My first few days living in the warehouse, I spoke more to the guinea pigs than with Jonas. I got to know the manager at the local bodega and the counter staff at the nearby eateries from which I picked up our takeout. I started flirting with the cute blond cashier, she of the most striking green eyes, at the 7-Eleven.
Whereas Jonas, after I moved in, hardly ever left the building.
Perhaps that was why, at long last, Jonas ceased his muttering and emerged from among his clustered workbenches to ask, “Do you ever wonder?”
Amid the monotony of my duties, I did little but wonder: about the shambles my life had become. About the choices I’d made, and that Amy, my ex, had made. About what Amy was doing now, and with whom. About the dreary and lonesome existence stretching ahead of me. I wondered if my scuzzball former boss was lolling on a beach, sipping mai tais.
None of which I was about to share.
“Sure,” I told Jonas.
“Maybe the world doesn’t need to be this messed up.”
If the world would leave me alone, I would gladly return the favor. I said, “Maybe some things are meant to be.”
“Fate?” Jonas looked disappointed. “God’s will? Karma? Here I thought you were an educated man.”
Did I believe in fate? Or did I only wish I did? How liberating it would be to blame forces bigger than myself for my failings. Because then they wouldn’t be my failings, would they?
None of which I was about to share.
“Not all education is the same,” I said. “You scientists learn to ask why things work. Engineers learn to ask how things work. Accountants learn to ask how much things cost.”
“And English majors? What do you learn?”
“To ask, ‘Do you want fries with that?’”
Jonas chuckled, but I hadn’t diverted him. He tried again. “But maybe the world doesn’t need to be this messed up.”
Forget fate, I thought. Just look at human nature. Evenings, if I took the time to surf the news, now that I again had access to the net, the world seemed pretty determined to go to hell.
What was on Jonas’s mind today? Economies in freefall? Climate change? Nuclear proliferation? Terrorism? Narco-states? On his wall of woes, all had a prominent place.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Jonas followed my glance to his corkboard. “Suppose someone knew what was coming. Would we listen?”
Had I believed anyone ever listened, I would have been a whistleblower instead of a patsy. Or maybe my character flaw was the lack of guts, not a lack of belief. Either way, I had held my tongue and held onto my paycheck for a few more months, while Britney’s orders outvoted my conscience.
Still, talking about most anything would beat the customary grim silence and nonstop introspection.
“The problem is, no one knows.” I gestured, vaguely, toward his corkboard. “The world is full of so-called experts who claim to know best, and who don’t agree on the time of day.”
A sad smile flickered over Jonas’s face. “No, they don’t.” When I didn’t comment, he turned back toward the workbenches and his whatever-it-was.
Suddenly I was loath to let our first real, however vapid, conversation end. To Jonas, but really talking to myself, I said, “We don’t need more experts. We need a do-over.”
“Exactly,” he said. “Suppose you could warn the world about Hitler in 1938. Not that he was an evil, ambitious man, or that he meant to start a terrible war—but that he had started a war. That millions died. That the whole political order of Europe was shattered, and that as a result, the communists occupied half the continent to enslave millions more. Would you?”
I’d been giving fresh food and water to the guinea pigs when all this started. Much to Jonas’s amusement, I had given them names. I finished, latched the cage door, and stood.
“That’s tricky,” I said. “Stop Hitler and what else do you alter? Millions of lives saved, sure, but billions of lives changed.”
“Not so tricky,” Jonas said, glowering. “Not for everyone. If you came from Poland, it would be easy. Between the Nazis and the Russians, one out of six Poles died during World War II. For decades after, the communists oppressed and impoverished those who had survived.”
Anger brought out the accent I had almost ceased to notice. From the short letter that passed for a contract between us, entitling me to live upstairs for the next fourteen months, I had learned Jonas’s full name. His family name was Gorski. I wondered when, and under what circumstances, he had moved to this country.
“Or I could go back to my youth,” I said, changing the subject without too overtly changing the subject. If Jonas had the locks changed while I was out running an errand, what could I do? Hire a lawyer? “I’d teach my younger self everything I’ve learned about women. It wouldn’t take long.”
I laughed at myself. After a second Jonas joined in.
But I kept picturing my younger self meeting the near-indigent I had become. I couldn’t imagine that overconfident, snot-nosed teen listening. Or me of a year—and a lifetime—earlier, either.
Did Jonas wish he could tell his earlier self to take better care of his grant’s finances? Or to choose a research topic more respectable than whatever it was he did do? Or to seek friends beyond his circle of fickle colleagues?
As Jonas went back to his enigmatic task, I couldn’t help feeling there was something more that he had wanted to discuss.
~~~
For all its awkwardness, the stop-Hitler-early conversation had knocked down the wall between us. That afternoon as we worked, we talked baseball. That evening, in the former break room become our improvised kitchen, we discussed music over pizza and beer. But when Jonas began frothing about a financial crisis, this latest one, apparently, embroiling Europe, I nodded along and concentrated on my beer. Whatever had gone wrong with Greece’s debt, no one could fault me.
The next day, as I cleared breakfast dishes from the workbench that served as our dinette table, Jonas talked about entropy. Whatever that was. Something to do with his abstruse physics, I guessed. He’d mumbled to himself about entropy often enough.
This once he noticed my blank expression. “Disorder, if you will.”
“If I will what?”
Jonas shook his head, smiling. “Think of entropy as measuring the homogeneity of a system.”
“That doesn’t help,” I said.
A coffee mug sat on a workbench beside him. He pointed. “There’s milk in my coffee. It’s well mixed, making the color within the mug uniform.”
“Uh-huh.”
He persisted. “The coffee is hot. At a molecular level the coffee and milk are rushing about. Despite that random motion, you never see milk gathering itself and the rest of the cup’s contents turning black. Entropy is why not.”
I frowned, trying to puzzle that out. “It’s some kind of force that operates on milk?”
“Only metaphorically,” Jonas said. “The force of numbers. There are countless ways for the milk and coffee to arrange themselves in which the fluids remain blended. The arrangements in which milk and coffee have separated are vastly fewer.”
“But it could happen,” I challenged.
“It could.” He stroked his chin pensively. Deciding whether to go on or cut his losses? “You’re familiar with the physicist Murray Gell-Mann?”
I’d heard of Einstein and Newton and an Italian. It took me a moment to retrieve that name, Galileo. I had my doubts I knew any other physicists. “I don’t think so.”
“No matter.” Perhaps not, but Jonas looked thwarted. “Gell-Mann once said, ‘That which is not forbidden is mandatory.’”
“So we should be seeing milk separate?”
“Yes, but not in our lifetimes,” Jonas said. “Gell-Mann’s domain was particle physics. I don’t know that he ever thought about milk dispersing. The thing is....”
“Yes?”
“The laws of physics, all of them, work the same forward and back.”
“Forward and backward,” I repeated.
“In time,” he added. “Suppose a car maintains a constant velocity due north at sixty miles per hour, and I know where that car is at this moment. By elementary physics I can as easily tell you where the vehicle was ten minutes ago as where it will be ten minutes from now.”
My mug was empty. Pouring a refill, I wondered about Jonas’s day-earlier wondering. I took a great intuitive leap. “You’re interested in time travel.”
“I am.”
“So that someone could stop Hitler.”
“Merely as an example.”
I’d been right from the first. I worked for a mad scientist. Outside of a Terminator movie, who talked about time machines?
But dusting in Jonas’s room, I’d seen framed doctoral degrees in physics and electrical engineering from Harvard and MIT. On the wooden crate that served him as an end table, a beer stein emblazoned with a Smithson-Briarwood crest congratulated him on making associate professor. It wasn’t hard to believe he had once won an NSF grant.
So: scientist, crackpot, or both? My thoughts spun around and around, like the wheels in a slot machine.
There was no jackpot.
As I hid behind my coffee mug, Jonas stood. “I have a list of groceries for you to pick up. After that, and taking care of the guinea pigs, I’ll have you start with—”
“What does time travel have to do with coffee and milk?” I blurted out. “I mean entropy?”
Blinking at the interruption, Jonas still managed to look pleased. He must miss discussing science with colleagues. As sorry a substitute as I must be, I had shown interest.
He said, “What isn’t forbidden is mandatory. Time travel, as far as anyone can tell, is not forbidden.”
Even I could complete the syllogism: Ergo, time travel is mandatory. But I could not bring myself to voice the obvious implication.
Jonas spoke for me. “So where are the time travelers?”
~~~
Where are the time travelers?
I take my coffee black, but I couldn’t not reach for the milk pitcher. I kept pouring, my coffee turning paler and paler. I didn’t stop till liquid lapped at the brim.
“The future is a long time,” I said, “If ever time travel is invented, wouldn’t someone come back to our time?”
“You would think,” Jonas said, watching me intently.
In my confusion, I managed to bump the table. Coffee sloshed, ran off the bench top, and splattered my shoes. I hardly noticed.
The more time goes by, the more thoroughly milk and black coffee must mix. As the future inevitably stretched out after the inevitable invention of time travel, must not the pre-discovery and post-discovery eras eventually mix, too?
So where were the time travelers?
Perhaps they lived among us in secrecy. Or maybe recorded history, all of it, was somehow a vanishingly improbable era, our “coffee” and their “milk” staying separate despite the odds. Or....
Suppose the metaphorical coffee of our era remained black because there was no metaphorical milk of time travelers from the future. Suppose the future—at least for humanity—came to an end before the invention of time travel.
Jonas’s sneering at fate notwithstanding, the litany of the world’s ills on his corkboard assumed a sickening new inevitability.
“I hope you’re a raving loon,” I said.
“I hope so, too,” Jonas answered.