Double Time
by Meredith SchwartzJack Jensen could feel guilty for anything. It was a knack, as much an art as gambling or being unlucky in love, both of which he disdained as the habits of men who'd watched too many movies with speakeasies in them. Jack's forte was to feel guilty for things so slight that no one else would even notice they had occurred, far less think to shoulder the blame.
Jack felt guilty for losing at solitaire because he had heard, once, that every game was winnable if you played your cards right. That meant each and every one of the 52 cards in the 4,038 lost games logged on his old PC represented an opportunity wantonly squandered. When he bought a new PC and decided on a fresh start, that tiny self-deception went on his conscience as well. He never failed to subtract the old tally in his mind, like a man whose car came with 200 miles already on it.
It didn't stop there. That would merely be obsessive compulsive disorder, ordinary and tragic. Jack felt guilty when someone misheard him, for not having meant what they thought he had. He knew enough about causality to know this was an impossible error to fix, and little enough philosophy to believe in causality, but he still felt it was letting "the side" down.
He didn't know what "the side" was, exactly, and he felt guilty for that too. Jack had tried confession and therapy, journaling and journeying to overcome his problem. None of them brought noticeable gains, save a crude appendix to his compendium of regrets. In particular, he felt guilty for having had a rather pleasant childhood; it was full of its own terrors and bizarre dream logic, but lacked a passive aggressive, domineering, or needy figure that might satisfactorily account for his proclivities.
The least he could do, Jack felt, was to be Jewish or Catholic, but he was not. He, like his father before him, was not-much-of-anything Lutheran. His mother was Methodist, but her primary allegiance had always been to comfortable common sense. His dad's was to a sort of inarticulate decency, about which Jack, naturally, felt guilty. Not so much because he wasn't basically decent, but because he felt the inarticulateness was a basic tenet of the faith - to which Jack, probing for the limits of definition, was never able to adhere.
As he neared 30, Jack decided to regret the time he had wasted on this soul-searching. It wasn't any more than he might have spent doing nothing in particular, but he felt that time spent diligently ought to be regretted doubly, as if he were on the clock.
He decided instead to cultivate a sort of wistful nostalgia usually found only in Henry James novels, since that was evidently what he was born to do. Sometimes he wondered if he ought to read Proust, to have a masculine model of wistfulness on hand, but so many people felt guilty about not reading Proust that he gave it up as common.
Jack lived in New York City, where regretting the examined life was counter culture. But since counter culture was paradoxically but perpetually popular, Jack's stance leant him a certain distinction at cocktail parties. Or would have, if he'd attended any. Mostly, he lived in the city much as he had in the undistinguished suburb of his birth. He did not go to museums, or galleries, or the theater, unless he had visitors from out of town.
Jack's unique sensitivities were useful for the middle bit of relationships, since he was quite good at guessing what he'd done when a girl refused to tell him. Even when he got it wrong, they tended to find his earnest wrongness endearing. At least, he was accustomed to being told with an indulgent smile, you tried. He rather thought he'd loved two of them. He'd rather thought he'd loved most of them, at one time or another, but about these two he still believed he might have been right.
The second of these two relationships had ended loudly. "You're not Heathcliff!" Amy had screamed at him during their last fight, "and I'm not what's her name! This isn't a tragedy. This is real life. If you don't like how things end up, do something."
Jack felt that some grand gesture was required, such as burning all his souvenirs or moving to Tibet, but nothing seemed germane. So when fate came along, in the form of an ad on the back page of the Village Voice, Jack was in the mood to grab it by the horns.
Jack didn't quite say so when he told me, but twenty dollars says as he pulled out his cell phone he squared his jaw and squinted into an imaginary wind. They're all the same, English majors.
Nine out of ten of the calls we got were like that, bitter and truculent. Eight out of ten were drunk. At least the bad breakups were better than the dead family members. We went through telemarketers like you wouldn't believe - three times the projected budget in training alone, never mind the insurance claims. Fortunately we'd built some slush into the grant, and there are always more work-study kids where that came from.
We'd launched the study five months earlier. It would have been six, but it took me longer than I expected to convince the chairman that the best way to keep the thing under wraps was purloined-letter style. The curse of an active, involved body of intelligent students is an active, involved body of intelligent students. Sometimes it seemed like half of them considered themselves budding investigative reporters.
Yeah, I know, the Manhattan Project, but that was six geniuses stuck in a room over Tom's Restaurant. This was a joint venture between the psych and physics departments, and we simply needed too many bodies to have any hope that they'd all keep their mouths shut. So we did something simpler: we picked an uninformative acronym for a completely un-catchy name (Preliminary Causative Uncertainty Trials) and we sent out a press release.
Any journal in the field would have caught it, of course, but they're far more inclined to hold up your finished findings - picking nits and submitting your peer review to peer review - than they are to blow the lid off a rumor. As for our competition at Johns Hopkins and Rice, let's just say that no news was good news for them too. Why give the public something to have hysterics about before you're in a position to reassure them? Especially in an election year.
It was only the third week of interviews, so we didn't have a backlog yet, and we were able to fit Jack in the following Tuesday. He came in clutching the ad (The Road Not Taken. Columbia University Psych Department seeks males 18-35, any race, for a study of choice making behavior at pivotal points in personal history. Paid.) as if we might have forgotten what we wanted him for. The interview took about fifty minutes, but I knew after fifteen that he was completely wrong for the project.
We'd found from our first, tentative essays, the ones that won us the funding in the first place, that what we needed was someone with a strong sense of the now. Our best observers so far were a Buddhist and a narcissist. They adjusted quickly, anchored the moment well, and reported little or no disorientation. I've always suspected children would have worked too, but of course that was out of the question. What Jack had, in contrast, was a hypertrophied sense of the then. He was useless to us.
So when he asked how the time travel was coming, I was stumped. Out of a hundred possible subjects, only Jack had been able to deduce from my carefully vague questioning what we were up to.
I don't pretend to understand the process - you'd have to ask one of my colleagues on the physics side for that - but I was assured that we were at least eighteen months from having results we could release without becoming a laughingstock. My job was to understand the people, and I knew letting Jack walk out on the street to tell his story was clearly out of the question. He was convinced that his special talent (it was obvious that's how he considered it, despite the conventional language of dysfunction) made him ideal for the job. If I told him that it was instead a liability, his wounded pride, already smarting from the loss of his girlfriend, would compel him to take some dramatic action against us, just to prove he could.
What could I do? I told him he could start Monday.
(Some wise guy asked why we couldn't just have our future selves zap back and make the announcement before he could spill the beans: the answer took forty minutes and three blackboards. Never ask a physicist why: he might tell you. The short version is, you can go back and watch, but you can't go back and change. I don't think they really knew what would happen if we tried, but it seemed to involve a melting smell coming from some very expensive equipment, and there were rumors that Rubowitz didn't really put in for early retirement.)
I guess I was hoping having to miss work would be too much for Jack, but no such luck. He turned out to be one of the most committed of our volunteers. Jack was bright. Jack was dedicated. Jack asked smart questions. Jack was a pain in the ass. Once it was clear we were stuck with him, we encouraged him to quit his job by scheduling him for weekday hours, lest he let something slip to his colleagues. But that meant he had plenty of time to get underfoot.
There was only so long we could put off giving Jack his turn in the Time Machine, I mean, causative observer-effect generator. I made sure I was scheduled to oversee his run myself: no telling what some techie type would blurt out in frustration when it didn't work.
We picked a key moment in Jack's past, which was standard procedure. The emotional loading is necessary to get past the initial skepticism. Usually it takes an average of three to twelve runs before people start to believe in their gut that they can do it, and we can start sending them back to moments that don't have particular resonance. So far only two of our best people were able to go to times they hadn't experienced at all. That was part of the delay: there's not much point to a time machine that only shows you what you already know. But at least with two independent data points, we could be certain we were actually accessing the time stream, and not just extrapolating details from unconscious memory. For the same reason we don't allow subjects to know what moment we've chosen in advance.
The fix was fuzzy and kept fading in and out, which I'd expected. What I hadn't expected was a very weird pattern in the data. It almost looked as if two different memory-moments were superimposed. Had Jack conflated two similar memories? Considering that we'd chosen his last fight with Amy, mixing it up with an earlier battle wasn't that far-fetched. I printed off the graph, more as a curiosity than anything else, with some vague thought that a spin-off of the technology might allow scientific verification of the controversial recovered memory hypothesis currently making the rounds in clinical circles and the popular press.
I was running through the post-run checklist on auto pilot, letting Jack's answers run through my ears and out the pencil with as little cerebellum contact as possible. So it wasn't until I saw the words scrawled on my yellow pad that I took in the significance of his answer to question four: How would you describe your mental state in the scene you witnessed?
Jack had not, as I had expected, said "Guilty." Jack had said, "Which one?"
I choked. I turned the choke into a cough, and the cough into an excuse to get a bottle of water for each of us from the Staples cases stacked up along the wall. It was important that no subject be given cues to which reactions were expected, lest they subconsciously conform their answers to our hypothesis and contaminate the experiment.
By the time I got back I was in control of myself. I turned over the page as though his answer naturally led down the second branch of follow-up questions and proceeded, in my most bland and routine tones, to make a wild-ass guess. We didn't have follow up questions for this, unless "Huh?" is considered a follow-up question.
It didn't fit any of the four possible hypotheses we had identified that could explain the effect, nor was it a known symptom of one of the nine mental disorders that might, if they slipped past us, play merry hell with the results. I suspected we were looking at mental disorder number ten. The back of my mind played with the pleasing fantasy that it was not merely one we hadn't realized would interfere with an observer's capacities, but a new disease altogether, one I could write up for a paper that would satisfy even the University's persnickety tenure review committee.
"Both, please, in order." I requested, as if I was reading from the sheet.
"But they weren't in order," Jack said, surprised. "They were ... all at once. The one where Amy walked out and the one where she stayed and we had makeup sex on...um."
"And how did you feel about that?"
"Well, kind of sad and happy at the same time, you know? It was weird."
"Sad that she left and happy that she stayed?"
"Yeah... well, no. Not exactly. I mean, kind of both about both. 'Cause I miss her and all, but she's really happy with Tim, her new guy, and now she'll never meet him, I mean, she wouldn't have, and I want to be with her, but do I want to be with someone who thinks like that about me?"
It's a good thing for the world that I left private practice. In any other circumstances, I'd have been ready to shake Jack to force his thoughts to align into some kind of sense. But at the moment all I wanted was to end the interview without alerting him that anything was out of the ordinary, and hightail it over to Peter's office. Nothing had prepared me for a development like this.
It turns out I should have paid attention to the part about why we couldn't change things after all. And I was right about Rubowitz. Apparently, the alternate universe hypothesis is on the money, or so Peter says. If you change something, you get sucked into the new timeline, and out of ours. God only knows what happens to the you that was there before you were. One theory is that there wasn't one, since the observer creates the entire new universe for himself at the moment of decision. That makes my head hurt, but I've been a scientist long enough to know that doesn't mean it is wrong. In layman's terms, whatever you believe most strongly becomes true for you. Unfortunately for our study, once there, there's no way to report back.
As a result, Jack, who never knew what he believed or wanted, was apparently capable of something we'd thought impossible in any observer-driven phenomenon. He could see both possibilities at once: the one man who could open Schrodinger's box and see a live cat and a dead one both.
Jack became the star of the project, which was clearly going to suck in the History department before long. We could finally answer decades' worth of Monday morning quarterbacking about what really would have happened if Waterloo or Pearl Harbor had gone differently, or if JFK had ducked. As the woman who discovered him, I was covered in reflected glory. I was also twice as busy as before. A second ad had gone out, trying to turn up other subjects who might share Jack's unique worldview.
After four months, we gave up. Jack was indeed one of a kind. The combined staff lived in constant terror that he would get run over by a bus. Or worse, get better. We found him an apartment on campus to minimize his contact with buses. As for making sure he had a constant source of regret ready to hand... somewhere along the line he and I found ourselves involved.
I no longer supervised his runs, of course - the truth is I couldn't edge onto the roster even if we hadn't been whatever it is we were. The real tech boys had priority, and after twenty rounds, the psych work up had slimmed down to a mere "anything new?" I still think that's sloppy methodology, but I'd given up arguing about it. Jack told me all about it over dinner anyway.
I was annoyed to find his guilt complex appeared to be wearing off on me. Jack could be so much more than a guinea pig if only he could get over constantly second-guessing himself. Peter had made it very clear that any changes in the status quo would be frowned on, but didn't professional ethics require me to say something? Or not professional, exactly. Were there girlfriend ethics? I tried some research, but Cosmopolitan and Woman's Day came up equally blank. I wished the field had a sensible journal so I could read up on the subject.
I wasn't sleeping well, a fact I could no longer blame on the soft bleeps and war cries from Jack's PC in the other room. I started staying later and later in the lab. The quiet hum of the machines was soothing, and I could get a lot done without any interruptions. One Thursday I even threw on a hoodie over my less-than-professional plaid pajama pants and fled back there after a bad dream.
That night I finally succumbed to what I'd wanted to do for weeks: I tried out the machine myself, without a spotter, and set the coordinates for Jack's childhood. Maybe I could find out what had made him this way.
I didn't, of course. Childhood is as endless to a machine calibrated in seconds as it is to an eleven-year-old dreaming of freedom. Even once I'd discarded the early years, as unlikely to involve choices to regret; late teens, by which the behavior was already apparent; and all the hours where I could reasonably assume he'd been sleeping, there was still work enough for months of spot checks. And still, I might miss it. Without Jack's participation, I might not even recognize the moment if I saw it: even a gifted psychologist is not a mind reader, and I'm merely stubborn and well trained.
I did see that he was a gawky kid with a cowlick, fond of GI Joe and those long grape Popsicles that come in plastic bags and have to be squeezed. He still has really horrible taste, preferring glowing orange macaroni and cheese to the real thing, and I could not have explained why that made my chest hurt.
And then, as I watched Jack squeeze the Popsicle too hard and a chunk of purple ice land with a wet plop on his formerly white sneakers, I wondered. If I could find it, would Jack even want me to tell him? He was important now, unique. Critical to a seismic shift in historical understanding, even, if you believe our grant applications. If he saw for himself whatever trauma had made him this way, he'd have a chance to fix it. But then PCUT would be out its only double-timer, as we'd taken to calling him. Jack would be out on the streets. And, not coincidentally, I'd be out of a job - and possibly out of the field for good, if word got around that I was the one who'd sabotaged the experiment. I could be out a boyfriend as well; how long could even Jack go without blaming me?
Then again, how long could I go on blaming myself if I didn't at least offer him the possibility?
The scene before me melted and changed, though I didn't remember altering the dials. There I was, still in the same fashion-challenged outfit, climbing the stairs to East Campus with rain in my hair. Damn, I thought irrelevantly, I should've left an umbrella in my desk. In the scene, I opened the door quietly, but Jack called to me from the other room, "anything wrong, sweetheart?"
And then one of me said yes, and one said no.
It was cold in the lab at night, and I wrapped my arms around my waist. I am a good scientist. I remembered to hit save before I jabbed the machine off and sat shivering. This was too important to lose, our first documented trip to the future, but Peter could interpret the raw data in the morning. I didn't want to know what happened next. And in a way, it almost didn't matter. Jack wasn't the only one who could see two timelines anymore. If only I'd taken a sleeping pill, or some warm milk, I thought as I powered down the machine. Everything would have been different.
©Meredith Schwartz
Meredith Schwartz first appeared in the February 2005 issue of Reflection's Edge with "Chains of Words," an essay about BDSM and the culture around it.