Talking to Myself

By: Ben Bielert

It’s a drizzly, miserable, cold fall day, which has completely screwed my usual routine.

Lately, I’ve been writing in the park, risking the possibility that a member of my city’s growing homeless population will try to steal my shitty 5-year-old laptop and pawn it for the $40 that it’s likely worth so they can get high for an afternoon. I can fend off any would-be laptop thieves, but there is no way my already dying Dell could get wet and not go haywire.

That’s why I find myself sitting in the back of this run-down shack masquerading as a bar. I try to tell myself that the place has character, that maybe all the random crap on the walls that fits a vaguely nautical theme will help to inspire me. Maybe it would; it’s reasonably cohesive, and most of it seems to be from the late 19^th century and early 20^th. There are nautical maps, paintings and plans for various ships, the occasional portraits of captains and lighthouses. On one wall, there’s even an old steering wheel for a ship. Do you call it a steering wheel on a ship? The helm? The ship’s wheel. I had to google it. All this nautical stuff does somewhat work, and maybe I could find this inspiring, but the cheap plastic Halloween decorations that are strewn about as though put out by a blind drunk with terrible taste are doing little to add to the place’s charm. Points for effort, I suppose.

My server is as cool and unaffected as you might think someone in this environment would be. When she greeted me she called me “man” and she’s leaving me well enough alone now that I have a cold beer. I sip my beer and try to make headway on my latest project, but I have the block and bad this time. I consider ordering a shot or two, but my bank account says otherwise, and everything I write when I’m drunk seems brilliant until I’m sober.

So, I just hit the same keys over and over again creating a nonsensical string of the letters lslslslslslsls and then hit the backspace key. The bar is deserted except for me and a group of older men who are talking loudly about their summer vacations and gripes about modern life. I know that one of them saw Plymouth rock last August, and they unanimously agree that too many people use their phones too often now. Ugh. 

I’m taking a heartier drink of my beer than I should when the little bell over the door rings. Instinctively, I look over to see who is coming in from the rain and I have to do a double take.

It’s me. Well, not me me, but an old guy who looks exactly like me. I remember that one time I watched an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where Xander met his supposed future self, and even as a teenager I was so angry that the dummy never realized his “future self” had blue eyes when his were brown. How the hell did you not realize that, Xander? For me now, there is little doubt that I’m either looking at myself from the future or that I am finally losing it.

Can this be happening? I must be dreaming, I realize. The thought that this is a dream and I am neither going insane nor is this actually me from the future manages to calm my nerves a bit. I am thankful that my mind supplied this explanation so readily because the future me makes a beeline for the table I’m sitting at and doesn’t even ask before sitting opposite me.

“What’s up?” I ask.

I peer over at myself, and if I had to hazard a guess from the thinning hair, the wrinkles on his face, and the general wear and tear he’s exhibiting I’d say there’s another twenty to thirty years on this model.

He chuckles. “Aren’t you surprised to see me?”

“This is a dream, so not really,” I say, and I sip my beer as nonchalantly as I can to punctuate the point.

“It’s not a dream, and I am what you think I am,” he says.

I shrug. “Alright then, I’m going crazy.”

The server comes by. “Can I get you something, sir?”

He didn’t get the “man” treatment, I guess future me is too old to be in the cool kids’ club.

He points over at my half-drunk glass of Dark Matter and says, “I’ll have what he’s having.”

She hurries off to fetch his beer.

“You’re not going crazy,” he says, “and this isn’t a dream. I am really here.”

“How?” I ask. “I know we’re not smart enough to invent time travel.”

“You’re right. We’re not that smart, but we are smart and charismatic enough to make friends with people who could invent time travel.”

The server comes back with his beer, and he thanks her before she hurries off.

He takes a long, thirsty drink. “Goddamit, that is good beer. I miss this so much when Hoyne goes out of business.”

“Wait, Hoyne goes out of business?”

“Yeah, I really can’t say more about that. It is tragic, though,” he says.

“So, if you’re not here to warn me about the future of craft breweries, why exactly are you here?” I ask, peering around.

Luckily for us, this bar is so empty and the “back in my day” crew are so enthralled in their conversation that nobody else seems to think this is weird. I am certain the server noticed our uncanny resemblance, but we could easily be father and son at first glance. I took stock of the unique features he had that we shared. The little hole in the top of my right ear, for instance. They say it’s a congenital defect, and future me has one exactly where mine is. He also has the same scar on the left side of his lower lip that I got when I fell off my bike when I was nine. I notice he has a couple of other scars that I don’t; one on his right hand, and another on his right eyebrow that admittedly looks pretty cool.

“I’m here to warn you about your life,” he says.

“Oh, is that all?” I ask. “No need; I know it’s a trainwreck. Mission accomplished.”

“I’m serious,” he says, “we eventually get it together, but we waste another ten years on this writing nonsense.”

“And then what?” I ask, with a grin.

“And then we finally get serious, join our brothers, and sell insurance. We’re very good at it, by the way. After that, we invest in the stock market and make a pretty penny. Eventually, we build a respectable firm of our own, but we could have gone so much further if we hadn’t wasted those years.”

Now he really does sound like my father.

“Listen, I’m used to doubting myself; it comes with the territory, but this is too much. I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but I’m going to continue to live my life.”

For a minute I see anger flashing in his eyes; he leans across the table and whispers. “You have no idea what I am giving up being here, what I had to do to be here. Just by talking to you, my timeline may no longer exist. I might no longer exist after this. It’s unclear whether I’ll go into a corrected timestream or not when I return. I’m doing this for your benefit, not mine.”

“Well, except that doesn’t check out,” I say. “Something tells me that the only reason you’re here, despite you telling me how awesome your life is now and how successful you managed to make yourself, is that you’re still not satisfied.”

“Like I said, we could have gone so much further,” he says.

I shake my head. “Are you well off?”

He nods.

“And still, you want more?”

“I thought that much was obvious,” he says.

“If you have enough to live comfortably, even extravagantly, and that doesn’t make you happy, what makes you think that having any more is going to fill that void?”

“You don’t understand, there are opportunities we can’t take, there are limitations to how high we can go because you waste all this time on this bullshit,” he explains.

I shake my head. “Again, that doesn’t quite track with me. I think that the real issue is that despite all you’ve achieved, and no matter how much you achieve in this vein, it’s always going to feel like you took the easy route out. You remember when we were in high school, and we really wanted to ask Cierra Buckley out?”

He smiles. “I haven’t thought about her in years.”

“Liar,” I say, laughing.

“You caught me,” he says, and he lifts his glass. “To Cierra Buckley, wherever she may be now, and to her health and happiness.”

I clink my glass with his and we both take a drink.

“We always wanted to ask her out, and we never had the guts. We eventually ended up asking out Sarah DuPrix.”

We both finish our beers and I signal to the waitress to bring us another round.

“She was a good girlfriend, an amazingly sweet girl. It didn’t work out, but it was a good time and our first love,” he says.

“But we’ve always wondered haven’t we, what might have been?”

“It’s not like I can lie to you and say no,” he replied.

“You see, that must be a lot like the life you’re leading,” I say, “always wondering what would happen if you took that leap. You are me, so I know that even as you’re walking this path you’re constantly wondering if it’s actually meant for you, if you aren’t just an intruder and meant to be somewhere else, doing something else.”

“I made the right decision, you fool. I should have made it years ago,” he says.

“Or maybe, you coming back and trying to change my mind is a way to convince yourself. And maybe this is just the push I need to make it work this time,” I say.

The waitress comes by and sets the new drinks down and clears the old glasses.

“That is exactly the opposite of the lesson I was hoping to impart here, I’ll just have to go earlier, I guess. Before you became so committed to this path.”

He goes to grab his beer, but his hand passes right through it. I notice that he is beginning to look a little faded around the edges.

“What’s happening?” I ask.

He looks at himself. “Oh shit, this is one of the probabilities I was told about. I guess I won’t be returning to a fixed time stream. You in the future are different enough or will take a different enough path now that my timeline has ceased to exist, and that means I cease to exist too.”

“Well, I hope that fading out of existence doesn’t hurt,” I say.

“So far it just feels like sinking into warm water,” he says as he slumps down in his chair, growing dimmer by the moment. “Goodbye, do the right thing.”

I smile wanly, waving my hand as he fades away. “So long, and don’t worry, I will.”

He looks as though he wants to say something else, concern crossing his features, but he is too faint. He disappears like mist in the morning sun.

I peer around, and nobody has taken notice, the server is somewhere in the back and the old timers are still so wrapped in the world that was that they pay no attention to the world that is or the traveller from a world that could be.

I go back to writing, and surprisingly I find that my block has cleared slightly. Will I regret this in ten years? Will he be right? I don’t know for certain. 

What I do know is that the future isn’t immutable, and I plan to do my best not to become him.

© Benjamin Bielert, all rights reserved