Zion's Fiction: A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature

Possibilities ^{Eyal Teler}

The memory will haunt me until my death—not long now. Fifty years could not erase the image of that old man, the feeling of my fists meeting his face. I can still see him standing there, taking my blows without protest, then crumpling to the ground. No cry, no blood, just a helpless body. Funny how this is what I remember—killing myself. The rest is too fantastic to contemplate: the time machine, Ray introducing me to myself, asking me not to become that man, not to go to Korea, to war.

The death—the death is real. Ray might have taken the body back with him, but the memory remains: killing a helpless old man, without reason, in a bout of madness. It is a cancer. Much like the one the doctors diagnosed, it eats me from inside. For many years I had used my writing and my success to block it, but the memory has won—no stories come to me as I’m lying on this hospital bed.

Thoughts that had played in my mind long ago, before I decided there was nothing but madness in them, are now coming back—questions about the reality of it all. How could Ray get a time machine, in that other reality? Just having me go to war couldn’t change reality so much, could it? It would be hubris to think so. And my actions, my words, that killing—they didn’t make sense.

Yet it couldn’t have been a hallucination. The only drug in my life had been my cigarettes, and my mind had always been sound enough—even when I suffered from depression. Besides, that time machine left a mark on the asphalt—I checked for it the next day.

I wish I had had the courage to find out what really happened on that day. I’ve never told anyone about it. Only once, about twenty years ago, did I try, halfheartedly, to find an answer.

“You must be Simon,” she said. It sounded so conclusive that for a moment I was tempted to turn back from her door. After all, if I could only be Simon, a specific, well-defined Simon, what use was there in seeing her?

“And you have no choice but to be Sedef, I guess.” I wondered, though. I hadn’t expected a short, round-faced girl, nor that broad smile in response to my dry joke. But her soft voice, with a hint of foreign accent, was as I remembered it from the phone.

“Come in,” she said, and I followed the path that her hand traced in the air to a brightly lit room with landscapes and a kitten picture on the walls. She motioned me to sit on the beige sofa, but I just stood, feeling as if I had happened to walk onto the set of the wrong movie.

“What did you expect, candlelight and voodoo accessories?”

Was I that transparent? What had I expected? An older woman, perhaps, with an air of mystery—a fraud—not someone my wife’s age, about half my fifty years. It was just a silly cliché, of course, and I wouldn’t have dared using it in a story. Funny how easy it was to use it in real life.

She looked more like a grade-school teacher than a seer, with her open, gentle, not-too-sharp face. Maybe it was fitting, in a way. We were all just gullible kids, those of us who came to her. Sure, Ray said that people swore by her. But then he also said that we should remain kids at heart. He may be my friend and mentor, but that doesn’t mean we have to agree on everything.

How had I managed to convince myself to visit a woman with a power I didn’t believe in? It was probably not too late to fix that mistake. I decided to turn around and leave.

The sofa was comfortable.

“So, Sedef, what can you tell me about that power of yours?”

She smiled. “Is this an interview?”

“No.” I preferred not to think of it that way. Interviews were intrusive and tiring, and my seeds of dislike for them had long ago grown into resentment. “Just curious. I never met anyone who claimed they had a power to see alternate realities.”

She giggled. “Will you stop calling it a power? Any more of this and I’ll have to start wearing spandex outfits. I don’t think I have the body for them.” She didn’t. Not that the flowery dress she wore looked that great on her.

“My talent, or ‘gift,’ if you wish, is the ability to see what might have happened had you made a different decision at some specific point in your life. I can tell you the most likely path that your life would have taken in that case. I don’t really know how I do it, and, no, I can’t really prove it, but people always tell me that it feels right, that they really would have done things that way.” Of course they would, if she was a good enough con.

“So, tell me what would have happened had I gone to war. I mean, to Korea.”

“Sorry,” she said, “I need to get more of a feeling for you first. Like, what do you do for a living?”

I didn’t know whether to feel insulted that she didn’t know me or happy that I didn’t have to deal with yet another mushy encounter.

“I create dreams.” My futuristic dystopias could perhaps be more correctly classified as nightmares, but it was the more lighthearted contemporary fantasy, the kid stuff, that had made me a household name. The wonders of commercialism. Not that I complained—it had been nice to take those vacations in fantasy lands.

She gave me a vacant stare.

I showed her. I liked telling tales. I loved the moment of conception, the minute or two when the idea was born, still ugly and unclean but with its inner beauty already showing. I told her a story set in a world where everyone had her power and knew the results of their choices.

“Wow!” The look she gave me could only be described as awe. My stomach turned.

“You liked my story?”

“What? Oh, it was fine. It’s not that. It’s just that your power of suggestion is so strong! You must be a great author!”

What a good performance; I nearly fell for it. Obviously she had known all along who I was. Still, I decided to play her little game.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, everyone affects the possibilities, you know. Not just choices affect them, but also wishes and dreams and desires. Authors, they don’t just think of ideas—they develop them, research them, let other people share them. Their words are like magic—they can change the world. Even the impossible can become possible this way. I once went with a friend to a writers’ conference. I could feel the possibilities change all around me. Not a lot, but it was still a little frightening.

“But you, you just told a story, without thinking about it a lot, without sharing it with lots of people, and I could feel the world changing. I could feel my power… damn!” She laughed. “Now I’m calling it a ‘power’ myself. I could feel it grow a little stronger, like this world was becoming more like the one you told me about. It’s like you’re changing the possibilities directly. I don’t know any famous writers, but I don’t think it’s normal.”

“I’ll try not to write too many alien invasion stories then.” Yeah, right. Trying to convince me she had a power was one thing. Telling me I had a power was just too much. “So, can you do your reading now?” Better get this charade over with.

“Yeah, I think I have enough feeling for you now. What war was that?”

“Korea.”

“Wow, that’s old! Sorry, didn’t mean it like that. It’s just that most people come to me to validate some recent decision they’ve made, not to ask me about something that happened thirty years ago. Don’t know how easy it’d be. Hell, I was just a little baby in Turkey at the time.” She was older than I had thought. “But I’ll try.”

Her eyes lost focus and looked up, and her forehead creased, as if she were trying hard to remember something. Then her hand went to her chin, her fingers brushing her lips. She reminded me of a female version of Rodin’s Thinker—but with clothes on, which made it somewhat less interesting.

I waited. I thought how to spin the tale I had told her into a publishable story. A better point-of-view character and some plot complications suggested themselves—enough material to pursue back home.

Sedef was still in thought, so I got up, curious to see what titles she had on her bookshelves. She didn’t have anything of mine. Several shelves strained under the weight of reference books—many of them about medicine. The rest were mostly classics and assorted poetry. She seemed to like Frost.

I glanced at my watch, then looked at her and wished she would stop. She could have at least made the show less boring—she could have mumbled or something.

“You know…” Her words startled me. I half imagined that she had fallen asleep in that posture. “There’s something very strange here. Some… barrier. I’ve never felt anything like it. I may be able to see through it, but it will take me some time. Could you tell me perhaps why you didn’t go to war? That might help.”

What could I tell her, that I had murdered myself for no reason, as if I had been possessed? That since that day I’ve kept fearing that I’d kill the people I loved? It had been too much for a boy of nineteen to think about. I was declared unfit for duty, of course, due to my mental state. I shut myself in my room and stopped seeing my friends. I wrapped myself in my writing and hoped that the stories would help me forget. All I wanted was to forget. Why did I come here to stir up these memories?

I made a show of glancing at my watch. “Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot an appointment. I have to go. It’s probably for the best. You’ll be able to look into my other possibility at your leisure, without pressure. Don’t worry, I’ll pay you for your time. Here.” I pushed a hundred into her hand as I picked up my coat and made my way to the door. “I’ll come back another day.”

I went out quickly, but I think I heard her say: “But I don’t take money….”

Lying in this hospital room, where day and night fade into a half-waking sameness, the memory makes me long for those days gone by, for the sound of words forming on a page in my typewriter, for conferences, even for signings—yes, I half miss even the company of people, of fans, and of Carolyn, to whose arms and tall, athletic body I returned that day; Carolyn of the intoxicating smell. I had overlooked her indiscretions, as she had for a while overlooked my mistress and true love: my writing. After our divorce the gossip columns told me that she had decided famous actors were easier to deal with than famous authors.

Those had been busy days—too busy to go back to see Sedef, or so I’d told myself—busy enough to push the memory back into its lair and take the thought of her with it. Once, some ten years ago it was, I think, I saw her on TV, on 60 Minutes. She was a physician. “Miracle doctor” they called her—one whose diagnosis was always on the mark. She had been offered work at ROI, a big research firm. I was tempted to find her again, to have her finish the reading. It didn’t matter if she was a fraud. If she could have come up with some plausible explanation, something to help me close that painful subplot of my life, that would have been enough.

I laugh inwardly and cough outwardly. It hurts—my punishment for being such a skeptic. I’ve seen and done strange things in my years on Earth, not the least of them killing an older version of myself, and still I don’t give her the benefit of the doubt, even though she had told me of a special barrier. She couldn’t have known enough for that to be a trick.

I found out where her lab was, but I didn’t go. She’d be too busy to do a reading for a silly author, I was sure—excuses were always my strong suit. Perhaps she didn’t even do readings anymore, being a famous and busy doctor. My wish to meet her remained just that—a wish. I still wish for it now, but it is too late. Even picking up the phone is too hard for me now.

There’s a knock on the door—a futile gesture. Weak as I am, the mere thought of saying “come in” makes me feel tired. I hear my thought echoed by the gruff voice of an orderly. There’s some argument about nobody being allowed to see me, but it’s settled quickly.

The door opens gently, and the tapping of low heels approaches my bed. I wait until she gets within my view—no use wasting my strength on turning my head. I wonder who she is and what she wants. I don’t get many visitors—Ray is the only one, in fact. I made sure the press was kept out.

“Hello, Simon,” she says. The voice startles me so that for a moment I forget my weakness and turn my head, and I see her sad smile. “I’m Sedef. You once came to me for a reading.”

As if I could forget. Yet the shock adds to my weakness and I can’t even tell her that. I can’t even smile back at her. I think of that old man that I hit—how silently he fell.

She has aged a lot since last I’d seen her. At last her looks seem to have caught up with her age. She looks rounder, and her hair, black touched with gray, is more orderly now. Perhaps she has a daughter named Pearl who is combing it for her, I muse—creating background details is a hard habit to break. Her clothes are more elegant, and I think the suit suits her—I find the pun amusing.

The joke eases the shock, and at last I manage to straighten my fingers—a feeble gesture of hello. She notices it and smiles. I’m glad now that the blanket is not over my hand, even though my arm feels cold.

She sits by my bed on the chair that up till now has been reserved for Ray, on his infrequent visits. She takes my cold hand in her warm one. It’s a good feeling, to have someone warm touch me. Her smile is warm, too, and there is warmth in her eyes. I find that I’m a little uncomfortable with all that warmth, even though I’ve often wished for more warmth, both for my body and for my heart. I don’t complain, though—I let her keep holding my hand.

“You know,” she says, “I was really insulted when you left me, twenty years ago, and even more when you didn’t come back. I decided to put you out of my mind, but I couldn’t. I met no one like you, with your power to alter the possibilities, and that strange barrier in your past. When I found out who you were, I was even more intrigued. You couldn’t have thought that the other path would have made you more successful. So why were you interested in it?

“I tried quite a few tricks to see your other path. I even researched you and read some of your books to get a better feeling for you. You know, some of them are quite disturbing. I liked the Lilian series, though. It’s more humorous and optimistic. It helped me forget the insult and think that perhaps there was some good in you after all.

“Anyway, I finally discovered that to move through the barrier I first had to move a little farther back in time. I didn’t even know I could do that, before. It then became easier than any other reading. It was as if your other path was the natural one, and I had to get back on it and then continue. It still doesn’t make any sense to me. Still…,” she pauses and smiles, “I guess I must thank you for all that practice. It really helped me understand better what I could do. It helped me help people better. Thank you.” It feels bad to get thanked for being selfish, but her gentle “thank you” warms my heart nonetheless.

“You had a very interesting life in that other possibility. Once I saw all I could see, I continued to follow you, day by day, in that other life. I can’t see the future, you see, even in another possibility, so I spent a little time each day finding out what you were doing. Then you died there, and I thought that if you were still alive here….I guess I’d better start from the beginning.

“Let me tell you the story of a young man,” she says. “He left his home, his parents, his sister, and went to war. It wasn’t easy for him to leave, and worse still was the war itself. Many of his friends died, people he cared a lot for. When it ended, he couldn’t face going home. He felt that it wasn’t right for him to live, with his friends dead. He started taking foolish risks, learning sports like cliff diving and bull fighting. Perhaps he was even disappointed that he was good enough at them to escape dying for years and years.

“It was in his days in Spain that he met a young woman from Turkey. He didn’t want to be her friend, but she always came to see him fight. She saw something special in him. Once, after he was injured pretty badly by the bull, she happened to see him being brought to the hospital where she interned. It wasn’t easy for her to get to see him, as he was quite famous, but she managed to pull a few strings and visit him.” She smiles. “I guess it’s the kind of thing she does.

“He talked to her then. He told her that he was sorry the bull hadn’t killed him. He said that he had friends waiting for him in another world, where life was beautiful and there were no wars.

“Then he talked to her about wars. He talked about them for hours and hours. He would only go to sleep when the doctors made the woman leave his side and would continue talking when she returned. ‘Soldiers are dreamers,’ he said, ‘and when a soldier dies, there is a little less dreamt beauty in the world.’”

I understand now what she had told me about how people react to her readings. That really felt like me, when I was younger and naïve.

“He talked about the dreams of his friends and how these dreams came to an end. And he talked about the dead of the enemy. He described the horrors of the ones unfortunate enough to survive, without parts of their body, or without a place to live or things to eat. When he came to the end of what he had seen with his own eyes, he talked of the wars he had heard about, the horrors he could only imagine.

“Eventually he finished talking and slept for an entire day. When he woke up, he said that perhaps it was good that he hadn’t died. He had a gift for stories before he went to war, he said. Perhaps if he could put all those horrors on paper, to show people what war was like, then he could do some good and make his friends in heaven happy.

“But the woman had a special gift. She had heard his war stories, and she had sensed something, and so she told him no. ‘You are special,’ she said. ‘Whatever you tell becomes more real, more possible. Don’t tell stories of war; tell stories of peace.’

“And he did. He told her stories of ending conflicts, of age-old feuds becoming forgotten through acts of love and kindness; of tyrants falling and of religious tolerance. He told of the Koreas healing back into one country, of Turkey and Greece ending their differences, of peace in the Middle East, of Europe joined. She was his only audience. ‘People don’t want stories of peace,’ he used to say. ‘They want conflict, action.’

“They moved in together, into a small apartment on the outskirts of Madrid. She worked at the hospital while he took care of their children and thought of new stories to tell. She would come home exhausted, and he would read stories to her while she slept. Around them the world blossomed. It took years and years, but they could track the change. Those stories that he typed they kept together with the news clippings from the papers when they became true. They could not be any happier, with each other, with their children, and with the world.

“And then he fell ill. The doctors found lung cancer, too advanced to be cured. They tried, the doctors. He tried. He told stories of doctors finding cures for cancer, and I know that they did, but they were too late to help him. He died in hospital, a few days ago. He did so much good for the world, but he couldn’t do himself a favor and quit smoking, the silly man.” Her voice breaks at the end. She squeezes my hand and falls silent.

It couldn’t have been. She must have gotten it wrong. “I…,” I gasp, “killed… me.”

“Huh, what?” Her thoughts return to me from elsewhere.

“Ah…” I start to say, but my voice betrays me. I force my head to my right, to the stand where my laptop sits. I’m not sure if I truly thought I’d write any stories here, or whether I just enjoyed the disapproving looks from Ray, who likes to act as if computers are demons taken form.

When it boots, and the word processor opens, she helps guide my feeble hand over the keys, “i killed me,” I write, “time machine.” Could I have helped create one with my stories, in that other reality? Did I really have that much power to change the world?

She thinks for a while, probably trying to decide if my illness had made me delirious.

“Well,” she finally says, “It sounds rather fantastic, but a time machine could explain why the other path felt more natural. It would take something that could really warp reality to change the natural path of someone’s life. But I still don’t understand what you mean by ‘I killed me.’ You mean literally?”

I don’t answer her. I’m too weary to make a sound or even nod.

“Simon, I’m sorry. I’ve tired you with my story. I guess I’ll come back later, after you’ve rested a little.”

She gets ready to let go of my hand, and I force my fingers to tighten around her. I know that there’s no way I can hold on, so I’m grateful that she stops and sits back down.

“Simon,” she says, and I can hear the humor in her voice, can almost see her smile. “It’s about time you didn’t let go so easily.” She pauses, probably smiling again. I open my eyes, and sure enough, there she is, smiling and looking into my eyes. Her smile grows wider. “Good,” she says.

“I know you’re tired, but I’ll tell you what we’ll do. I’ll ask you questions and you can squeeze my hand for the answers. One time for yes, two for no. No, bad idea—wouldn’t want to tire you. Nothing for no, then. I’ll just wait enough to make sure.” She smiles again. “Okay, let’s see if I get this straight: the older you, from the other reality, came back in a time machine to the time you were about to go to war, and you ended up killing him. Is that what happened?”

I hesitate for a second, then squeeze her hand feebly.

“That’s what I thought. Not that it makes any sense. I’m quite sure now that the possibility I followed was your natural path, and you never got near a time machine there. There probably never was one to be near. So it must have been something else. But what? I wish you could tell me more. Maybe after you’ve rested.”

No way. I’m not letting her go. I have to finish this now. There might not be another day. What was the signal for “no”? Nothing—no, that’s no good. I guess I’ll just have to squeeze “yes.”

“Yes? So you want to rest?”

I guess that saying “no” now would be okay.

“No? Or are you just resting? Not a very smart signal scheme I came up with, is it?” She smiles. I smile back, which probably looks grotesque, with half my face paralyzed.

She smiles a big smile back. “Well, if you can smile a big smile like that, I guess you don’t need to rest. So, you want to continue?”

I squeeze “yes.”

“You want the computer?”

No. I just need to think.

“You need some time to think?”

Hey, she didn’t tell me she has ESP too. I smile in my thoughts and squeeze her hand.

I think back to that day, fifty years ago. My memory is as sharp as ever, but emotions still cloud my view. I push past them, try to see the scene as I saw it then: two men stepping out of a strange contraption that hadn’t been there a moment before. One of them old, feeble, and unfamiliar; the other, Ray, old but recognizable. I remember him telling me the other guy was the old me, and I then saw myself in him. I nearly freaked out then.

There’s some detail here, some buried realization that I must uncover. I stop thinking and let the scene take over, as if it were part of a story, as if these were characters of my own creation that I’m trying to get to understand.

Obviously, Ray was the protagonist. He was the one who talked to me, the one who acted. The old me did little. What did Ray want? He asked me not to become that guy. He wanted me to continue writing. He brought that guy to show me what I would become, and then took his body away. Yet Sedef says that I died in hospital. Perhaps he snatched me from there, then returned me back, dead. Did she miss that moment? She probably couldn’t follow every moment of my life—that would have left her no time for her own.

No, that doesn’t make sense. That old me looked old and muddled, but he didn’t look like he was dying. How did he look? I try to picture that guy—his face like mine, but wrinkled, gaunt; his body thin, shriveled. That’s nothing like me, even after the cancer started taking its toll. I might have imagined this to be me, fifty, even twenty years ago, but not now. Could I have aged differently in that other reality? I find it unlikely.

Ray, the bastard! Did he hire an actor to impersonate me?

“Ray!” I cry. It comes out as a croak. I look to my laptop. When she gets it for me, I type, “Can you check him?”

I wait.

“Ray… Bradbury; the writer, right? I remember now. You knew him before you went to war. You don’t meet him again in the other possibility, but I remember that my research of you mentioned him. I guess you’re friends here. Now that I think of it, I saw him interviewed once. He thanked you for putting science fiction in the limelight. That stuck in my mind.”

It was really Ray who deserved the fame. He was the real artist, with his prose that was poetry. I’ve always thought it unfair that it was my straightforward style that won people’s hearts. Ray never agreed with me, of course. “Simple people need a simple style,” he used to say. It was enough for him that they were reading.

“So Ray had something to do with the time machine? And you want me to check his alternate life?”

I squeeze “yes” to both questions.

“I’m not sure I could follow someone else’s life based on your decision. I do have some feeling for him, from that interview and what I saw in your own life….I guess I’ll just have to try.”

I find it funny that she uses the same Rodin posture that she did twenty years ago. She does have nice lips, I notice when her fingers brush them. I wonder if she has anything of mine on her bookshelves now.

I imagine her mind flying from the east coast to the west, finally settling on Ray’s house, dropping down to the mess he calls a basement to see him sitting among his books, writing his next story on his old typewriter.

A touch on my arm wakes me up. “Simon, are you asleep?” I open my eyes, and I see her smile. “Not a very clever question, is it?

“I’m sorry,” she says, “but I couldn’t really see Ray. I did find something. It jumped into my mind when I tried to look for Ray in that other possibility. I guess I could see it because it had something to do with you. He wrote a story about you, you see. He even got it published very recently, so I guess we’re lucky that I’m just checking for it now. Wouldn’t have been able to see it before.”

“What… was… it… about?”

“I didn’t see the exact details—just a second, I’ll see what I can get. My God! It was about him taking your old you to the past to convince you not to go to war. Would you believe it? Did he really do that? No, of course not. Oh, I see. It makes perfect sense now!

“Ray is a good writer, right?” I know an understatement when I hear one. “He probably waited for you to come back, all these years. He thought about you, he even got a story published about you. He finally did it—he changed the possibilities; he changed your past! That’s some power.”

The time machine, the encounter—they were part of a story? He probably didn’t even realize what he’s he’d done. I certainly hope this doesn’t mean that book burning will become true one day. But I don’t really care. It all makes sense now—my irrational behavior, the killing—it was just a story. I didn’t kill me! I didn’t kill anybody! It’s like the stone has been raised from over my grave, and I can breathe again. I smile, and Sedef smiles back at me, her brilliant smile amplifying mine.

Ray didn’t have to make me kill myself. But I guess that’s just the way he is. I smile again, imagining how I’ll give him a piece of my mind in the next life. There must be one—enough people believe in it. I might have to wait for him a few years, though—he doesn’t seem too willing to let go of this life. I, on the other hand, will soon be looking at new vistas. I hope that heaven isn’t based on the most mundane of human dreams.

I look at Sedef one last time. She takes my hand, and I close my eyes, lose all sensation but her warmth. No more pain, no more queasiness. It seems so right to have her by my side as my consciousness slips slowly away. The warmth becomes sunny, and I’m surrounded by light. A tunnel beckons me. Of the world of my life, I carry only one thing with me; one thing, as if sketched by Lewis Carroll—a smile.