rough draft: How the War Was Won
The day his father died, there was a man at a card table on the busy street, standing still and vacant in a threadbare tuxedo. No one else seemed to take much notice of him, but Anton drew close. Three red plastic cups sat turned over on the scratched surface. The man met his eyes and Anton felt a moment of blankness, the still and dark face of a lake he’d never been to. Before he could react, the man reached out and lifted the middle cup with his white gloved hand, revealing something which arrested Anton’s retreat - a buffalo nickel with a star scratched over the face. Immediately, his hand went to his pocket, where that coin should have been, and found nothing.
The man in the tuxedo lowered the cup.
“Are you watching very closely?”
It sounded tired and rote. The man moved the cups much more slowly that he should have, his eyes never leaving Anton’s. He lifted each cup, and there was nothing. He left the cups on the table and walked away. Somewhere, his mother was screaming. It was 1986.
I.
It was New Year’s Eve, 1999, and Derek said he had a disappearing trick to show them. He made a grandiose gesture, and then, as the ball on the TV dropped, shotgunned two beers at once.
Fireworks were going off; someone took Anton’s drink away and led him to a dark room, saying, “It’s all gone. Did you see it? It’s all gone.”
II.
It was Anton's thirtieth birthday and when he hung up on his dealer, a nickel fell into the coin catcher. Cars were speeding past, the reverberation dull and bee-like in his temples as he traced the star on the coin. Complicated old world, it was. What were the chances? It had been taken from him unfairly, so why not now? But he felt sick. The phone rang; he jerked away from it and shoved his way out of the booth.
Outside, the colors yammered, the rush of sound and stimuli for a brief moment alien. He pocketed the coin and went on his way. The graffiti along the bus stop was familiar yet no longer reassuring. Time will say nothing but I told you so. Bright red, like a field of poppies. The meter expired as he reached his SUV.
Sara was quiet when he picked her up from school, absorbed in a book he was proud (and concerned) to note was at least middle school level. He let her read without anything more than a perfunctory greeting. Within a few minutes, however, she lowered the book to her lap and leaned against the back of his seat.
“When are we leaving for the lake?”
“Probably after dinner.”
“Are you cooking tonight?”
Anton made eye contact with her in the rearview and she smiled a little, sheepish to have been so transparent despite the innocuous tone of voice. Marisol would have laughed and threatened her with brussels sprouts, or made a comment about the resale value of men who could make pancakes.
Sound seemed to stop as he looked at Sara’s face, that rare happy expression that her solemn nature meted out like reluctant rewards. He had never known how she came from him or Marisol; she resembled neither of them, nor any relatives they knew, and seemed to existed in her own world, only moving through theirs with the distant independence and strange grace of a summoned spirit. At the same time, he would hear his phrases in her voice, had changed her diapers and washed her hair, had seen her asleep in Marisol’s arms or reading to the dog. Sometimes, there was no sound when he looked at her. It seemed to suck something out of him in a way that made drugs irrelevant, distractions at best.
The impact jarred him from this preoccupation. There was still no sound, and as he felt himself propelled from the driver’s seat, passing through the window shield as cleanly as a ghost, he could only think: but I always wear my seatbelt now. So that Sara will -
He could not look back to see her. He could not move or speak or see.
III.
The man in the tuxedo has Anton’s face, though he is older. It’s not something he could have known when he was four, but he sees it now, when the man puts one hand on Anton’s shoulder and with the other, takes the coin out of Anton’s pocket.
“Time travel is poison,” he says without inflection. Tired. Rote.
“… what?”
The magician puts the coin in Anton’s hand, not looking away, not blinking. “You believe in self-determination. So do I.”
There is a whole lot of nothing around them. It could be space, if space were empty and starless. Anton cannot meet the magician’s eyes. They are exactly the same as wherever they are.
“What the fuck are you talking about? What’s going on? Where’s Sara?”
“I can’t change what I say. This is what I always say, and this is what you always hear. Time is not stopped, because time is never stopped: one thing happens after the other, that’s the limitation of our existence, that’s how we perceive things. Things happen in sequences. Time is still happening. It’s just not the same time you were in.”
Anton tries to remember getting high, but he knows he hasn’t done it for months. It used to be every weekend, but not in the past year or so. Just because he can’t remember doing it doesn’t mean he isn’t, though. He’s certainly had those kinds of weekends before.
The magician is still talking. It is completely incomprehensible. “Time is an illusion. The laws of science do not distinguish between the past and future. Memory is time travel. Dreams are time travel. Reading a book written centuries ago is time travel.” And then: “Sara is going to die.”
When he grabs the magician by the lapels of his suit, it feels - bizarre. Or like nothing. Anton can’t decide. “In the car crash?”
The magician stares back. “Metatime.”
“Is she going to die in the fucking crash?”
“Metatime is the time that passes while we try to change time.”
“Can we go back and change this?”
“I have spent twenty years -”
Anton shakes him. “Can we save her?”
“I don’t know.” There’s something wrong with the magician’s voice. It’s like an echo, Anton realizes. It’s coming from farther away than where the magician is, even though he’s right here, solid, sad.
“Then what the fuck are we doing here? What is this? Where is this?”
“It’s so hard,” the magician says, not quite urgent, not quite dead. “If you drop a pebble in a lake, the ripples spread, then fade - it shifts the total volume of the lake, it scares a fish, it changes the topography of the lake bottom, but in immeasurable ways. We can never calculate any of it. We can’t even begin to track it. And no one cares. No one. A kid dies in a car wreck. Thousands die in a field in Flanders. Millions are systematically extinguished. What a tragedy. No one cares. Except me.”
“Except us,” Anton says, shaking him again. “Stop fucking around. We have to do something.”
“Yes,” the magician answers, closing his eyes. “This is how it starts.”
IV.
Now the darkness has stars, sharp and clear in a way Anton has never seen before. The closest comparison he can make is a night out in the country, at summer camp. But the sheer vastness overwhelms him, oppressive even with the too large moon. He could look up forever and never see enough.
“Ethiopia,” the magician says, staring up as well.
Anton manages not to punch him, though it takes a moment of struggle. “What are we doing in Ethiopia. This is going to save Sara how, exactly?”
“You need to understand some things.” The magician’s voice does not rise or fall. It does not change in any way.
“Like what?”
“Causality.” The magician lowers his eyes, falling silent for a moment. “'The winds must come from somewhere when they blow.'”
“Are we...” The moment when it hits him is accompanied by a new surge of frustration. “... is this that valley where some of the earliest human remains were found. You've taken me back to the beginning. As opposed to thirty seconds before the fucking crash?”
“So let’s go closer.”
Without transition, they stand in a plain where rough-dressed laborers lay down broken stones to form a road, and the magician says, laconic, “Rome -”
This time Anton really does hit him. The workers take no notice.
“Do I become a complete asshole in about twenty years, is that it?” Anton shouts as the magician wipes the blood off his mouth and onto his white gloves. “Does time travel drive me so fucking crazy I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore?”
“This is how it happens. This is what I have to do. The first time, it was a lie, but -”
“This is the first time!”
“This is the tale of Michael Cut, a man born in twentieth century America, surname derived from a Scottish man who killed a Danish general…”
At this point, the magician has to pause because Anton is trying to smash his head in with a rock, but throughout the struggle, his voice drones on. “… having cut off the general’s head with his knife and presented it to King Malcolm the II, the king imposed upon him the surname ‘Eriskine’, which in Gaelic means ‘upon the knife’, and his armor bearings were henceforth a hand holding a dagger with the motto ‘Je pense.’ Having failed numerous times to change the outcome of the crash, I took it upon myself to practice upon someone completely unrelated to me, whose genealogy would not affect hers, in a way which would not drastically alter the events of the world as we know it, though of course such things are immeasurable and unknowable but fuck it, we had to start somewhere, and so at various points of his life, I interfered with Michael Cut, eventually influencing him to become, though he initially had no interest in such a field, a hair stylist -”
“I grow up,” Anton says, throwing down the rock, “to be a complete -”
“- fuckhole,” they say together, then stare.
The magician approaches Anton without fear, puts his hand on Anton's shoulder again. “You have a decision to make.”
“Yes,” Anton says finally.
V.
He's not very well versed in science-fiction and time paradoxes and all that, but Anton is fairly sure that killing your older self should entail more consequences than there appear to be. Perhaps he's stuck here in ancient Rome for the rest of eternity? The entire struggle had gone unremarked upon, so he supposes they can't see or hear him. Maybe he will just fade away.
“I can show you what will happen.”
Anton slowly lowers his face into his hands at the sound of his own voice. The magician is standing next to the body of the man Anton killed, with the same tuxedo, the same lack of expression.
“Do you want to see?”
The magician picks up his own body, careful yet without effort. He stands, waiting for Anton's answer.
“Fine,” Anton says into his hands. “Okay.”
VI.
The road stretches farther than he can see, but he doesn't need to see what's ahead: he knows. It's the same as what's here. The road is lined on both sides with the bodies of the magicians he killed fastened to crosses, with one arm tied outstretched to point the way. He can't count them. There are too many.
“Don't look back,” the magician tells him, soft and sad, and before he can think about it, Anton turns. He realizes, even as he sees what the magician told him not to see, that he would have looked no matter what the magician had said. There, millions of years before or after this, millions of miles away, is Sara, a point of focus that, in a strange way, has none. He can see her on the day she was born, on the first day he realized he loved her, and older than she is now, a young woman who has grown to resemble Marisol; he can see Marisol too, an old woman with her hand in his, a teenager in a white Capoeira uniform flipping a much larger man onto a mat, a young child with a candle. He can see everything from here, but it overwhelms him. He would have to practice and learn how to see things properly. It would take time.
“That, at least, we have,” the magician says, and though Anton cannot look away yet, he knows the magician is leaving. He is walking away, up the road.
After a while (how long no longer means anything), Anton follows.
The man in the tuxedo lowered the cup.
“Are you watching very closely?”
It sounded tired and rote. The man moved the cups much more slowly that he should have, his eyes never leaving Anton’s. He lifted each cup, and there was nothing. He left the cups on the table and walked away. Somewhere, his mother was screaming. It was 1986.
I.
It was New Year’s Eve, 1999, and Derek said he had a disappearing trick to show them. He made a grandiose gesture, and then, as the ball on the TV dropped, shotgunned two beers at once.
Fireworks were going off; someone took Anton’s drink away and led him to a dark room, saying, “It’s all gone. Did you see it? It’s all gone.”
II.
It was Anton's thirtieth birthday and when he hung up on his dealer, a nickel fell into the coin catcher. Cars were speeding past, the reverberation dull and bee-like in his temples as he traced the star on the coin. Complicated old world, it was. What were the chances? It had been taken from him unfairly, so why not now? But he felt sick. The phone rang; he jerked away from it and shoved his way out of the booth.
Outside, the colors yammered, the rush of sound and stimuli for a brief moment alien. He pocketed the coin and went on his way. The graffiti along the bus stop was familiar yet no longer reassuring. Time will say nothing but I told you so. Bright red, like a field of poppies. The meter expired as he reached his SUV.
Sara was quiet when he picked her up from school, absorbed in a book he was proud (and concerned) to note was at least middle school level. He let her read without anything more than a perfunctory greeting. Within a few minutes, however, she lowered the book to her lap and leaned against the back of his seat.
“When are we leaving for the lake?”
“Probably after dinner.”
“Are you cooking tonight?”
Anton made eye contact with her in the rearview and she smiled a little, sheepish to have been so transparent despite the innocuous tone of voice. Marisol would have laughed and threatened her with brussels sprouts, or made a comment about the resale value of men who could make pancakes.
Sound seemed to stop as he looked at Sara’s face, that rare happy expression that her solemn nature meted out like reluctant rewards. He had never known how she came from him or Marisol; she resembled neither of them, nor any relatives they knew, and seemed to existed in her own world, only moving through theirs with the distant independence and strange grace of a summoned spirit. At the same time, he would hear his phrases in her voice, had changed her diapers and washed her hair, had seen her asleep in Marisol’s arms or reading to the dog. Sometimes, there was no sound when he looked at her. It seemed to suck something out of him in a way that made drugs irrelevant, distractions at best.
The impact jarred him from this preoccupation. There was still no sound, and as he felt himself propelled from the driver’s seat, passing through the window shield as cleanly as a ghost, he could only think: but I always wear my seatbelt now. So that Sara will -
He could not look back to see her. He could not move or speak or see.
III.
The man in the tuxedo has Anton’s face, though he is older. It’s not something he could have known when he was four, but he sees it now, when the man puts one hand on Anton’s shoulder and with the other, takes the coin out of Anton’s pocket.
“Time travel is poison,” he says without inflection. Tired. Rote.
“… what?”
The magician puts the coin in Anton’s hand, not looking away, not blinking. “You believe in self-determination. So do I.”
There is a whole lot of nothing around them. It could be space, if space were empty and starless. Anton cannot meet the magician’s eyes. They are exactly the same as wherever they are.
“What the fuck are you talking about? What’s going on? Where’s Sara?”
“I can’t change what I say. This is what I always say, and this is what you always hear. Time is not stopped, because time is never stopped: one thing happens after the other, that’s the limitation of our existence, that’s how we perceive things. Things happen in sequences. Time is still happening. It’s just not the same time you were in.”
Anton tries to remember getting high, but he knows he hasn’t done it for months. It used to be every weekend, but not in the past year or so. Just because he can’t remember doing it doesn’t mean he isn’t, though. He’s certainly had those kinds of weekends before.
The magician is still talking. It is completely incomprehensible. “Time is an illusion. The laws of science do not distinguish between the past and future. Memory is time travel. Dreams are time travel. Reading a book written centuries ago is time travel.” And then: “Sara is going to die.”
When he grabs the magician by the lapels of his suit, it feels - bizarre. Or like nothing. Anton can’t decide. “In the car crash?”
The magician stares back. “Metatime.”
“Is she going to die in the fucking crash?”
“Metatime is the time that passes while we try to change time.”
“Can we go back and change this?”
“I have spent twenty years -”
Anton shakes him. “Can we save her?”
“I don’t know.” There’s something wrong with the magician’s voice. It’s like an echo, Anton realizes. It’s coming from farther away than where the magician is, even though he’s right here, solid, sad.
“Then what the fuck are we doing here? What is this? Where is this?”
“It’s so hard,” the magician says, not quite urgent, not quite dead. “If you drop a pebble in a lake, the ripples spread, then fade - it shifts the total volume of the lake, it scares a fish, it changes the topography of the lake bottom, but in immeasurable ways. We can never calculate any of it. We can’t even begin to track it. And no one cares. No one. A kid dies in a car wreck. Thousands die in a field in Flanders. Millions are systematically extinguished. What a tragedy. No one cares. Except me.”
“Except us,” Anton says, shaking him again. “Stop fucking around. We have to do something.”
“Yes,” the magician answers, closing his eyes. “This is how it starts.”
IV.
Now the darkness has stars, sharp and clear in a way Anton has never seen before. The closest comparison he can make is a night out in the country, at summer camp. But the sheer vastness overwhelms him, oppressive even with the too large moon. He could look up forever and never see enough.
“Ethiopia,” the magician says, staring up as well.
Anton manages not to punch him, though it takes a moment of struggle. “What are we doing in Ethiopia. This is going to save Sara how, exactly?”
“You need to understand some things.” The magician’s voice does not rise or fall. It does not change in any way.
“Like what?”
“Causality.” The magician lowers his eyes, falling silent for a moment. “'The winds must come from somewhere when they blow.'”
“Are we...” The moment when it hits him is accompanied by a new surge of frustration. “... is this that valley where some of the earliest human remains were found. You've taken me back to the beginning. As opposed to thirty seconds before the fucking crash?”
“So let’s go closer.”
Without transition, they stand in a plain where rough-dressed laborers lay down broken stones to form a road, and the magician says, laconic, “Rome -”
This time Anton really does hit him. The workers take no notice.
“Do I become a complete asshole in about twenty years, is that it?” Anton shouts as the magician wipes the blood off his mouth and onto his white gloves. “Does time travel drive me so fucking crazy I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore?”
“This is how it happens. This is what I have to do. The first time, it was a lie, but -”
“This is the first time!”
“This is the tale of Michael Cut, a man born in twentieth century America, surname derived from a Scottish man who killed a Danish general…”
At this point, the magician has to pause because Anton is trying to smash his head in with a rock, but throughout the struggle, his voice drones on. “… having cut off the general’s head with his knife and presented it to King Malcolm the II, the king imposed upon him the surname ‘Eriskine’, which in Gaelic means ‘upon the knife’, and his armor bearings were henceforth a hand holding a dagger with the motto ‘Je pense.’ Having failed numerous times to change the outcome of the crash, I took it upon myself to practice upon someone completely unrelated to me, whose genealogy would not affect hers, in a way which would not drastically alter the events of the world as we know it, though of course such things are immeasurable and unknowable but fuck it, we had to start somewhere, and so at various points of his life, I interfered with Michael Cut, eventually influencing him to become, though he initially had no interest in such a field, a hair stylist -”
“I grow up,” Anton says, throwing down the rock, “to be a complete -”
“- fuckhole,” they say together, then stare.
The magician approaches Anton without fear, puts his hand on Anton's shoulder again. “You have a decision to make.”
“Yes,” Anton says finally.
V.
He's not very well versed in science-fiction and time paradoxes and all that, but Anton is fairly sure that killing your older self should entail more consequences than there appear to be. Perhaps he's stuck here in ancient Rome for the rest of eternity? The entire struggle had gone unremarked upon, so he supposes they can't see or hear him. Maybe he will just fade away.
“I can show you what will happen.”
Anton slowly lowers his face into his hands at the sound of his own voice. The magician is standing next to the body of the man Anton killed, with the same tuxedo, the same lack of expression.
“Do you want to see?”
The magician picks up his own body, careful yet without effort. He stands, waiting for Anton's answer.
“Fine,” Anton says into his hands. “Okay.”
VI.
The road stretches farther than he can see, but he doesn't need to see what's ahead: he knows. It's the same as what's here. The road is lined on both sides with the bodies of the magicians he killed fastened to crosses, with one arm tied outstretched to point the way. He can't count them. There are too many.
“Don't look back,” the magician tells him, soft and sad, and before he can think about it, Anton turns. He realizes, even as he sees what the magician told him not to see, that he would have looked no matter what the magician had said. There, millions of years before or after this, millions of miles away, is Sara, a point of focus that, in a strange way, has none. He can see her on the day she was born, on the first day he realized he loved her, and older than she is now, a young woman who has grown to resemble Marisol; he can see Marisol too, an old woman with her hand in his, a teenager in a white Capoeira uniform flipping a much larger man onto a mat, a young child with a candle. He can see everything from here, but it overwhelms him. He would have to practice and learn how to see things properly. It would take time.
“That, at least, we have,” the magician says, and though Anton cannot look away yet, he knows the magician is leaving. He is walking away, up the road.
After a while (how long no longer means anything), Anton follows.