The Time Traveler's Wife Read online

spoke to Jeff my neighbor; he popped his head over the fence the rascal. That was unexpected. Yeah, he’s pretty much the same. So then in the afternoon my littlest wanted to…”

  He carried on like this for the entire ride. He must take notes. He’d have to. No-one could remember all that. Maybe he was just used to it. After all, he’d had the same weekend for the last eight years. If he didn’t know off by heart know, well….

  “See, I don’t know if I’m bored or I’m upset. I don’t know. I never learned this at school. I learned how to do so much shit that I’ll never have the capacity, the chance or the fucking will to do. I know how a crane works. I can peel a potato eight different ways and I’m a little more than average at playing Green sleeves on a recorder. I can speak French, Dutch, Mandarin, Portuguese and English. I can read and write in eleven types of computer code. I can even unhook a bra. Yet, I can’t tell the difference between being bored and depressed. And If I am bored then I just need to do something. I just need to keep myself busy. But if I’m depressed and the things I’m doing are making me feel this way, then at the end of the day, I’m only gonna feel worse. So I don’t know what to do.”

  “This weekend?” asked Stefan, louder than before. “Well come over,” he said, having assumed the gist of John’s admission. “We’re having a barbeque for Thanksgiving.”

  “You always have a barbeque for Thanksgiving,” John said, picking at a rough hair poking out of his nose. “And I’m always there. And I sit in the same god damned seat below that stupid mosquito killer and, know LED doesn’t attract mosquitos right?”

  Stefan was trawling the other guys and gals, seeing if anyone was nibbling at his bait.

  “And we always eat the same five buck steaks and the sausages always have charcoaled ends. And we spend the whole night talking about how things were and then we settle on the fact that that’s ok. That it’s fine, that we’ll never get to think or act or feel that way again. And then you tell me about your fucking kids and you force one of them to do some retarded fucking dance that you can tell they are not comfortable in fucking doing man, but you push them. And probably by themselves, they get it but who gives a fuck, that doesn’t matter. Fact is, you get drunk and tell them to do that funny thing and to do that dance, that dance they do. And they fuck it up, and you laugh royally, and they cringe and squirm like dry shriveled sponges, and you open another beer, and the sausages start to burn, and then at some point, I get the courage to say fuck it, we have to go.”

  “Of course you have to go,” said Stefan, catching only the last words. “Anyway, you gotta see this thing the kids have been working on. It’s ace. It really is. I swear, now I know most parents say this, but my girl, she has talent you know.”

  The elevator opened on the top floor, The Dairy Parlor. All of the workers were there, gathered in their departments and their teams, bunched up together, gossiping and laughing as Managers, dressed in gumboots and yellow rain coats, kneeled before each person, attaching wires with small electrodes to each person’s cheeks and sneakily, under their garments, to the tips of their nipples.

  And in the laps of each person, The Managers placed reading paraphernalia. For some, it was a newspaper filled with headlines of war and disparity. In others, they placed thick plastic books with short, simple to follow stories of playing pets and busy farm animals and with mounds of fur and brushy hair, for the reader to stroke, before they turned each page.

  John fidgeted as the electrodes were placed on his nipples; the cold, or maybe his boredom making him uncomfortable. When he moved, The Manager let go of the clamp and it bit down hard on his shrinking nipple and he screamed.

  “Watch it” he shouted.

  The Manager said nothing. They never did. He just realigned the clamp and called in another manager to hold John still so that they could finish getting him prepared. They had so much work to do after all.

  As he sat in his cubicle, the electrodes lightly stimulated his left nipple causing his thoughts to flurry, John sat still, watching a television screen in front of him but not watching it at all. There was a video playing of his thoughts and there was a device beside the television that was recording everything. And from one of his nipples, his creativity oozed in a thick creamy liquid from a thin transparent tube that curled around his body and his chair and fed into a silver bucket that rattled with every drop.

  “We’re planning our next vacation,” said Stefan, his screen showing a video of a group of armed Jihadists, synchronized dancing. “October, ‘32”

  “You realize that’s decades away right?”

  “You book in early, you get the best rates. Prior preparation prevents poor performance, Doug.”

  “It’s John.”

  “Exactly. You have to know what you’re doing so you can do it well. So you don’t have to think about what you’re doing. You can think about whatever you want.”

  “That’s why I can’t remember anything. Not that it matters.”

  “Everything matters. That’s why we do it.”

  “I don’t need to remember anything because nothing ever changes. Everything is the same. This” John said, looking at his cubicle and realizing that he had spent almost half his life in here, being milked daily of his thoughts and his ideas.

  “This what?” Stefan asked, his screen now sowing a football match and two dogs mating, in the corner of the goal square.

  “We do the same thing every day. We come here. We sit in this stall. We get milked and for what? Where does it go?”

  “In the bucket,” Stefan said.

  “And then what? Our ideas are mixed, watered down and pasteurized and then packaged and labelled and branded and sold to some other poor schmuck in some other city in some other part of the world. He drinks our Creative Milk and we drink his. So what’s the point?”

  “It’s your job. Stop analyzing things. Anyway, you can’t drink your own Creative Milk. It’s not good for you. Maybe if you were like on a desert island or something. But…” he said, making a disgusted face. “I couldn’t,” he said, shaking his head and tongue protruding like a poisoned cat.

  “Do you think about dying at all?” John asked, his television screen now looking like a mirror, showing his pale reflection looking back at him, frowning miserably.

  “Me? I can’t see the point. The wife does. I don’t really pay much mind. It doesn’t faze me. You’d have to get her roots under a microscope to find her true color. Not my thing, though.”

  “We live and we die,” John said, the image on his screen showing just a grain of sand. “That’s it. The most significant event in my life is my death. And everything else….”

  “I wanted to do something different but then, why take the risk? So we’re thinking of going with the same resort. If it aint broke…”

  “If every day in my life is the same, if one week is no different to the last then what’s the point?” John said, peering round his cubicle wall into Stefan’s. “If there’s nothing new, if there are no more synapses, if I can’t taste cumin again for the first time, if I can’t ever taste cold on my tongue again for the first time, if I can’t feel or fuck or speak like it fucking matters, then what’s the point? If I have already defined every dimension of my every sense if there are no more surprises, then why delay the inevitable? Why shouldn’t I kill myself now?”

  “You should have kids.”

  “What the fuck will that prove?”

  “It’ll even you out. Be critical on someone else, takes the focus off yourself.”

  The image on John’s screen was now of a house that he used to live next to when he was just a boy. The image was fuzzy, just like it was in his thoughts. The memory had been with him his whole life, that of gathering at the steps of this building each October and running for dear life with the other children as from within the house, a dark impervious figure with a black cloak and sharp fanged teeth took flight from the doorway and chased the children down the street.

  He had few memories of
when he was a boy but those that he did have; they now played out on the screen before him. There was Dracula, his neighbor, and how tried to kill all of the children and how nobody, not even his own mother and father, ever said a thing.

  And then, the memory of watching his friends all climb onto the sinking mound of mud of dirt in the adjacent park and wishing he could but feeling trapped, as on the screen and in his thoughts, the young boy in his memories stared down at the bright red skates that he wore on his feet, the reason he couldn’t climb that mound.

  “What did you want to be when you were young?”

  “I wanted to be a Manager,” Stefan said. “Of anything really. Just a Manager. What about you?”

  On Stefan’s screen, there was the image that he had in his mind. It was the image of himself, standing in yellow Wellington’s and a yellow rain coat with a floppy yellow hat. His pants sat high on his waist and his belt, which was nothing more than the cord of an old toaster, was tied into one thick knot and its loose end hanged down past his knees. He didn’t look happy but then again, most Managers never really were. He carried a clump of lettuce in one hand which he was feeding to a worker in their cubicle and in his other hand he carried a silver bucket full to the brim of thick creamy Creative Milk.

  “I didn’t want to be anything,” John said. “And that’s the thing. I didn’t know what