The Man Who Folded Himself (19 page)

The baby was born this morning.

It was a girl. A beautiful, pink, little girl.

I am delighted. And disappointed. I had wanted a boy.

A boy. . . .

I will not tell Diane this. I think this is a decision that I have to make myself. (And there are ways that it can be done so that she will never know. I know when the child was conceived and I know
which drugs to take beforehand. I will have to either replace Danny, or make him take the injection, but she will never suspect.)

My daughter will be a son.

Why do I keep coming back?

I get on her nerves, she gets on mine. We argue about the little things; we make a point of fighting with each other. Why?

Last night we were lying in bed, side by side, just lying there, not doing anything, just listening to each other breathe and staring at the ceiling. She said, “Danny?”

I said, “Yes?”

She said, “It's over, isn't it?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

She turned to me then and slid her arms around me. Her cheeks were wet too.

I held her tight. “I'm sorry,” I said. “I wanted it to work so much.”

She sniffed. “Me too.”

We held onto each other for a long time. After a while I shifted my position, then she shifted hers. She rolled over on her back and I slid on top of her. She was so slender, so intense. We moved together in silence, hearing only the sound of our breathing. We remembered and pretended, each of us lost in our own thoughts, and wishing that it hadn't come to this.

The sheets were cool in the night and she was warm and silky. If only it could be like this all the time….

But it couldn't. It was over. We both knew it.

I'm not going back anymore.

Whatever there was between us is gone. We both know it. The bad moments outweigh the good. There is no joy left.

Besides, she isn't there all the time anyway.

I have brought my son forward with me. I will find him a home in the twentieth century. And I will watch over him. I will be very careful not to accidentally excise him. He is all I have left.

It's not without regret that I do this. I miss my Diane terribly.
But something happened to us. The magic disappeared, the joy faded, and the delight we had found in each other ceased to exist.

The last night . . . we made love mechanically, each seeking only our own physical release. Somehow, my feelings had become more important to me than hers. I wonder why?

Was it because I knew that I would never—could never—experience it from her side?

Perhaps….

Love with Diane was . . . sad. I could see the me in her, but I could never be that me.

And that meant that she wasn't really me. Not really. She was—somebody else.

I couldn't communicate with her. We used the same words, but our meanings were different. (They must have been different. She wasn't me.)

I'm sorry, Diane. I wanted it to work. I did. But I couldn't reach you. I couldn't reach you at all.

So.

I'll go back to my Danny. He'll understand. He's been waiting patiently for so long….

Oh God, I feel alone.

It's been years since I last added anything to this journal. I wonder how old I am now. I really have no way of telling.

Forty? Fifty? Sixty? I'm not sure. The procolaine-N treatments I've been taking in 2101 seem to retard all physical evidence of
aging. I could still be in my late thirties. But I doubt it. I've done so much. Seen too much.

I've been living linearly—semi-linearly. Instead of bouncing haphazardly around time, I've set up a home in 1981, and as it travels forward through time at its stately day-to-day pace, I am traveling with it.

Oh, I'm still using the future and the past, but not as before.

Before, I was young, foolish. I was like a barbarian at the banquet. I gulped and guzzled; I ate without tasting. I rushed through each experience like a tourist trying to see twenty-one European cities in two weeks and enjoying none of them.

Now, I'm a gourmet. I savor each day. I taste the robustness of life, but not so hurriedly as to lose its delicate overtones. The twentieth century has become my toybox. These years are the most remarkable of all; they are a teeterboard suspended between the wistful past and the soaring future.

And occasionally, if I am careful, I can give it just the right little push.

I have not abandoned the use of the timebelt.

Sometimes I use it for amusement. The jackass who cut me off on the freeway this morning. Instead, he had four flat tires on the on-ramp.

And sometimes for justice.

The man who walked onto a schoolyard and started firing his rifle. He thought he had cleaned it, but somehow a wad of wet modeling clay had been jammed up the barrel. The gun exploded in his face. (I like that trick, I use it a lot. There are an awful lot of exploding guns in the world.)

I read the news every day. I don't like seeing tragedies. I don't like plane crashes and murders and kidnappings and bizarre accidents. So, they don't happen anymore. I go and I see and I fix.

Planes that might have crashed get delayed for odd reasons. One of my insurance companies watchdogs the airlines, demanding fixes of things that might not be discovered until after a plane goes down.

Murderers and kidnappers disappear. Missing children are found. Terrorists have their bombs blow up in their faces. Rapists—never mind, you don't want to know. Serial killers never get a chance to start. Devastating building fires don't happen without warning. People who start forest fires get caught. Famous actors do not die in car crashes. Great rock stars don't lose their talent to drugs. Sometimes it's tricky, but I like the challenges. I like making things better. And I never leave any evidence.

I can't fix it all. I do what I can.

The odd thing is, I don't do it because I care. I can't care. These people aren't real to me. They're pieces on the playing board. I just do it because it satisfies my sense of rightness.

Because it makes me feel a little bit more like a god to be doing something useful.

And because I want my son to have a reason to respect me.