THE MOVIE ENDS a million years in the future. Humans are long extinct. The dominant creature on the planet is a hyperintelligent ant. Just the one ant. The other ants are the same normal dumb ants from now. I mean, not dumb, of course, because ants are remarkable and mysterious bugs, to be sure, as I have said, et chetera, but this one very smart ant can do calculus and integral calculus and he can fly, but not like winged ants. This one can fly in a jet he built by hand. Oh, this ant has hands. Four hands. And two feet. So this ant, who calls himself Calcium for some reason (in reference to his calculus skills?), even though the other animals on the planet are not smart enough to know what a name is, lords it over the planet. But even with all his power, his mansions and jewels, he is very lonely since there is no one with whom he can share his life. For a while, he lives with (and loves deeply) a female ant he calls Betty, but she doesn’t have any idea what is going on and just keeps trying to get back to her colony, bumping against mansion walls. Eventually he lets her go and watches her walk away to a Paul Simon song—I think it’s “You Can Call Me Al,” which upon reflection is probably used for this line:
If you’ll be my bodyguard
I can be your long lost pal
I can call you Betty
And Betty when you call me
You can call me Al.
The rest of the song doesn’t really apply, as far as I can tell. The ant’s name, after all, is Calcium, not Al or even Alcium. Anyway, Betty leaves and Calcium (Al?) is all alone. He reads. He watches Brainio. He looks up at the stars and wonders at the vastness of space. He works in his laboratory inventing perpetual motion machines and various drugs to help mankind, I mean, antkind.
One of the drugs he invents has an unusual and unexpected property. It travels back in time. At least he suspects this is so because he discovers a capsule of it in his weekly pill organizer compartment marked “Tuesday” even though he doesn’t invent it till Wednesday. The next day, the pill is in the “Monday” compartment. “How can this be?” Calcium wonders aloud. He opens the capsule to investigate the granules of medicine, but they instantly disappear.
“Into the past?” he wonders, again, also aloud.
He checks the jar of pills in his laboratory but finds they are gone, too.
“Into the past?” he wonders again and aloud again. “What did I do? But, more importantly, what did my concoction, if anything, do to the past?”
Calcium’s question causes this viewer to reconsider the entire film: What did Calcium’s time-traveling medication do to affect the past? Do some of the more confounding elements of the preceding filmic tale now make more sense? Or less?! Or exactly the same amount of sense?
“Do I exist now at all, in this time,” wonders Calcium (silently now, but in ant voiceover), “only because I sent this pharmaceutical-cum-creature back in time? Did the past I created create me? I must pore over my copious journals and graphs to see if there is anything alluding to a backward-traveling chemical compound.”
Calcium soon finds an entry of interest in his journal from three days ago:
Odd, he had written, it seems there seems to be some sort of seemingly minor outbreak of a seemingly previously unknown illness among my friends, the other ants: flu-like symptoms, a slight queasiness. I’m not sure to what it can be attributed. It seems minor. Perhaps I should retire to my lab and work on a cure just in case their symptoms are to worsen in subsequent days.
Was this why he had been working on the very medication that became this time-traveling creature? It boggles the mind, both mine and Calcium’s.
In a journal entry from four days ago, he comes upon this: There seems to be an outbreak among some of my friends: terrible flu symptoms, violent nausea, the occasional death. I must set about concocting a cure.
From the day before: What is going on? Out of nowhere, there is a major outbreak of terrible, terrible flu symptoms and extremely violent nausea, much death among my friends. A cure! A cure! Think, Calcium, think!
The day before that: All of my friends are dead. Why? How? What nightmarish disease has taken them? If only I had a cure on hand!
And the day before: My friends are all suddenly reanimated zombies! I am at a loss. Shall I invent a medication? To what end? Can zombieism be cured? Is the word zombieism? No time to look that up now in the dictionary I compiled! They will soon attack! I am almost without hope!
The day before: My mansion has been set on fire by the zombies that my fellow ants have suddenly without warning become. There is nothing to be done. Rebuild? To what end. All is lost.
How bizarre, muses Calcium. Destruction is happening backward, making its way into the past. My mansion is here today, gone yesterday. What fresh hell have I created?
He checks his journal from nine days ago: My entire town has been set on fire by a swarm of zombie ants! Where did they come from? All my papers are on fire!
His journal notes end after the ninth day. He will never know.
Calcium weeps, then frantically scribbles on the back of a laundry list. We hear his thoughts in voiceover:
“I can find no more records. I will never know what has happened. Perhaps I can invent a time-travel vehicle of some sort for myself so I could see what Air Rabies (for that is what I have named it) will did to the world in the past. But such a vehicle is an impossibility. One cannot travel back in time (unless one is [was?] Air Rabies [perhaps]). Time travel defies all physical laws, as well as the laws of three states. There is nothing to do but go forward and be thankful I didn’t invent Air Rabies next week because the world today would be a very different, horrible place if I had. Still, as I go forward, I cannot help but reflect on the past to come. Some mysterious, extinct philosophizing creature once said: ‘Life must be lived forward but can only be understood backward.’ It is, it turns out, the only remnant from this ancient species, about whom we know nothing else. We do suspect (well, I do suspect) they had pens. What will became of the Air Rabies? Will it evolved over time? It is, of course, impossible to knew with any certainty. One would presume there would have been no existing predators for an Antichron (as I now call the genus), so there would not have been any need to evolved for defensive purposes. Maybe it will evolved due to food shortages. Although there does not seem to be any shortages of ants currently, so I suspect that’s not an issue. Perhaps genetic mutations will created separate strains of Air Rabies and those strains will fought among themselves for dominance. The world must look very different, indeed backward, I imagine. I am reminded of the writings of ‘Walter Benjamin,’ a second mysterious ancient creature, who appears to have, with also a pen, written the following:
“His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
“I attempt to predict the path of my terrible creation. How can I know what will happened, where Air Rabies will went? Indeed, how can I know how the world appears to a creature marching doggedly into history, where the conventional experience of cause and effect is twisted like the ankle of a runner who has twisted her (yes, her) ankle? Is it just a simple reversal in which creatures grow young (note: interesting movie idea! Explore!), or is it an unimaginably different world? What is necessary in the constitution of a creature to push successfully against this formidable current we call time? Fortitude, strength, adaptability, ruthlessness. Indeed, its devastation of the ant community is nothing more than a reflection of its cold need for survival. The natural world is without sentiment: It kills what it must and when. It lusts after what it must and when. It shuns what it must. And when. But what a singular experience of reality it must be, to walk the other way, to walk back. A creature falling into a hole in such a world, for example, would not seem the least bit funny to an observer. Instead, this creature rising from the hole would appear almost divine, Jesus rising from the dead, ascending to his rightful place beside his father (oh, Daddy). Could humor even exist in such a reality? Perhaps those whose deeds seem to us miraculous would appear, to the backward traveler, as ridiculous and comical. Imagine a well-meaning saint sickening the healthy, or a god whose lightning bolts shoot back into his hands, uncausing destruction. Imagine an army of ‘terrifying’ flying, bloviating robots sucking deadly laser beams into their eyes, seemingly causing their own stupidity. These silly examples, off the top of my abnormally enlarged head, paint a picture of a profoundly different world. It could be that one’s nature, one’s aesthetic, would be so confused, so damaged by this reality that avoidance and blindness might become a necessity, circuitous paths a form of self-defense. This is how I imagine my multiplying rabic children as they rush headlong toward the beginning of time. Perhaps it is actual weather they became or some heretofore unknown analog, swirling and howling and spitting and destroying their way backward, unseen by a forward-plodding world, hiding in plain sight, growing in scope, becoming, in the end, a dynamic system blanketing the entire world at its very beginning. This is all just conjecture, a simple-minded tale an old ant tells himself to pass the time. One can do no more than foolishly wonder about a thing one can never know. And yet wonder I do. As I move forward in time, further and further, with each passing moment, from the origin of Air Rabies, with each one of those moments doubled as Air Rabies moves that much further from me, in the opposite katefthynsi tou chrónou, I waste what is left of my small life speculating, constructing a possible scenario, one I can never verify, a theory I can never test. But what else is there for me here, now, alone in this world with no hope of communion with another of my kind? I am as a child playing with dolls, making up stories on a rainy afternoon for my own amusement.
“And, also, why did the ants turn into zombies?”
MY MEMORY OF the Calcium scene is interrupted by a series of intrusive thoughts in my head, seemingly delivered by many different shouting people, only some of them Marjorie Morningstar:
Do not trust the others!
Do not allow yourself to be laughed at!
Protect your own interests!
No one has suffered as much as you!
You don’t have a right to complain, considering all the real suffering in the cave!
Many people have it much worse than you!
Enjoy Slammy’s!
Don’t be anyone’s fool!
Impress the others!
Don’t forget to have a Slammy’s burger!
The others are trying to cheat you!
Look how pretty she is!
Look how handsome he is!
Look how successful they are!
Listen to this song now: “The cave is beautiful and love is the answer / you need to be dutiful and avoid getting cancer / You must remember—”
Eat at Slammy’s!
Dance!
Try this drug!
Don’t do drugs!
Religion is a lie!
The group that isn’t yours is trying to destroy you!
Mmmm! Taste this!
You are ugly!
Watch this Brainio!
Boy, that kid sure is a prodigy and you were not!
Don’t you feel like crying now?
Watch this cute dog!
Everyone is laughing at you!
The barrage ends. The space around me is filled with Trunks and words and Rosenbergen and smoke and bad nonsensical ideas and reviews: Everything is reviewed, analyzed, hated, loved, puked back at us in endless iterations, multiplying, replicating, repeating itself, repeating patterns, echoing, but the voice in my head at least has quieted enough for me to get back to my memory of Ingo’s film.
Someone knocks into me. Jesus. Is it Jesus? I can’t see much in all this smoke, but someone has bumped into me hard and it feels like what I imagine it would feel like to be bumped hard by Jesus. It’s a good thing, really. A compassionate bump. Someone or something with a beard and long hair. Of course, who knows what the historical Jesus looked like or if there even was a historical Jesus. Certainly we have contemporaneous mention of him in the writing of Josephus, but it doesn’t tell us anything much about this so-called Jesus. Yet with this nudge, I felt a calmness, instantaneously blissful. Join us, he would plead, I imagine, and I would scoff.
Black wool, I want to ask him, is that how he achieves this smoke?
I try to ask him, but he is gone. Still, my calm remains. I’m happy to marvel at the billowing black noxious beauty of it, at the rib-cracking hacking, the caterwauling symphony of coughs and screams. Is it black wool? It doesn’t matter; it is beautiful. I am reminded of the poem “A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle” by the great Scot modernist Hugh MacDiarmid, in particular the stanza:
And Jesus and a nameless ape
Collide and share the selfsame shape
That nocht terrestrial can escape?
Is this the collision I just experienced? Is this perhaps every collision? Is every collision a collision that results, on some level, in the so-called God particle?