You're the TV

If you could travel to the future, would you? Would you risk knowing an outcome and thereby realising it, ensnared in a self-fulfilling prophecy that mightn’t have eventuated had you not known?

On the nightstand sat a silver bowl like a miniature satellite dish or a metal hibiscus, an antenna in its centre.

“So, it’s a time machine?” said Melissa, cross-legged on white sheets.

“Not quite,” said Nora. “It’s a time dish – it collects signal, waves, from existing superpositions yet to be collapsed.”

“Alternate realities, then?”

“Alternate potential realities – or futures, I suppose.”

“Here,” she said, handing Melissa a white cap from which wires grew like hair. “It’s an EEG cap. We typically use it to monitor brainwaves, but when attached to the dish, it transmits time directly to you. You’re the receiver – the TV, so to speak.”

“I’m the TV?” said Melissa, pulling it on.

“You’re the TV. Now sit back—” she plumped a cushion— “and make yourself comfortable. We need you in Hemi-Sync.”

“Are you sure it’s safe? I mean, it can’t go wrong, really, can it?”

“Melissa… We can postpone if you’re not ready.”

Melissa sighed. “Are we ever?”

She downed a glass of water, audible gulp, and closed her eyes. Inhale, exhale. And very quickly, from years of practice, she slipped into Theta.

*

Welcome mat like a large cork coaster, floral border in red and yellow and green. Melissa rang the doorbell and muffled Mozart played once, then twice. Her stomach curdled like milk – something was off.

“I’m not answering,” she mumbled, eyes clamped shut, forehead vein like a vine.

“Try the window,” said Nora, leaning back in her chair and biting the butt of her pen.

And so Melissa did, she tried the window, stumbling over flowerpots, their occupants bowed and withering. The sliding of glass. A pane smudged with fingerprints. She squeezed through the frame, out of sunshine and birdsong, and into the silence of a pristine kitchen. Dishrack full, crockery so white it winked. Pessoa on the counter half-read, shadow of a white lace curtain projected across the checkered linoleum.

Fridge, empty. Instant noodles in the pantry. A Snickers wrapper in the otherwise empty bin. There was little else there in the kitchen – uninhabited, it almost seemed.

Melissa peered into the next room – unopened letters in the hallway beneath the front door. She leant down only to find her full name, as small as thread, in each of the envelope windows. Red stripes, red stamps. Her stomach sank.

“Is everything alright?” came Nora’s voice as though over a PA system.

Melissa didn’t respond – a smell, something sickly sweet like rotten meat, lured her down the hall to the bathroom door where she turned the knob.

A strangling stench. Her head throbbed. A buzz as loud as a beehive – and a fly, green and bottle-eyed, diving through the crack.

Melissa? Nora’s voice, ignored.

Wine bottle on the floor. Aluminium blister pack, like a domino, empty.

A hand—Melissa gagged—a hand, swarmed with black and white, overhanging the bathtub. Grains of rice, only grains of rice – squirming grains of rice.

Her insides emptied themselves onto the tiles. Burning throat and nose, acid eyes, maggot-ridden mind, and swarming flies. Retreated – she retreated, stumbling.

*

Nora was monitoring the screen, sipping at green tea, when Melissa’s brainwaves shot from Theta into Gamma.

Thud of porcelain against wood as Nora abandoned her cup and rose to her feet.

A metre away Melissa removed the cap with jittery hands, as careful as one in a minefield. Don’t move. Stillness. And the silver time dish, like a metal frill-necked lizard, seemed to glare at her, an inanimate object registering, at least to her nervous system, as a threat. Frozen and wide-eyed she sat.

“What did you see?” asked Nora, hurrying to her bedside.

No response.

Nora knelt on the white carpet and took Melissa’s hand in hers. Cold and clammy, it was, nail beds turnip white.

“It’s not fixed, Melissa. What you saw – it isn’t fixed.”

At this, Melissa lifted her head and the women’s eyes locked like a Chinese finger trap. Neither blinked for a minute. A transmission of sorts.

“All it means,” said Nora, “is that your energy is in homogeneity with that future right now.” She’d had this conversation before – once, believe it or not, on the receiving end. She rose from the carpet, poured a second cup of tea.

Melissa accepted, hands abuzz like a room with voices. And the tea, it rocked, it sloshed against the cup’s lip.

“So,” she managed, swallowing, “I’m on a collision course with that future?” as though it were a meteoroid hurtling towards her.

“You could say that. But it isn’t real, not yet.”

“So, what is it if not real?”

“A potential reality,” said Nora. “And judging by your reaction, one that you’d like to avoid.”

“Right, and how so?”

“Change.”

“But grief has become my identity,” managed Melissa. “I don’t know who I am without it.”

“You’re the TV.”

“What do you mean?”

“You receive signal but at the end of the day it’s you who turns it into something – into images, sound, reality. You convert the invisible into something perceptible, something real.”

“But it was all already out there, wasn’t it?”

“Exactly – there are a million superpositions waiting to be collapsed, to be realised. But whatever signal you pick up, whatever you’re in consonance with, is ultimately what you bring into fruition, what you collapse into being.”

Melissa nodded. Pursed her lips. Something was still shaken behind her eyes.

“You’re not grief,” said Nora. “You’re just vibrating at that frequency.”

“Right.”

“So, what did you see?”

Self-fulfilling prophecies – not only do they work backwards; they work forwards, too. It’s no mystery you go wherever you believe you’re going, and you needn’t a time machine, a time dish or clues to tell you as much. Because despite your doubt and disillusionment, your deterministic sense of defeat, your damning naïveté and foredooming self-deceit, you – you’re the TV. What, don’t you believe me?