I DO NOT LIKE it here in this part of the cave. It is cold and dark. The air is soupy. The people are complex and hard to see. The ground is also hard and hard to see. I no longer have any sense of purpose. This morning, I woke up to find out it is yesterday. Right now, it is a week ago, and I’m not even here in the cave yet. And yet I am. I wander, disembodied, waiting for myself to show up, hoping I will be able to see myself once I do. How will I know? It is very dark. This new time wrinkle disorients me. I try to make sense of it by accessing my vast mental library of time travel literature, both literary and scientific (I minored in chronology at Harvard). I recall there was a fiction writer named Curtis Vonnegut, Jr., who, in the mid-twentieth century, wrote of the chrono-synclastic infundibulum, a space-time dimension in which one could be everywhere/everytime at once. It is an ingenious storytelling device. Curtis Vonnegut, Jr., was a fiction writer I loved dearly. I read all of his work as a child and also several pieces he wrote as an adult—wonderfully whimsical stuff heavily dosed with social satire, fully stocked with whimsical notions, doodads, geegaws. Utterly delightful. Of course, one wearies of such things as one matures, and by the time I was eleven, I was on to Stanislaw Lem, equally funny and clever but not to the average reader, who would find thonself stymied by Lem’s erudition and level of scientific discourse (Lem was himself a trained physician, as well as a trained seal trainer). To the layperson, Lem reads terribly dry and inscrutable, but of course he is among the funniest writers to have ever lived (up there with Marie-Henri Beyle). But I outgrew Lem as well, discovering him to be an imposter, bombastic and derivative.
When I was fourteen, my best friend, physicist Murray Gell-Mann, introduced me to the science fiction of R. Harrington Folt, whose sophisticated and irreverent spin on time travel made Lem look like the drooling imbecile it turns out he was. Folt’s novel Zahlungsaufforderung, which Gell-Mann gave to me with the inscription, B., You amaze me. And I won a Nobel Prize in physics, for Christ’s sake. Fondly, M., changed my young life. The book, written in prose at once transcendent and second-rate (how does one accomplish this miracle?), draws parallels between cervical and time dilation. Of course, those parallels seem obvious to all now, but Folt was the first person to understand it. As I was able to venture out from under Gell-Mann’s enormous shadow (I’m not saying he was fat, but, well…), I realized that Folt’s revelations were ludicrous and that he was, and remains, a complete fraud (turns out his editor Gordon Lish was the genius in that relationship), and I discovered Pleven, a writer so secretive, even his publisher has never met him (legend has it he lives among the Oromo people of Ethiopia). His recondite theories of time have perhaps been best characterized by literary critic George Steiner as “Chrono-synclastic infundibulum on acid.” Imagine, if you are able, a universe in which not only can an individual be everywhere/everytime, but time itself can be everywhere/everytime and nowhere/notime. Now multiply that by ten. Now unmultiply (or “divide”) it. There you have Pleven in a nutshell, a nutshell that exists in seventeen dimensions. My world was shook. It made Folt’s work appear to have been written by a common garden slug.
I recall at one point attempting to interest my then-wife in Torque, Plenum, which in my estimation is Pleven’s masterpiece, and she could make neither heads nor tails of it. I don’t say this to denigrate her. It is a profoundly difficult book for almost anyone. Gell-Mann threw it across the room. Indeed, it ended our friendship. Look at this, I said to Murray, opening up my dog-eared copy to the funniest passage I had ever read in any book, ever. But Murray just threw the book across the room again, this time hitting his cat Schrodinger and perhaps killing him. It ended our friendship and my marriage and, for some reason, Gell-Mann’s marriage as well. But Plenum was not enough. I began to find his poetry prosaic and his prose poetic. It was then that I discovered Setiawandt, a writer whose timic philosophy was so unnerving, it rendered me mute retroactively for seven years of my childhood, during which time I pored over the childhood poetry of the then-mute Marguerite Annie Johnson, until we both, each in our own times, discovered how to dance, rediscovered our voices, and arguably changed the world. For the better, I would like to think. Of course Setiawandt was a grade-A moron. I know that now.
A CAVE IS the opposite of a fire, I tell myself. Unless there’s a fire in the cave. Then it is one and the same or one in the same. But usually there is not. I feel dizzy and confused. Not much to burn in a cave. Sometimes there is wood soaked in gasoline, but I would say that this is simply the exception that proves the rule. Why does an exception prove a rule? That doesn’t make any sense if one stops to think about it for even a second. Even a twenty-fourth of a second.
THERE ARE CROWDS of darkened bodies everywhere here, darkened by the darkness of the cave, I believe. Would they be darkened outside of the darkened cave? It is impossible to know. Just as it is impossible to know which of the hundreds of tunnels to take. Some, perhaps all, will undoubtedly lead to ruination. How to choose? How to know? The bodies shuffle by, talking in hushed tones. There is a stink about the place. The stink of crowds.
Eventually I see a new dim glow and make my way to it. I enter a space containing at least one hundred incubators and what can only be a dozen massive cloning machines. A tiny, ancient paper Nazi flag on a toothpick is unceremoniously scotch-taped to the wall. Upon close examination, I see the remnants of chocolate icing on the bottom of the toothpick from what must surely have been a Third Reich cupcake, no doubt baked by the monstrous Constanze Manziarly for the führer himself.
“Heil Hitler,” comes a voice.
I scour the huge space and finally spot what I take to be the last Rosenberg clone, sitting at a collapsible card table, sipping thin bone broth. His skin is pale, almost translucent. Maybe this is due to a lifelong lack of sunlight, maybe it’s a side effect of the cloning process. Perhaps it’s something else. I am not a physician.
“I am Alfred Rosenberg,” he says. “Pardon my translucence.”
“It’s fine,” I say. “I am B. Rosenberg.”
“I am not a Jew,” we both say in unison.
We regard each other with suspicion.
“Can I help you?” he says finally.
“I’m just browsing,” I say.
“OK,” he says. “Take your time. The toothpick flag is not for sale. It is a family heirloom.”
I nod and wander around, keeping my hands conspicuously clasped behind my back so he doesn’t think I’m planning to shoplift.
I stop to study one of the cloning machines.
“Do you want a clone of yourself?” he asks. “I can hook you up. As long as you’re not Jewish.”
“I already told you I’m not Jewish.”
“I had to ask. One has to ask.”
“Well, I’m not.”
“Good. Want a clone then?”
“How long would it take?”
“I can get you a fresh one in a week tops.”
“It comes as a baby, right? I mean, I have to raise it, right?”
“Someone has to. We are not heartless.”
“Well, could you? Then maybe I pick him up in, say, ten years?”
“I could do it, sure. I’m just sitting here.”
“But I don’t want a Nazi.”
“Oh. I thought you said you’re not Jewish.”
“I’m not. But I am against all forms of genocide.”
“Oh. Huh. OK. That’s cool. Hmm. Let me think…OK, well, what do you want him to be?”
“A filmmaker.”
“A Riefenstahl?”
“No. No Nazis.”
“Godard, then? Those are your choices.”
“Yes. Godard works. I’m his biggest fan.”
“Perfect.”
“What do I owe you?”
“I have no use for money in the current apocalyptic economy. You can pay in a clone. I will grow two of you. One for you and one for me.”
“A filmmaker and a Nazi, then?”
“Yes.”
“Fair enough,” I say after some thought.
I am, after all, not the world’s policeman.
He holds out his hand. I try to shake it, but he wrestles me to the ground and sticks a Q-tip in my mouth and swabs.
“Obviously, you did not need to take my DNA by force,” I say.
“Hindsight is twenty-twenty,” he says. “See you soon.”
NEXT I FIND myself in the magnificent manse of movie star Mandrew Manville (formerly Cheryld Ray Parrett, Janior), met by his two flying (via jet packs) manservants Mudd and Molloy. They are ancient now, as old at least as Ingo when I first met him.
“We’ve been expecting you,” says the skinny mustachioed one I take to be Molloy, hovering in front of me. “I’m Mudd,” he adds.
“I took you to be Molloy,” I say.
“That happens,” says the other one, also skinny and mustachioed, who I know by deductive reasoning must be Molloy.
“I must be Molloy,” he says. “I don’t choose to be Molloy, but I must be because these are the cards I have been dealt, and just like each of us, I must play the cards I have been dealt.”
I smile because I have no idea which facial expression is called for right now.
Apparently, I chose incorrectly, because Molloy lands, lunges at me, and attempts to swab my inner cheek with a Q-tip.
Mudd and Molloy are senile, I suspect. They offer me tea, then immediately offer me tea again. I say, “yes, please,” and they bring me an eggplant and a straw.
“Eggplant in French is aubergine,” I say.
“Eh guh guh guh guh guh gug guh,” says Molloy, mocking me, I think.
They both fly off, and I am reminded of my childhood cartoon companions, Hegel and Schlegel. They flew, too. And were a comedy team of sorts. It occurs to me that I am also half of a comedy team. Except in my case, it is unwillingly and I do not know who my partner is. The universe? I am the perfect buffoon for this time—the arrogant idiot—and I do not like it at all. Why can’t I be the straight man? I envy Molloy his transformation. But of course Molloy exists in the world of fiction, the only place where transformation is possible, even required, for we as a species need our hope, our character arcs. We need to be assured that this, too, shall pass.
“I have finally learned to love,” Molloy shouts down to me, as he flies by again overhead.