Droun

When I was ten, Uncle Droun gave me my first telescope. My parents were obviously pleased for me but also somewhat embarrassed by his generosity.

“Droun, you didn’t have to give Andrew anything,” declared my mother, shaking her head. Uncle Droun was not really my uncle, he was an out-of-town friend of my father’s whom he had met at a conference a few years ago and brought home to meet the family.

About ten years younger than my parents in many ways he treated me more like a big brother. Droun was an astrophysicist and my father’s field was thermodynamics but they would talk and laugh together about many things. Above all my father loved to discuss philosophy with him. But Astronomy belonged to me and Uncle Droun.

My mother raised me to be a good Catholic boy, but my father -who had agreed to my baptism to please my Mom - made no secret of his atheism. At different times they tried to use the influence that Uncle Droun had over me to draw me to their position. Droun had been raised as a Catholic too, he told my Mom. She was thrilled by this and loved watching my father squirm when he succeeded in logically backing my free will denying father into a logical corner.

I was thirteen when Uncle Droun returned for a visit. He had two days in town he said and didn’t know when he’d see us again. He and I talked for hours about the latest findings in astronomy. My Mom drew him into a deep theological discussion and my father took his turn with their favorite philosophical conversations. At the end of his stay he took me aside and told me he had a trick for me to employ through my teenage years that he had found useful. “Be good to your mother and father and do as you are told. But, if you must disobey and you get caught, invoke your father in his argument denying free will. If you tell your father you had no choice in the matter, he will have to back down if he wants to remain consistent with his argument. Then go to confession, it will make your Mom happy.” I took his advice and followed it to the letter for the whole of my teen years. Many times my father was frustrated by his inability to discipline me and also be consistent with his anti-free will position. My mother was sad when I messed up and delighted when I employed the sacraments to reconcile with God and the church.

When I was seventeen, Uncle Droun visited again. “Call me Droun,” he insisted,” the time for “Uncle” is over now that you are about to head off to college.” We spent hours poring over ideas about where and what to study. So I was surprised when his primary piece of advice was not academic, instead he said, “find someone special, perhaps a Catholic girl,“ he winked at me and continued “don’t be scared to wait, when you find her, marry her and be good to her. She will be good to you and loyal too.”

He hadn’t been wrong yet so I tucked the nugget away, keeping it to myself. I had a sneaking suspicion my Dad who approved of my academic plans would not have approved of this suggestion.

By the time I saw Droun again I was twenty-one, I had met Maggie and we were engaged. I had also been invited to continue research into a new discovery which had implications for how we understood time and space. I was dying to talk to Droun about it but it was all subject to a non-disclosure agreement. He said he understood and he looked excited for me. He didn’t meet Maggie but he said he would try to get back for the wedding.

The year I turned twenty-five everything changed. That was the year we realized that the new materials we were working with from outer space could create a stable environment for time travel.

Maggie and I were married with one son already and my career was really taking off. I wished I could share the news with my wife, my parents with my old friend Droun but I was compelled to keep the highly confidential project secret. I was conducting time experiments with particular caution. Many had speculated on the challenges of time travel but nobody had actually attempted to discover the reality of time travel. Was it ethical? What were its limitations? Could the timeline be manipulated if I went back in time? As the experiments continued we concluded that the events that had occurred could not be adjusted but great care had to be taken. I certainly never considered traveling in my own timeline.

Then one day Droun phoned me and asked if he could meet me at the lab. I said it was impossible, he wouldn’t be allowed in. He agreed to meet me outside the building. Droun was getting older his hair was starting to go gray and he looked more serious than I’d ever seen.

“How’s Maggie?” was his first question.

“She’s good, very good.” I answered.

“And how’s Ben? Is he thriving?” And I reassured him, my family was well. It had occurred to me then as it had before that he knew much more about my family than I knew about his.

“I have something I need to explain.” He paused, it was a long pause.

“I know about your work. I am involved more deeply in your work than you know. I know you better than you realize.”

I looked at him, I knew he couldn’t know about my work. Then I looked at him again, into his eyes and I recognized something I hadn’t seen before.

“Since you’ve been working on this project, it hasn’t occurred to you? That you would step back in time to see your family? You’ve never questioned how there comes to be a certain likeness between us?”

“Not until now.” I could see it now and I couldn’t unsee it.

The man I knew as Droun was me. In case I had any doubt about this he walked me up to the building security and bypassed the bio-metric security to the lab with ease. Up until this point I had not considered the possibility of entering into my timeline. Now Droun had not just given me permission to do so he had told me that’s what I would do. I remembered many of the details of Droun’s visits to me and now I was going to undertake them and go back to spend time with a younger version of myself and my parents too.

“I won’t be back,” he said.

“You shouldn’t,” I agreed, “It’s too risky.”

“Before you go, where did you get the name Droun?” I asked him

“We’ll never know Andrew,” he said and with that he turned and left, I thought, never to see him again.

When I was thirty-five I gave Andrew his first telescope. I experienced my parents as colleagues and friends. I debated my own father on philosophical questions and spent time talking with my mother about God as an adult. I advised Andrew as a new teen and then again as an emergent adult. I prepared him to meet Maggie. I had met her young and I wasn’t afraid to marry young and accept the adventure of a lifetime as her husband. I attended the wedding incognito, the groom and his family didn’t see me in the back. I wasn’t needed, I just really wanted to go back and revisit that day.

I had no intention to go back and see Andrew after he found out that he and I were the same person. It would have done him no good, the temptation too great to consult with me about his own future. Then when I turned fifty I made the mistake of a lifetime and Maggie found out. After twenty-seven years of marriage, Maggie left me.

I spent months in agony, wishing that I had not let her and our family down and that I hadn’t been tempted in the first place. I wish I could go back in time and stop it from ever happening again. Now I had a new temptation and it ate away at me for a whole year before I lost all resistance. It was my last chance, my only chance. Yet it was hope against hope, how could I change the timeline?

“You’re not supposed to be here,” said Andrew. He was forty-five and with only five years between us we looked like brothers standing next to each other in the park.

“ Maggie is going to leave you. Not her fault. You made a mistake, a huge mistake. It was the cost you paid for your work. You have to slow down your work. Live. Spend time with your family. Less work. Much less.”

To say Andrew was shocked was an understatement, “has it just happened?” he asked.

“It’s been a year since she left.”

“How old are you now?

“I’m fifty. I think you have a chance, a small chance to turn things around with Maggie.”

Andrew was exasperated, “how could I possibly turn things around? It’s already happened on the timeline, you know it isn’t adjustable.”

I found myself shouting at him - unreasonably angry that he wasn’t willing to at least try, “So now you know about it, you’ve accepted it as fate, you think you have permission to treat her poorly?”

“How dare you, Droun?” He was seething. “I haven’t done anything to Maggie to hurt her. You did it. You are the one who cheated, not me. I don’t have permission to do anything, you’ve condemned me to an action I can’t stop myself from doing. Dad was right, when it comes to you and me there is no free will. I can’t undo the decision you made to cheat on our wife.”

He was right. There was no solution to this dilemma.

“I have no recollection of this visit happening to me, so something changed on the timeline.”

Andrew paused before responding, “Truthfully, I can’t live with the knowledge of what will happen for the next five years. I’m going to see a hypnotist and have the memory of this meeting removed.”

“So that’s it then”

“That’s it.”

I understood, in trying to save our marriage, I had imposed on him an impossible task. I turned and walked away.

The loneliest year of my life turned into two. I started to agree with Andrew that Dad was right all along. Free will is just an illusion.

Then Maggie came back.

“I thought you were gone for good, why, why did you return?”

“I forgive you. I love you,” she said.

“You didn’t have to come back. I know don’t deserve it, don’t deserve you.”

“I wanted to come back. I chose to come back of my own free will.”

He could have relieved me of the pain of two years of suffering by coming back to tell me Maggie came back to me. He didn’t. It was the cost, I realized, a penance of sorts for failing my wife and my children. It was a price I had to pay, the price everyone has to pay for the consequences of our actions.

It was a cost I have come to accept in time.