The Man Who Folded Himself Read online

  Well, it hasn’t. Not for us.

  I see her as something special. Not a new person, no, but another reflection of myself. Another Danny perhaps—and in the most different guise of all.

  Yes. Danny with a vagina.

  Think of her as he. It is the quality of Danny-ness I see in him that is so intriguing, so independent of sexuality. There is a Danny trapped inside that female body screaming to let me in. Just as there is a Diane inside me.

  I cannot help but like it.

  We enjoy our physical roles as we have never enjoyed them before; at least I know I do; but deep inside is a sense of—loss. I think I loved my Danny more. And I think I know why.

  With Danny, the physical forms were identical; the mental roles could be arbitrary. It was just me and him. We could choose our roles, we could take turns, we could be pansexual. I didn’t have to be male, I didn’t have to be dominant. With Don I could be weak, with Don I could cry.

  With Diane, it is different.

  I feel limited.

  And in a sense, I am. I am limited to the role given me by fate, by gender. My sex is the one thing about myself I cannot alter. Our bodies determine and define our roles—at least to the extent that I must be a man to her woman. Despite all the different roles either of us are capable of playing for each other, ultimately we can only return to the ones already assigned us. (If this is Danny, then Danny is the only woman here. There are no tradeoffs anymore. Danny has limited our roles.) There is no other relationship for either of us.

  At least, that’s how I perceive it.

  The relationship is not unenjoyable. Indeed, it is the most joyous of all. But still, there is that sense of loss....

  We have been together how long?

  Months, it must be.

  We have a home on the edge of prehistory, a villa on the shores of what someday will be called Mission Bay. It’s a sprawling mansion on a deserted coast, a self-contained unit; it has to be, because we brought it back to the year 2000 B.C. A honeymoon cottage for the outcasts of time.

  The sea washes blue across yellow sands. Seagulls wheel and dive, cawing raucously. The sun blazes bright in an azure sky. And the only footprints are ours.

  We live a strange kind of life in our timeless world.

  Loneliness is unknown to us; yet neither of us ever lacks for privacy. We see each other only when both of us want it. Never can either force himself on the other. That’s part of being a time traveler.

  I cannot journey to her future, nor can she to mine. When we bounce forward, I am in Danny’s world, she is in Diane’s. The only place we can meet is in the past, because only the past is unaffected by both of us.

  Should either of us need to be alone, we simply bounce to a different point in time. (I have seen the ruins of this mansion standing forlorn and alone, swept by the sands and washed by the sea, while the sun lies orange in the west. These walls will be dust by the time of Christ.)

  Returning, I am in her arms again. I am there because I want to be there.

  She vanishes too, but only momentarily; she returns in a different dress and hair style. I know she has been gone longer than I have seen, but I know she comes back to me with her desire at its fullest. I open my arms.

  We have never had an argument. It is impossible when either of you can disappear at the instant of displeasure. All of our moments are happy ones. Life with Diane is almost idyllic.

  Almost.

  Today she told me she was pregnant.

  And I’m not sure how I feel about that. There is a sense of joy and wonder in me—but I am also disturbed. Jealous that something else, someone else, can make her glow with such happiness. The look on her face as she told me—I have seen that intensity only in her climax.

  I know I shouldn’t be, but I am bothered that I cannot give her such prolonged intensity of joy. And I am bothered that someone else is inside of her, someone other than me.

  And yet, I’m happy. Happy for her, happy for me. I don’t know why, but I know that this baby must be something special.

  It must be.

  The baby proves something that I have suspected for a long time. My life is out of control. I am no longer the master of my own destiny.

  There is little that I can do with this situation. Except run from it.

  Or can I . . . ?

  Being pregnant is a special kind of time.

  Within me there is life, helpless and small; I can feel it move. I can feel it grow. I wait eagerly for the day of its entrance into this world so I can hold it and touch it, love it and feed it, hold it to my breasts.

  This is a special baby. It will be. I know it will be. I am filled with wonder. I see my body in the mirror, swollen and beautiful. I run my hands across my bulging stomach in awed delight. This is something Donna could never have given me. (I miss her though; I wish she were here to share this moment. She is, of course. She will be here when I need her.)

  Oh, there is discomfort too, more than I had expected—the difficulties in bending over and walking, the back pains and the troubles in the bathroom, the loginess and the nausea—but it’s worth it. When I think of the small beautiful wonder which will soon burst into my life, the whole world turns pink and giggly.

  I feel that I’m on the threshold of something big.

  The baby was born this morning.

  It was a boy. A beautiful, handsome, healthy boy.

  I am delighted. And disappointed. I had wanted a girl.

  A girl….

  In 2023 the first genetic-control drug was put on the market. It allowed a man and woman to choose the sex of their unborn child.

  In 2043 in-utero genetic tailoring became practical. The technique allowed a woman to determine which of several available chromosomes in the egg and sperm cells would function as dominants. The only condition was that the tailoring must be done within the first month of pregnancy.

  In 2167 extra-utero genetic tailoring was widespread. The process allowed the parent to program the shape of his offspring. A computer-coded germ plasm could be built, link by amino-acid link, implanted into a genetically neutral egg, then carefully cultured and developed, eventually to be implanted inside a womb, either real or artificial.

  I do not want to design a whole child. I just want a baby girl. I want her identical to me. I will have to go back and see Diane before she gets pregnant, but that should be the easy part.

  I will not tell Dan this. I think this is a decision that I have to make myself. The baby is mine and so is the decision. My son will be a girl.

  The baby was born this morning.

  It was a girl. A beautiful, pink, little girl.

  I am delighted. And disappointed. I had wanted a boy.

  A boy. . . .

  I will not tell Diane this. I think this is a decision that I have to make myself. (And there are ways that it can be done so that she will never know. I know when the child was conceived and I know which drugs to take beforehand. I will have to either replace Danny, or make him take the injection, but she will never suspect.)

  My daughter will be a son.

  Why do I keep coming back?

  I get on her nerves, she gets on mine. We argue about the little things; we make a point of fighting with each other. Why?

  Last night we were lying in bed, side by side, just lying there, not doing anything, just listening to each other breathe and staring at the ceiling. She said, “Danny?”

  I said, “Yes?”

  She said, “It’s over, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  She turned to me then and slid her arms around me. Her cheeks were wet too.

  I held her tight. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I wanted it to work so much.”

  She sniffed. “Me too.”

  We held onto each other for a long time. After a while I shifted my position, then she shifted hers. She rolled over on her back and I slid on top of her. She was so slender, so intense. We moved together in silence, hearing only the sound o
f our breathing. We remembered and pretended, each of us lost in our own thoughts, and wishing that it hadn’t come to this.

  The sheets were cool in the night and she was warm and silky. If only it could be like this all the time….

  But it couldn’t. It was over. We both knew it.

  I’m not going back anymore.

  Whatever there was between us is gone. We both know it. The bad moments outweigh the good. There is no joy left.

  Besides, she isn’t there all the time anyway.

  I have brought my son forward with me. I will find him a home in the twentieth century. And I will watch over him. I will be very careful not to accidentally excise him. He is all I have left.

  It’s not without regret that I do this. I miss my Diane terribly. But something happened to us. The magic disappeared, the joy faded, and the delight we had found in each other ceased to exist.

  The last night . . . we made love mechanically, each seeking only our own physical release. Somehow, my feelings had become more important to me than hers. I wonder why?

  Was it because I knew that I would never—could never—experience it from her side?

  Perhaps….

  Love with Diane was . . . sad. I could see the me in her, but I could never be that me.

  And that meant that she wasn’t really me. Not really. She was—somebody else.

  I couldn’t communicate with her. We used the same words, but our meanings were different. (They must have been different. She wasn’t me.)

  I’m sorry, Diane. I wanted it to work. I did. But I couldn’t reach you. I couldn’t reach you at all.

  So.

  I’ll go back to my Danny. He’ll understand. He’s been waiting patiently for so long….

  Oh God, I feel alone.

  Grow old along with me!

  The best is yet to be,

  The last of life, for which the first was made . . . .

  —ROBERT BROWNING

  Rabbi Ben Ezra, from first stanza

  It’s been years since I last added anything to this journal. I wonder how old I am now. I really have no way of telling.

  Forty? Fifty? Sixty? I’m not sure. The procolaine-N treatments I’ve been taking in 2101 seem to retard all physical evidence of aging. I could still be in my late thirties. But I doubt it. I’ve done so much. Seen too much.

  I’ve been living linearly—semi-linearly. Instead of bouncing haphazardly around time, I’ve set up a home in 1981, and as it travels forward through time at its stately day-to-day pace, I am traveling with it.

  Oh, I’m still using the future and the past, but not as before.

  Before, I was young, foolish. I was like a barbarian at the banquet. I gulped and guzzled; I ate without tasting. I rushed through each experience like a tourist trying to see twenty-one European cities in two weeks and enjoying none of them.

  Now, I’m a gourmet. I savor each day. I taste the robustness of life, but not so hurriedly as to lose its delicate overtones. The twentieth century has become my toybox. These years are the most remarkable of all; they are a teeterboard suspended between the wistful past and the soaring future.

  And occasionally, if I am careful, I can give it just the right little push.

  I have not abandoned the use of the timebelt.

  Sometimes I use it for amusement. The jackass who cut me off on the freeway this morning. Instead, he had four flat tires on the on-ramp.

  And sometimes for justice.

  The man who walked onto a schoolyard and started firing his rifle. He thought he had cleaned it, but somehow a wad of wet modeling clay had been jammed up the barrel. The gun exploded in his face. (I like that trick, I use it a lot. There are an awful lot of exploding guns in the world.)

  I read the news every day. I don’t like seeing tragedies. I don’t like plane crashes and murders and kidnappings and bizarre accidents. So, they don’t happen anymore. I go and I see and I fix.

  Planes that might have crashed get delayed for odd reasons. One of my insurance companies watchdogs the airlines, demanding fixes of things that might not be discovered until after a plane goes down.

  Murderers and kidnappers disappear. Missing children are found. Terrorists have their bombs blow up in their faces. Rapists—never mind, you don’t want to know. Serial killers never get a chance to start. Devastating building fires don’t happen without warning. People who start forest fires get caught. Famous actors do not die in car crashes. Great rock stars don’t lose their talent to drugs. Sometimes it’s tricky, but I like the challenges. I like making things better. And I never leave any evidence.

  I can’t fix it all. I do what I can.

  The odd thing is, I don’t do it because I care. I can’t care. These people aren’t real to me. They’re pieces on the playing board. I just do it because it satisfies my sense of rightness.

  Because it makes me feel a little bit more like a god to be doing something useful.

  And because I want my son to have a reason to respect me.

  The twentieth century is a great time to live. It is close enough to the nation’s adventurous past to still bear an astonishing idealism, yet these same strange years also hold a sense of promise. You can almost taste the eagerness for the wonders to come. Transistor radios are marvelous devices and color television is a delicious miracle, blue skies are commonplace, and the wind blows with a freshness from the north that hints at something wild—suggesting again that the city is only a temporary illusion, a mirage glowing against a western desert.

  Brave new highways crisscross the state—and (I thank myself again) with a minimum of billboards. The roads are still new; they are the foundation for the great freeways of the future. This is the threshold of that era, but it is still too soon for them to be overburdened with traffic and ugliness. Driving is still an adventure.

  The hills around Los Angeles are uncut and gold with the city’s own special color of vegetation. The dark trees hover, the smell of dry grass permeates the cool days. The century is a tumble of easy days, a blue-and-white time filled with sweet yellow days, innocent music, and bright popcorn memories—slow peaceful seasons, abruptly punctuated by bursts of noise and emotion, anxiety and impatience. The seasons turn and return. The years tumble over each other like children, each rushing eagerly for its turn—and each in turn tumbling inexorably into the black whirlpool of forever time lost. Well, not forever lost, not to me.

  Last week, in a mood of wistfulness for times lost, I went jaunting again. I went back to the past, to the house where Diane and I lived for such a short, short, long time.

  One of the walls had collapsed and the wind blew through the rooms. A fine layer of clean, dry dust covered everything. The pillars and drapes stood alone on the cold plain.

  My own doing, of course. I had not come back far enough, but I was afraid if I journeyed too far back, I would see her again.

  And yet—I do want to see her again.

  Just a little bit farther back....

  And this time, the house was not ruined. Just abandoned. It stood alone, empty and waiting. My footsteps echoed hollowly across the marble floors.

  Was she here? Had she been here at all?

  There was no way of knowing.

  I found my way to her rooms. Despite the acrid sunlight, her chambers were cold. I opened closets at random, pulled out drawers. Many of her silks were still here. Forgotten? Or just discarded?

  A shimmering dress, ice-cream pastel and deep forest-green—I pressed my nose into the sleek shining material, seeking a longremembered smell, a sweet-lemony fragrance with an undertone of musk. The clean smell of a woman....

  Her smell is there, but faint. I dropped the dress. I am touched with incredible sadness.

  And then a sound, a step—

  I ran for the other room, calling.

  Perhaps, perhaps, just a little bit farther back.

  The day after the last day I was there. So many years ago....

  The air conditioner hums. The house
is alive again.

  And my Diane is beautiful, even prettier than I remembered. Her auburn hair shimmers in the sunlight. She moves with the grace of a goddess, and she wears even less, a filmy thing of lace and silk. I can see the sweet pinkness of her skin.

  She hasn’t seen me yet. I am here in the shadows, deep within the house. It has been too long. It hurts too much to watch.

  Abruptly, puzzlement clouds her face. She comes rushing in from the patio. “Danny? Is that you?” Eagerness. “Are you back?”

  And then she saw me.

  “Danny? What’s happened? Are you all right? You look”—and then she realized—old.”

  “Diane,” I blurted. “I came back because I loved you too much to stay away anymore.”

  She was too startled to answer. She dropped her eyes and whispered, “I loved you too, Danny.” Then she looked at me again. “But you’re not Danny anymore. You’re someone else.”

  “But I am Danny—” I insisted.

  She shook her head. “You’re not the same one.”

  I took a step forward. I reached as if to embrace her.

  She took a quick step back. “No, please, don’t.”

  “Diane, what’s the matter?”

  “Danny—” There were tears running down her cheeks. “Danny, why did you stay away so long? Look what you’ve done to yourself. You’ve gotten old. You’re not my Danny anymore. You’re—you’re not young.” She sniffled and wiped quickly. “I came back, Dan. I couldn’t stay away either. I came back to wait for you and hope that you’d come back too. But look at you. You waited too long to come back.”