Week 44 - The Moment Time Began

The Moment Time Began

Matthew Ryan Fischer

It was a Tuesday. Normally my Tuesdays aren’t all that exciting. A day off work. A day to relax. To shop, to read, to catch up on errands... or drink. Whatever. Nothing stunning to report or unusual. That Tuesday was shaping up like most Tuesdays. I certainly didn’t expect it to be any different. It started off like most Tuesdays. It sure felt like it was going to be just like most any other Tuesday. And it would have been too, except that this was the Tuesday when I first met Joe.

Joe was a drunk at the bar and I thought for sure that he was out of his mind.

Normally I work long hours. Normally when those shifts are over I like some time to myself. Certainly some peace and quiet. But not always. Sometimes I want to be around other people. Not necessarily interacting with them, but around them.

It had been an especially draining week. A busy ER. A lot of foot traffic. A lot of unfortunate souls.

It was good to have a day off; it was a good day to drink.

I had walked by The Reisender at least a dozen times. A tavern pub of some sort. I had passed it on my way to work, but never stopped in. It always looked dark and depressing. Normally not my speed. But that day, after that week, it seemed just about perfect. A strong drink seemed just about perfect. Maybe a couple.

I was sitting at the bar, politely minding my own business, when a drunk in a back corner booth started cursing at whatever program was on television. Normally I tune that sort of thing out or I get up and leave. But I didn’t. I had come in with the intention of having a drink and somewhere decided to have several, and I meant to do it.

The criticisms from the back corner continued. Our level of ineptitude made him laugh, he later explained to me. We knew nothing and the only problem with that was that we thought we knew something. He knew something. Or so he claimed. He knew enough to know something from nothing or anything at all. He knew, he told everyone in earshot that wasn’t really listening to him. He knew and he could tell it to all of us. If only we would listen and understand. But he didn’t think our tiny little brains could possibly understand at all.

This was not a pleasant first encounter.

But I imagine if I were a time traveler, stranded in a past, I wouldn’t be so pleasant either. No, if that were the case, being bitter and angry would probably be the least of my problems.

I don’t know why I listened. I don’t know why I cared. Something about that day. Something about being lonely and sad and tired of watching people die. Something had left me a little bitter and angry and instead of being annoyed, I somehow found myself commiserating with his obvious pain.

Joe was a man who hated his situation and hated the people around him and that seemed okay to me. I didn’t know at the time I was going to care much beyond that moment, but who really knows that sort of thing as it is happening.

I drank my drink and he drank his and slowly the mumbling subsided. I assumed I would forget all about him and his rants. A week later I found myself wanting another midday drink and found myself again at The Reisender. I found Joe once again drunk, once again loud, once again waiting for someone to lend a listening ear.

Upon being bombarded with the same annoyingly loud diatribes, I decided I would confront the man and reason with him. Maybe I wanted his silence. Maybe I wanted his acquiescence. Maybe I wanted something more that I didn’t quite understand yet.

I made the assumption Joe would be a reasonable man and that I would be able to reason with him. And we all know what happens when we assume. Now, some men are reasonable, some men aren’t. Sometimes you can reason with the unreasonable, and sometimes you can’t reason with a man, regardless of how reasonable they are or aren’t. I hadn’t tried to figure out the likelihood of his rationality or the probability that he would want to be reasoned with even if he were capable of said mental function. I imagine if I had thought it through, I wouldn’t have gone over in the first place. But one or two beers or three or four will make a man forget some of his faculties. I did however assume that based on the volume of his rants that we would be on a somewhat even playing field when it came to drunken conversation.

I asked him to lower his voice and let the rest of us drink our drinks in peace. He looked at me and thought about that for at least one second and soon smiled. “A man after my own heart,” he said. He raised his glass as if to toast me, and then took a final big swig of the pint.

And then he shut up. The matter was closed. It should have been closed. I should have walked away. I had achieved my goal and had my opportunity to stay. And yet for some reason or another I stood there and stayed.

Joe began counting out crumpled dollar bills and pocket change. Satisfied he had counted correctly he looked back up at me. “Sit and listen and I’ll lower my voice and I’ll buy you a cold one for your troubles.”

A man after my own heart.

Joe seemed harmless enough. And the offer made him seem rational enough. And really, who was I to pass up a free beer at a bar at four in the afternoon? All I would have to do was spend 20 minutes or so listening to drunken gibberish? I waste at least three times that much time every night watching what passes as international news and prime time entertainment. And no one gives me a free beer to do that.

So I sat.

We drank.

Soon it was me buying the booze. You could only watch a man count crumpled up dollars and pocket change so many times before you knew for sure he made his wages on some street corner. You could only stand to watch him repeatedly count that same currency over and over, hoping that more would miraculously appear, before you took some form of pity and provided some of the change yourself.

Besides, he was fun to talk to.

And that was how I really got to know Joe. On that second Tuesday, drunk as skunks, pissing time away. Joe was good at that. He said that was all he did anymore. Time meant nothing to him. Time was only there to be pissed away. He was fairly certain of that.

Drinks later, Joe decided or finally let it slip that he was a man with a big secret. Not only was he a know-it-all and wiser than any of the rest of us there, he was a man with a big fat important truth, and he was obviously itching to tell someone. I didn’t ask, but he sure didn’t care. He was ready and willing and after I provided the latest round, he began to tell me his secret...

Joe was not from around here. In space or in time. He was a long long way from home. A long long time from home.

Joe was a time traveler.

Supposedly.

That’s what he said anyway.

Of course I didn’t believe him. I asked him for evidence. I asked him to tell me what was about to happen, and he laughed in my face.

“How in the hell should I know,” he mockingly asked. “If I asked you what happened on Tuesday March 23rd 1801 or 1901 or 2001 or last Tuesday for that matter, could you tell me? With perfect memory? With perfect detail? Can you recite or recall anything and everything?”

I was pretty sure I couldn’t, but I didn’t really want to argue that point. Joe didn’t give me much time to anyway. He just kept on with his diatribes. Joe believed in a lot of nonsense. A lot. Luckily for me, he wasn’t shy about sharing. No, not at all. Loud and boisterous without a hint of self-awareness or humility.

Joe told me about how the present didn’t exist. There were only two things, the past of the future. Nothing could exist in the moment. And to think about the moment meant you were already past it. Or something like that. It wasn’t a hundred percent clear, but little of what he said was.

“Nobody from the future cares about the past. That’s just the way it is.”

So not only did the present not exist, but the entirety of the past basically didn’t count either. The past was basically something made up along the way that people in the future told themselves about to justify their present. Maybe I should have pointed out that he just told me the present didn’t really exist, no matter what time period it was in, but Joe didn’t take too well to being challenged and I wasn’t in the mood to fight him on that point.

“The future doesn’t care. Not all the way. Not like they care about themselves or their present or their future. The past is just something people talk about, but there’s nothing that be done about it. We tell stories. That’s all the past it. A story. We bend it, change it, make it our own, all in an attempt to justify the current present. Or whatever it is we want the present to be right now. Who won what and why doesn’t really matter. What matters is how we look at it now. We look at the past through a lens and bend what we can bend and leave out anything else. The past could have done whatever for any number of infinite reasons. The reasons only matter if they build the foundation and support the current. So rewrite the current, rewrite the past, build whatever future you want. Ignore the rest. Nobody really knows the past. You can’t know the past. It’s impossible. Not unless you’re there in the moment. Right then and there, seeing it, feeling it, knowing it. But even then, do you really know it? And if you’re there, then it isn’t really the past. Then it’s the present. And the present is just a thing that we see when we are thinking about what happened between what did and what will. The present is the instant that we can never properly perceive. If we try, we’re wasting time and suddenly we’re past it and the future we were anticipating has slipped into the past while we weren’t looking.”

Apparently time perception was just a big mess that none of us had never noticed before. But thankfully Joe was there to set me straight.

My first response should have been to question why he came to the past if nobody cared about the past, but I wasn’t exactly thinking sober and I wasn’t exactly thinking it was my job to reason him out of his delusions. I was just listening and letting the ride go where it would. He was very passionate. Very fun to listen to. Very dedicated to his conceit.

And besides, Joe was right about one part of it all. I had no idea how I would prove to someone I was from the future, if indeed I was from the future. Basically I would just be some strange guy with some strange ways of doing things and some strange opinions on how things should be. I’d be frustrated too. I’d hate the people that didn’t listen to me and didn’t know any better. Slowly I’d go crazy and a half-empty bottle of booze didn’t seem like such a bad way to lose one’s mind.

I told him that if he couldn’t prove he was from the future, he should at least tell me how he got here and why he was still here.

That one was easy, he told me.

“Time isn’t what you think. You see the straight line – your past, your present, your future. One leads into the next. But that’s not how it works. Not really. Space-time – a combination of location and event. It leaves behind a signature. Like a coordinate for a machine. That’s what they made. A beacon. A lighthouse. You’re familiar with those terms, right?”

I was.

“They turned the machine on and it was a signal. And anyone on the other side looking for a signal would be able to find it. You understand?”

I told him I knew what a signal was.

“I never know with you people. It’s like talking to fucking cavemen sometimes. So they turned the machine on but they weren’t prepared at all for what would happen. We all started showing up. They had no idea. None. They acted surprised. What did they think would happen? You turn on a light in the dark and expect people not to see it? Idiots.”

Who were the idiots? I didn’t think to ask. Probably some government conspiracy. But I wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking about the logic of his story. I was prepared to play along, I just wanted to understand things more clearly. I told him I didn’t understand why the people on his side didn’t know about what had happened to him, to everyone that showed up. Shouldn’t they have all expected whatever happened to have happened? Wasn’t it part of their recorded history?

“That’s part of the illusion that time is linear. Or that history matters. Or that history is real at all. History is a story. It’s there as the root of the word. We tell stories about the past. We bend it all around; make it a story about ourselves, not about what really happened—”

I pointed out that he was repeating himself.

“I am?”

I told him that he had already told me about history. That nobody knows and nobody cares. How he was all a lie.

“A lie the winners tell to justify how they won.”

Riiiight. My new friend Joe was going to be a lot of fun.

“Well good. At least you know that much.”

Was it strange that I took some comfort in this compliment, as if the rambling opinion of a mad man mattered to me at all?

“Oh boy, oh boy. They really didn’t know what was coming. They really didn’t think at all. They might as well have renamed things year zero around here. I mean, that’s how we all felt anyway. They make the first moment in human history available for anyone to see and they don’t expect people to come and see?”

I replied that I thought he said history wasn’t real.

Joe was not amused.

“Don’t get smart with me. I hate when people get smart. You’re not that smart.”

He had told me that fact several times and would tell me the same thing several more.

“They invented it. They made moment zero. Made it! Who else can do that? Who else can claim that? Maybe some emperor or some guru that invented the calendar or something. But not many people can make that claim. They called us. Put it out there. Asked us to show up. And then they expected people not to show up? What? Like that makes any sense? So what do they do then? Panic. They freak out and turned the machine off. How are we supposed to reconnect with ourselves on the other end if half the connection is broken?”

I told him I didn’t know. And really, I didn’t. If it were true, if any of it were true at all, it would indeed suck to be stuck and trapped all because someone else turned off their beacon.

“Exactly. So here we all are. Stuck. Until someone turns another machine on and lets us know. That’s if things on our side are still turned on and someone is looking and the door can still be opened.”

Us, I asked him. How many of you are there? And why was I starting to ask questions like I believed his story.

He told me to look around the room. Reisender meant traveler. The Reisender was a perfect place for all of them to meet. Supposedly, somehow, I was in a room full of time travelers. It looked more like a room full of alcoholics and panhandlers, but who was I to judge how they would or wouldn’t look.

“I don’t know how many there truly are... I couldn’t count that fast. The room was filling up. Fast. There were a lot of us. A lot of people want to see the moment time began.”

I asked him how they covered it up. I asked how no one else in the world knew about it. I asked how a bar full of time travelers could go unnoticed. Why didn’t they announce themselves? Why didn’t they try to build something, do something, anything that might get them back home? Who wants to stay trapped in a world that isn’t their own?

“You really are an idiot. You think the government tells people about things like this? You’re listening to me and you don’t believe me. You think anyone else listens to people rave on about time travel and thinks it’s real? In a world of billions, a few thousand lunatic voices is nothing. Unless we had an army and were killing people. Or a blog. People might notice those things. But not some rants at how pointless the news is or how anything you do won’t matter to anything or anyone yet to come. Nobody wants to hear that. They all want to think their actions matter, that these moments, these actions matter, that they make a future. Nobody wants to know the past doesn’t matter. The past—”

“The present,” I corrected him.

“Whatever. My past, your present, their future. Those are all just terms we invent. All that is happening is happening and happened or will have happened. They’re just dots floating around out there waiting for someone else to connect them. The dots don’t care. The dots don’t connect themselves. Only we connect them and call it soup.”

Suddenly it was late and I realized I had to leave. I needed my sleep. 24 hours later I was going to be beginning a 16 hour shift at the hospital. Drunken stories were fun, but real life had its place too.

Life in the ER could be a blur sometimes. The weather had turned cold and there was a lot of sickness going around. There were a lot of the homeless and the destitute coming in, looking for help and for shelter. Pneumonia, flu, exposure… All sorts of the bad and the broken. Bad season, worse for the homeless. I don’t normally notice their faces. It’s easier that way. But with one of them, I did. One that didn’t quite make it. One whose time ran out...

It was Joe. My Joe. Crazy Joe.

This time, I felt a little bad. An honest and lonely sadness. I didn’t know the man, but I felt this. He had seemed pleasant enough. He was a bit of an ass and he was full of himself, but his ideas had been silly and fun and enjoyable to imagine about. Oh well. There was nothing I could do. Nothing to do, but to forget him and move on to someone that could actually be helped.

Joe was just a drunk at the bar who I met and listened to a few times. He seemed angry and broken and told insane stories and I was fairly certain that he was out of his mind. But looking back, he just seemed sad and desperate. A man without hope. A man who deserved some. I’m no longer sure I’m totally convinced one way or the other about him. I’d kind of like to believe he wasn’t just nuts and there was something more there.