First Person Binary
If you’ve ever wondered if your younger self would recognize your older self should the two of you happen to meet say in a doorway, the answer is yes, at least for me. It was visceral and immediate and there wasn’t any doubt. There was surprise.
“What are you doing here?!” the version of me that had chronologically lived the longest, so was the oldest, yet looked the youngest asked the wide-eyed middle-aged woman in the doorway who had dropped my shoulder bag.
“You never came to Evanston,” I continued.
“How would you know?” I as a middle-aged woman asked.
“Because I never came to Evanston. I stayed out at Meadowlands with Oliver. Don’t you see. You’ve got to be there because something’s coming in the mail for you. It’s important. You’ve got to open it.”
“How would you know what I’m going to do? Aren’t you from my past?”
“No, I’m from your future.”
We stared at each other.
Carmen jumped in. “Why don’t we come out of the entryway and sit together in the living room so that we can sort this all out. Maura, why don’t you come with me to make some tea for all of us.”
“Thanks, Aunt Carmen, but I’m not going anywhere. Who are you?”
“I think Carmen’s right,” my girl self said. “This feels too confrontational and it doesn’t need to be. Let’s sit down in the living room, get some tea, and figure this thing out.” I looked at my daughter, chin set, nostrils wide. I’d only seen her look like that one other time before. “Don’t worry, Maura. You won’t miss anything if you go help your Aunt Carmen. In fact, I’ll go with you.”
My middle-aged self and Maura took off our shoes at the door and settled our bags while Carmen and my girl self walked to the kitchen.
“Holy Jesus!” Carmen rasped out as we walked.
“I know.”
“I guess we’ll learn something today about the space time continuum.”
“Have I ever told you how much I appreciate the way you always look at the bright side?”
“If you’ve got lemons going on in your life you better bring on the sugar and make some lemonade.”
“I don’t even know who I’d be without you,” I said, grabbing her arm and leaning against her briefly before entering the kitchen.
Carmen filled a pot under the faucet and set water to boil on the stove. I brought out the teacups and saucers and spoons and put them on a tray. I could hear a murmur of conversation from my middle-aged self and Maura out in the hall. It was strange not to know what I was saying.
“You said that you didn’t come here when you lived through this before?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“So, that means this is not the same timeline, Althea.”
“I think I’m going to need some brandy in my tea.”
Carmen laughed. “Now wait there, little miss, you might feel like a grown woman, but you’re not, so no brandy.”
“I know. I was kidding.”
Carmen put the water in the tea pot and carried it to the living room while I followed with the tray. My middle-aged self, younger in time yet older in body, which was still a marvel, sat right next to my daughter on the couch.
“I bet you’re wondering why I called all of you here today,” Carmen said so that we’d all laugh, but none of us did.
My girl self sat in a chair across from the couch and spoke.
“I’ll tell you what I know and then you can tell me what you know. Right around this time, but I can’t remember the exact date, sometime just after my birthday, a present from Kali came in the mail. It was a scene in stained glass, a picture of a room that I recognized from where I came from originally. How could Kali have known what it looked like?! I was shocked, but also curious. What would happen if I put the glass up to the wall and stepped into it? Would I go back? And if so, would I be able to return? It was a risky thing to do, so I didn’t right away. Finally, curiosity got the better of me and I stepped into the stained glass picture and ended up in this place we call the Library, where I came from. I think I’ve talked with you both about it before. When I did, I returned to my younger self. Apparently, time operates differently in the Library, so I didn’t age there, only on Earth. While in the Library, I found my brother and discovered that he’d been creating colored glass pictures that brought him to Mars. I decided to come back to Earth to find him and find my home world from Earth, so I built a colored glass to return through. Unfortunately, I remained a girl rather than a woman. My plan is to study astrophysics and learn as much as I can about Mars and other worlds. Part of that plan is getting in touch with you, Maura, and Kali, Theo and Oliver, but I was waiting for you, my middle-aged self, to pass back to the Library. Only, here you are. And I don’t understand why because I never visited Carmen in 2012. Never. And Maura, there was never a Northwestern University job possibility.”
My middle-aged self and my daughter stared at me for a few minutes. I hadn’t realized how much we looked alike.
“Sounds like you’ve solved the Fountain of Youth problem,” said Maura, coming at it from a completely unexpected direction as was typical for her. “You can keep looping your life as long as you like and live forever.”
“Wow, Maura, I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Or build an army of yourself,” said Carmen.
“Pleasant thought.”
My middle-aged self stared me straight in the eye.
“To answer your question,” I said to my girl self, “we’re here because we were worried about Carmen. Yes, Maura would have come anyway, but very likely, I wouldn’t have known she was coming for an interview if we hadn’t talked about you, Carmen, and decided to visit. You were calling us every few days. You’d never done that before. And asking all sorts of questions. We were sure something was going on. Well, we weren’t wrong.”
“And so, maybe you could get in touch with Oliver and put him on the look out for the package from Kali and make sure it’s waiting for you when you get back home,” I, as a girl, said.
“It won’t matter,” I, as a middle-aged woman, replied. “I’m not going back. You tested it for me and I thank you for that. I have no desire to leave my family. If I go through that glass, then they are left with, no offence, but they are left with you in my place.”
“But you have to go back! You’re supposed to go back!”
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t know! My gut tells me. Reason tells me. If you don’t go back, then I never went back. Doesn’t that put me, ultimately you, out of existence?”
All of our heads were hurting at the same time in the silence that followed.
“If I may,” Carmen’s calm reason entered the silence, “we don’t really know how any of this works. It’s possible that suddenly the girl version of Althea will disappear if the adult doesn’t go through the portal. Maybe it won’t matter though.” She turned to my girl self. “Althea, I know you’ve got your heart set on this idea of studying astrophysics and finding your brother on Mars and discovering your homeworld, but that’s going to take years and years in the making and maybe there is a better, shorter way when we use the resources of the whole family. Maybe you’re the messenger and we’re the engineers.”
We thought about this in the silence that followed and the girl version of myself had an uneasy feeling in my stomach. I shook my head.
“It’s not just about me though. We’re forgetting my brother, Pintor, and my friend Anches. They are part of this, too. If I don’t go back, I don’t meet them. They don’t find out about Earth. Pintor doesn’t find out that Theo is my son. We don’t all see the map. And that map is probably important and I don’t know that I would be able to make sure that you all can see it, too. I think you’ve got to go through.”
My middle-aged self looked at my girl self with steel eyes. “I’m just not going to do it. I don’t care as much as you do about finding my homeworld. This is my homeworld. I don’t need to go anywhere else.”
“What about Pintor?”
The name struck my middle aged self silent as my girl self knew it would. The doorbell rang.
“Lands. When it rains, it pours. I’ll be right back,” said Carmen as she went to the door.
“Just whose idea was this anyway? Pintor’s?” middle-aged me asked girl me.
“It was my idea.”
“Your idea! You didn’t really think it all through, did you?”
“At this point, it’s all experimentation. I didn’t know for sure what would happen. I reasoned out that if I returned as a woman, no harm done, I’d just continue on. And if I returned as a girl, well, I could devote my life to solving the puzzle of my past, where Pintor and Anches and I come from and how this all works. Aren’t you curious? Come on. I know you’re curious.”
Carmen entered the room with another person.
“Hello, everyone! Now the party can get started and look, I’ve brought a present!”
And there she was, my twig thin daughter, Kali, in her flowing flower-print clothes, holding up the stained glass window she’d made of the room in the Library. “Tah-Dah! Happy Birthday, Mom!”
Next: Closing the Loop
This is the thirteenth part in a series of stories. Following are the previous installments starting with the first:
1. The Library
2. Listen, Move, Hide, Repeat
3. A Necessary State of Alarm
4. Anches
5. A Question in Colored Glass
6. How a Lifetime Friendship Began
7. In the World I Created
8. To Make Things Right Again
9. Escape from the Library
10. Pintor’s World
11. Vincente
12. What I Didn’t See Coming