Don't touch me!

Don’t Touch Me

“Who the Hell are you?”

“Who”, the stranger replied, “is not the right question.”

Brad would have reflexively preceded his initial question with a violent reaction, even with an intruder as advanced in years as this, but that would have been as impossible with his pants around his ankles and his hand full of unpleasant tissue, as was the sudden appearance of the old man in the cubicle.

“I don’t give a shit….uh or whatever.  Get out of here.  Now!”

The privy crasher tried to leave, but there was no room to open the door with Brad trying to clean himself and stand.  The owner of the bar apparently preferred to allocate floor space to drinking rather than to patron convenience.  The door opened into the cubicle barely clearing the toilet to minimize the floor space consumed by the legally mandated washbasin. Realizing that there was no room for anyone to have entered the cubicle while it was occupied should have been heart stopping. However Brad’s focus was occupied with finishing the task at hand, and securing his pants, without letting this creep touch him anywhere - except at the end of his fist.

         To avoid contact, Brad struggled to rise with his legs astride the toilet. He glanced down to adjust things appropriately, and when he raised his eyes and his trousers, the stranger ceased to be in front of him. At this observation, Brad who rarely drank anything stronger than a sugarless large coffee, decided that even the half finished draught at his table had challenged his alcohol tolerance.  As he opened the cubicle door, Brad rationalized that the apparition could not have been the result of any amount of beer he might have consumed. Moreover he noted to himself that there was something odd about the imagined intruder himself, which caused him to mutter aloud, “ … and that is a major understatement”.

         “I need to find Albert Einstein.”

         On seeing the old man outside the cubicle in that equally compact space without absorbing the absurd statement, Brad fell back into the cubicle, choking off an imminent profane expletive. This was not a situation appropriate to an author’s tired idiom, “recovering his composure”.  Brad was in no state or position to recover anything, but the shock that had for too brief a moment begun to abate.

         “Albert Einstein?  You pop up in the toilet and you want Einstein when I should be punching you senseless?  Einstein’s dead.  Dead a long time. What’s wrong with you?”

         “That doesn’t matter.  I have to talk to him, and you know where he is.”

         Weird and weirder, was clearly worse than ‘dumb and dumber’, Brad reflected. He was gradually becoming as troubled by the familiar appearance of this aged privy crasher, as by his arrival.  The experience was shocking to say the least, but Brad was finding it increasingly more difficult to sustain his anger.  Any concern about an unwelcome motivation and bending over jokes dissipated, as Brad recognized genuine distress on the stranger’s face.  It was an expression that triggered memories, and motivated a question seemingly as odd as the intruder’s presence and comments. 

         “You know, you remind me of my father.  He’s dead now, but you look a lot like him.  Who the hell are you – and how did you get in here?  I know I locked the door.”

         “Well, I’m definitely not your father, but you’re on the right track.  I can explain it later, but first we have to find Einstein.”

         “Look, Einstein’s been dead for 30 or 40 years – or more.  I don’t know exactly, but he’s dead, dead and buried, and rotting six feet down somewhere.  You can’t meet him, and I’m going to smash your face in if you don’t get out of here.”

         “None of that matters.  I have to find him and ask some questions.”

         Brad shook his head with eyes rolling to the dirty ceiling as he eased toward the door out of the washroom.  To Brad’s annoyance the old man followed, step for step in the cramped space, which Brad consciously noted was reviving his fading hostility.  He had never been able to tolerate anyone not mutually intimate with him, being in his close personal space.  In fact Brad was normally quite isolationist, seldom socializing voluntarily, or competently, with anyone, of any orientation. 

         “Give me some room.  I don’t like anyone being this close.”

         “I’m sorry, but I have no choice about that.  I have to be as close to you as possible.”

         That was exactly what Brad did not want to hear. It was making things wilder than he would have thought possible, but it was about to get worse.  As Brad turned to squeeze around the invader without contact, his mouth locked open and he felt an urge to rush back to the toilet.  The mirror over the dirty sink, showed only Brad in the washroom.  As a physics major and successful science writer, there was no way on this earth that he could, or would, buy into vampire or werewolf crap - even in fiction.  Someone must have spiked his beer, or this was a nightmare – the cheap escape from impossible situations for hack authors, and he would wake up in his bed, or his office, soon – though not soon enough.

         The stranger saw what had now upset Brad, and tried to calm him, “That can be explained.  Don’t let it bother you.”

         The implied “trust me”, was definitely not convincing evidence for Brad’s traumatized mind, and what followed as an explanation was not an improvement.

“I’m not your father.  I’m you in thirty years.  That’s why I look familiar.”

         That was worse than shape-shifting bats and wolves, because this left a story that Brad knew was equally impossible, even if it did fit in an unsettling way with the intruder’s persistent nonsense.

         “I need to talk with Einstein, or maybe Heisenberg, or even Steven Hawking.  There’s a problem with the paradoxes.”

         “No kidding.  I think the time travel paradox is the least of your troubles, Buddy. Buzz off into the ether or hyperspace, and let me wake up.”

         Before the older doppelganger, or whoever it was, could speak, Brad’s inability to avoid a debate on science compelled him to pose, even if in a dream, some obvious objections to the ludicrous premises proposed by this apparition. 

         “Look, even if you could travel from the future you cannot be in the same time and space as your former existence.  The laws of conservation of matter and energy make that impossible.  If you were who you say you are, then by being here you diminish the balance of space-time in your era, and add superfluous energy and mass to this time.  It upsets the essential balance in nature.” 

Brad could not resist continuing this argument, “Plus everything you do or say to me you already remember, so you know the answers and that changes the questions.  You create an illogical circle in reason, as well as in time and space.  Anyway, if you were me, you would already know all of this.  You’re nuts, or I’m dreaming and can’t wake myself - yet.”

         Brad was beginning to feel idiotic for even trying to rationalize with a figment of his imagination, but that was minor compared to how he felt when the apparition responded.

         “Brad, I am not completely here.  That’s why there is no image in the mirror.  Photons and light waves in this time are not exactly in the same space or time for both of us due to universal precession, so light in your time and space is not blocked by my presence.  It is temporally out of phase. What you experience is a sort of solid hologram of me.  My mass remains in your future – at least most of it does. Some drifts back and forth.”

         “Like I said, you’re an unwanted creation of my imagination. Crap, I’m talking to a dream, that I know is a dream.  Maybe I’m in an asylum somewhere. I’m going to grab my supposed future self, and throw you painfully out of my space.”

         “Don’t try that.  If any part of your body enters the same space as my mass-energy image of it, there will be an irreversible paradox event for both space-times . As you said, we cannot both exist in exactly the same space-time. We had to fix a location for a temporal jump based on known criteria and it was safest to use my particulars to lock in the first transition, but we cannot be in identical space. That would destructively stress the universe.”

         Brad found that his logical self  could not resist arguing the points as if he were criticizing a student’s writing, but first he had to deal with a more immediate tension whether this was a physical pervert or some ephemeral visitor.

         “Don’t worry about contact. You’re too damned close to my space as it is, and you’d better not even think about getting so much as a millimeter closer. I’m not into that stuff, even in a dream.”

         Brad realized that this reasoning was flawed, but even being that analytical was  disturbing since it seemed to bring him more and more in tune with the entity impersonating his older self.  As the locale moved through space in a temporal universe, the image from the future would have to lag behind the local body slightly, but if so then Brad should not be able to reach the image, because as he moved toward the visitor, the image should shift back in space to maintain its relative position in space, or would it? Brad presented this interpretation to his probably imagined associate, even while wondering what was going to happen when another patron wanted to get in the  washroom, which is normally a busy location in a bar.

         It became difficult to focus on the response as the intruder’s clothes began to waver in the dim light, and become disturbingly translucent.

         “That would only apply to the same body parts trying to touch.  If you reached for a different part of me, then we might not have much of a problem, but if the same parts began to overlap it could be cataclysmic.  Please forget this for now.  I need you to take me to Einstein’s last location so that our team can get a spatial lock on me in that space at a time we can accurately identify.”

         Even while trying to ignore the growing nudity of his toilet partner by turning to the exit with his back to his older self, Brad, to his own annoyance, felt driven to continue the absurd dialogue.

“Look, my dream self, or time traveling invader, or whatever you are, you already know what you need to know if it is possible for me to get you to Einstein’s location. If we now go there we change what already happened, and won’t’ go there.  It’s paradox nonsense which is what writer’s seem to ignore in time travel stories … and now I have to wake up., before I’m found in here with a naked old man.”

         Brad could not get the specter to dissipate or stay behind while he made an exit. Instead it, or he, persisted in plaguing Brad’s sleeping mind, or his deluded conscious self - whichever might be the case. It was now completely naked and immediately behind him, bringing too many jokes to Brad’s disturbed mind.

         “Listen, Brad, when I am brought back to my time, the team will make changes in my neural system before I can speak, so that all memory of the trip will be eliminated.  This will prevent the pre-information paradox from occurring and creating a cataclysm for the universe.”

         “Oh great, a voluntary act to avoid a physics paradox, and we chase all over North America so you can delete any information you acquire.  Now there is the perfect fantasy writer’s cop out.  Whatever you cannot explain, or is unbelievable, just call it magic, a dream, or amnesia, and the story skips over the impossible.  If this were at least science fiction, you could have an impossible premise but the rest of the story would have to be consistent with that premise.  My damned nightmare has gone from fiction to fantasy, and I don’t write fantasy.”

         “That’s a good point”, the elder Brad whispered alarmingly close to the back of his younger ear, “but I will have the answers to my questions written and stored where we can find them in the future - without any references to events of the day.”

         Brad was getting ready to overlap the space-time bodies  probably by slamming the old nut in the face as he should have done when he first appeared.  It would be hard, though to assault an entity that resembled his father, especially his now completely unclad father.  Hugging his elder self to avoid acting violently toward the image might end its existence, but then their chests would touch and that was the feared contact, in more ways than one, of identical parts.  This thought was particularly alarming to Brad, because it made him aware that being more concerned about the cataclysmic possibility of contact, than about its kinky aspect, meant that he was beginning to assess this situation as if it might be real.  He found himself thinking,  “If it’s real and I force myself into the same space the doppelganger occupies, what will the effect be on space time  … and the universe?  Either the future and the present bodies will pass through each other like ghosts in a movie, or there will be an event that will, at the very least, remove both me and any future self from existence.  Could it end time or space as well?”

         Voices from the bar were either becoming louder and closer, or Brad was asleep on the toilet and finally beginning to wake.  He knew he had to focus on the voices from the bar.  He was finally able to either let those voices in, or they were actually getting closer.

         “Hey, open the door.  I gotta go.”

         That was someone real shouting and pushing the door.  Brad heard the bar noises increase as he began to let the door open.  The reality of the bar gave him his first sense of relief that this dream was ending, and he was almost able to eliminate from his mind the too vivid picture of a naked old man following him out of the toilet as he squeezed by the man coming in. Brad tried to force his mind to replace the fear of a cessation of existence with the more personally distressing possibilities if there really was a nude old man behind him as he became visible to everyone in the bar..

         “Wooops.  Oh shit, I’m pissed” exploded into the washroom as the drunk  stumbled against the opening door and fell into the cramped room, knocking Brad backward into his closely following doppelga