarantee he'll never go home again, no matter what.
Well, he really should be saying this himself—it's not for me to say; well,
but maybe it is though, really, surely. I was all confused and just babbling
away to fill the time, words all ajumble. I tried to stop, when Rita reached
out for her revolver and then staggered as if she had been struck by
something.
I was full, full to overflowing from sitting so long, continuing to confront
directly this unprocessable development. Unable to figure out what was
what, I bolted up from my chair and ran over to Rita, who was dancing a
strange dance and slowly dropping to the floor.
Looking down at her, lying on the ground, her long hair strewn about,
only then did I notice the small hole in her head.
She had a bullet in her head.
And not just that, James. She had an actual hole in her head.
This was the moment when it happened.
Looking back now, I realize that the instant it happened overlapped
precisely with the Event. If that much harm and that much tragedy had not
condensed in the world at precisely that moment, I would still have
recognized what happened there as an event. But that's not how it was.
What happened there was a derivative offshoot of the Event and not the
Event itself.
I bent over to peer into the hole in Rita's head, and just at that moment,
Rita's body bent straight upward. I dodged, reflexively, then sprang up and
reached out both hands to Rita, as one would to pet a dog.
Rita's eyes swam to blankness, and then she reversed direction in time.
From all walls and the floor of the room, reddish-black fluid came flying
at Rita's head, rushing at the little hole in it. And then, I could see, in slow
motion, the butt end of the little bullet emerging backward from the hole,
heading at me. At least, I felt like I could see it. All the blood flying through
the air toward Rita's head was suctioned into her skull, and the hole became
whole and disappeared.
I am unable to explain what happened next. The little plug that exploded
from Rita's head pierced the left side of my chest, and I lost consciousness.
All I know is that the explosion from Rita's revolver had put things back
in order. Rita picked up the gun, and then this and that went on among our
relatives. I don't know the details.
Jay was a step ahead of us arriving at the hospital. The strange tinge of
fantasy had disappeared from his face, but neither could I see any trace of
the shyness he had shown before I went to talk to Rita.
"What were you thinking, going off on your own to that nutty girl's
place," he said, grilling me. "How could you let her have a gun?" he asked
her family indignantly. And then he turned on Rita scornfully: "Why can't
you handle a gun?"
Something had certainly changed.
"In her head…" I started to say. "She had a bullet, right here."
I stared straight at Jay, holding my finger to my temple.
"Are you okay?" he said back to me. "Nobody just walks around with a
bullet in their head."
I blinked twice and fell silent.
The reason why I was okay, despite being shot on the left side of my
chest? Well, do I really have to say? The five-dollar coin that Jay had given
me. It was all too banal, so I didn't pursue it any further. Most things that
happen are like that. Five dollars is enough to stop a bullet. Of course, the
all-bent-out-of-shape coin I gave to Jay would be a fantastic talisman.
Later I tried to think long and hard about what had happened. The bullet
that emerged from Rita's head had headed straight back to the future, and it
should have gone straight back to the muzzle of the gun that fired it.
But, for whatever reason, I stood in the line of fire, and the backward-
coursing bullet struck me.
If the bullet had gone right through me, there would be no problem at all.
I would have died, then and there, and the bullet would have returned to the
shooter. Instead, the bullet had stopped in my breast pocket, and I had
ended its life.
So, the problem here is in the direction of the bullet's entry. If a bullet
from the future could shoot Rita, it would have to have gone through my
back. But it hit me in the chest and stopped there. My back was uninjured.
In other words, Rita had not been shot. I had stopped the bullet that should
have returned to the future, and it had not returned to the shooter. In other
words, the shooter had not fired it.
This distortion of the structure of time probably hesitated for no more
than an instant, and then it chose the simplest solution. Rita had not been
shot. Therefore, no bullet had entered Rita's head. In other words, Jay had
nothing to fret about. I had simply gone to Rita's house for no particular
reason and been felled by Rita's bullet. That's it.
Now, if Rita had no bullet in her head, Jay had no reason to like her, and
Rita had no reason to be interested in Jay if he wasn't thinking the same
things she was about the bullet. They might have come to like each other in
the future, but somewhere in the direction of the day after tomorrow the
intersection point had been lost. But preventing Rita from being shot—
hadn't that been Jay's wish? I finally traced this thread backward to the
point where we had had that conversation and what Jay had been thinking
as he shed those tears.
It was only long after that that I learned something about Rita's birth. The
response that came back to me seemed somehow manufactured: she had
been given up by a distant relative, and it seemed she had never been able
to develop a strong connection with her new parents. I knew nothing at all
about anything really before the Event blew in, and I don't really know if I
would ever have any way of knowing.
Neither am I able to grasp whether the unknown solution to the not
readily comprehensible space-time matrix that resulted from this incident is
the reason why I am able to retain the memory of this incident.
One reason that comes to mind is that the whole business was
bothersome to me, as the figure in the center of this space-time structure,
but it is hard to make the case that my being the center of space-time is a
decent solution. At that point in time, I was a singular point. That may be it.
Not that that explains anything.
Sometimes I think this memory of mine might be my own invention. It is
actually the most plausible explanation. But there is still something odd
about the details. If Rita had already been shot at the time I was speaking
with her, the room should have been splattered with blood. And there is no
way Rita would have been able to carry on a normal conversation with me
immediately before, or after, the shooting. Rita's house was not exactly
normal—it was kind of a mess—but it was hardly drenched in blood. At
least, I don't think so, not now.
Or it could be that this memory is a real one, but if it's real and nobody
believes it, what is the point of its being real? What I think now is that
something simply satisfied itself with something like that, at least to some
degree.
Regardless, a suitable compromise was found at a suitable time for my
own mental health.
Or else, it was just the ordinary passing dream of a young boy. It
certainly is a lot like, perhaps too much like, the dreams young boys have.
Even more so as the dream of someone who remembers how things were
before the Event.
I will record what happened to Jay and Rita after that, and then I will
close the record.
In the end, Jay never found a lover in the place where he was born and
raised, and after high school he went to New York. There it seems he
discovered he was hardly the greatest genius in North America, but he
wasn't too put out about it because he had never claimed to be. After
graduation he wandered around the East Coast, and at some point, though
it's not clear how, he landed at a research lab in Santa Fe. Playing a part in
the so-called Plan D, he was apparently working on West Coast time-lattice
repatriation strategy, but he disappeared along with Santa Fe and the entire
middle west of the North American continent.
For some time after the incident, Rita withdrew from the world, but after
less than half a year she started walking around outside again, due at least in
part to my influence. I'd kept telling her it was no big deal. Rita no longer
carried a gun on her belt. For a time I noticed she was helping out at a local
grocery, but when her sixteenth birthday came she flew the coop. It was
around that time that the Event really started to make itself felt. All hell
broke loose, and practically as soon as I heard a rumor she was gone I had
forgotten all about it.
The day she left, Rita came to my house. As always, she apologized for
what had happened three years before, and then she told me she was
leaving. She was planning to take the last train. I put her tiny bag in my
family's car, a reluctant Jay got in with us, and we all drove to the station.
The three of us waited in silence for the train, and then suddenly Rita
called out our names.
Noticing our failure to look up at her, after a moment she called our
names again.
"Richard. James. I have this feeling I have heard your names somewhere
else before. Not here, and not even something to do with me. I just don't get
it at all."
James replied in a surprisingly gentle tone, "Lots of things are getting
harder to get."
"I think you realize I won't be able to see you again, on the future side."
We all said that was ridiculous, but I think of course we all knew it was
true.
That was the last time I ever saw her. At least in this future.
I don't know what happened to her after that. I guess I haven't tried very
hard to locate her.
Sometimes I think about James, and what happened to him, having
disappeared from my future, wrapped up in the events of the North
American middle west.
It has been explained that the Event smashed and atomized time itself. As
a consequence, I feel like any explanation that doesn't make me feel like I
get something shouldn't really be called an explanation. Is that right?
James has disappeared from my present and future, but I'm sure he is
alive somewhere in atomized time. He was the kind of guy who would
never shed a tear even if a bison trampled his toes. I, of course, am mostly
talk.
I still buy James's hypothesis that Rita was shot from the future, or
somewhere in that direction. The thought that Rita and James might meet
again out there somewhere among the broken shards of time still makes me
smile. I wouldn't mind at all. Any way you slice it, time has been smashed
to smithereens, and order and consistency have abandoned the field. James
is on one fluttering crumb of time, and Rita is on another. Somewhere in
space, those crumbs could collide, and James and Rita would meet again.
That would certainly be exciting.
Of course, James is the smartest guy I ever knew, and Rita was the kind
of girl who might have a screw loose, but she was definitely one of a kind,
marching to the beat of her own drum.
Wouldn't I want to be part of that excitement?
Not at all.
Not on your life, is what I'm thinking as I look up at the blue sky and
laugh out loud.