Chris Vanjonack is an MFA candidate at the University of Illinois and a former language arts teacher from Fort Collins, Colorado. His fiction has appeared in One Story, The Rumpus, The Boiler, and elsewhere. Read more at chrisvanjonack.com.
Fourth period, during science class—ninth grade with Mrs. Kalipsky—you somehow manage to open an interdimensional portal underneath Ethan Paswaters’s desk that swallows him whole and sends him hurtling into an alternate reality where everything is basically the same as this one except for the grass smells rancid and his mother looks at him strangely, and in the split second between the portal opening and the chaos that follows, you realize with joy and horror that you are a science fiction inventor.
“How did you do that?” Kalipsky demands, frightened, you assume, because with a rubber band, three paper clips, and a miniature electric motor you have surpassed, in seconds, her wildest ambitions for herself and for the future.
“I don’t know,” you say. “With science?”
“If it happens again, you’re getting a referral,” Kalipsky says, legs shaking, as rescue workers in hazmat suits file towards the polychromatic swirling gateway overtaking the back half of the classroom. The workers hop one by one into the void, tethered by rope to each other and to Mrs. Kalipsky’s desk. The principal tells everyone to stay home for a week, and the rescue crew doesn’t emerge with Ethan until six days later. They hold a press conference the next morning. Ethan is fine, they say. No toxins in his bloodstream. No injuries. The only issue is he’s lost all interest in race cars, and also, they concede, his relationship with his mother might be pretty fucked up for a while. “Otherwise it was an uneventful trip,” one says. They’re unable to account for the additional member of their search party who came back with them and they keep asking where Hubert Humphrey is, agitated that he might hurt somebody.
“But he’s dead,” says a reporter.
“Like that even really means anything,” scoffs a hazmat.
You watch all this from the den in your living room and Dad says, “Fuck yeah.” Now that the kid’s all right he wants to celebrate, and that night he takes you out to dinner at Hardee’s. He buys you an ice cream cone and a slab of french fries and tells you that he’s proud of you.
“But I didn’t do anything,” you say.
“Listen kid,” says your father, mouth full of cheeseburger. “You sure as shit did something.”
You have a great and awful power, you realize, and you are just getting started.
. . .
In the years following this incident you invent everything—or at least nearly everything—you can imagine.
Junior year of high school, you produce a small metallic chip that, when planted into a person’s neck, allows them to see a flash-before-their-eyes montage of their future with anyone they come into physical contact with, a gold-ribbon science fair submission that leads to the premature termination of Mr. Neilson’s marriage. Your first year of undergrad, visiting home on weekends as your father wastes away from cancer, you indulge his love of Gene Roddenberry. “Now build a holodeck,” he gasps. “A tractor beam.” For your graduate thesis, you create a ray gun, which—you assure campus security—does not destroy so much as obliterate life, erasing a living organism from existence and sending it back in time into the airy zero-gravity of its mother’s womb.
You invent with dizzying productivity, utilizing artificial intelligence, parallel timelines, and slightly less gifted clones to maximize your output, creating and creating and creating throughout the multiverse with nary a sense of limitation, until, of course, you fall in love.
And it’s fucking incredible.
Your productivity decreases dramatically. You spend long stretches of time on the sofa, in the bedroom, in parks. You jet throughout the galaxy. Zip across time. She shows you her hometown; you show her photos of your father. All the answers you’ve been searching for as a science fiction inventor are right there in her eyes, in the way she looks at you, a look that remains constant for months, years even, until one day—subtly at first—it begins to diminish, and you find that you need—do not want, do not desire, need—a device that lets you see the world as she sees it, that lets her feel the way you feel.
“Well?” you ask, on the first attempt, sitting atop your twin-sized mattress, having both ingested an experimental tablet, touching fingertips. “Do you understand now? Why I got so upset the other night? While we were watching Criminal Minds? About the microwave?”
She smiles, sort of, a little one, sad. “No,” she says. “I’m sorry. Do you get why I’m not ready to move in just yet?”
If it were working, you’d understand, hug her so close it’d be like you share the same body, but it’s not working, and you don’t get it, and in fact you’re still kind of pissed at her, and so you say, coldly, “I’ll be up late tonight.”
Nine months later, after 105 failed attempts, the situation is becoming desperate. Neither of you wants to fight but you just keep fighting. In fact, the fights are getting worse. Louder. More frequent. You’re saying shit to each other that the next morning you cannot even believe. It’s a race against the clock. You’re not sleeping. You’re distracted. You’re doing mediocre work on even the most perfunctory of science fiction inventions, can hardly even string together a teleporter.
“This isn’t working,” she tells you.
“But it will,” you say.
And it needs to, because if you can’t make this work, then who are you, anyway? Your identity is so wrapped up in this that, Jesus, if it doesn’t, how could you even live with yourself? You trash the newest model and start over. This time you’ll get it right, you think. This time, you’ll find that missing piece of the equation that will allow her to feel love and see colors the way that you felt love and saw colors at Red Rocks last night, tripping mushrooms and feeling melancholy at a Sharon Van Etten concert, standing in the cool otherworldly mist of the season’s first snow, unable to shake the notion that the left side of your body is more alive than the right, zoning out and blissed out and wishing she was beside you, and, in imagining her, somehow conjuring the nervous scrape of her fingers against your palm during the final seconds of a Jets game, and she is smiling, nervous, a smile that you can only articulate the nuance of when you are hooked up to your Language-Perfector Helmet. You want so badly for her to feel an approximation of how you were feeling: unable to finish a sentence, unable to move, unable to unpack the privilege of tripping mushrooms and feeling melancholy at a Sharon Van Etten concert at Red Rocks; unable to complete your work on a device, that will, when finished—God willing, one day—project you both into an empty room, with no windows, no doors, and no context, the walls white and bare, just your shells and the way you love each other. Because there is so much love. And there is sadness, too, and frustration, and anger, and pain, but all of it is outweighed by the love, and even though you both know this, you need to feel it, goddamn it, you need to feel it from each other.
“You,” you say, not in an empty room with no windows, no doors, and no context, but in a regular room, a messy room, your room, incapable of expressing how you are feeling at the tail end of another screaming match, and as you draw this syllable out into oblivion using your Moment-Elongator Machine, you’re not sure how many times you’ve put the ray gun to your chest, pulled the trigger, and disintegrated into the ether, only to awake in the airy void of your mother’s uterus and then to slide into the airy void of modest privilege and then to sleepwalk all the way back to this moment in your regular room, your messy room, your room, alone with her, and with the cat and the dog.
“Obliterate me,” you say, and you will start again until you get it right.
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