Unhappenings (12 page)

And every day, in recognition of the fact that—very much against my expectations—it was still there, I would finish by whispering, “At least for now.”

y diploma turned out to be permanent. Unfortunately, it was about the only thing from that part of my life that was.

During my senior year, I applied to, and was accepted into, a Masters program at Cornell. I wasn’t due to start until the fall semester, so I spent much of the summer relaxing, and planning to relocate. My displacement—physical this time—was a refreshingly simple ordeal, and preparing for it made me feel pleasantly normal for a change. Toward the end of July, my father carefully broached the topic of how long it was going to take me to start looking for a job. To anyone else preparing to move out of state for graduate school in a month, such a suggestion would be confusing. To me, it was all too clear. A search through my correspondence from that year soon turned up the rejection letter from Cornell in my saved e-mails, along with similar letters from several other universities.

It was surely an act of remarkable restraint that my father’s inquiries about my future plans were as kind as they were. The conversations we must have had about my universal rejections from graduate schools were probably awful for both of us, and I was at least partially grateful not to have actually experienced them. Dad was always deeply invested in my prospects as a physicist. His own field had been computer science, and he had been fortunate enough to be exactly the right age to ride the cascade of developments in artificial intelligence that transpired in the 2060s. Had he graduated two years earlier or later he would have missed what was a very narrow window of unprecedented opportunity in his specialty. While he never wished for me to follow directly in his footsteps, I was his only child, and the possibility that I would follow science of some sort was a point of personal delight for him. I know he often saw me as a younger version of himself. We even looked strikingly similar. Same skinny build, same unmanageable hair (although unlike him I did ultimately get to keep mine), we even had the same taste in eyeglasses, at a time when those had gone nearly extinct. When I finally asked for optic surgery, it nearly broke his heart. I can only imagine how he must have crashed at my apparent washing out of a career in science.

With grad school suddenly no longer an option, I did indeed begin to look for work. This proved significantly daunting. My intent was always to pursue a PhD and spend the rest of my life steeped in research, exactly as my father had hoped, preferably in time travel applications. I never had a plan B.

How short-sighted of me.

Fortunately, my parents were people of means, and there was no real urgency for me to be employed, at least from a survival perspective. Nevertheless, it was unacceptable to them, and to myself, for me to begin a career as a layabout. My first choice was to put my physics degree to work, especially as I was now planning to start the grad school application process all over again, and I wanted to be able to build experience to make myself a more desirable candidate. Partly on the strength of my background, but largely as a result of my father’s connections, I was able to get a job as a research assistant, which he found encouraging. That lasted for nine days. On day ten I woke to discover that I had been working for three weeks as a tech support person for a communications firm. The next few days were an embarrassing sequence of incidents in which I needed to be retrained on very simple matters. Eventually, I settled into the work.

That job lasted for ten weeks. Then, abruptly, I was a substitute teacher at a private high school. Seven weeks after that, I discovered that I really worked as the electronics manager at Sears. A few weeks after that I was unemployed, and had always been. A few more weeks along and I was suddenly, retroactively, a cashier in a grocery store. The unhappenings continued in cycles of four to eight weeks, and each was progressively more discouraging than the last, as my new jobs drew me further and further away from science.

This went on for over two and a half years.

he spate of unhappenings I experienced after graduation had a very different character than anything I had seen previously. Many of my losses over the years had been profound, and there were occasional, if brief, patterns. My experience with girls in high school was the most obvious example of this, as was my rotating panel of physics teachers, but both of those were sporadic, even at the time. This crisis of new and surprising occupations every few weeks—sometimes switching in shifts of only a few days—was the longest sustained obstacle in my life to that point. The fact that it was so consistent, and prolonged, coupled with the specific timing that the barrage began immediately after my school days had come to an apparent end, made it impossible for me to continue denying the inescapable. This was no mere obstacle; it was a sustained attack.

Penelope, in every age at which I encountered her, always refused to tell me the cause of our unhappenings. Sometimes she claimed she didn’t know, other times she simply dodged the question. All she ever shared freely was that she and I shared that experience, along with at least one other person, possibly more. Eventually I learned to stop asking, but the more times she spirited me away to “run a fix,” the more convinced I became that we were engaging in some sort of covert, time travel combat. I wondered how many of my own unhappenings were “fixes” being run by some unseen foe.

More than once I wondered if that foe might not be Penelope.

Adding to that nagging thought, I received no visits from her during this stretch of my life. The oldest version of her I had yet encountered assured me we would meet again, many times, but I had seen no sign of her since that day. I could not bring myself to believe that she had been playing me for nefarious purposes this whole time, but it would have been very gratifying to see some evidence of that.

It became clear that I was not going to be allowed to pursue my PhD when every attempt I made to submit applications to schools was immediately undone. It was equally clear that I was not destined for any sort of rewarding employment, or a career in any type of science. The jobs through which I was rotated were all menial, or middle management in companies that held nothing of interest to me, and that was when I had a job at all. I spent a fair portion of those days unemployed, to various degrees of parental disappointment. All of this combined to weigh me down with a despair that my dream of becoming ‘Dr. Walden’ and spearheading the research that would lead to time travel was not to be. It was a terrible conceit on my part, but I had spent the previous five years certain that my destiny was to be the sole scientific mind to be credited with the most significant discovery in human history. It turned out that my true destiny was to be a bystander.

Then I met myself for the second time, and everything changed again.

It was during one of my stretches between jobs. I told my parents I was going out to look for work, then camped out at the public library. Soon enough, I would be assigned a random job that I might even be able to maintain long enough to see a paycheck. Until then, any genuine job hunt would be an absolute waste of time. Usually I would bypass the terminals on the main floor, and hide out in the print collection. Apart from the librarian who worked there, no one ever took an interest in it, leaving it peaceful, pleasant and private. That was where he found me.

“What are you doing here?” I heard myself say. In the light of day, and out of the rain, I could better see his face. It had the same gray stubble I had seen in drunken closeup, and I could now see his hair, long, completely gray, and not particularly kempt. It was impossible for me to know if he was wearing the same clothing as the last time we met, but his hair looked like it was just drying out. The weather outside was sunny and very cold. Five years ago we had an awful encounter that was probably an hour ago for him. He seemed less crazed now, but I wouldn’t say that reassured me.

“Hiding from your parents,” I countered.

He froze, a confused frown on his face. Whatever conversation he thought we were going to have, it wasn’t that one.

“No,” he said, “I mean why aren’t you at Cornell? I was just there. They said you never enrolled.” He took a moment to look around the room, perhaps to confirm we were alone, perhaps just to get his bearings, then pulled up a chair. “You know who I am,” he said. It was difficult to tell if he meant it as a question.