Instead of simply telling me what happens, however, I-60 proposes that we meet for yet a third time, at La Grenouille no less, for him to deliver the third chapter in the never-ending tale of How My Life Went Horribly Wrong. I understand this is serious business, and that he has traveled a long way, but I am annoyed all the same. I will now be out for three dinners.
Needless to say, when the bill arrives I-60 does not make so much as a gesture in its direction. This is particularly frustrating because, presuming even a modest rate of inflation, the check, which represents more than two days of my salary, would cost someone spending 2040 dollars something like ten bucks.
“Perhaps if this is going to be a semiregular thing,” I say as I reach for the check, “we could undertake to share the damage. I imagine you have some recollection of what a young professor earns.”
“Not much, that’s for sure. And you ain’t getting rich from your novels.”
“Well, then?”
“You know what our mother used to say,” I-60 says, smiling. “It all comes from the same pishka.”
“Seriously,” I say. “This is the second time we have had dinner together and now there is going to be a third meal. I really don’t make very much, as you recall, and money is very tight. Q and I are trying to save as much as we can. Her parents are covering the wedding, but we don’t want to rely on them for anything more than that. We’re trying to save for our honeymoon and for an apartment. I certainly don’t have enough spare money to be eating meals at Bouley and Jean-Georges.” I cast him a serious look. “It would be great if you could help me out.”
At this suggestion, I-60 grows solemn himself. “Time travel is still in its infancy,” he says. “Many of the practical and philosophical issues surrounding it are yet unexplored. What we do know is that it is highly problematic, potentially cataclysmic, for physical objects from one period to come into contact with the same physical object in another time line.”
“So it’s okay for you to come back and talk with me, but if our watches were to encounter one another, that would be a problem.”
“Yes.”
“That makes no sense.”
“The universe is arbitrary. Just look at Jeff Goldblum.”
This doesn’t sit right with me and I let him know. “Hold on a second,” I say. “Money is fungible. The value of a dollar is a concept, not an object.”
“Unfortunately, the only form of money I possess is currency, which is physical. And since I can’t very well put dollar bills from the future into circulation, I’m stuck with a few old dollar bills, which I happened to save from my own past. I need to use these sparingly. If one of these were to come into contact with itself …” He shakes his head at this prospect and quietly says, “It’s just not a chance worth taking.”
“So I guess I’m stuck with the tab.”
“I guess,” says I-60. “Unless you can get them to accept a postdated check.”
He laughs heartily at this, as I hand the waiter my credit card.
“That’s funny,” I say, though my experience of it is quite different.
Chapter SIX
I harbor suspicions, intensified by this conversation at the end of our meal at Bouley, that my putative arrival from the future may be an elaborate ruse. Several things don’t fit. There’s the lime sucking, of course, and the persistent refusal to pay. But what makes me most wary is the gratuitous shot at Jeff Goldblum. Tastes change. I didn’t like coffee or fish when I was a kid, but I do now. It’s possible my predilection for lime evolves over time. I-60’s frugality is credible. The animosity for Jeff Goldblum, however, is utterly implausible.
I like Jeff Goldblum. I did not happen to care for The Fly, but I very much enjoyed Igby Goes Down and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Furthermore, Goldblum had a small role in Annie Hall, my favorite movie ever. When Alvy Singer and Annie Hall go to the party at Tony Lacey’s Hollywood home, Goldblum is the man saying into the telephone, “I forgot my mantra.” This alone gives him a perpetual pass in my book. I am thus distrustful of I-60. I suspect he is not genuine and that this whole thing is a hoax.
Concededly, I am not sure what the point of this would be. I theorize that it could be an elaborate practical joke or a credit card scam, though creating a fictitious future self just to secure access to my American Express seems a bit extreme. If I were being honest, I would admit that my suspicions about the authenticity of I-60 are really part and parcel of a more general, long-suppressed skepticism about the authenticity of life itself.
This doubt originates in high school. My parents move from Brooklyn to Long Island the summer after ninth grade and I am forced to change schools. I don’t know anyone at the new school. I spend most of tenth grade trying to make friends, with limited luck, and trying to meet girls, with no success at all. Then, miraculously, on the last day of school, Amy Weiss and Rebecca Perlstein independently invite me to go to the beach. I glide home only to notice that my psoriasis has become enflamed. I cannot imagine how anything like this could happen by coincidence and conclude that everyone around me, including my friends and parents, are automatons, characters in the play that is my life.
I begin to note similarities in appearance between ostensibly unrelated individuals like Mr. Mudwinder, my calculus teacher, and the guy who gives out the shoes at the local bowling alley. Some figures appear to be recycled. The boy who delivers our Newsday bears a close resemblance to one of my old camp counselors. The guy who runs the hot dog cart outside our high school looks eerily like my second cousin Zelda’s first husband. From this evidence I conclude that the Grand Manipulator has only a finite number of robot models at his disposal. I only waver from my complete conviction in this belief when I read, many years later, that a quarter of the planet is descended from Genghis Khan. Still, I think my hypothesis is just as likely to be true as not. Often when I walk to school or work, I wave to the imaginary audience that I envision to be observing my life.
I am enormously disappointed when these metaphysical anxieties later become, more or less, the plot of The Truman Show. This suggests that I am not the only person to wonder about the possibility of a contrived existence. Sure enough, as I enter university and my intellectual horizons broaden, I learn that this idea has occurred to many people, including Ludwig Wittgenstein, Woody Allen, Kurt Vonnegut, and Bob Barker. At first blush, it seems implausible that if life had indeed been orchestrated as an elaborate deception of me, that the planet would be sprinkled with philosophers, satirists, and game show hosts asking the very same sort of questions that I myself am asking. Upon further reflection, though, I conclude that this might itself be part of the deception, the sort of misdirection that the shrewdest of puppeteers would employ.
So, over the course of my young adulthood, I search unceasingly for examples of inconsistencies that could expose the fraud. I scrutinize the comments of my friends to see whether they reveal facts that they could not have known, search for bargains that are too good to be true, and, of course, keep a sharp eye out for recurrences of the visage of my calculus teacher, Mr. Mudwinder.
I find no hard evidence to support my suspicions but nevertheless remain leery. Optimists confuse me. How could Evel Knievel and Amelia Earhart think for even a moment that they would make it? People with religious conviction make no sense to me whatsoever, except the Baptists, who seem resigned to enduring the worst that life has to offer. I am especially mistrustful of other Christians, particularly Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and those insufferable Quakers, who maintain an unrelenting faith in the positive direction of life that seems, to me at least, fundamentally incompatible with independent, rational thought.