Jacob sighed. “Yes, OK. I hope you’ll appreciate the elaborate calculations I’ve done in order to set up these demonstrations of extraordinarily unlikely events. Come over here. Please. You’ll see that we’re in a region of, well, not exactly a region of unlikeness, that would be a cheap association — very Ilan-like, though, a fitting tribute — but we’ll enter a region where things seem not to behave as themselves. In other words, a zone where events, teetering toward interfering”—I briefly felt that I was a child again, falling asleep on our scratchy blue sofa while my coughing father watched reruns of Twilight Zone—“with a fixed future, are pressured into revealing their hidden essences.”
I felt years or miles away.
Then this happened, which is not the crux of the story, or even the center of what was strange to me: Jacob tapped one of the silver balls and it rolled up the inclined plane; he set a flask of water on the Bunsen burner and marked the rising level of the fluid; a balloon distended unevenly; a magnet under sandpaper moved iron filings so as to spell the word “egregious.”
Jacob turned to me, raised his eyebrows. “Astonishing, no?”
I felt like I’d seen him wearing a dress or going to the bathroom. What he had shown me were children’s magic tricks.
“I remember those science magic shows from childhood,” I said gently. I wasn’t not afraid. “I always loved those spooky caves they advertised on highway billboards.” Cousin or no cousin, Ilan had clearly run away from Jacob, not from me.
“I can see you’re resistant,” Jacob said. “Which I understand, and even respect. Maybe I scared you, with that killing me talk, which you weren’t ready for. We’ll return to it. I’ll order us in some food. We’ll eat, we’ll drink, we’ll talk, and I’ll let you absorb the news slowly. You’re an engineer, for God’s sake. You’ll put the pieces together. Sometimes sleep helps, sometimes spearmint — just little ways of sharpening a mind’s ability to synthesize. You take your time.”
* * *
Jacob transferred greasy Chinese food into marginally clean bowls, “for a more homey feel.” There at the table, that shabby impromptu lab, I found myself eating slowly. Jacob seemed to need something from me, something more, even, than just a modicum of belief. He had paid for the takeout. Halfway through a bowl of wide beef-flavored noodles — we had actually been comfortable in the quiet, at ease — Jacob said, “Didn’t you find Ilan’s ideas uncannily fashionable? Always a nose ahead? Even how he started wearing pink before everyone else?”
“He was fashionable in all sorts of ways,” I agreed, surprised by my appetite for the slippery and unpleasant food. “Not that it ever got him very far, always running after the next new thing. Sometimes I’d copy what he said, and it would sound dumb coming out of my mouth, so maybe it was dumb in the first place. Just said with charm.” Never before had I spoken aloud anything unkind about Ilan.
“You don’t understand,” Jacob said. “I guess I should tell you that Ilan is my as yet unborn son, who visited me — us — from the future.” He took a metal ball between two greasy fingers, dropped it twice, and then once again demonstrated it rolling up the inclined plane. “The two of us, Ilan and I, we collaborate.” Jacob explained that part of what Ilan had established in his travels, which were repeated and varied, was that contrary to popular movies, travel into the past didn’t alter the future, or, rather, that the future was already altered, or, rather, that it was all far more complicated than that. “I, too, was reluctant to believe,” Jacob insisted. “Extremely reluctant. And he’s my son. A pain in the ass, but also my beloved child.” Jacob ate a dumpling in one bite. “A bit too much of a moralist, though. Not a good business partner, in that sense.”
I no longer felt intimidated by Jacob. How could I? He had looped the loop. “If Ilan was from the future, that means he could tell you about your future,” I said.
“Sure, yes. A little.” Jacob blushed like a schoolgirl. “It’s not important. But certain things he did know. Yes. Being my son and all.”
“Ah, so.” I, too, ate a dumpling whole. Which isn’t the kind of thing I normally do. “What about my future? Did he know anything about my future?”
Jacob shook his head. I couldn’t tell if he was answering my question or just disapproving of it. “Right now we have my career to save,” he said. I saw that he was sweating, even along his exposed collarbone. “Can I tell you what I’m thinking? What I’m thinking is that we perform the impossibility of my dying before fathering Ilan. A little stunt show of sorts, but for real. With real guns and rope and poison and maybe some blindfolded throwing of knives. Real life. And this can drum up a bit of publicity for my work.” I felt myself getting sleepy during this speech of his, getting sleepy and thinking of circuses and of childhood trips to Las Vegas and of Ilan’s mattress and of the time a small binder clip landed on my head when I was walking outside. “I mean, it’s a bit lowbrow, but lowbrow is the new highbrow, of course, or maybe the old highbrow. It’ll be fantastic. Maybe we can go on Letterman. I bet we’ll make loads of money in addition to getting me my job back. Let’s be careful, though. Just because I can’t die doesn’t mean I can’t be pretty seriously injured. But I’ve been doing some calculations and we’ve got some real showstoppers—”
“I’m not much of a showgirl,” I said, suppressing a yawn. “You can find someone better than me for the job.”
Jacob looked at me intently. “We’re meant to have this future together,” he said. “My wife — she really will want to kill me when she finds out the situation I’m in. She won’t cooperate.”
“I know people who can help you, Jacob,” I said, in the monotone of the half-asleep. “But I can’t help you. I like you, though. I really do.”
“What’s wrong with you? Have you ever seen a marble roll up like that? I mean, these are just little anomalies, I didn’t want to frighten you, but there are many others. Right here in this room even. We have the symptoms of leaning up against time here.”
I thought of Jacob’s blathering on about Augustine and meaningful motion and yearning. I also felt convinced I’d been drugged. Not just because of my fatigue but because I was beginning to find Jacob vaguely attractive. His sweaty collarbone was pretty. The room around me — the futon, the Chinese food, the porcelain teacup, the rusty laboratory, the piles of papers, Ilan’s note in my back pocket, Jacob’s cheap dress socks, the dust, Jacob’s ringed hand on his knee — these all seemed like players in a life of mine that had not yet become real, a life I was coursing toward. “Do you think,” I found myself asking, maybe because I’d had this feeling just once before in my life, “that Ilan was a rare and tragic genius?”
Jacob laughed.
I shrugged. I leaned my sleepy head against his shoulder. I put my hand to his collarbone.
“I can tell you this about your future,” Jacob said quietly. “I didn’t not hear that question. So let me soothsay this. You’ll never get over Ilan. And that will one day horrify you. But soon enough you’ll settle on a replacement object for all that love of yours, which does you about as much good as a life jacket in a train wreck. Your present, if you’ll excuse my saying so, is a pretty sorry one. But your future looks great. Your work will amount to nothing. But you’ll have a brilliant child. And a brilliant husband. And great love.”
He was saying we would be together. He was saying we would be in love. I understood. I had solved the puzzle. I knew who I, who we were meant to be.