Ideally, Part III

I am a cliché standing in the rain. My cell phone battery died when the thunder started. I pulled off the highway with thick white hail pounding on the hood of my car, the windshield whipers whining against the glass. The world made a sound like drums.

Finally, I thought, I get to give up. I get to turn back and go home. I couldn’t drive, not in this weather, and my cell phone was dead, giving me no way to contact the boss. At last I had good reason to give up his stupid quest. And so I laughed, pulling into the nearest parking lot as the sky lit up electric. This was the worst job I ever had.

But then I heard the church bells, their clamor a contrast to the thunder. The hail cleared, giving way to the kind of rain that inspires rain sticks, a light shower of drops that sound like fingers rapping rhythmically against a table. Now I could see the building next to me: an ornate church with confused architecture, a gothic spire atop a square stone building with plastic-looking awnings, and a large simple sign reading “Chronology.”

I swore under my breath. This is where I was supposed to be. And now I stand, depressed in the rain: pathetically, fallaciously, riding on the fumes of hope that here I would find ideas.

The religious man inside the church wears thick cologne and is overweight. His moustache is the neatest part about him in more ways than one. He has a permanent smile on his face but his eyes dart around suspiciously. He runs his hands through his hair too much, like he so wants me to notice and appreciate how not-bald he is at middle age. I do notice, but I’m not impressed. I don’t like this man.

“I hear this project of yours is really innovative,” I say, hoping to capture his attention.

“Chronology, sir,” — he stresses the sir — “is no mere project. Chronology is the first scientific faith. Chronology is truth, extending for real and tested physical and temporal studies. Those who hear us, understand us. Those who understand us, understand life. Those who understand life, take control of their lives. The only project I’m a part of is helping people do that.”

He points at me when he talks, his voice accusing, his forehead sweating. It’s like he’s expecting me to sneer, grab him by the lapels of his tacky robe and call him a phony, a fraud and a liar. I don’t, though. I’m too tired.

“So how does it work, Chronology? What do you teach?”

He smiles suddenly and looks me in the eyes. He thinks he has me, I realize, and fight the urge to laugh. He launches into a speech that he’s probably recited dozens of times before.

“I teach and I preach. They are separate and distinct, but equally important elements of what I do here. Chronology is the understood belief that time is dimensional, just like space. But while it’s easy for us to understand the length, width, height and depth of this room, for instance, it’s much harder to comprehend the time of this room. What has happened is not gone — it’s still happening. Five minutes ago, when you ran across the parking lot in the rain, that’s still happening. Because it’s part of the timeline of your life, of my life, of this building’s life.”

His words bounce up and down. Water still drips down my face. He’s excited to be speaking now, his passion for this — whatever it is — comes through as sincere. It’s like he doesn’t want to stop.

“It’s like a river, you see. Your life is like a river and you are floating down that river, with the current, in a little boat, but the key behind Chronology is recognizing that just because you went around a bend and have left a part of the river behind, that part of the river still exists. That time you spent going down that part of the river? It still exists. And it matters. In fact, you can make connections with those parts you’ve experienced to strengthen your experiences in the future. And that is what I teach.”

He stops and waits for me to respond with questions. I have none. Time is like a river, I think — that idea’s been done. It’s been done to death.

“And you preach?” I prompt.

“I preach different levels of things, all about harnessing that past experience that is not really in the past insofar as it is always occurring in four-dimensional space. I preach that people can, through transcendent, pure and directed thought, send messages across the timestream, thus altering their emotions, hopefully for the better. To put it in easily-understood terms: you can talk to your past-self, and make him perceive things differently than you did when you first experienced that part of time.”

I hear foot-steps behind me. A small mousy woman, also clad in a tacky robe emblazoned with a clock face, holds a towel, offering it meekly to me. I thank her and wipe the water off my face.

“Perfect example,” he says smugly, nodding at the woman. “You came in here miserable, thinking about how wet you were, how uncomfortable. But now you’ve got a towel. So if you focus — if you concentrate real hard — you can send a message across time, to your five-minutes-ago self, just entering this building, and tell him not to worry, a towel’s coming. And he’ll be happier than you were — though they’re both you — and that feeling will progress back across time, to you.”

“Okay,” I respond to this grinning man, “but isn’t that just me happy that I have a towel now? Happy to be drier?”

“No! No,” he dismisses my question like a room full of students at recess. “The key difference is that that would imply a certain quality of happiness only now — from this point on in the river ride. Chronology seeks to increase levels of happiness, security, motivation and satisfaction over the course of the whole river ride. So that when you get to the end, you can look back and remember no waves.”

I just stare blankly at the religious man, shuffling back and forth across the church floor, brimming with excitement. I keep my other comments to myself: So you confuse people until they give you money?, Isn’t this from a Sci-Fi movie?, Is it really an honour to be leader of the crazies?” But instead I just stand there, waiting, pretty sure he’ll talk again.

He does. “Even I am still learning just how far this amazing principle extends. Do you ever have moments where you’re maybe driving down the street and suddenly you have a terrible and tragic image of yourself, turning the heel suddenly, careening into traffic, hearing the crunch of metal? Do you ever have images of that that just seem so real? That is the highest point of Chronology — renovating time like you’d renovate a room to make it bigger. The you further into the timestream makes a mistake, like hurtling into traffic, and then communicates with you, appearing as a voice in your head, telling you not to do it, and then you don’t — but sometimes the image is still there, because the timestream is changing.”

“It’s a river and a stream?” I ask.

“A river and a stream and a room and a galaxy!” he grins. “It is everything. Do you understand the vast potential? If we can harness this communication across time, we could all change our pasts, alter events, better ourselves, better the world. I am offering not only a religion of personal growth, but of world peace.”

He smacks his hands together in summation. The sound echoes off the high ceiling. I pause and fiddle with the pen in my breast pocket, thinking about this odd man’s words.

“It’s original,” I conclude, ‘but kind of stupid.”

His demeanor immediately changes. His smile remains the same, but his eyes become shifty, his movements agitated. I’m the enemy again.

“I thank you for coming. I hope your boss will be interested in your report,” he says sharply.

I wave abruptly and he leaves. I should have charged my cell phone, I think, cursing myself inside my head. I’m alone in the church, and I can still hear the rain outside. I finger the dead phone in my pocket, wishing I had had the foresight. My footsteps are loud as I walk slowly towards the exit door. The mousy woman is waiting for me, clutching a jacket to her chest. She looks at me wide-eyed and scared. I try to smile but I’m in no mood.

“So do you feel it?” she asks. “Do you feel the past happening? Do you see the river?”

My cellphone’s ringing and I don’t know why. I pick it up as I walk past the woman, not acknowledging her questions.

I step outside but stand under the awning. The water cascades off the roof edge and onto the ground like a waterfall. My boss yells my name.

“What do you have? Do you have something?” he demands, prepared for cynicism.

“I don’t know, boss. This place is pretty out there. The whole thing seems kind of shaky. Original, I guess, but shaky.”

“You were supposed to call when you got there! Before you went in!” He never regulates the volume of his voice, my boss.

“My phone died. Battery was totally dead. Truth be told, boss, I pretty much planned to just go home. I had no way of getting in touch with you. I really have no idea why this started working again, I was cursing myself inside for not remembering to charge it…”

I pause as it hits me. I whirl and look back at the church door. There’s a stained glass window above it, designed to look like a stylized clock. I wished I had charged my cellphone earlier. “Oh, fuck you,” I say to the church.

My boss is confused. “What?” he asks. “Why?”

“Nevermind, boss,” I say, looking back at the rain again. “Look, I don’t think there’s anything here, but I think the rain is letting up, so I’m going to come back to the office and type up a report for you. Maybe you’ll see something I don’t.”

“It really doesn’t matter if it’s stupid,” he says. “I just need the ideas. You know that.”

“Is this really the best we can do?”