Other Earths (collection)

And you are tracing your finger over one thread, choosing a life. But you could stop right now.

Isn’t that restful?

Isn’t that a restful thing to think?

6. The alternate history is here, it is just not evenly distributed. There are places the South won the war. There are places the Nazis won the war. There are places the Revolution succeeded and lapsed into the everyday. There are places the rightful king was restored. There are stacks of skulls. There are clusters of adobe buildings in the sun, where water runs, cold and clear, in secret shaded places, and the women’s hands sift the grains of corns and there is peace. There is just government and technical brilliance and magic. There are those who heal with their hands, and there are places where superstition was banished by the light of Reason. There are lithe, furry, upright creatures with heads the size of softballs who carry spears, running among the vines.

7. The definite history.

We love choice. Choice is liberty, choice is the bounty of the common man. When we tell ourselves alternate histories, we are reassuring ourselves of the profaneness of events. We might have lost the war, we tell ourselves. We might have lost. And then everything would be different. There was a point of divergence. For want of a nail.

(If you had kissed the other one, instead …)

And so too in this moment: For want of will, for want of clarity, for want of love, we could lose this moment, this war, this choice. We stand at a fork in the road, and one road leads down into darkness and the other up into light. Choose, choose, choose, choose, choose wisely.

We stand in the supermarket aisle and read ingredients. These cookies have partially hydrogenated vegetable oil; these do not. Plus they are made with organic flour. This stock has a P/E of 15. This browser has better security. This job is nearer to my house. This one loves me best.

But perhaps this cry of “choose” is like the hooting of an owl. Perhaps choice is limited to the Planck radius, and damping effects make of our macroscopic world a clockwork machine. Perhaps God guides the nail from the shoe, dropping the horse, grounding the king, losing the battle, because God wants the war lost. Perhaps this is all overdetermined by historical inevitability. Perhaps the date of your death is written already in the pages of the Book of the Norns, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil or no.

Perhaps this history is the only history, perhaps it is a series of equations with definite solutions, perhaps it commands our obedience. And this is to say that it is sacred, that there are secret numbers behind apparent choices, that if we could see the world finally, we would not see choices but only things. And then when we wrote alternate history, we would only write: No.

8. The provisional history. Conceivably, the world is a machine designed to solve some problem. Perhaps it is a problem that cannot be solved analytically or intuitively; it requires a world, it requires a sequence of events. The solution cannot be apprehended from afar, all at once; instead, a tree of possibilities must be exhaustively traversed. Moments must be gone through, one after the other, each moment the startling, unpredictable result of the last, a chain of events followed until it becomes clear that the chain is not approaching a solution. Then the machine must back-track, erasing the events, resetting the state, and then embarking down a different path.

So this time you are living in now, perhaps it has no durability. Unless it yields results, it will be erased. Your choices are provisional; if they work out, they will be retained. Otherwise, you will choose again. We may say, adjusting the framing of our narration to the bounds of your phenomenological experience: You will have the chance to choose again.

You will have a chance to unbreak the doll, unkiss the kiss. On the other hand, all this will be lost.

What is it like, then, to tell such a tale, to tell a story that turns out to have no consequences? A story of a draft universe, a narrative transaction that is rolled back and eliminated, of deaths postponed, shadow lives swirling and then clearing, as a mist, until the final, the correct life is found?

(If the machine ever even halts; some problems are insoluble).

Restful, restful.

9. The provisional history, theological. I am crying for you, Beloved. I am killing you, and I am crying. And then you are here again. And on and on, until you have done your duty. Until I have understood. Thank you. Thank you. I am sorry. Thank you.

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