Unhappenings (3 page)

n the fall of my tenth grade year, I met Mindy Decker. We were in the same calculus class. I didn’t really get to know her until about November. We had gotten together with several other kids to study for an exam. There was some obvious chemistry. After that, I started contriving reasons to spend time with her. So did she. We dated for about two weeks, just long enough for me to fall for her, hard.

One day she was missing from calculus. I briefly panicked, flashing back to Beth Richmond, until I saw Mindy in the cafeteria at lunch. I sat with her, as always, and asked her where she had been.

She had no idea who I was.

To call that a horrible moment would downplay its effect on me. I attempted to pass the whole thing off as a case of mistaken identity, and pretended to be embarrassed, to mask my pain. After fleeing, I considered starting over with her. Partly from a grim recognition that recovering from that first impression would be challenging, and partly from cowardice, I decided against.

When I was in eleventh grade, and she was in ninth, Leslie Dietrich joined the math team. She had one of the keenest minds I have ever seen in action, and with the added edge she brought to competitions, we made it to the state championship that year. She also had a crush on me that everyone but me on the team found very amusing.

At first, I kept her at arm’s length, making it clear I really only wanted to be friends. I felt our age difference left anything else out of the question. She was also a bit small for her age, and I was already taller than most of my peers. The longer I got to know her, however, the less it seemed to matter. She had an outspoken maturity that belied her youth, and she was easily my intellectual superior. Just as I was about to relent, and had worked up the nerve to ask her out, she beat me to it.

Over the next two months we were inseparable. My friends all adored her. I got to know her brother, who was a year older than I, and we became close friends. More than one of my teachers referred to us as a cute couple within my earshot. It was one of the most joyous periods of my adolescence.

One day, in a van on a way to an important meet, Leslie was sitting between me and Stan Rosen, one of my best friends. I wish I could remember what we were talking about. All I do remember is at some point I made a joke to Leslie that was overtly flirtatious. She got uncomfortable. Stan accused me of hitting on his girlfriend. I tried—and failed—to laugh it off.

My entire relationship with Leslie unhappened to me, and happened to Stan, all in one, smooth, agonizing motion. It cost me my friendship with him, not out of some kind of jealous confrontation, but simply out of my depression over it. I withdrew from my entire social circle after hearing them ask me what had gotten into me one too many times. Ultimately, I quit the team without explanation. Neither Leslie nor Stan expressed any misgiving over that decision.

At the end of that school year, at a time in my life when I felt more alone than I could ever recall, Carrie Wolfe spontaneously kissed me. We had been friends, on and off, for years. I had no idea she ever had feelings for me, and she admitted she hadn’t realized it either. We had both had difficult years, for different reasons, and we sort of stumbled upon each other in our times of need.

Carrie was my first summer romance. As far as she—or anyone else—knew, she was also my first girlfriend. It got very serious, very quickly. We started planning a future together, applying to all the same colleges as a precaution against becoming separated when high school ended. Our parents had all known each other since we were children, and were all pleased with this turn of events.

In October, we had our first major fight, and broke up for an entire week.

In December, we lost our virginities together.

In April, I asked her to marry me. We agreed to a five-year engagement, long enough for us each to earn at least one college degree. Our plan was to keep this betrothal secret from everyone for those five years, but we each told one person, and after about two days, that was that. Our parents expressed the proper level of concern, but generally supported us.

One Sunday morning in late May, the day after our senior prom, one of the most glorious nights of my entire life, I called Carrie’s house and asked her mother if I could speak to her. She hung up on me without comment.

It took me three days to find out that Carrie Wolfe had died in a car accident when she was twelve years old. My subsequent mental breakdown terrified my family, and what few friends I still had left. That I would fall apart six years after an event I had apparently been fully aware of at the time without ill effect baffled everyone. I ended up hospitalized and missed my own graduation ceremony. Eventually, more from a unique sense of understanding my situation than anything else, I pulled myself up from my despair, and soldiered on to MIT.

I did not have any girlfriends in college.

y freshman year was peppered with more unhappenings than almost any other time in my life, before or since. Sometimes they came so quickly I began to think if I were observant enough, I would actually be able to see the changes in real time. That never worked out to be the case, though. Invariably, the people in my life whose memories of me fluctuated never had that experience in my presence. There were times when I discovered a classmate was unaware of a conversation from only an hour before, or I would first meet someone I had evidently already known for some time, but those shifts always took place outside my own frame of reference. In this sense, while my life was hideously inconsistent, it appeared, even to me, to be in perfect continuity.

This phenomenon, among others, pushed me further and further toward my studies of time travel theory. It was, at least at that time, the only plausible avenue of explanation. As disorienting—and occasionally devastating—as these disturbances were for me personally, their nature fascinated me. Was the fact I could never perceive the changes directly a property of the event, or of my own consciousness? Were the occurrences random, or were the patterns I sometimes seemed to observe indicative of some underlying structure?

Of one thing alone I was absolutely certain: no one but me ever shared this experience.

Part of that certainty came from presumption, bordering on conceit. The ways in which my life was routinely tortured and gutted were so personal it was virtually impossible for me to conceal the effects they had on me. My family, my friends, my professors, and often total strangers made frequent remarks that I seemed off. Which, indeed, I was. So, if my own pain was that obvious to everyone I encountered, another’s pain for similar reasons would have to be obvious to me. I looked for it everywhere I went. Every human contact included a quest for signs of this trauma. No one ever had it. No one ever even understood it.

Another part of that certainty came from arduous research. As a boy, I was naturally inclined to ask my friends, from time to time, if they had ever seen signs such as I had. It was always easy enough to do with subtlety. Never broach the subject in the presence of more than one other person. Only discuss it with individuals who could be trusted completely. Describe the phenomenon as some queer variation of déjà vu. I learned to ask the questions in ways that prevented me from being seen as insane, but I never found the answers I so eagerly sought.

And yes, part of that certainty came from exploring the possibility it was, in fact, madness. I scoured the literature on abnormal psychology, hunting for some sign I had an identifiable disorder. I did find some cases of perceptual disconnection that approximated what I felt, and I did occasionally take on those labels to see how well they would fit my mind. Always, however, there were too many other indicators that persuaded me that I did not have these particular disorders. Some other aspect of my psyche was too functional to comfortably fit whatever diagnosis I chose to explore. So, either I was the only person to be experiencing these retroactive life changes, or I was the only person with this particular mental illness. Either way, I was unique.

I did, of course, go down this road of investigation with the aid of psychotherapy. However, on more than one occasion, I found myself showing up for an appointment with a psychologist who had never heard of me. In other aspects of my life, that sort of awkward moment was a familiar embarrassment; in this context it represented a risk that might have broader consequences. On the third try, I gave up.

So, I firmly established the fact this undoing and redoing of my personal history was an experience linked solely to me.

I was, of course, quite mistaken. Obvious now in hindsight. Whatever hindsight even means anymore.