Man Meddles With Nature

In every instance of my investigation, in my poking, in every timeline, in any tangible, traversable point, and in all my efforts, my mother always dies. 

Whether it was cold blooded murder, or something completely innocent to the untrained eye; driving over a speed bump triggering a brain bleed, an argument, or just a spiral of causations and effects that were lost in my chasing. 

I followed all such incidents, like a speck of dust through a sandstorm. And when I took the precautions, when I remembered that particular chip in that particular plate (from which my father had hacked with a steak knife) would kill by infection, I would stash it away. She would eat from something else, and then die in a mix up of prescriptions, or slip on a nail in my father’s garage.  

I chased these all to no end, returning only to find her dying, or dead already. 

The first time she died, my father had struck her with a knife, quickly, and in anger right into her stomach. She told me, as she lay dying in hospital, her face pale like ivory stone, that he had run away- in shame or in terror I do not know.  

She couldn’t hold down food, or lift her hands to hold mine, or squeeze my fingers when I reached for them regardless. Her face was sunken and when I pressed the doctors for more, to try some other avenue, they would look at me in a way I'm sure they did towards all persistent, stupid family members.   

‘I’m sorry but we have done all we can,’ they’d say, as they have in every hospital since, ‘operating now will be too invasive, and she does not have the strength to recover.’ I would get that particular look that said she is old, she is going to die, just be with her and leave me alone. 

A drip of some clear substance fed into her arm, and she stared at the flowers, slowly wilting on her bedside, oblivious to the coughing and groaning on either side of her curtain walls.  

Her eyes went wide for just a moment, her mouth opened, I knew this was it. I had never seen death, but I knew by the contortions of her face that this was dying. I leaned forward, expecting her to turn to me, in her final moment, say something profound, or tell me then how much she loved me.  

But she collapsed, like a shrunken caricature of my real mother. There was a strangle gurgling like a drainpipe.  

And then she was dead.  

My chair was creaking, I was still itching with this unkillable sensation of more, something else is supposed to happen, I thought. Despite seeing her, from the two absolute stages of being alive and dead, this horrid anticipation of then what? 

Of course, I went looking for my father.  

The police shrugged, maybe peered down the road where it had happened, but that was most of their investigation. I knew then nobody would be of help.  

I used everything at my disposal. I tracked his cards, his phone, his bills and nothing came of it. It was, in no exaggeration of the word, like he had completely vanished. In my mother’s first death, it was as though both my parents had been killed, and I was inconsolable.  

I did not know where else to look, where to predict he would be in the future.  

Before I could poke through time, I lived in the dark. My tongue tasted rancid, my chin itched and flaked. For several weeks I shuddered away from everything one was supposed to do. trays of food were left for me; cousins, aunts, great-grandparents, essentially strangers who’d pass by in a breeze. Old cabbage, Turkish delights, baked pasta with stringy, under-cooked broccoli, chocolates with bursts of alcohol, and I’d shake my jaw like a dog eating medicine.  

I picked at these in my hopeless despair.  

I imagined my father escaping on an adventure. A satchel of belongings on a stick, hiking into the mountains, growing out a horrible, ginger beard.  

But when I really considered my father, and what he must have been thinking to ruin our lives, I figured he was dead already, though I never said this out loud. 

Regardless, this thought enraged me. 

 I could see my mother disappearing in her mortuary freezer, lying in wait for me to do something. Even then, in the time that had passed since she had died, I felt this terror that, if I were to bury her in the ground, how will she get out again?  

I could not throw away her things, or move or clean anything in the house, wash the cutlery she had last used, move her shoes from the door, because she would need them again. 

This spiral would send me into fits of anguish, and shadows of people would pass through the house, sometimes friends, or police with no news of my father, but I was somewhere else, hiding in a dug out waiting for someone else to do something for me.  

It was impossible to rest, to close the chapter which I had not finished reading. It was not the motivation of due process, or my vagrant father climbing cliff sides which invigorated me. He had caged my mother into a realm I could not get to, and I had every intention of pulling her out. Wherever my father was, I didn't care.  

 Despite the magnitude, or the excitement, in the human meddling of time, I have so far achieved nothing. I won’t bore you with the mechanics, the details and such. I wouldn’t ask an Olympian to teach a baby how to swim.  

Sometimes an event only needs traversing backwards several seconds, in which I prevent my father’s knife with my hands, but then my mother falls backwards regardless, hitting her head and dying. I go back several minutes, leaving a pillow for her to land on.  

This seemed to have worked, and as she leaves the home to buy ingredients for dinner, a pothole sends the truck flying, colliding straight into her side and she is dead long before the ambulance arrives. So I go back several days in my second attempt, destroying the knife, watching my father like a guard, and in doing so I miss my mother, driving in his car, unaware of a loose wire, a nick in the tire, a fault in the engine and dying, all events in which I have also tried to prevent.  

I have even sold the car before, no doubt frustrated with me, she is forced to take a train, or a bus, or a taxi. A terrorist explodes, the train track derailed, a car bomb beside her stuck in traffic, a meteor, a gas leak- even the second hand smoking of other people, standing around her at the station, and when I am quite satisfied nothing has happened for several years, she is dead by some mass growing inside of her.  

In other times, I chased back the root of the causation into such vast expanses of the past, I was struck by giant insects, unbearable heat and foreign greenery- only to get lost in finding the single event which spiraled into the death of my mother. Sometimes it is the fight between two birds, the construction of the house, the fault of one splinter poking askew in the foundations, or the face of the earth, which when the space debris falls, lands directly onto her and she dies instantaneously. 

Despite my many attempts, and all the avenues I had taken, going mad in the process of derailing time, I was no closer to preventing her end as the first day she had died.  

Ironically, in my efforts, I had ruined the finality of my own dying, the dilemma of ‘what next,’ had been lost on me, like it had become another language in which I was no longer privy in speaking.  

The fear of death, and of punishment had been eradicated. The blackness of the end had been illuminated by my meddling.  

But despite this thought, when I returned again to find my mother under white sheets, in an inoperable state, or perhaps buried already, this revelation mounted to nothing, and I knew less than when I started.  

Of course, the stress consumed me. She must have noticed something changed about me, our relationship was now akin to a zookeeper and his tiger. I sat with her for dinner, logging the fire while we read, or watching her cut fruit into little shapes– all the while like a madman, waiting for the strike of death and for my arms to reach backwards, hoping as I did every time, to find the original cancer, and hack it off.  

On one such instance, I had stopped death by several months, chasing back the food she must have eaten, preventing some hyperlipidemia. The details are lost to me now. 

It was her birthday. It was her fifteenth fiftieth birthday, and every time, I took her to a diner to eat fat burgers and milkshakes. She liked the stereo music, but I was quite sick of the same songs by then, I had even remembered the rotation.  

We picked at little conversations for a while, and I fiddled with a scrunched-up ball of used tissue in my pocket.  

‘What’s next?’ She said airily, swirling her straw in the sad bit of milkshake leftover.  

‘Tonight?’ I said, a cautious grin, she had never asked to go to a bar, or a club before.  

‘Well, just, what are you going to do next?’ 

‘Next?’  

She put her palms flat on the table, her eyes crinkling, one side of her face illuminated with the neon red outside, ‘What are you going to do?’ 

‘I don’t follow,’ I said, and I meant it.  

‘You’re done with grad school, you said you hated teaching sciences, so what are you going to do?’  

I sat stupidly for a moment. Too embarrassed to look at her, I didn’t remember the last time I had considered the future, what I was going to be, certainly not with the presence of death, and the work of surveillance.   

I heard her laugh into a smile. ‘You know, a long time ago, I was your teacher,’ she said, not unkindly. ‘Tying your shoes, and when Spots died,’ she was looking somewhere else, speaking her thoughts, her face flushed from her birthday prosecco, ‘I didn’t understand why you were so upset but your father told me, dogs are very special. And when you die, sometimes they just starve, too sad and loyal to eat. But your father and I pushed you in the right direction and you wrote that little poem for Spots, and you buried him by yourself. And you picked the flower from my garden. I think that was the first lesson you taught yourself.’ 

I remember this birthday, her fifteenth fiftieth birthday, because it was the only timeline she had said this. 

 I sat there, staring at her in the light, her benevolent features, and could only think of all the instances she had died. Her body in so many places, at so many different times, dying or dead in ways I didn't know were even possible. And despite how prolonged one instance might have been, as I sat watching her there, happy and nostalgic, humming to Elvis, the notion of alive, and then dead, were so inextricably different, I felt the food I had eaten swirling inside of me.  

It is a blink, a space in time I couldn’t penetrate. This third point, before she is dead, but not quite when she is alive. So many of these instantaneous transitions had made the unbelievability of her death even more unexplainable than when she had first slipped away from me.  

I drove her home that night. Her fingers wobbled when she locked the door, and she laughed at how drunk she was. I heard the door close to her bedroom and that was that.  

Two months later she was dead again.  

I never kept count of these things, I figured, if I did, I would set up the expectation that it would happen again, which wasn’t right. Of course, I did everything I could to implement more precautionary measures, but I never allowed myself to imagine how she would die next– it had never even occurred to me that at some point, I had to allow it to happen.  

I remembered what she had said. 

 I think that was the first lesson you had taught yourself. 

I felt so strung out. I left my mother in waiting again, some freezer, in the care of some doctor she was fond of. When I drove home to an empty house, I reached backwards again. A sensation hit me, I felt my stomach lurching and my hands tensing. Just as I was about to penetrate it, find whatever else had killed my mother, I felt my foot catching on the chair leg and I fell forward. I caught myself just in time to slump over on my side.  

I twisted something. A pain shot up my leg like a wire all the way up to my spine. I waited it out on the floor, I felt the cool touch of the wood against my skin, which calmed my nerves and when the pain dulled into a quiet throb, I sat up feeling rather foolish.  

There was a chill about the room, and I was suddenly aware of how hungry I was.  

The pantry was empty, except for pancake mix, some sliced almonds, and lunchbox raisins. I didn’t know what to do with myself, I didn’t know how to keep myself clean or how to conduct myself. 

I could still hear her door closing on the night of her birthday.  

I realised then that I had never, in some moment of clarity, for all my mother’s deaths, I had never attended her funeral. I had never gone through any of the formalities, I had never fitted a black suit, sent out emails, checked her life insurance, or anything that follows death. I had always waded backwards through time, so much so, I was unsure of what year I was living in (until, of course, the next time she died).  

Yes, I was struck by the absence of my mother, but not in any natural sense. I had never given the time to mourn, it had never crossed my mind. I had never experienced the full cycle because everything in my logical mind disagreed with the inevitability of her death. There was no formal agreement, but I understood my mother to be a permanent fixture of my life. But this wasn’t right, and as I picked at baking ingredients, and dry oats, I felt stupid. 

Changing her timeline suddenly felt useless, and I was exhausted.  

A wind rattled the glass and when I turned, I saw the garden outside, illuminated by the moon.  

There was a large rock, surrounded by smaller, round stones, where I had buried Spots.  

A childish name but I was a young boy. Besides my mother, nothing had compelled me. And yet, for no reason I can formulate, I sat on my knees where I had covered Spots in the garden soil and cried.  

I could imagine his little bones, I remembered the horror I had felt as a child, and even then, I thought, wouldn’t it be better if he had never existed at all.  

I considered this of my own mother, whatever this meant for my own existence, was a scientific question I never entertained– one I didn’t care for.  

Under the moonlight, I pulled backwards again, snot still wobbling on my lip. I knew how far I had gone before and pushed it harder, one more time. I felt my body penetrating; my face being pulled in a gust of wind until I was somewhere else. I grabbed the tendrils of time, weaved them between my fingers like strands of hair. 

When I opened my eyes, I felt as though I was in God’s first preconception of the earth. I seemed to be existing in a place where time didn’t exist–or didn’t matter. Cloudless, entirely shapeless, I couldn’t even describe the colours I could see. 

I was in knee deep water; I waded forward until it rose to my chest. I could feel the sand under my feet, a slight sinking sensation, but not uncomfortably.  

I considered what my mother might have said, or what my father would have done, thinking, again, about whether I should leave, return for a little more time. But as the water rippled like a long pelt of fur, I knew then I would end up here again.  

My mother would be dead again. Perhaps by my father’s knife, or a dog bite, or a terrible gruesome accident, even by suicide–endless possibilities like a ribbon of infinity, and I couldn’t follow it any longer.  

I closed my eyes as the sand licked over my face. I imagined Spots in the garden, limping with cancer, panting and giving up. I saw my mother, as she had died the first time, before my inventions, her face sunken in, how confused I was. The unimaginable finality of death, like a chill in my breath, as the ground swept beneath me.  

And when I am layers deep in rock, hardened next to footprints and dead creatures, I hope the bristles don’t itch and the sun isn’t too jarring– if I can pray for so much.