The Man Who Folded Himself (24 page)

Perhaps I should just leave him this manuscript instead. These pages will tell the story better than I can.

Maybe that would be the best way.

There is just one last thing....

What is it like to die?

There is no Don to come back and tell me.

And I'm scared.

It's the one thing I will have to face alone. Totally alone.

There will be absolutely no foreknowledge.

Nor will there be any hindknowledge. The terrible thing about death is that you don't know you've died.

—Or is that the terrible thing? Maybe that's the blessing. It's the jump-shock that will kill me. I know that. I will tap my belt twice—and I will cease to exist.

Cease to exist.

Cease to exist.

The words echo in my head.

Cease to exist.

Until they lose all meaning.

I try to imagine what it will be like.

No more me.

The end of Danny.

The end.

(What happens to the rest of the universe?)

I am afraid of it more than anything else in my life. Absence of—

—me.

Dear Danny,

Time travel is not immortality.

It will allow you to experience all the possible variations of your life. But it is not an unlimited ticket.

There will be an end.

My body has not experienced its years in sequence. But it has experienced years. And it has aged. And my mind has been carried headlong with it—this lump of flesh travels through time its own way, in a way that no man has the power to change.

I've had to learn to accept that, Danny, in order to find peace within my mind.

My mind?

Perhaps I'm not a mind at all. Perhaps I'm only a body pretending the vanity of being something more. Perhaps it's only the fact that language, which allows me to manipulate symbols, ideas, and concepts, also provides the awareness of self that precedes the inevitable analysis.

Hmm.

I have spent a lifetime analyzing my life. Living it. And rewriting it to suit me.

I once compared time travel to a subjective work of art. That was truer than I realized. I am the artist of time. I choose the scenes I wish to play. Even the last one.

And that scares me too. Just a little.

I don't know when that body was coming from. It—he tapped the belt and came back to August 23. Thinking he was going to witness the arrival of himself. Thinking he was going to witness his death.

Or maybe he was seeking it.

I don't know when that body came from. I don't know when its starting point is/was/will be.

I don't know when I'm going to die. But I do know it will be soon. I admit it. I'm scared.

But perhaps it will be a gentle way to go.

I will never know what happened. I will never really know when. And I will die much as I lived—in the act of jumping across time. It will be a fitting way to go.

Danny, you cannot avoid mortality. But you can choose your way of meeting it. And that is the most that any man can hope for.

Live well, my son.

Maybe this will be the last page. I think I should add something to “Uncle Jim's” diary.

Uncle Jim has given his life back to himself—that is, to me. Now that I know the directions in which I will go—no, can go—the decisions are mine.

I need do none of the things that Uncle Jim has described. (In fact, some of them shock me beyond words.) Or I could do all of them—I may change as I grow older. The point is, I know what I am beginning if I put on this belt.

I feel a strange empathy for that frightening old man. He was bizarre and perverse and lost. But he was me—and all those things he did and felt and wrote about echo profoundly in my own soul. I feel a terrible sadness at his loss, greater than I did before I knew who he was. And not just sadness; fear and horror too. I cannot be this person in this manuscript. This is too much to assimilate. Is this me? I am drawn to it and simultaneously repelled. It can't be true.

But I know it is.

My god. What have I done to myself? What am I destined to do?

I wish he were here now. I wish there were some way to reach him—punish him, scream at him, berate him. How dare he do this to me?

And . . . at the same time, I want to hug him and thank him and tell him how much he means to me. Even though I know he knows—knew.

I saw him in his coffin. I sat through his funeral. He's dead. And he isn't. I could go looking for him. . . .

Should I?

I want to reassure him. And be reassured by him. And—the tears roll down my cheeks. I'm crying for myself now more than him because now I know how truly isolated I really am. I am abandoned by the universe. There is no god who can save me.

I am so alone I cannot bear the pain of it. Now I know how desperately isolated one human being can be. What have I done to deserve this?

I will surely go mad.

No. I will not.

I can't escape that way either.

I know what choice I have. And it is no choice at all.

The decision is mine.

A world awaits me.

The future beckons.

All right, I accept.

I am going to put on the belt.

I
've never made a secret of who I am, but I've never considered it important enough to discuss in public either. I've always felt that anyone who wants to talk about my private life is only demonstrating the paucity of his/her imagination when there are so many more important and exciting things to discuss.

Sometimes, when a person's sexuality is discussed, the humanity of the individual gets lost—subjugated to the sexual identity. We sometimes make the mistake of thinking that “gay” explains a person's life. Most of the time, it doesn't. “Gay” is an adjective, not a noun. It only describes one small part of a much larger reality. But any attempt to make this point, to recontextualize the use of the word, is doomed to failure, because it also serves to call attention to the issue or credibility. It ends up looking like rationalization and justification. Eventually people start wondering about the need to have this discussion.

So let me start here: A few years ago, someone bawled me out for not going public with my identity. He argued that the hypothetical gay thirteen-year-old in Peoria needed positive role models. My response was that my friends, family, and colleagues knew. That was my definition of “out.” Going public was a political act—and I am not obligated to put my life, my career, my well-being, and my son's well-being at the service of anyone else's agenda. I had an agenda of my own—raising my son. Everything else was irrelevant,
even my writing. (Which is why a certain long-awaited book has taken much longer than I ever expected it would.)

For the record, my son is now 19, and he's turned into a remarkable young man; I am enormously proud of him. I should also add that with gay adoptions now under fire by the ignorant, going public has become necessary—the lies must be refuted by the families who know—because unlike that hypothetical thirteen-year-old in Peoria, there are a lot of very real children in the foster care system who will never be adopted because of a critical shortage of qualified adoptive parents willing to take on the challenge of a special needs child. People who want to adopt (gay or straight) need to be encouraged—the children need them. My son once told me how he used to cry himself to sleep wishing for a dad. If gay parents can be part of the solution, it would be immoral, even criminal, to deny these children the opportunity to have loving parents.

Ideally, I want to live in a world where sexual identity is irrelevant, where it makes no difference at all, where we do not judge people by who they love—where we celebrate the quality of love, not the form. We're not there yet. But the way to get there is to live as if such a world is the right world to live in. I'm not ashamed of who I am, haven't had that internalized dilemma for a long time; but I do admit that I sometimes wonder how much of my personal life I really want others to have access to. This may be true for a lot of writers. That's the real irony of any writer pretending to be private, because what we do for a living is access our lives as source material for our stories. Ultimately every significant moment—traumatic, transforming, overwhelming—ends up in the books in one way or another. It's all there, as much in the denial of the expression as in the expression itself.

Because our society is the way it is, being gay can be an access to a cultural vision—quest—if a person is willing to use it. It's the opportunity to step outside the boundaries and look back—and see things about the relationships of human beings, men and women together, that might be impossible to discover any other way. Ultimately, that confers an enormous advantage to those willing to use it—a specific flavor of insight. Harlan Ellison says that the writer's imperative is to explore the human condition—to go to the other
side of the mountain, take a good look around, and then report back. Whatever mountain is in front of you.

When I first started writing
The Man Who Folded Himself
, I worked enthusiastically on it every day—until I got to the gay sequence. Then I stopped—because I knew what came next and I wasn't sure how or even if I wanted to tackle it. I wanted to write the scene, I knew it needed to be written, but I didn't want to write the scene. I didn't want to do it wrong and I couldn't yet see the right way to do it. (And, for the record, junior high school had taught me all I'd ever wanted or needed to know about public embarrassment.) It was 1971; we were in the middle of redefining our culture and our identities within that culture. Science fiction was mutating/transforming/evolving into something else, and I didn't have the long view yet; so I put the book aside and wrote the first fourteen chapters of
A Matter For Men
instead. Then one day, my agent called and told me he'd sold
The Man Who Folded Himself
to Random House, my first hardcover sale, so I had to finish the book. The mountain demanded.