The Man Who Folded Himself Read online

  “Is it? Why is it?”

  “Because it’s not right—”

  “Is it any worse than masturbation? You masturbated yesterday, Danny, I know. Because I did too. You were alone in the house, but you’re never alone from yourself.”

  “I—I—but masturbation isn’t—I mean, that’s—”

  “Danny—” He silenced me with a finger across my lips. “I want to give you pleasure, I want to give you me. You have your arms around me. You have your hands on me. You like what you feel, I know you do.”

  And he was right. I did like it. I did enjoy it.

  He was so sure of himself.

  “Just relax, Danny,” he whispered. “Just relax.” He kissed me again and I kissed him back.

  I’ve done it twice now. I’ve been seduced and I’ve seduced myself. Or maybe I should say, after Don seduced me, I seduced Danny.

  I’m filled with the joy of discovery. A sense of sharing. My relations with Don—with Dan—have taken on a new intensity. There is a lot more touching, a lot more laughter, a lot more . . . intimacy.

  I look forward to tonight—and yet, I also hold myself back. The anticipation is delightful. Tonight, tonight . . . (I begin to understand emotion. Now I know why there are love songs. I touch the button on my belt. I fly to meet myself.)

  So this is love.

  The giving. The taking.

  The abandonment of roles. The opening of the self.

  And the resultant sensuality of it all. The delight. The laughing joy.

  Were I to describe in clinical detail for some unknown reader those things that we have actually done, the intensity and pleasure would not come through. The joy would be filtered out. The written paragraphs would be grotesque. Perverse.

  Because love cannot be discussed objectively.

  It is a subjective thing. You must be immersed in it to understand it. The things that Danny and I (Don and I) have done, we’ve done them out of curiosity and delight and sharing. Not compulsion. Delight.

  And joyous sexuality. We are discovering our bodies. We are discovering each other. We are children with a magnificent new toy. Yes, sex is a toy for grown-ups.

  To describe the things we have been doing would deprive them of their special intimacy and magic. We do them because they feel good. We do them because in this way we make each other feel good. We do it out of love.

  Is this love?

  It must be. Why didn’t I do this sooner?

  And yet, I wonder what I am doing.

  A vague sense of wrongness pervades my life. I find myself looking over my shoulder a lot—Who’s watching me? Who’s judging my days?

  Is it wrong?

  I don’t know.

  There is no one I can talk to about it, not even myself. Every Don I know—every Dan—is caught up in the same whirlpool. None of us is any closer to the truth. We are all confused.

  I’m alone for the first time in days.

  It makes no difference. I’m still talking to myself.

  I wish some Don from the future would come back to advise me—but even that’s a useless wish. Any Don who did come back would only be trying to shape me toward his goals, regardless of mine.

  (I did meet one once. I don’t know if it was intentional or accidental. He looked to be in his mid-thirties, maybe older; there were tiny lines at the corners of his eyes. He was a little darker and a lot heavier than me. He said, “You look troubled, Danny. Would you like to talk about it?” I said yes, but when we sat down on the couch, he put his arm around my shoulders and tried to pull me close. I fled into yesterday—Is that my future? Am I condemning myself to a life of that?)

  (Is condemning even the right word? There are times when I am lying in Danny’s arms when I am so happy I want to shout. I want to run out in the middle of the street and scream as loud as I can with the overwhelming joy of how happy I am. There are times when I am with Don that I break down and cry with happiness. We both cry with happiness. The emotion is too much to contain. There are times when it is very good and I am happier than I have ever been in my life. Is that condemnation?)

  (Must I list all those moments which I would never excise? The times we went nude swimming on a California beach centuries before the first man came to this continent. The night when six of us, naked and giggling, discovered what an orgy really was. [I’ve been to that orgy four times now—does that mean I have to visit it twice more? I hope so.] I had not realized what pleasure could be—)

  But when I think about it logically, I know that it’s wrong. I mean, I think it’s wrong. I’m not sure. I’ve never had to question it before.

  Man is supposed to mate with woman. That’s the order of life, isn’t it?

  But does that mean man must not mate with man? Is it possible there’s more?

  And always, there is this. No matter how many arguments I marshal against, I am still outvoted by one overwhelming argument for.

  It’s pleasurable. I like it.

  So I rationalize. I tell myself that it’s simply a complex form of masturbation, and masturbation is all right. Ninety-five percent of the people in the world enjoy masturbating, and the other five percent are liars.

  But this isn’t simply masturbation. I know it. This is something more. I respond to Dan as if he were another person, as if he were not myself. I am both husband and wife, and I like both roles.

  Oh my God—what have I done to myself?

  What have I done?

  Rationalization cannot hide the truth. How can anything that has given me such happiness leave me so unhappy?

  Please. Someone. Help.

  I put the pages down and looked at Don. The mood of the moment had abruptly evaporated. “You’ve read this, haven’t you?”

  He wouldn’t meet my gaze; he simply nodded.

  I narrowed my eyes in sudden suspicion. “How far ahead of me are you?” I asked. “One day? Two days? A week? How much of my future do you know?”

  He shook his head. “Not much. A little less than a day.”

  “I’m your yesterday?”

  He nodded.

  “You know what we were about to do?” I held up the papers meaningfully.

  He nodded again.

  “We would have done it if he hadn’t stopped us, wouldn’t we?”

  “Yes,” said Don. “In fact, I was just about to—” He stopped, refused to finish the sentence.

  I thought about that for a moment. “Then you know if we are going to—I mean, you know if we did it.”

  He said, “I know.” His voice was almost a whisper.

  Something about the way he said it made me look at him. “We did—didn’t we?”

  “Yes.”

  Abruptly, I was finding it hard to talk. He tried to look at me, but I wouldn’t meet his gaze.

  “Dan,” he said. “You don’t understand. You won’t understand until you’re me.”

  “We don’t have to do it,” I said. “Both of us have free will. Either of us can change the future. I could say no. And you—even though you have your memory of doing it, you could still refuse to do it again. You could change the past. If you wanted to.

  He stretched out a hand. “It’s up to you. . . . ”

  “No,” I shook my head. “You’re the one who makes the decisions. I’m Danny, you’re Don. Besides, you’ve already—you’ve already done it. You know what it’s like. You know if it will . . . be good, or if we should . . . avoid it. I don’t know, Don; that’s why I have to trust you.” I looked at him. “Do we do it?”

  Hesitation. He touched my arm. “You want to, don’t you?”

  After a moment I nodded. “Yes. I want to see what it’s like. I—I love you.”

  “I want to do it too.”

  “Is it all right, though?” I held my voice low. “I mean, remember how troubled Don looked?”

  “Danny, all I remember is how happy we were.”

  I looked at him. There was a tear shining on his cheek.

  It was enough. I
pressed against him. And we both held on tight.

  I put the papers down and looked at Don. “I had a feeling we were heading toward it,” I said.

  He nodded. “Yes.” And then he smiled. “At least, now it’s out in the open.”

  I met his gaze. “I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner….”

  “Think about it,” he said. “It can’t happen until Danny is ready. Any Don can try to seduce him, but unless Danny wants it to, it won’t happen.”

  “So it’s really me who’s doing the seducing, isn’t it?”

  Don grinned. He rolled over on his back and spread his arms in invitation. “I’m ready.”

  So was I. I moved into them and kissed him.

  And wondered why previous versions of myself had been so afraid.

  I wanted to do it. Wasn’t that reason enough?

  Evolution, of course.

  I had provided a hostile environment for those of me with doubts about their sexuality. They had excised themselves out of existence.

  Leaving only me. With no doubts at all.

  Survival of the fittest?

  More likely, survival of the horniest.

  I know who I am. I know what I want.

  And I’m very happy.

  If I’m not, I know what I can do about it.

  As I was going up the stair,

  I met a man who wasn’t there.

  He wasn’t there again today.

  I wish, I wish he’d go away!

  —HUGHES MEARNS

  The Psychoed

  —only, the little man was me.

  I keep running into versions of myself who have come back from the future to tell me to be sure to do something or not to do something. Like, do not fly American Airlines Flight 191 from O’Hare to LAX on such and such a date. (It’s a DC-10 and the engine falls off.) Or, do not go faster than seventy miles per hour on the freeway today. (The highway patrol is having radar checks.) Things like that.

  I used to wonder about all those other Dans and Dons—even though I knew they weren’t, it still seemed like they were eliminating themselves. They’re not, but it seems that way.

  What it is, of course, is that I am the cumulative effect of all their changes. I—that is, my consciousness—have never gone back to excise anything. At least I have no memory of ever having done so.

  If they didn’t exist to warn me, then I wouldn’t have been warned and I would have made the mistake they would have warned me against, realized it was a mistake and gone back to warn myself. Hence, I am the result of an inevitable sequence of variables and choices.

  But that precludes the concept of free will. And everything I do proves again that I have the ultimate free will—I don’t have to be responsible for any of my actions because I can erase them any time. But does the erasure of certain choices always lead to a particular one, or is it just that that particular one is the one most suitable for this version of me? Is it my destiny to be homosexual and some other Danny’s destiny to not be . . . ?

  The real test of it, I guess, would be to try and excise some little incident and see what happens—see what happens to me. If it turns out I can remember excising it, then that would prove that I have free will.

  If not—if I find I’ve talked myself out of something else—then I’m running along a rut, like a clockwork mechanism, doomed to play out my programmed actions for some unseen cosmic audience, all the time believing that I have some control over those actions.

  The test—

  —was simple. And I passed it.

  I simply went back to May 21, 2005, and talked myself out of going to the races. (“Here’s today’s paper,” I said. “Go to the races yesterday.” Danny was startled, of course, and he must have thought me a little crazy, but he agreed not to go to the races on May 21.)

  So. I had excised my first trip to the track. In this world I hadn’t made it at all.

  Just to double-check, I drove out to the race track. Right. I wasn’t there. (An interesting thing happened though. In the fourth race, Harass didn’t bump Tumbleweed and wasn’t disqualified. If I had been there to bet, I would have lost everything—or would I? The Don I might have been might have foreseen that too. But why had that part of the past been changed? What had happened? Something I must have done on one of my other trips must have affected the race.)

  But I’d proved it to my own satisfaction. I had free will.

  I had all of my memories of the past the way I had lived it, yet I had excised part of it out of existence. I hadn’t eliminated myself and I hadn’t had any of my memory magically erased. I remembered the act of excising.

  There might have been differences—perhaps even should have been differences—in my world when I flashed forward again. Perhaps the mansion should have disappeared, or perhaps my fortune should have been larger or smaller; but both were unchanged. If there were any differences, they would have to be minor. I didn’t go looking for them.

  The reason?

  The mansion had been built in 1998, a good seven years before Danny had been given the timebelt. (I had done that on purpose.) Because it had already existed in 2005, it was beyond his (our? my?) reach to undo unless he went back to 1997. The same applied to my financial empire. It should be beyond the reach of any of my casual changes.

  Of course, from a subjective point of view, neither the mansion nor the money existed until after I’d gotten the timebelt—but time travel is only subjective to the traveler, not the timestream. Each time I’d made a change in the timestream, it was like a new layer to the painting. The whole thing was affected. Any change made before May 21, 2005, would be part of Danny’s world when he got the timebelt. Unless he—later on—went back and excised it in a later version of the timestream. And if he did, it still wouldn’t affect me at all. It would be his version of the timestream and he would be a different person from me, with different memories and different desires. Just as there were alternate universes, there were also alternate Dannys.

  My house already existed. My investments in the past were also firmly in existence. He could not erase them by refusing to initiate them, he would only be creating a new timestream of his own, one that would be separate from mine.

  In effect, by altering my personal past, I am excising a piece of it, but I’m not destroying the continuity of this timestream. I’m only destroying my own continuity—except that I’m not, because I still have my memories.

  Confusing? Yes, I have to keep reminding myself not to think in terms of only one timestream. I am not traveling in time. I am creating new universes. Alternate universes—each one identical to the one I just left up to the moment of my insertion into it. From that instant on, my existence in it causes it to take a new shape. A shape I can choose—in fact, I must choose; because the timestream will be changed merely by my sudden presence in it, I must make every effort to exercise control in order to prevent known sequences of events from becoming unknown sequences.

  This applies to my own life too. I am not one person. I am many people, all stemming from the same root. Some of the other Dans and Dons I meet are greatly variant from me, others are identical. Some will repeat actions that I have done, and I will repeat the actions of others. We perceive this as a doubling back of our subjective timelines. It doesn’t matter, I am me, I react to it all. I act on it all.

  From this, I’ve learned two things.

  The first is that I do have free will.

  With all that implies. If I am a homosexual, then I am that way by choice. Should that please me to know that? Or should it disturb me? I don’t know—I’m the me who likes it too much to excise. So I guess that’s the answer, isn’t it?

  And that’s the second thing I’ve learned—that every time I travel into the past, I am excising. I am erasing the past that was and creating a new one instead. I didn’t need to excise my first trip to the races to prove that I had free will—I’d already proved it the first time I was Don, when I’d worn a windbreaker instead of a sweat
er.

  Every time I excise, I’m not erasing a world. I’m only creating a new one for myself.

  For myself—meaning, this me.

  Because every time I excise, I am also creating versions that are not me.

  There are Daniel Eakinses who are totally different people than I am.

  The Danny that I told not to go to the races—he’ll go off into a timestream of his own creation; he’ll have different memories, and eventually, different needs and desires. His resultant timestreams may be similar to mine, or, just as likely, they’ll be different.

  And if he can be different from me—

  —then there are an infinite number of Dannys who are different from me.

  Somewhere there exist all the possible variations of all the possible people I could be.

  I could be any of them—but I cannot be all.

  I can only be one of the variations. I will be the variation of myself that pleases me the most.

  And that suggests—

  —that my free will may be only an illusion, after all.

  If there are an infinite number of Dans, then each one thinks he is choosing his own course. But that isn’t so. Each one is only playing out his preordained instructions—excising, altering, and designing his timestream to fit his psychological template and following his emotional programming to its illogical extreme . . .

  But if each of us is happiest in the universe he builds for himself, does it matter?

  Does it really matter if there’s no such thing as free will?

  It bothers me—this me.

  I need to know that there is some important reason for my existence. There must be something special about me.

  I will find the answer!

  Yes. Of course.

  I know what my mission is. I know who I am.

  I should have realized it when the timebelt was first given to me.