The-Man-Who-Folded-Himself-David-Gerrold

I bounce back and forth through the days like a temporal Ping-Pong ball. I don’t even know how old I
am anymore. I think I’ve passed my twentieth birthday, but I’m not sure.
It’s strange. . . .
Time used to be a flowing river. I sailed down it and watched the shores sweep past: here, a warm
summer evening, ice tinkling in lemonade glasses; there, a cool fall morning, dead leaves crunching
underfoot and my breath in frosty puffs. Time was a slowly shifting panorama along the river bank. I
was a leaf in the water. I was carried helplessly along, a victim of the current. Now I’m out of the river
and standing on the bank. I am the motion and time is the observer. No longer a victim, I am the cause.
All of time is laid out before me like a table, no longer a moving entity, but a vast and mutable
landscape. I can leap to any point on it at will. Would I like a nice summer day? Yes, there’s a pleasant
one. Am I in the mood for a fall morning? Ah, that’s nice. I don’t have to wait for the river to carry me
to a place where I might be able to find that moment—I can go exactly to it.
No moment can ever escape me. I’ve chased twilight and captured dawn. I’ve conquered day and
tamed the night. I can live as I choose because I am the master of time.
I laugh to think of it. Time is an everlasting smorgasbord—and I am the gourmet, picking here,
choosing there, discarding this unnecessary bit of tripe and taking an extra piece of filet instead.
But even this temporal mobility, no matter how unlimited it is, does not keep me from arbitrarily
dividing things into “day” and “night.” It must be a human thing to want to divide eternity into bitesized
chunks. It’s easier to digest. So no matter how many jumps I make, anything that happened
before my last sleep happened “yesterday,” and everything since I woke up (and until I go to sleep
again) is part of my “today.” Some of my “todays” have spanned a thousand years. And “tomorrow”
comes not with the dawn, but with my next awakening. I think I’m still on a twenty-four-hour life
cycle, but I can’t be sure. If I add a few extra hours to my “day” so as to enjoy the beach a little longer,
I find my body tends to obey the local time, not mine. Perhaps humanity is unconsciously geared to the
sun. At least, it seems that way. I don’t get tired until after the world gets dark. (But like I said before,
I’m not sure how old I am anymore. I’ve lost track.)
Anyway. What I’m getting to is that this happened “yesterday.”
Don and I were listening to Beethoven. (The original
Beethoven. I had gotten a recorder from 2050, a multichannel
device capable of greater fidelity than anything
known in 1975, and had taped all eleven of the master’s
symphonies. Yes. All eleven.)
We had spent the day swimming—skinny-dipping actually (it’s strange to watch your own nude body
from a distance), and now we were resting up before dinner. I have this mansion in the hills
overlooking the San Fernando Valley; the view is spectacular. All fields and orchards. Even the
bedroom has a picture window. It was dusk. The sun was just dipping behind the hills to the west. It
was large and orange through the haze. Don had turned on the stereo and collapsed exhaustedly on the
bed (a king-size water bed) without even toweling off.
I didn’t think anything of it. I was tired too. I made an attempt to dry myself off, then lay down beside
him. (I’d gotten into a very bad habit with Don—with Dan—with myself. I’d discovered I didn’t like
being alone. Even when I sleep, I need the assurance of knowing there’s somebody next to me. So
more and more I found myself climbing into bed with one or more versions of myself. Sometimes
there’s a lot of horseplay and giggling. What did I want? Did I know? Is that why I did it? It extends to
other things too. I won’t swim alone. And several times we’ve showered together, ostensibly so we
could scrub each other’s back.)