I knew this boy who found out about time

I knew this boy who found out about time. He was a quiet kid with black eyes who always spoke at a quick pace. Sometimes I’d see him walking home from school, moving calmly with his hands by his sides. He didn’t look at the things around him but watched them. He watched the leaves on the street and the birds in the trees and the people passing by. When I talked to him he watched the things around me.

When we were ten he told me for the first time. He said he had already lived in the future. When he was twenty it suddenly came to him. ‘Can you imagine other dimensions?’ he asked me. I told him no. I was weary. He seemed to start again. ‘I found out death is very simple. We are transient when we die.’ I nodded, pretending to understand the things that confused me. It was a dark day, the sun barely glimpsing past the grey sky. ‘I can’t explain it right.’ He watched the clouds. We were quiet for a while because I didn’t know what I should say. After a while he lowered his head to look at his feet and kicked the dirt a bit. Then he just walked away slowly.

Once again at fifteen he tried to explain the matter to me. I was wiser then and considered him quietly. ‘You remember that I was twenty when I worked it out?’ I didn’t say anything. ‘The realisation struck me that you can only comprehend the fourth dimension when you are dead.’ There was a pause before he sighed, ‘time’. I asked him to go on. He watched the wind blowing the trees pensively. ‘As soon as I realised it I died’. Noticing my face he hurried on: ‘But can’t you see that made it possible for me to go back and forwards in time however I pleased?’ He looked hard at me for a brief moment before turning away again. I realised I was sitting uncomfortably but didn’t want to move in case I denied him the seriousness of the matter. The sun had just moved over the wall and stared me in the face. I asked him how he had died. He replied that it had just happened and looked dejected as if I didn’t believe him. When neither of us talked, we could just hear the noises of the wind, giving voices to all the inanimate things around us. I wanted him to explain how he could move forwards in time if he had died. ‘When I could control the time around me,’ he uttered, ‘I could choose not to die.’ There was a faint ache in the back of my head. The rushing of the cold air made my eyes water. I didn’t want him to see it. I felt like a kid.

He told me that he was always moving in time. I asked, almost in a whisper, what the future was like. He sighed and watched something that seemed invisible to me. ‘Lots of things.’ He was vague about specifics. I noticed for the first time the lines in his face and the heavy shadows beneath his eyes. It was autumn and everything around us was dead.

The wind renewed its force and shoved us from behind. The leaves were lifted and dropped and lifted and dropped. All the while, the sun moved too slowly to see. I didn’t push him about the future because I understood that it made him anxious. He examined his hands and gently tugged at his fingers like they weren’t his own. Finally, I asked whether he had told anyone else. For a moment he seemed confused. He replied that he hadn’t. I felt he was contemplating his own answer. And just like before, he got up and left me alone.

After this I regretted all the things I didn’t ask. I wanted to say I believed him because it would make him happy. Sometimes I found myself acting out our conversation again and again as I lay in bed waiting to get to sleep. Gradually I came to understand that I was his only friend. I didn’t see him much after this time.

When I was twenty the news reached me that he had died. I was quiet. I watched everything moving around me. But I wasn’t really watching things but wondering about this kid I had known. No-one could explain his death. It had begun to rain lightly. The soft drops mourned quietly on the world of objects. There was a puddle at my feet. I watched myself.

Quite suddenly I found the answer. In a turn of events neither him nor I could have predicted, his journeys in time had altered the course of his future life. I was certain now that his actions had worked against him – that one way or another he had altered the course of his own history and destined himself never to come upon his realisation about time. Instead of being transient he was now just dead. And at the instant, when for the first time I found that I fully comprehended what he had been trying to tell me, I felt myself die as well.

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