Alby's Drawings Of Time

Alby got his name from the way he was always volunteering for things:

“I’ll be it first,” he said for games of Kick the Can played in the cul de sac where we all lived, back when we were 12.

“I’ll be right down,” he said when he climbed up the tree and out onto the long limb because we wanted to hang a rope swing over the quarry where nobody was supposed to swim because it was too deep and sometimes there were rock slides, back when we were 15.

“I’ll be the designated driver,” he said on prom night junior year, which everyone thought was him being nice but which really was because Alby worries that if he got buzzed, a little, he will try to kiss Susan, who he’d loved since the seventh grade but who was dating Rex and Rex would punch Alby out.

“I’ll be back in a bit,” Alby would say when, our senior year in high school someone had to go down to the Kwik-N-Gone to buy beer from Tom, who worked there second shift and who would sell us Bud Light if we paid him 50% over the regular price.

It was never a surprise when Alby volunteered for stuff, is my point, which meant it should not have been surprising to me to learn that Alby had volunteered to become the first time-traveler ever for the U.S. Army in a secret project.

Only it was surprising because I learned it when we were only one month away from graduating, and Alby was still seventeen, and hadn’t yet even told me he was thinking about enlisting when all of a sudden one night, the two of us sitting against his car in the parking lot of the Burger King down off Elmore Road, Alby said to me:

“If you had to do it, do you think you could shoot a man?”

I looked at the end of my Camel Light, which I wasn’t really inhaling. I only smoked because Susan did. Both Alby and I had a crush on her and the only reason our mutual need to date her didn’t destroy our friendship was because Susan thought of both of us as little brothers, and because we never ever mentioned to anyone except each other that we were in love with her, in order to avoid Rex beating the crap out of us.

“It depends, I suppose,” I lied.

I shouldn’t of lied. Maybe if I’d told the truth Alby wouldn’t have picked me to help him. If I’d said “Look, I don’t think I can do that, Alby,” he might not have told me his story at all, might have told someone else or might have just told nobody and would have gone on to join the U.S. Army and rise to the rank of lieutenant and volunteer for their time travel mission and things wouldn’t have turned out the way they would have. Or maybe they would have turned out the way they would have. That’s the thing about time travel: you can’t really tell.

“Shoot him to kill him?” Alby asked.

I pictured looking down the barrel of a gun: looking down a rifle, for some reason, not a pistol, probably because rifles were the only guns I’d seen outside of movies and teevee, looking down the rifle and there was a man kneeling in front of me, his hands on his head. His eyes were wide with terror, or maybe anger, or maybe both. His mouth was bleeding a little, a swollen lip. He had his fingers intertwined and I could see that every muscle in his body was bulging with the effort of not moving, of not hauling off and trying to tackle me.

I pictured pulling the trigger.

“You can see him, too, can’tcha?” Alby whispered.

“Jesus God, Alby,” I said and burnt my finger on the ash of my Camel Light when I really and truly took a drag of it, the first time I ever smoked, and my eyes watered up and I coughed and choked. “What are you talking about?”

But Alby was looking at me.

“You saw him?” he asked again.

I nodded.

“You really saw him?” Alby asked again.

I nodded again. I took a drag off the cigarette again, the second one. I wasn’t smoking for Susan now. I was smoking because of the man.

It was long long silence then, cars pulling past into the Burger King drive-through. I suppose they were ordering, Whoppers and fries and shakes and crap, but I didn’t hear anything they said.

“Could you kill him?” Alby asked.

I turned away, then, staring up at the sign that advertised

W OPPER $1 TODAY ONLY

“If my life depended on it?” Alby said more quietly.

“Yeah,” I lied. I took my third-ever drag of a cigarette.

I shouldn’t of lied.

But I did, and so Alby tells me his story, but here’s the thing, too, about time-travel: It gets you all mixed up inside and all mixed up outside, too, so when I think back on that day some things stand out clear as day, clear as a bell, clear as whatallfuck things are supposed to be clear as. Like that missing H in the Whopper sign, I remember that clear.

Other things get all swirled together and you can’t tell what was real and what wasn’t real, because that’s the thing we ought to know about time: It’s all real, and the reason you don’t screw around with it is that what keeps all the other times, all the other events, all the other everythings from being real is the fact that time can only happen one time at a time, if you know what I mean. Which is I guess to say that when I’m going to take a drag of a cigarette or Rex is going to feel Susan’s boob right in front of us at the junior prom or Alby is going to ask me to kill a guy, usually those are just one time things, or one things in time, or something – I’m just a high school kid, after all, or I was years/minutes ago when this all began, so it’s hard for me to explain – and that’s fine that they’re all one thing/one time, or it’s not fine if maybe you want to be the one wrapping your hand around Susan, but the real heart of it is that those things happen once and only those things happen once and things don’t happen more than once and more than one thing doesn’t happen at a time.

Or: “Rex doesn’t grope and not grope Susan’s tit,” one of the Albys said to me one of the times he made.

But he does, kind of, now. Rex does both, now. Thanks to us.

*****

This I think is how it happens sometimes. Happened sometimes. Will happen sometime. Who was that writer who said the worst part of time travel is trying to come up with a vocabulary for it? He was wrong, of course: for me the worst part is how many times I have to kill that guy and how many times I just can’t, and how many times there are because of that, but it is hard to talk about time, or times, without the right verbs.

I think one of Alby’s drawings that he made that first night – that was I suppose the last first night, the last beginning or ending, since now everything’s all hell of messed up – was pretty accurate. They were all pretty accurate, but the one that is stuck in my mind more times than not is The Octopus.

Time is like an octopus, Alby has always said to me all the time now but that night was the first time he said it to me and the only first time ever he said it to me even though now it was all times he always said it.

By which he meant, I know now, that events are the head of the octopus, some times, and time, the times, plural, are like the octopus' arms. The events control the time and determine which one is going to be used.

Events like standing in that room, a kitchen, an ordinary kitchen! An ordinary kitchen with an ordinary table and an ordinary chair and an ordinary wife knocked unconscious in the corner and an ordinary chicken dinner from an ordinary cardboard bucket spread all over the table and me holding an ordinary gun pointing at the man, and he is holding his ordinary hands on his head, his muscles twitching.

“ALBY!” I am hollering in this event that is the head of an octopus. “HOW DID I SEE THIS?”

I have to holler over the sounds of fighting outside, the gunshots riddling the house and the sirens and the bombs exploding. One of the Albys from one of the times knows a shitload about explosives and a couple of the Albys that are on our side are pretty good with guns, and I am staring at the man, who is ready to leap at me.

“Don’t do it,” Alby says next to me, quietly. He isn’t talking to me. He wants me to do it. He is talking to the man, who is Special Forces and also really smart and who is almost ready to jump at me, knock the rifle away, and stop us from killing him, something that we have to do so that all the explosions and Albys and stuff won’t ever happen.

Or wouldn’t have ever happened, except they always did happen, each moment of our moments splitting into a hundred million thousand different options: explode/don’t explode run/don’t run die/don’t die hit the man’s wife with the butt of your rifle/don’t do that she’s a goddam woman all of those options that exist in all their different versions, some with spilt chicken and some without, but only one could ever happen at a time, which meant that all the others never did happen, or always didn’t happen, or something, or that was how it used to be/always wasn’t.

And I am here in the head of this octopus, time stretching out from us in tentacle after tentacle, grabbing onto flotsam and jetsam, moments and non-moments, wrenching them out of their path, pulling them fr0m this to that, ripping open bits of time like they are oysters and it is dinnertime for The Octopus.

“HOW, ALBY?” I am crying.

“Do it,” Alby says to me.

I stare at the man, who is about to jump at me.

The Special Forces man doesn’t jump yet right away because Alby is holding the man's daughter, who is only three years old, and he has a gun in her mouth and if the man jumps at me, I know, Alby will shoot the girl and I will not shoot the man.

But if I don’t shoot the man he will jump at me.

Time is like that: time is like shooting the man and not shooting the man but I never shoot the man. I shouldn’t of lied to Alby.

*****

Another drawing Alby made that night was a pyramid. He drew this one on a paper from his notebook, the little torn-apart fringes whispering in the breeze as Alby drew four quick lines and four more lines linking their base.

“Let’s say you are at the top of a pyramid,” he said to me and always says to me, each time we live this part over.

“Okay,” I say. I can see the man’s eyes, looking at me but seeing only his daughter, who is three years old, with a gun in her mouth, and I am seeing only his eyes, forever.

How did I see this, Alby? I will ask him over and over for an eternity, in so many combinations!

“Okay,” I say again, lighting another Camel Light. Susan would find me so sexy! Obviously she did, in enough times that I probably fucked her at least once. Take that, Rex! I bet she loved it. “I’m at the top of the pyramid.”

Alby turns the paper:

“How can you tell?” he asks, and the top is the side and the side is the top but they’re all connected and I suppose it would matter where you were standing to see what might be the time that began it all – the top – and what might be the results of the time that began it all.

Put another way, as everything always is all the time, all possible combinations of words are said all possible combinations of ways in all possible groups of people gathered for all possible reasons, put another way, if the top of the pyramid causes the base, then the corners of the base cause the walls and everything is the top of the pyramid, which is fucked up because then nothing causes anything but how can that be? If cause and effect are effect and cause and both are each other, then the universe is truly screwed.

That didn’t use to be that way: it used to be that cause was always followed by effect. But then I didn’t shoot the guy and suddenly the top of the pyramid wasn’t the top of the pyramid and my not shooting the guy didn’t cause Alby to pull the trigger and blow the little girl’s head off any more than him jumping at me didn’t cause me to not shoot him, any more than his wife screaming as we came in trying to shoot him quietly while he sat down at his kitchen table to eat a drumstick before going down to his workshop to sketch out the blueprint for what would be the time machine caused me to hit her with the butt of my rifle and her to spill the chicken and the commotion to make the little girl come running into the room from where she’d been watching TV quietly.

In the olden days, there were olden days, and in the olden days, things happened for a reason. Now, reasons happen for a thing and I see that guy’s eyes all the time, just like Alby knew I did.

*****

This is the most obvious reason that time travel is possible: time looks like a thing, only we don’t see it.

That’s how Alby explained it to me, how Alby explained it to Alby when Alby came to visit himself one night, according to what Alby told me. It had been that night, the night of the cigarettes and Alby’s drawings of time and the missing H on the sign: Alby had gone into the Burger King to use the john and he had run into himself, older, a bit more scarred up and grizzly and wearing an old Special Forces jacket and Alby had told himself how Alby would volunteer for the U.S. Army and make lieutenant and would volunteer for a time travel mission but he shouldn’t do it, only the thing was that Alby couldn’t get out of it because Alby couldn’t talk himself out of it.

“He… you… told you… himself, all this? In a minute? Inside there while you were whizzing?” I asked him.

Alby shook his head.

“No, he just told me not to volunteer for the U.S. Army, which I hadn’t even thought about doing, but the moment he said it I knew all this stuff.”

“All what stuff?”

“All this stuff I’m telling you. Like how time is a circle.”

“It is?”

“It is. It goes around and around and around. At least when you look at it from one direction. Imagine how a cube looks to a two-dimensional being,” Alby said. He sipped his Pepsi through the straw while I tried to imagine that.

“You can’t, really, can you?” Alby asked.

I couldn't even imagine how a cube looked to me. All I could see was that damn guy. Why did he have to get stuck in my mind? Why not get one of those times I must have made out with Susan in the backseat of her dad’s Lincoln? I’d thought about it enough that there must be a couple dozen of those existing, at least, but I can’t even remember one of them, really, because all I see is that guy.

“The thing is,” Alby said back that first night, “That a two-dimensional being can’t even picture what the cube must be like – if he’s two-dimensional,”

“Or she is two-dimensional, like Flat Jenny,” I have always said in a joke that Flat Jenny, who was actually kind of cute but had no bust, wouldn’t have always liked.

Alby ignored me: “He can’t even imagine something having three dimensions. It’s beyond his experience. If you took a two-dimensional guy and showed him a cube, he’d imagine that it’s simply one 2-d surface after another: he’d crawl all over it and think man, this is a shitload of 2-dimensional stuff here,” and he’d keep going back over the surfaces he’d gone over and never realize that he was going over the same thing because that can’t happen in his experience, you can’t circle a globe in two dimensions. You’d just go on and on in an infinite direction and you’d never retrace your ground unless you turned around. You want to go over the same thing without turning around, you need more than two dimensions.”

“What’s this got to do with the guy?” I asked Alby. I should’ve told him then: The guy I don’t kill. But I didn’t.

“It has to do with time,” Alby said, and gestured at all his drawings. “Time looks like all these things, but we can’t see it, because we are a worm crawling on a cube. We can’t picture what the fourth dimension really looks like because we are a dimension lower.”

“So time looks like an octopus and a pyramid and a circle? How can you say that if you can’t picture it?”

“Because I’ve been outside of time,” Alby said.

“And yeah,” he added. “From some angles, it looks like a circle, which is why it was stupid of me to try to stop me from joining the U.S. Army, because I always do that and coming back to keep me from doing it simply makes me do it. I wouldn’t have thought to join the U.S. Army until I told me that I shouldn’t,” Alby finished up.

He bent down and started drawing another time, and then stopped and looked up at me.

“I had a Special Forces jacket,” he told me. “I’d like to get me one of those.”

*****

Alby tore a strip of paper off, licked one end, stuck them together halfassedly.

I knew what it was from math class.

He was right about this one, too, just like he was right about the Octopus and the Pyramid and the Circle: time looks like all those things and like a Mobius strip, too, because the thing you don’t know about time is how if you walk along the path you ordinarily would stay on the outside of the path or the inside but not cross into the other.

But the thing is, if you can imagine an hourglass that’s superthin, a grain of sand thin, perhaps, an hourglass full of sand but only one grain thick so that standing up it’s almost two-dimensional, about as 2D as an hourglass can get, and then if you can imagine someone breaking that hourglass, you’d take a 2D thing (almost, right?) and make it a 3D thing, as the sand flies in all directions that it couldn’t before, and that is what can happen with time, too: It’s trapped in our 3D world, almost compressed into 3 dimensions, but if you break it, if you break what holds time in, you snap it out to its full four dimensions and then

And then…

And then…

And then… you just live every moment, ever, all at once and all in order and all in different orders, you just keep looking at the man and he’s looking at you and neither of you want to look at Alby, who is crying and holding the girl with the pistol in her mouth and telling her to stop struggling and I am howling, too, about why we have to kill him Alby, why do we have to do that and the man is listening to the sound of the explosions stopping outside and I’m wishing that I could simply have walked away from Alby or told him I could never kill the guy or maybe I could just shoot Alby before he shoots the girl (and sometimes I think I must have done that, too, but not often enough because I don’t remember that anymore than I don’t remember kissing Susan or remember growing up and growing old and getting married and having kids and telling them not to ever stand in a parking lot talking to their friend, especially if their friend is the kind of guy who volunteers for everything, I don’t remember telling my kids that sometimes it might be necessary for them to tell their friends the truth, that they can’t kill a guy, or maybe learn to kill the guy. I don’t remember lots of stuff, even though everything that ever could have/did happen to me did happen to me all in an instant that lasts forever, now.

I don’t remember Alby telling me, either, what was so bad that he needed to not join the U.S. Army (which he always did) or not volunteer for the time travel experiment (which he always will), what was so bad that we had to break into a guy’s house just after he got home from the civilian job the guy had at the time working at the U.S. Army base just outside of town, the one where Alby would in two months go to have his head shaved and get sent off to Basic Training, a decade and a half before time travel was invented, and bash his wife in the head and scatter his chicken dinner and hold his daughter at gunpoint, I don’t remember Alby telling me what would happen if we didn’t do all those things we always did.

I just know that we went from the path where we would graduate high school and I would go off to college and flunk out after two years and go to work in the local record store and eventually become a barber because you only had to get a certificate to do that and that took only two months of class, and Alby would go to college and graduate and get a degree in archaeology and work in a museum in San Francisco, we went from that path to the one where we snuck out of his house the night after the Burger King night with his dad’s rifles and waited in the man’s house, hiding in the attic, until he came home from dinner and then burst downstairs and hit his wife and grabbed his daughter, our paths twisting away from college and record stores and haircuts and fossils to murdering a kid and not shooting her dad, and then we twisted around again and we were in college and so was Susan but Rex had never existed and then we twisted around again and we were in the kitchen:

“Shoot him this fucking time!” Alby screamed at me, his hands shaking as he held the girl.

“I want to!” I lied. I shouldn’t of lied.

“I don’t want to kill her again!” Alby said and he was sobbing but of course that happened again, too, that I didn’t shoot and he did, and I wondered when in all these times I would shoot or we wouldn’t go at all, but that never seems to happen.

*****

Alby drew all these dots and specks and star-shapes, some big ,some small, all over the paper, dotdotdotdot and then bigger and then they were circles and some were stars.

“Time is all over the place,” he said.

I nodded, I hoped, wisely.

“It’s like stars: It’s there and there and there” he was jabbing the paper with his pencil, over and over and over and over, a horrible metaphor of what our lives are/will be/were/are, “And sometimes we see them and sometimes they’re hidden” it took me a moment to realize he was saying

Some

Times

“and some times, they take eons to get here and some times they’ve already arrived, but they’ve always been there, always, always, and they always will be. Always expanding out and always glowing and reaching out and overlapping, getting farther away but still reaching out and showing us themselves”

He looked up at me, from his paper drawing, then up at the sky.

I looked up at the sky, too.

“Always?” I asked.

“Always,” Alby nodded.

I should of told him the truth right then: I can’t kill that guy, Alby.

I should of asked him if you can get from one time to the other, like going from one star to another, or if they all collapse in or something. I should ask him that some time.

Instead, I asked: “What made ‘em, Alby?”

I always ask him that.

I shouldn’t of lied to him.

But I always did.

And that was maybe why I lied: because I always did.

Alby shrugs.

He always did that.

“I don’t know what made ‘em,” he says.

“Maybe nothing,” he says, always.

I didn’t ask him if there were other ways time looked. He’d drawn other stuff but he never showed me the other drawings. I didn’t ask him. Instead:

“And they never go out.” I said.

I only said that the one time, but I kept repeating it forever.