by Wes Holtermann

 

 

1.

 

TIME IS PEAR-shaped. It is not just a measurement of intervals. Of space between moments. It is not fluid, not progressive or linear. It is not scattered either. It is relative to the speed at which we travel. A fly, whose wings beat the batter-thick air one thousand times a minute, whose life-span is almost two thousand times smaller than ours, feels time slower, more weightlessly. One of our seconds, to him, is fractured. Shattered into hundreds of tiny moments, hundreds of reactions and events. That's why flies move so fast. Like lightning or a twitch. Time is the medium through which we exist. Like a kind of space that we haven’t tried yet. I want to step over it. To toe its line. I should say we. We being my dog and me. We want to make time stutter.

My dog is a genius. Jasper. He can do things that most dogs cannot, and he wants, more than almost anything, to be shot, a cork, through space and into the past, since according to Stephen Hawking, and I wholeheartedly agree, time and space are deeply interconnected; they are woven, crocheted together in such a way that you cannot be inside one without touching the other.

Another thing Jasper wants to do is to kick a field goal, but dogs aren't built for it.

 

My methods have been described as unorthodox. My hair has been described as strange, although probably what they think is my hair from the blurry newspaper picture is really just my tinfoil hat. It's form-fitting. I wear it for a reason.

I have been doing research and Jasper has been helping me. We are clockwork. An assembly-line. A machine. We read and take notes from Einstein, Hawking, and Galileo, Aristotle and Smoot, and when I say we take notes I mean, obviously, I take notes, because Jasper is a dog.

Dogs don't take notes.

 

When Jasper started talking, it wasn't weird. His voice was a dulcet baritone. Calming, if anything. Not alarming. I was staring at outer space through my telescope. He looked up at me, his wet nose at the right knee of my tan work pants. "Stop looking at your anus," he said.

I paused. Oh. Uranus.

He almost never says anything though, so it doesn't really matter that he can, I guess.

 

 

WHEN LOOKING THROUGH your telescope at Gorgonea Tertia (a semi regular variable star), you are looking at it three-hundred-and-eighteen years ago, as it is that many light years away from earth. This means that the people of the Gorgonea solar system, looking at  our planet through their telescopes, are watching the most notable events of the year 1690. They see, for example, John Flamsteed spotting Uranus for the first time, hanging like a bell from a clock tower in the deep expanse; or maybe the astronomer, G.D. Cassini, hunched and wincing through his hilltop telescope, observing differential rotation within Jupiter's atmosphere; or the invention of the clarinet in Nuremberg, all of which, I think, would be boring things to watch.

Needless to say, aliens are most probably watching our history.

 

My idea is a mirror, a dressing room mirror, projected into space at such a velocity that it will pass even Gorgonea Tertia, and become lodged, facing earth, on some rocky planet in a remote and exotic solar system. Live video will then be taken, rebounding off of the mirror and onto the Earth's past, showing the details that the archaeology, documentation, and speculation of historians have overlooked, like what's for breakfast during the settling of Roanoke or the fall of the feudal system.

"It's mathematically impossible," Jasper tells me.

"Mathematically improbable," I say.

 

Jasper says he’s done talking, because it puts him in a different context.

 

 

2.

 

MR. DASGUPTA HAS joined us for dinner. He has arrived, the table already carefully set with forks and knives and fingerbowls, each filled one-and-a-half inches deep. Any deeper and Mr. Nikil Dasgupta will not endeavor to rinse his fingers. This we learned the last time. He is afraid of oceans.

Mr. D. has a sense of humor. One that cannot be deciphered. He is dark-skinned and shiny-cheeked. A palpable, greased black mustache hangs like vacuum bristles beneath a sea cliff nose, by which I mean his nose runs a steady downhill along the bone until it reaches cartilage and plummets mouthward. Which is unappealing.

I show him our research. Four spiral-bound, college-ruled notebooks on the table, each open to hurricanes of equations. Ballpoint sketches of curved space and warped time. I feed him a duck, a cooked duck, a headless one, as he pours over the notes. He says points are interesting, items in our notes. He says the links we make between accretion discs and relativity are both ingenious and astrophysically sound.

Not that I’m entirely sure what accretion discs are.

The dinner is going well. The duck is moist, hot, and the potatoes are not too crispy, not soft, they are golden-brown and give off a dull shimmer like ore plucked freshly from the stream. We are making an impression, because Mr. Dasgupta is nodding, has been nodding. I ask him would he like more bird. To eat. “Put it in my backpack,” he says. Jasper and I shrug. This answer is, to us, puzzling.

The reason he is here, Dasgupta, an extremely wealthy man, a banker, an eccentric, is to fund us. To pay for our trip through time, our journey to Ford Theater or to the crossing of the Delaware. He has backed scientists before, those who cannot get a national grant. Those who are not scientist enough. This is our third try to get financial support – the first having to do with a smaller-scale hadron-collider, the second about a tremendous furnace with the chemical recipe for life’s origins – but neither attempt succeeded, our credentials being too weak, our ideas being too naïve. But this time, I think, we have our foot in the door. This time we have solid gold.

“I’ll fund it,” Dasgupta says. “Your time machine just may work!”

Then he asks for the duck again. To take home.

 

Jasper and I press down in the kitchen. We have one piece of Tupperware for the bird, and the top won’t close. We push with thumbs – I with thumbs, Jasper with paws. We push with terrifying force, but the lid seems to be just millimeters too small.

“What is this, trick Tupperware?” Jasper says.

It won’t close.

 

 

3.

 

 

MONTHS LATER

 

JASPER AND I are worried. We’re nervous. Disbelieving. Our faces are black with the residue from our telescope’s eyepiece. Mr. Dasgupta is on the intercom from the basement of the observatory, which doubles as a kitchen. “Well,” he says. “What are you seeing?” Light years away, ricocheted off of our interstellar mirror, which was launched fourteen months ago, traveling at warp speed until it was lodged, positioned by a robot, Roosevelt 9, on the icier hemisphere of the planet Neptor, deep within the Plutar galaxy, we see ourselves standing, the two of us, I in my brown shirt, arms akimbo, Jasper in his blue and gold dog-sweater, in the middle of dilapidated Athens, Georgia during reconstruction. Near us is a horse-looking appliance about the size of a garbage truck, presumably our time-machine. The one we are yet to build. The one that will launch us, physically, backward in time. “What is it?” Dasgupta says. “Does the method work? Are you seeing the past?”

I, too uncomfortable with the situation, yield to Jasper, who says in a voice strikingly similar to mine, “We see robots. Riding mules, Mr. Dasgupta. They had robots back then. Nothing is like we thought.”

Jasper’s unerring Me impression has been causing problems.

 

 

4.

 

JASPER, UNDER THE pen-name T. R. Milpitas, has written an oversized book. Pictures of space and of the Earth’s past, including a very clear shot of, allegedly, Pocahontas, her tan back and arms spilled haplessly, asleep on a beige hill. Also a blurry satellite x-ray of John Steinbeck, showing the occlusion of his coronary arteries, the stenosis that is said to have killed him. And a faded picture of Paul Revere’s boyhood Beagle. The book’s title is The United States: Images of a Bygone Era, which I think is weird. Even for a book by a dog.

It is well-bound. Tightly woven. Printed in eight colors. Blocks of text, mostly descriptions of our project’s machines and robots, are scattered throughout. Jasper uses a photo of Robert Packwood for the dust-jacket. The Foreword is written, using intriguing and bizarre grammar, by Mr. Dasgupta.

 

Although Jasper is an international success and a heavy favorite for the National Book Award, he has stopped talking altogether. He’s mad because I gave him a dumb haircut.