Inward Gravity

Eighty-one-year-old Professor Bernard Hamilton sat in his study in Princeton, but his mind was with Helen in West Windsor in 1997, beneath the red letters of MOVIES AT MARKET FAIR 10. The professor stared at the light cones and at the Morris-Thorne metric he had written across his chalkboard, the equation curving space around the throat of a wormhole. Helen handed young Bernard a paperback copy of Contact by Carl Sagan from her Staff Picks for the week. Einstein-Rosen bridges were inherently unstable, and without exotic matter the inward gravity of the throat forced them closed before anything could cross. After the last employee left for the night, young Bernard opened the rear theater door to find Helen holding a Barnes & Noble bag in one hand and a white cardboard box from Charlie’s Sweet Tomato Pie, in the strip mall next door, in the other. Everything had been impossible until the first time it happened.

The two moments had begun alternating before Bernard pressed the red button, memory laying itself across the present so completely that he could smell warm bread, newsprint, and the tomato sauce leaking through Charlie’s box. His notes called the experiment an attempt to send memory backward through a stabilized wormhole. The truth was simpler. He wanted to return to one night in August of 1997 and tell his eighteen-year-old self what cowardice would cost him.

The danger was that the Window might work. If Bernard changed the past, perhaps he would fade like the boy in Back to the Future, erased by the future he prevented. Perhaps his mind would fill with a marriage, quarrels, reconciliations, and sixty-three years his present consciousness had never experienced. Or perhaps he would remain a tourist outside another man’s life, able to improve it but never remember living it. That possibility frightened him most because it seemed the most scientifically defensible.

His study had surrendered any pretense of order. Books, journals, and papers covered the chairs and Persian rug. Matt Visser’s work on the Roman ring lay beneath the Stanford Encyclopedia entry by Frank Arntzenius and Tim Maudlin, and a Wired article about the 2005 time-traveler convention at MIT was pinned beside the chalkboard. The shelves held a tin robot, a Twilight Zone lunchbox, and ticket stubs from the science-fiction films of his youth. Isaac Asimov occupied an entire bookcase. Helen occupied one small drawer.

Bernard opened the drawer and removed the Staff Pick card she had given him that last summer. The ink had faded to brown, but he could still read Helen’s looping hand: CONTACT, BY CARL SAGAN. FOR ANYONE WHO HAS EVER MISTAKEN DISTANCE FOR ABSENCE. He placed the card beneath a brass armature, pulled the oxygen mask over his mouth and nose, and clicked the red button.

First came tires moving over Route 1 and a train calling softly from Princeton Junction. Bernard closed his eyes until the smell followed: tomato pie, warm bread, and the dry odor of fresh newspapers. When he opened them, the study remained around him, but not convincingly. The chalkboard had become glass doors. His desk stretched into the concession counter, and the hiss of his oxygen machine disappeared beneath the soda fountains and the mechanical breathing of ten projectors.

The last customers left at eleven twenty. Young Bernard walked each auditorium with a flashlight, collecting cups and waking an old man who had slept through the end of Air Force One. Assistant Manager Marty signed the closing sheet, complained about a scratched reel in theater seven, and reminded him twice to set the alarm. At eleven forty-five, Bernard watched Marty’s Honda turn onto Route 1. Five minutes later, he opened the rear door for Helen.

She wore a green dress beneath a denim jacket, her dark hair pulled through a Princeton cap she had stolen from him. They had met at Charlie’s before dozens of movies, always splitting a tomato pie in the same booth, but Bernard had never called them dates because that required admitting he wanted them to be dates. In three days he would begin orientation at Princeton. Six days later Helen would leave for Stanford to study writing.

Bernard’s mother believed the theater was holding an employee screening. Helen’s parents believed Barnes & Noble was conducting overnight inventory. Bernard had the alarm code, a rear-door key, and enough training to run any print in the building. By two, they intended to be gone.

“You’re late,” young Bernard said, taking the white box from her.

Helen stepped inside and waited while he locked the door. “I had to finish my Staff Picks. Some of us have jobs that contribute to civilization.”

“I preserve the motion picture arts.”

“You sell four-dollar popcorn to people who have already eaten dinner.”

“That popcorn finances the motion picture arts.”

She laughed and walked through the empty lobby as if it belonged to her. The metal gates had been drawn across the mall entrance, the arcade machines were dark, and without the crowds the patterned carpet seemed to continue forever beneath the amber lights. Helen set her bag on the concession counter and opened Charlie’s box. Garlic and baked cheese rose into the lobby, warm and familiar, overpowering the chemical sweetness of the soda machines.

From his study, the professor watched his younger self move beside her, smiling when she smiled and becoming intensely interested in napkins whenever she looked at him. “Tell her,” Bernard said. “Tell her before the two of you start talking about books and films and every other thing that does not matter.”

The young man did not hear him. Helen removed three hardcovers from her bag and stood them beside the napkin dispenser. Her display that month included Cold Mountain, Angela’s Ashes, and The God of Small Things, which had arrived with enough praise to make Helen suspicious and had overcome her resistance in thirty pages.

“You chose a war, a starving Irish childhood, and a family tragedy,” Bernard said. “Do happy books offend you?”

“Happy people don’t need help choosing books.” Helen reached into the bag and handed him Contact. “This one is for you.”

He opened the cover and searched for an inscription. “You know I already own it.”

“Not this copy.” She continued looking at him, waiting for him to understand something he would spend most of his life pretending had not been obvious.

“Is there a secret chapter?”

“There might be a message.”

Young Bernard turned the book upside down and shook it. The handwritten card fell between his shoes. He picked it up, smiled at the line about mistaking distance for absence, and slipped it back inside the cover.

“Very clever,” he said.

Helen remained beside him for another moment. “That’s all?”

“What else would there be?”

Her smile tightened. “Nothing, I suppose. Let’s see the movie.”

Helen closed Charlie’s box and tucked it beneath her arm. “Are you going to miss this?” she asked. Bernard said Charlie’s would probably still be there at Thanksgiving. “I don’t mean the pizza,” she said. “I mean me coming through that back door and the two of us sitting in an empty theater when we’re supposed to be somewhere else.” Bernard promised they would write. “Everybody says that,” Helen told him. “Yes, but everybody isn’t us.” “No,” she said. “We may be worse.”

The professor looked down at his desk and found a silver frame beside the red button. Inside was a photograph of Bernard and Helen at eighteen beneath the theater marquee, her arm around his waist and his hand held stiffly above her shoulder as if afraid to let it land. He remembered no camera, no photograph, and no touch. The object had changed, but he had not.

Bernard wanted to switch off the machine. A new history was gathering in the room without entering him. He still remembered watching Helen board a plane in Newark, answering her first letter with six pages about special relativity, and leaving the third unanswered because she wrote that she missed him and he could not think of a clever reply. There had not been a fourth. He allowed the Window to carry him farther.

The projection booth took form around him. Young Bernard had left the 35mm print of Contact assembled on a horizontal platter. He drew the film from the payout deck, guided it through the rollers and mechanical brain, passed it across the failsafe, and threaded it through the projector to the take-up platter. He traced the route twice. A bad thread could spill more than two miles of film across the floor, and nothing killed romance like winding Carl Sagan by hand until sunrise.

Helen leaned against the worktable while he switched on the exhaust and started the motor. The xenon lamp struck with a white flare. Bernard lowered the Dolby processor so the soundtrack would not travel through the locked mall, opened the douser, and watched the beam leap through the booth window.

“You look happy up here,” Helen said.

“I know what everything does.” Bernard checked the take-up platter again. “Machines behave according to rules. You make the right connections, they work. You make the wrong ones, they stop.”

“People aren’t machines.”

“That’s the problem.”

She watched him for a moment. “Is that what you think is happening to us? We’re going to different schools, so we stop?”

The boy looked into the projector instead of at her. “California is far away.”

“I know the geography, Bernard.”

“You’ll be writing. I’ll have labs. You’ll meet people who understand all these books you keep giving me, and I’ll meet people who know why the books are wrong about physics. Things move apart. That is what things do when there is no force holding them together.”

Helen folded her arms. “Then I suppose it’s fortunate we have established there is absolutely nothing between us.”

“Inward gravity,” he muttered in a whisper. “Makes it hard for travelers to reach the other side…”

She went downstairs without waiting for him. Young Bernard remained beside the projector, miserable and confused by a result he had produced with perfect efficiency.

The professor stood behind him now, close enough to see a white thread hanging from the shoulder of the burgundy vest. The study had disappeared. Bernard had never seen the back of his own head, and he understood, with the cold clarity of a man watching an equation resolve itself, that this was no longer memory.

“Go after her,” the professor said.

Young Bernard turned. His face went pale as he looked directly at the old man.

“Yes, you can see me,” Professor Hamilton said. “No, I cannot explain this in the time we have. Go after her.”

“Who are you?”

“You, if you continue behaving like a coward.”

Young Bernard stared through the old man’s transparent shoulders at the projector. “This isn’t possible.”

“Nothing cured me of impossible ideas, and eventually one of them worked. Now go.”

They followed Helen into the empty auditorium. Blue light traveled over rows of vacant seats, and the air smelled of carpet, tomato pie, and the rain beating against the emergency exits. Helen sat in the seventh row with her feet against the seat before her. Young Bernard stopped at the end of the row while the professor stood behind him like an impatient conscience.

“Tell her you want to be with her,” the professor said. “Show her it isn’t just words. Do something to start a future.”

“Telling isn’t enough,” young Bernard whispered.

Professor Hamilton had come prepared to argue with a coward and found himself confronting a physicist. “No, it isn’t. You have to make plans. Create a force strong enough to pull you back together. Answer her letters even when the answer is not brilliant. Call on Sundays when you have an exam on Monday. Buy the plane ticket before the visit is convenient.”

The boy looked back at him. “Do we stay together?”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Then why should I take advice from you?”

The question struck harder than Bernard expected. He looked at Helen waiting alone beneath the changing light. “You don’t want to be like me, kid. That’s why.”

Young Bernard sat beside her. For several minutes neither spoke. On the screen, humanity listened for a voice across a distance too large to comprehend. The professor moved into the empty row before them.

“I’m not asking you not to go,” young Bernard finally said.

Helen kept her eyes on the screen. “No, you wouldn’t.”

“I’m trying to say this properly.”

“Words were never your strong suit.”

“I don’t want this to end.” The words came out too loudly and seemed to travel through the empty theater. “I should have told you before tonight. I thought saying it would turn your leaving into a big drama and I’d be making things hard for you or standing in your way. I want you to go. I just don’t want us to stop… this.”

Helen looked at him then. Her expression softened, but she did not rescue him. “What do you want?”

Young Bernard glanced toward the old professor.

“Sundays,” Professor Hamilton said. “Start with Sundays.”

“I call every Sunday night,” the boy said. “No matter what I have Monday morning. We write once a week, real letters. No excuses.”

 “That’s quite a proposition.”

“You come home at Thanksgiving. I’ll save everything I make here and fly to California after Christmas, if not before then. Next summer I’ll apply to every physics program within train distance of you, even if the work is terrible.”

“Bus distance,” Helen corrected. “California is not especially committed to trains.”

“Bus distance, then. And if one of us gets frightened or busy, we talk about it, even though I am terrible at talking.”

She studied him with the caution of someone being offered something she wanted too much. “You have given this a surprising amount of thought in the last thirty seconds.”

“Time isn’t on our side.”

She moved closer and rested her hand over his. “I don’t want this to stop either. I have been trying to tell you since June. But you always change the subject. I thought maybe you were good with moving on.”

In Princeton, a walnut plaque appeared beneath Bernard’s chalkboard: UNIVERSITY OF SAN FRANCISCO, DISTINGUISHED VISITING PROFESSOR, 2014. A brass Eiffel Tower stood beside his tin robot, followed by two Métro tickets. Photographs developed in new frames: Bernard and Helen beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, outside Princeton Chapel, and on a rain-dark street in Paris. The professor recognized the people and places but remembered none of them.

“Wait,” the professor shouted. “There will be three letters. The third one matters. Answer it.”

Young Bernard had turned toward Helen. “When you write to me, I’ll answer.”

“Even if you are busy and preoccupied?”

“Especially then.”

Helen leaned against him and kissed him, carefully at first and then without caution. The projector poured moving light over them as individual frames broke loose from the screen and fluttered through the auditorium. The professor reached for his younger self, wanting to give him every ordinary instruction required to build a life, but his hand passed through the boy’s shoulder. How could he impart wisdom he’d never learned?

Up in the booth, the soundtrack warped and a loose end of film slapped through the projector. One frame stopped in the gate. A brown blister spread from its center, devouring the stars on the screen, then Helen, then young Bernard. The film of the world burned white.

Professor Hamilton opened his eyes in the study with one hand against his heart. The Window was dark. The room smelled of hot wiring and a faint sweetness that might have been tomato pie. Around him stood the evidence of another life: photographs, the San Francisco plaque, a French hotel key, and a shelf of Helen’s novels in editions he had never read. He waited for the memories to arrive, but nothing came. Had the memories once existed? Had the dementia claimed them too?

He still remembered the silent bed, the unanswered third letter, and the departmental dinners at which colleagues had stopped asking whether he intended to bring someone. The changed life belonged to a Bernard whose memories had not crossed with the objects. Perhaps that man existed in a branch the Window had opened, or perhaps the room was collecting souvenirs from a country Bernard could visit but never inhabit.

He picked up the brass Eiffel Tower. The metal was worn where another version of his thumb had rubbed it. That man had known Helen in middle age, worked in San Francisco, and walked with her in Paris. Professor Hamilton possessed proof of those years without one afternoon of their experience. If the change became complete, he would either cease to exist or become someone who had never needed the Window. There was no outcome in which the present Bernard received sixty-three years as a gift.

The machine clicked as its capacitors recharged. Helen’s third letter remained in the drawer, but another postmark had appeared on the envelope, as if two histories had been printed on the same surface: September 14, 1997, the first Sunday after Helen reached California.

He could not reclaim a life in one grand correction. He would have to retrace it one missed step at a time, returning as a tourist to the call he had not made, the flight he had not purchased, and the letter he had left unanswered. Every bridge possessed inward gravity. So did every frightened person.

Bernard entered the September date into the Window. The life produced by his work might never belong to him, but somewhere beyond the dark glass a younger man had the opportunity to live it. Professor Hamilton adjusted the oxygen mask, placed his finger over the red button, and resisted the gravity of his poor decisions with all his might.