For a moment, I have no consciousness but a whirl of sensations, of wet, and cold, and pain, and for some reason something warm and furry on my face. The last sensation brings me back to myself, returning future-me to the now-me that I started from.
It is raining, hard. I am sprawled on the bank of the pond, right beside the bridge where I slipped and fell right through the rail. The rail is still underneath me, stabbing into my hip. The water is normally about three feet deep, but with the rain, it's at four feet and still rising, lapping at my cheeks. My head is hurting, my leg hurts worse, and a reddish-orange kitten is batting at my face. "Catness," I say, and raise my head.
Catness Everready is a kitten I brought home from an animal shelter the week Tiffany and I moved into our appartment, right next to this park. Tiffany and I both love her, and I swear, if a cat can love anybody, that cat loves us back. Catness is almost grown now, but the way she acts and even looks is still kittenish. She isn't the kind of cat who shreds your nicest clothes or leaves hairballs in your shoes, but she loves to get everywhere and into everything, and she can't wait to play. As often as not, the first thing I wake up to is Catness on my face trying to get me up. The funny thing was, Catness did the same thing with Tiffany, and she would sleep right through it. So I'm not surprised to wake up to Catness now, even if it is raining.
"Thanks for coming, Catness," I said. "I wish I could get up and play, but, well, I can't get up. I'm sorry Tiffany isn't here, either, but I drove her away again, and this time, she isn't coming back. You know, the way you get into things, Tiffany swears you must know shortcuts in space-time, and now, I think you just might, because I just found one. It's only in my own head, but I can go back in time and if I give a hard push, I can change what I do. If I can find the right time, and make old me do the right thing, then maybe I won't be stuck here, and we won't be alone, and I won't die. So don't worry if I seem out of it for a minute. I'm just back in time, and I won't be long, because time's relative."
Now it's our wedding night, and the first night we make love to each other, and our first BIG fight. The wedding was wonderful, just a small, short ceremony. Our families throw the big bash at our "reception" later. And the love-making, already, it's fantastic. I come in right after.
We're in the tub, sipping champagne, ad she's turned around so I'm holding her legs in my arms. I love it. I love her. I'm about to say, "Your legs are better than Nikki's."
The effort's like passing a bowling ball, but I- that is, future me- manage to make my past self say instead, "You are the most beautiful woman I have ever been with."
She straightens up. I can tell she isn't happy, but at least she doesn't scream. Yet. "You mean," she says, "I look better than Nikki."
"Well... Yeah. For example. But that's a compliment, isn't it?" It's now-me saying this, without my help. I don't know if I can do anything more. But this is already sounding like it did the first time around, and I should do something.
Tiffany's saying something I remember, except she isn't screaming or hitting me. "No, it's not a compliment, Pat. It's not okay to compare me to Nikki, or any woman you've been with, even if it's in my favor. Can you understand why, Pat? It's because what you're telling me is that you still think about Nikki, even when you're with me, and that means I'm still competing with her. It was hard enough for me to deal with that the first time around."
Now I try to get through to now-me again. It's not easy, but it's nothing like what it was to change what I said. It looks like, once I make the first change, I can follow without using any more of my chances. "All right, Tiffany. I understand. I do. Sometimes I feel insecure about you comparing me to Tommy..."
She doesn't scream. This is much worse. "You're bringing Tommy into this?" she says, and it's like a hiss. "You dare bring up Tommy's name? You cowardly, hypocritical sonnuvabitch-" That's when she throws the champagne bottle, and things end the same way they did the first time I lived through this: I get hit right in the face, the bubble bath turns red, Tiffany screams and jumps up and falls over the side of the tub and hurts herself. So we're both crying and bleeding, and then there's a cop banging on the hotel room door.
I move forward, and make a stop just to see if things are different. We're living at the place Tiffany built behind her parents' place, in a little apartment crowded in above her dance studio, and doing our best to be happy. Just now, it's 2 AM, and Tiffany's asleep, holding me really tight with her face buried in my chest, and I'm still reading a book. It's a collection of stories by Ambrose Bierce. I set down the book, frown, and shake Tiffany awake. She comes up slow, and definitely not happy. "This had better be worth my while," she said.
"Tiffany, look at this," I said. The book's open to a story titled "Some Haunted Houses", which is really several little stories strung together, and I point to the heading of one, "A Fruitless Assignment". She takes the book, and as she reads, she gets a little more alert, and when she's done she gets a funny look.
"What the fuck," she says, and throws the book away.
"Exactly!" I say. "It's one thing to have a story without a happy ending, but this is hardly even a story. There's just a guy we don't really get to know anything about, no real story, just the creepy house, and the completely freaky scene, and then at the end you don't even know if he knows whathefuck happened!"
"No, Pat," Tiffany said, "I mean, whathefuck- you thought it was worth waking me up at 2 AM to show me this?" She buries her face in a pillow, and then pulls the pillow over her head. "God... I really thought it was losing Nikki that made you crazy. I thought if you were over her and together with me, you would get better, or at least do better. But now I'm figuring it out. You were always crazy, you're always going to be crazy, you're like this big blob of crazy waiting to engulf anybody who tries to help you. Nikki just had the good sense to get away from you..."
She starts to sob, and I'm sad, but I'm still hurt and angry over what she said, and as future-me in my own head, I'm hurt and angry all over again. I don't try to stop myself from shouting, "Don't call me crazy! You call me crazy, you're judging me, and you're a hypocrite. I've got my problems, I never denied it, but I'm not the one who threw a bottle and-" I go then, I flee. I don't have a perfect memory, even if people do say I'm pathologically anal retentive, but I'm sure that everything is happening exactly the same. Nothing is changed.
I said there were limitations in trying to change the past. But all of them put together are nothing compared to the problem of actually succeeding. Even if you do everything right and give your past self a push at just the right time, you're going to run into what Professor Gummitch calls historical reluctance. Basically, it's like you're an actor in a movie where the director lets you do some improv, but will step in if you try to go completely offscript. Like, suppose you could go back to a cafe in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. A car pulls up, and a scrawny guy who's really just a kid steps forward with a gun. Then suppose you draw a gun to shoot the kid. The gun jams, and he shoots the man and the woman in the back of the car. Or you try to wrestle the gun away. The gun goes off, and the people in the car get hit just the same. Or maybe you tackle the kid. The gun falls from his hand, and some other nobody picks it up and shoots. Or, if everything goes right and the people in the car just ride away, powerful fools will still look for an excuse to fight, and it may even be the living Archduke Ferdinand rather than the dead one who starts the First World War.
That's what I'm up against. I have to think it's God's way of keeping us from messing with things, and I wonder if that means it's wrong to try. But then I have to think, if it was always wrong to do it, why would God make a universe where we can do it at all?
