Turtles All The Way Down
Jul. 14th, 2012 12:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
talonkarrdeYou've heard this story before, I'll wager, or seen this movie. At least, you've likely heard something like it, because most stories are really this one — one person meets another, they form a connection, have a relationship, are happy for awhile. And then it all goes up in flames.
Or, if you want to be very stereotypical, boy meets girl, boy loses girl
It's about love and it's about loss, and like I said, you've probably heard this story before. It's not about a hero's journey, and it's not a morality tale. It's simply a story about what happens when you're a specific type of person, and you meet someone who's another type of person, and what happens when you were together is something that you're not able to let go of, ever.
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It starts in media res, as our protagonist steps inside a complicated machine, whispers something under his breath — a line from a poem — and pulls the lever.
Nothing happens.
Then he steps out, looks around, and asks someone in the lab what his address is. This is not, apparently, a curious request, and the answer is exactly what he's expected:
1125 Larch Court.
It's wrong, of course, because he lives at another address completely, but it means the experiment was a success.
You see, he's traveled between worlds.
Cue flashbacks.
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Twenty years ago — high school.
Our protagonist is a boy, and he sits in biology class, in the second row. His head slowly nods forward as he listens to the teacher droning, and a few seconds later, he falls asleep, only to be jerked awake by the teacher slamming a hand down on his desk.
The boy is smart, which doesn't count for particularly much at this point in life, but it allows him to coast through most of his classes. He continues coasting and being something of an outcast through all four years, until college... where he goes to a state school and coasts some more like the unmotivated person he is.
But at some point in time, something changes in him, a very specific something, and he turns into someone who is not only motivated but driven. How do you go from being an average student in high school to having two doctorates when you're thirty, and being the foremost expert on theoretical physics?
More often than not, it's because you've lost something very dear to you, and you'll do anything to get it back.
Flash forward.
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It's college, and he sleeps through most of his morning classes, and attends fifty percent of his afternoon ones, if that. He works in the computer lab at school, which is a relatively boring job. He's a bit older, a bit more sarcastic, but otherwise the exact same person he was in high school. A collage of his life doesn't need to play for you to recognize that it's the same old underachieving kid wasting his potential.
And then, of course, he starts talking to a girl. It doesn't matter to describe the girl, dear reader, just as I haven't described the guy, because there's no need to. Everything is interchangeable, and all the details are just that, details. The only thing that matters is that these two fit each other — when he wraps his arms around her and look in the mirror, or when they curl up in bed together, there's a distinct sense that they fit, as objects more complex than puzzle pieces rarely do.
Flash forward.
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He loses her.
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He graduates at the top of his Master's class in only a year, does some very advanced research, and pushes the envelope of science forward, in more than just the pimple-sized expansion that most Ph.D. students end up doing with their thesis. He publishes in multiple journals on theoretical physics, submits experiments for consideration to be performed by the LHC, and has not one, but two doctorates by the time he's thirty, as mentioned
And then, theory complete, he turns to practice. He starts building the machine that he will step through at the beginning of this story. He finances it with money earned from patents and papers, and wholly devotes himself to this project, which, if it works, will completely transform humanity's understanding and knowledge of the world.
A year later, the machine is finished. He sells his apartment, gives away the furniture on craiglist, and puts all of his belongings in a single moving box, which he then throws out.
Flash forward.
-
And here, now, we're at the second most important of his life. Now, here, everything matters to him, because it's the moment he lives through again, and again, and again.
But this is the first time.
It's right before dusk and he stands on the doorway of an old colonial home, with an old but well-maintained Toyota Camry in the driveway. It's just finished raining, and so the air smells new, which he finds appropriate for the occasion. He raises a hand to knock, and his new suit pulls back from the wrist, revealing a navy-blue collared shirt underneath. He knocks once, twice, three times, and then rings the doorbell which chimes three times, also, a low-medium-high tone.
He waits five seconds, and then, as he raises his finger to the doorbell again, hears footsteps coming down the stairs. The door unlocks, and opens, and there she is.
They stay there, like that, for a long time, as night falls. They talk in gestures, in glances, in thoughts, but neither one breaks the silence... until the choice is taken out of their hands.
From behind her, a baby starts crying.
-
He remembers that first time vividly, the following times less so. Tries blur, as the Toyota changes into a Mercedes into a motorcycle, as the colonial becomes victorian becomes an apartment. Sometimes, it's raining, or snowing when he visits, sometimes there's a fog so thick that he approaches the wrong door at first
Each time, though, the answer is constant; the answer is negative.
So he keeps jumping through his machine, sometimes tirelessly recreating it when science didn't go the way it did from the world he came from. He keeps tweaking a formula that he keeps in his head to figure out which variables need to be changed to jump closer to the world where their split didn't happen
At first, he tries to keep the rest of the world constant, but eventually stops caring, until he jumps into worlds that are not even close to his own, into worlds that he wouldn't recognize otherwise. But he always recognizes her.
And her answer is always the same.
-
He tells someone, only once, in one world, a friend of his from a long time ago, in a form that is foreign to him but yet undeniably the person he knew. She's smart enough — perceptive enough — not to ask him why he doesn't jump to a completely foreign world, which he surely knows how to do. She asks, instead, why he doesn't go back, earlier, to before they stood outside in a parking lot and bid their goodbyes for the last time it was meaningful. And frustrated, impatient, he tells her that it's not possible to do that, or why the hell wouldn't he have done so already? He can only travel across worlds, not forward or back.
He doesn't tell anyone else after that.
-
One of the definitions of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. But for him, it's worth it, because there is a chance, he believes, no matter how infitesimal, that there is a world closer to where it worked out. Closer to, in his mind, the center of things, where everyone is happier, if there is such a center. And so he keeps jumping, keeps trying, even though each world is exactly like the last in the only way that matters: losing her.
-
'Why' is the question to be asked, here at the end. What causes someone to love so deeply, so much, for it to become obsession, or is love itself simply an obsession? Why doesn't he just give up, or kill himself, or find someone else? Why doesn't he just give up?
-
There are two types of people in the world, he would say.
Those who are alone
and those who aren't.
To stay in the ignorance of the first is understandable,
and to be in the paradise of the second is preferable.
and to have been complete, but no longer be — hell.
So he keeps jumping, because he believes in heaven.
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no subject
Date: 2012-07-14 10:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-14 09:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-14 09:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-14 10:00 pm (UTC)I think so. I want to sort of paint this picture, if you will, of the earlier sections being 'foggy', because the story and the details and the setup are interchangeable. It could be a girl pursuing a guy, or a guy pursuing a guy, or whatever; in film, I would blur the edges of the scene and probably shoot the entire thing out of focus. But each flash could probably be a bit shorter, yes; I also wrote it pretty late in the morning ;)
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Date: 2012-07-14 10:18 pm (UTC)Late night/early morning writing can be so awesome. :D
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Date: 2012-07-14 02:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-14 09:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-15 08:12 pm (UTC)I highly enjoyed this. I love that it's both detailed and not at the same time. It really gives the piece a unique feel to it.
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Date: 2012-07-15 09:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-15 10:05 pm (UTC)Well, I will sit here and cross my fingers that you do. ;D
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Date: 2012-07-16 03:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-16 04:08 am (UTC)so he keeps jumping, keeps trying, even though each world is exactly like the last in the only way that matters: losing her.
This echoes the prompt in close abstraction, and brings a dramatic punch that is only secondary to the final lines of the story.
Fantastic piece!
no subject
Date: 2012-07-16 04:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-16 07:26 pm (UTC)The idea of Infinite Regress interests me, but writing a story about it, not so much.
But the alternate meaning in TV tropes, of indistinguishable realities, fascinates me. I like how you used it here, where there are alternate realities running in parallel and the character hops from one to another (always potentially 'burning the bridge' behind him) for the sake of wanting to find one in which that love affair doesn't end.
It's clothed in soft sci-fi execution, but at its heart it's the drama of pursuing love unto personal destruction-- which is one of the greatest SuperStory themes of all time. :)
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Date: 2012-07-16 07:43 pm (UTC)I sort of try and go for that ;)
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Date: 2012-07-16 07:59 pm (UTC)I agree. I enjoy the different worlds and ideas, but how solid the story is depends on how well it works within the construct of the local "humanity."
I sometimes say I prefer "fantasy" to Science Fiction, when there are several SciFi authors I like, but the truth is that I like the dramatics of different societal constructs and ways of thinking ("The Left Hand of Darkness," Golden Witchbreed") and I like character drama ("The Lathe of Heaven"). Gadgets and guns and robots have limited interest to me, unless we're talking about something like Artificial Intelligence and the morality and effects of that.
In all honesty, there's a lot of both SciFi and Fantasy I don't like. Stories, yes. Novelty-based blather? Not so much.
Now, how to work the satirists like Douglas Adams and Jasper Fforde into that model? Though I think that by the time you're mocking humanity's conviction that it's the be-all/end-all of the universe, you've already entered into the arena of human drama. ;)
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Date: 2012-07-16 07:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-16 07:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-16 11:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-16 11:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-19 05:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-20 07:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-06 05:18 am (UTC)(And Happy Birthday.)
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Date: 2012-10-06 08:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-06 05:40 pm (UTC)