“You don’t really want to try that, do you?”
“I might,” Robyn said. “But it sounds kind of dangerous.”
“I’ll go to Tibet with you if you promise not to conjure up imaginary beings.”
“Who said tulpas were imaginary? They just come from another plane of existence.”
“Sometimes it’s hard to tell what is real and what isn’t,” I admitted. I was looking at the ceiling of the mall with its high-res video display. It appeared that there was no roof at all and that we were looking up into a beautiful azure sky, the same sky I had once become when I fell out of a tree.
“None of this is real,” Robyn said with great confidence, sweeping her arm in a wide arc. “It’s very, very thin. These people are leading trivial lives. They have little substance.”
I tried to keep up my end of the conversation, which now seemed to be about density. I had remembered reading something while in my bathroom at home. My dad would leave science articles on the video screen in the bathroom and I’d get caught up reading about the latest wonder drugs or long-distance laser surgery or even stuff about space. “Do you know anything about neutron soup?”
“Does it have tofu in it?” she asked.
“No. It’s in space. It’s made up of collapsed matter. It becomes compacted together and incredibly dense, so dense that some of it the size of a cube of sugar would weigh a thousand million tons.”
“So that’s what happens to collapsed matter,” she said perfectly matter-of-factly, and I couldn’t tell whether she was genuinely interested or just joking.
“On the other hand, a neutrino has virtually no mass at all and every day we are bombarded with neutrinos hurling around in space. They pass right through us, right through the earth as if it isn’t even here.”
“That’s because this is all an illusion.”
The video screen in the front of the Gap store caught my attention. Three-D human images kept taking clothes off and putting on new duds. One minute, a girl would be totally naked and the next she’d be putting on the latest designer top and pants. Some little kids were staring at it and laughing. The display was very sexual and I was thinking it was making me horny so I turned away.
Robyn noticed that I was uncomfortable. “You are different, aren’t you? You’re shy, too, right?”
“Sort of.”
“Do you like me?”
“Yes.”
“Enough to go to Tibet with me?”
“Maybe. But I need to get to know you first.”
“Did you know that in the seventeenth century, many people believed that every time you had sex, it took a day off your life? You’d die a day sooner?”
“That would make you think twice about doing it.”
“You’re funny, you know that?”
And then she kissed me. I closed my eyes and I was someplace else. I don’t know exactly where I was, but wherever it was, it sure wasn’t the mall.
CHAPTER SIX
I liked Robyn’s suggestion that it was all an illusion and I liked Robyn a lot. It was really fortunate that I connected with her as soon as she arrived at school. My hair was growing back already, creating a kind of fuzzy stubble. I’d given up on wearing black and wondered what would be next for me. I was like an insect going from the larval phase into something else, I figured. No, not a butterfly, that was for sure. But a metamorphosis nonetheless.
One of my childhood dreams was that someday I would figure out how to travel through time. I understood that all you had to do was travel faster than the speed of light and you could alter time, but no one was offering me a clue about FTL travel. Except my father, that is, who took my question to heart in his clinical, scientific way.
“You want to travel back in time? Not satisfied with the here and now?”
“The here and now, as you call it, sometimes sucks. I don’t want to go back to ancient Egypt. I just want to see what it would be like to be alive, um, say, twenty years ago.”
His brow furrowed as if some small excavating machine had just carved a canyon across his forehead. “Why twenty years ago?”
I didn’t really have an answer. I just had this fascination with everything from the turn of the century. The millennium, as they called it — the year 2000 and the ten years leading up to it. “I think everything was simpler then. Things made sense.”
“Trust me. Things made about as much sense then as they do now. Some people thought the world would end at midnight on December 31, 1999.”
“Maybe it did. Maybe this is all an illusion.” I had bought into Robyn’s theory at least in part. She was now my mentor.
“You’re going to tell me that all matter is made up of 99.9 percent empty space, right?” My father sounded slightly sarcastic but not insulting.
“I was thinking along those lines.”
“That we’re all just bundles of energy, and there really is no such thing as matter?”
“That too.”
“Dylan, I think you should study quantum physics. You’d like it.”
My father often said that he wanted me to go to university and study physics or biochemistry. I wanted to be an entomologist, however. It was an ongoing debate. “If I study quantum physics, could I figure out how to travel faster than the speed of light?”
“You could give it a shot.”
“Then I’ll consider it. What sort of equipment would I need for FTL travel?”
“You’d need a lot of energy would be my guess. If you could get yourself into space and build a spacecraft that was strong enough, then detonate a contained one-hundred-megaton nuclear explosion that could push you out of the solar system, you might, and I say might, approach the speed of light, but I don’t think you could make it work.”
“But if I could, it would alter time, right?”
“Somewhat. But the blast would probably kill you.”
“That’s the downside, eh?”
“Real down.”
“Can’t I just create some kind of force field with my mind and travel back in time?”
“And what kind of force field would that be?” My father could be a bucket of cold water at times.
“I’m not sure. But I’d like to go back to that night of December 31, 1999, or maybe sometime in 1995.”
“Why do you want to go back to the year 1995? That was before you were born.”
“I don’t know. I just think I’d be more at home there.”
“Do you realize how slow computers were then? How primitive the WorldCom was?”
“It was called the Internet back then, remember? The World Wide Web.”
“It was like a tortoise. And everything was two dimensional — video screens, comp monitors, cinascreens. You’d be bored out of your gourd.”
“I am bored out of my gourd — sometimes, anyway.”
“You’re sixteen, Dylan. It’s