The Other Side

Every time I look at my feed—couldn’t tell you why—I find some variation on this headline: “Scientists Recently Discovered Evidence of a Fourth Dimension.” Or, it’s a high energy ghost particle in space we didn’t know was out there. Some radiation spike deep in the Pacific whose cause is eluding us. My response is always, “Huh.”

For one, I know nothing about science. That’s why I don’t understand how the algorithm has me pegged as someone who might click on these things.

But I do.

*

For years, I lived in interior-Alaska, where, if one-hundred people are spread over thirty miles, they call it “a town.” Winter gets dark. You start comprehending the origins of the word. Why people are scared of it.

Maybe you’ve gotten a taste? Wound up alone. On a cloudy, moonless night. Far from artificial light.

How’d you sleep?

Darkness usually gets pegged as absence. But anyone who’s experienced it at that level knows it isn’t. Once in a while, I’d be forced outside to drag more firewood into the mudroom. Once there, with the darkness, something would stop me, stand me up straight. A feeling.

Now, it might be that, without sight guiding us, one of the other senses dutifully steps up. But that doesn’t explain why in these moments I found myself listening.

*

I click on the articles because I’m getting older. Someone has to. A million wild alternatives to my life swim inside of me, but no one seems interested. Why do I care so much? In these other scenarios, variations on a variation, that might have bent me this way or that.  

*

I tried Anchorage for a few winters (my joke was that I missed the warmth and the big city), commuting a half hour to Chugiak for work. It wasn’t far, but moisture in the air changed so much getting away from the ocean that, at a point, the road adopted a new personality, and suddenly, accelerating and braking became things you could do. Then, heading home, the reverse happened. But where it happened, this changed every day, every hour. Once again, fucking science. 

I was leaving work one night. The foggy road was ice. I was going seventy. Just a quiet stretch of road. Done it a hundred times. And, topping a little hill, there in my lane, was a State Trooper. Laying down flares. The first in a number of steps he was taking to close the lane on a shitty night.

My first instinct was to brake. When that didn’t work, I had, by quick calculation, two seconds to make a decision. If not, the Trooper would fly over my windshield. The flare he was holding would burst into infinite sparks. Would curl, rain, then fade, dying in the otherwise silent night.

I tried pulling the wheel softly toward the other lane. Any amount of turning was dangerous at this speed. But, I thought, I just have to clear him by an inch. Soon, the wheel no longer worked, had developed a mind of its own. I spun. And on the second rotation, I realized I had passed him. The Trooper stood paralyzed and dumbfounded in the light of the flare. With that worry, at least, laid to rest, my mind relaxed. And I was suspended. The ground dropped away. I rotated and considered the difference between how you think it’s going to end and how it actually does.

And more often than I want to admit, I find myself thinking hard about the alternatives of that night.

I say thinking, but it’s listening.

*

Today’s headline reads, “Scientists Find Evidence of Negative Time.” I click. Researchers in Toronto, led by Daniela Angulo, apparently got atoms cold. Really, really cold. Then decided to see what happened when they shot light through them. These scientists, man. What our stoners found was that the light actually exited the material before entering it.

Huh.

*    

I’ve driven the height of Canada five times. In 2013, the girl I was sleeping with, but who months earlier, told me we couldn’t hang out anymore—that we were only allowed to have sex because she was on a break from her boyfriend but they were back together—asked if I’d accompany her on a 2,444-mile road trip. It was weird.

So, I agreed.

By day five, things were mildly erotic. I mean, we cuddled at night, but that’s it. No handjobs. No payoff. I was beginning to tire of her sad Portland music.

We made it to Smithers, B. C. A cool, slightly funky, yet somehow slightly lame mountain town. Google it.

After two days without cell service, I asked, could we please stop anywhere so I could make a call. She turned into a car dealership. Seemed as good a place as any to let my family know I wasn’t dead yet.  

I wandered the sea of overpriced red Hondas, getting my mom on the line. I knew from her voice something was wrong. Really wrong. My grandfather had died. She held his hand in the hospital while it happened. “I’m sorry, Tyler,” she sobbed. “I asked, should we try calling you, and pappa said no, that you two said goodbye the last time you spoke in person.” Which was true. “I’m so sorry, mom,” was all I got out.

I hung up. Dropped to my knees.

There on the pavement, I felt something. A living substance that’d always been inside me, yet I never knew was there, dislodged from whatever it’d been stuck to. My soul, maybe? As it moved up, and eventually from the crown of my head, I felt its weight. I felt that weight exit. It flew into the air and away from the car dealership.

I screamed, and the girl picked me off the ground.

*

What was that? I think all the time. What the hell left me?

*

Recently, an opportunity opened up. One where an idiot like me, someone who for almost three decades survived off mouth-breathing manual labor, was handed the keys to a cushy office job. The deal was to try it for four months, and if you like it, and don’t screw anything up, we’ll slide you into that seat permanently. I’d just gotten married. With plans to have kids. It seemed the universe was finally, for once, cutting me in.

I passed the test. Nailed my interview. And pacing the parking lot, telling some HR stooge that yes, I accepted the offer, felt like a new future awakening. My wife and I looked at houses that night. Laughed more than usual. Got frisky beneath the sheets. The stars were aligning.

Three days later, our new President, one that resembles a popular corn chip, took office. One day afterward, I got another call, from the same stooge. She told me the offer was rescinded. Do not pass go. Collect two-hundred fodders.

But that’s not the point.

For those four months I had the keys to daddy’s Porsche, I had a reckoning. A dying. Of the life I was living. I saw the opportunities afforded to me in my time as a Backcountry Ranger, a job—the joke goes—that’s paid in smiles and sunsets, laid out in my mind’s eye. Like pieces of an enormous puzzle. And there weren’t enough pieces. There would never be. So, I said goodbye. And felt myself get older.

Getting the news that, in fact, no new life was there—that, there had never been, and probably never would be, a new dawn into which to step—felt like time reversing.

*

I know why I click the articles about particle theory and zoom past other news looking like I just smelled shit. Because the other news articles have answers. Describe the tracks we’re on—climate change, war, hair loss—like they’re preordained. As if we’re all car wrecks, due to a birth year lottery, destined to be witnessed. The masses want to shine a light on everything, it seems. They can’t get enough answers.

While me, I vote for darkness. More confusion. More what ifs.

What flew out of my head in that parking lot, what I lost, it wasn’t my grandfather. It was the darkness he and I had always had in front of us. The possibilities.

*

Yesterday, I found an old ten-speed on the side of the road. It had a sign that read, “Free. Yes, seriously.” I looked back and forth like someone might catch me, then picked it up. Using its only good tire, I limped it home.

It was rusted, looked as if the back half spent perhaps decades buried in a riverbed. But something about it being likely as old as me, made me cut it some slack.

I grabbed my socket gun, a hex set. Began dismantling it. I poured vinegar in a plastic container. I plopped the tiny metal parts in, watching them fizz. Wondering what stories were getting erased.

The day was beautiful. The first of each year that feels like a freebie. I leaned back against the porch seat, absorbing the breeze’s comforting blow. I looked at my phone. “Scientists Pull Back the Veil on the Universe.”

Huh, I thought.

It’s easy to believe there’s life on the other side of a wall, but we can’t see it. But it’s there, all the same. With as much depth. With the same number of stories and what ifs.

I drifted on the day’s lightness. I allowed my mind to consider, what if I had stayed with that partner, or moved to Asia, instead of Hawaii, what would have happened? Where would I be? I saw those lives, watched the light exiting before it ever reached them.

My wife interrupted. Said, I was needed. That, apparently, the shower drain was not draining. And this was my job. To battle the sludge and hair ruining our existence for the moment.

And, if I was lucky, I might get a kiss from the deal.

I stood, brushed chain rust from my shorts, said, “Of course, my love.” I looked at the bike. Now in more pieces than what I’d brought home. Now one more in a list of things Time will decide whether I ever get back around to.