Lessons From the Future

“Bad night?”

That would've been obvious to anyone with eyes if the bartender hadn’t been so eager about clearing my empties. I found my reflection in the mirror behind the bar. The glass was so foggy and warped that it turned the scene into an impressionist painting—or maybe that was the seven beers I’d just drank. “I am having a bad night.” 

“I know.” The woman I’d never seen before sat down next to me. “You told me to meet you here.”

“I don’t know you.”

“In the future, you do.” A fire truck screamed outside and she paused while it passed. The red lights pulsed in the white bar top, my beer glass, the ice cubes in her drink. “You sent me back here to find you.”

That was a good hook. On any other day, that would’ve sent me scrambling for the Notes app on my phone. I would’ve put it in a story. I snuck a glance at her in the mirror. She was pretty, around my age, and had a haircut I couldn’t explain. I’d spent my whole life orbiting around people who gave me things to write about. I’m also very partial to women who hit on me. But I’d just given up writing—for good. That very afternoon. 

“Wouldn’t telling me about the future create some kind of dimensional paradox?” I asked, dumping the rest of my beer into my mouth. Most of it ended up on my shirt.

“I’ve been sitting through your lectures on temporal ethics since I was a freshman,” she handed me a napkin. “We’ve worked it all out. Trust me.”

I was too drunk for this game. “You’ve got the wrong guy,” I said, crumpling up the napkin without using it. “I’m not a science person.” 

“Not yet,” she insisted. “I’m here to teach you.”

I waved at the bartender and paid my bill, but I couldn’t ignore the plot holes. “You’re here to teach me? You just said I was your professor.” 

“You were. And now I’m going to be yours. So you can be mine.”

That would be a mess of a story. “I’m leaving now,” I said and stumbled towards the door, holding on to the bar for support like the floor was made of ice and my skates were too big. 

I woke up with pizza in my bed. There are worse sleeping companions. I stared at the ceiling, listening to the traffic on 1st Avenue, the headache pounding against my skull like it was trying to get out, my downstairs neighbors who were always yelling at each other, my upstairs neighbors who were always having sex. 

I knew the rejection letter was still on the floor next to the front door, where I’d left it yesterday. I’d clawed it open, read the first three words, and slammed the door shut behind me. I was already on my way to the bar by the time it hit the floor. 

I tiptoed into the kitchen and eyed the letter nervously from a few feet away, like I was afraid it might suddenly charge at me. 

If I was rejected from medical school, I’d tell myself that my test scores just weren’t high enough. That it was a numbers thing. That it wasn’t personal. But being rejected from an MFA program in fiction writing is different. There aren’t any numbers to blame it on. 

My gaze landed on the picture of Emily that was still on the fridge. If there’s an acceptable amount of time to keep a picture of your ex after the breakup, it’s definitely long since passed.

Emily hated how I treated my life like it was just material for my stories. And the people in it like they were just characters. She said it made her feel used. 

“It’s never just you and me,” she said. “It’s you and me and the editorial board of whatever journal you’re going to submit the story about us to.” 

I’ve never had much of an imagination, never understood how other writers could just invent people in their minds. I was always looking for things I could steal from reality. Somehow, Emily could tell when I was doing it. She could see it on my face.

“You get this look in your eyes and then it’s like you’re not even here. Like you shift to some other dimension.” 

After some trial and error, I discovered that spontaneous acts of free will were the most effective way of convincing her that I was there in the moment and not just writing about it in my head. The more random, the better. I paused in the middle of the intersection on 3rd Avenue and 14th Street while we were walking to Trader Joe’s and did a series of pirouettes. I came up behind her while she was folding laundry and licked her elbow. I shouted, “GIRAFFE!” in the middle of a subway car and then cleared my throat politely like nothing had happened. She liked that stuff. It made her laugh. 

I made sure everything I wrote while we were together had nothing to do with her. She read the novella I’d been working on, which was terrible, over breakfast at the kitchen table, with her feet in my lap. She leaned back and said, “Wow, I had no idea you were into war fiction.” 

I wasn’t. I’m pretty sure most of it was plagiarized from a movie we watched in 11th grade history class. I didn’t want to write about the power of friendship in the trenches of World War I. I wanted to write about the way her hair curled at the back of her neck. I wanted to write about the little noise she made before she said, “Good morning.” 

I told her that I wouldn’t write about her, but all along, somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that one day I would. 

I slammed the lid on the trashcan and retraced my blurry steps from the night before to locate my keys and shoes. As I bent down to tie my laces, I noticed a large book on the coffee table that hadn’t been there yesterday. Unpredictable Predictability: the Cosmology of Theoretical Physics. 

I stared at it for a long minute. A breeze whispered through the living room and blew goosebumps down my spine even though all the windows were closed. A truck honked outside. I jumped a little. I rubbed my face with my hands. I needed coffee. And a bagel. 

I was lying on my back in Tompkins Square Park with cream cheese on my face, eyes half-closed against the bright afternoon sky, when suddenly everything went dark. My first thought was that maybe a meteor was crashing into Earth and maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. I opened my eyes to find the woman from the bar standing over me, blocking out the sun.  

“You again?” 

“I’m surprised you recognize me,” she said. “You were very drunk last night.”

“Your haircut is… unique.”

“It’s trendy in the future.”

“I’m sure.”

“We need to start studying,” she looked like she was trying to remember something she had rehearsed. “You have… potential that you don’t see right now.” 

I sat up slightly. “Did you come home with me last night?” 

She made a face. “We’re both 23 now,” she said. “But in my eyes, you’re still my 70 year-old physics professor.” 

“I’m not playing,” I said, refusing to let her know that she had guessed my age exactly right. “There was a textbook on my coffee table this morning. Did you break into my apartment?” 

“We don’t have time for this,” she said. “I have so much to teach you, Ethan.” 

I didn’t remember telling her my name. 

“How do you—?” 

My phone started buzzing. I hung up on the telemarketer and shoved it back into my pocket before turning back to face her. 

But she was gone. 

I looked around. There were two old men playing chess on a bench nearby. A mom with three children and a dog. I stood up so I could see further down Avenue A. I caught a glimpse of her weird hair crossing the intersection of E 10th Street. 

I started running.  

In the end, Emily broke up with me over snow. It was Christmas and we were at her parents’ house upstate. They served dessert and then promptly announced that they were declaring bankruptcy and getting divorced. We barely had a bite of pie. 

I never liked seeing Emily cry, but in her childhood bedroom, surrounded by pictures of little Emily, it was even worse. Emily with bangs. Emily with braces. Emily with a cast on her arm. I held her on the twin-sized bed and thought about all the times she must have cried on that bed when I hadn’t been there to hold her. 

“There, there,” I whispered. For someone who considered themselves a writer, I wasn’t great with words. The more emotional a situation, the more I wanted to retreat into my head.

I pulled the blanket up around her shoulders. I tried to blanket her in love. Snow began falling outside, blanketing the lawn… We watched it in silence for a few seconds before she turned to look at my face. 

Then she sat up.

“I. Can’t. Believe. You,” she said, suddenly shaking with anger instead of with tears.

“What—?”

“Now?” she asked. “Of all times?” 

“Now what?”

“You’re thinking about a play on words,” she said. “Wrapping me in the blanket while the snow blankets the ground outside.”

“I’m not,” I said. I tried to think of something spontaneous and random I could do to convince her, something I could do to make her laugh, but my mind was blank. “I’m—I’m just thinking about you.”

“You’re not thinking about me,” she said, disentangling herself from the blanket and my arms for the last time. “You’re thinking about what you’re going to write about me later.” 

I thought there was some core difference between our ideas about what life and writing were for, but it felt too big to explain right then. I’d have to write about it first. So I let her storm off to the guest room and I stayed, wrapped in that blanket, staring at that blanket of snow. 

The story I wrote about her wasn’t good enough to get her back. It wasn’t good enough to get me into grad school, either.  

I chased the women to the mouth of the 1st Avenue L station. She was fast and I was hungover and every passerby seemed predestined to be exactly in my way. I flew down the stairs, panting, the metallic breath of the subway filling my lungs. 

The train doors were already closing by the time I made it onto the platform. I hurled myself between them and most of me made it through. My foot got stuck. I kicked off my shoe and just left it there, shoving my way through the crowded car, cream cheese still caked around my lips, trying to find her. The other passengers averted their eyes, which told me enough about how crazy I looked.

The train pulled out of the station. People jostled against each other. I wound up in a man’s lap, muttering apologies behind me as I kept pushing my way through the tangle of bodies, until I finally made it the full length of the car and—she wasn’t there.

I paused to catch my breath. I rubbed my face with my hands. Maybe I was as crazy as I looked. I found my reflection in the glass doors. And then—there she was. Right behind me. Waving in the reflection.

I wheeled around.

She wasn’t there.  

I got off at the next stop and walked home, still missing one shoe. I laid down next to the pizza in my bed and stared at the ceiling, trying to decide if I should call a locksmith or a psych ward. If I needed my locks checked, or if I needed to be locked up.

I thought I might have to write about it first.