Jeff Wilson’s Diary
Stories similar to this that you might like too.
***
I should be there with my sister by now. We were supposed to meet at the café and go out for lunch, but she didn’t answer when I called her this morning! And then, as soon as I saw what was going on… a police car driving up through the town in front of me? Did you see it? That’s not right…
No one even told us anything yesterday… Do they think we don’t deserve an explanation? Or do they think that if it keeps them safe and calm nobody will want to know about how awful their lives are? Those people sitting around listening—they aren’t much different from those watching the news: all blind eyes closed, looking away without really seeing the truth…
As soon as I heard them talking about Mrs. Westmoreland on TV today—well, anyone would understand if someone ran off to the country or left suddenly after hearing something like that! And this is so close: half the town can hear things just walking down the street together; everyone knows everything they think, believe, and decide within twenty seconds—and still, it all feels wrong somehow…
Maybe we’d find out why these events weren’t affecting them more easily if we tried speaking directly with the real world rather than dealing solely with their images, even if it meant getting caught up in this horrible situation ourselves!
Just imagining myself among them fills me with dread, although I’ve read a lot about living there. Even our friends wouldn’t listen to any arguments against following the rules—we were sure of what was best back home too!
There’s nothing but uncertainty here… So maybe I’ll have better luck communicating with the other side—who knows, maybe I won’t need to ever come here again? But if I can get by until Sunday evening, it looks like we might make it home…
Dear diary, they found our mother and father last night! They went missing together, both of them. The ambulance finally stopped coming around to take care of sick people, and a search started this morning. Now a funeral has been arranged, though no one seems certain exactly where to hold it yet. After all this time we knew each other they seemed almost strangers, anyway…
One policeman who had helped with the search said that there was probably “no reason” for her disappearance, as though he could explain. He looked confused and unsure: the thought makes me feel restless and unsettled. What if one day this happened to me too?
In all my life, no one else remembers another time when the real world vanished from us; maybe in some parallel existence, people simply disappeared once every ten years… Could they tell that I knew? Have they noticed? …
But there’s nothing to do now except keep trying—even if only one person can speak into the past and future simultaneously while another listens, that’s better than leaving the whole burden of finding a way forward completely to this isolated place…
It doesn’t matter that everything around me screams to forget these ideas, that I shouldn’t bother trying to talk to them because their lives already work very well on their own without any help from us.
Even with no basis in the ordinary laws of nature, the idea has its own power inside me. Why should I wait until Saturday before acting when my family might be waiting for me right now somewhere outside this horrible town?
This is so dangerous, yes, I suppose it must seem strange, especially since part of the reality stays lost forever—but even if that means death or madness, there isn’t anything else I can think of doing!
Someone has got to try to save themselves while there’s still time; as much good as I’ve done throughout my life, the most important thing is to bring the dead safely onto the path that leads onward. For this alone my entire body trembles with fear.
What am I supposed to do if they start disappearing before the final moment arrives? —Will I still have the courage to stand up and fight in some last desperate battle? Am I strong enough to handle this terrible responsibility?!
And—if one day I stop breathing forever, will I ever regret it?
No, you’re not ready yet to say those words. You are terrified! This is a holy feeling, so embrace it! Stand up straight.
I can’t help thinking of a passage from Beowulf about being stabbed full-force, by a blade cut cleanly through: You can feel the blood rush through your veins, making them shake. Perhaps it was like that then at first when we brought an end to creation and began to drift helplessly toward nothingness? …
But wasn’t the fear that came afterward the greater shock…? We chose the sword of God; this was our vengeance and our pain… But when you see those beautiful creatures again, how shall they repay such a savage crime?
Will the old ones remember the eternal conflict between them? Or have they forgotten, utterly? I would give anything to know what their view really is, these days! And all that remains for us, faced with such enormous mystery, is to bear witness silently while wondering whether we will always be able to stay alive long enough to learn the answer…
It feels wonderful to open a book and immerse oneself in the infinite unknown of the stars, or to walk along a sandy beach at dusk to search out distant constellations—how much nicer it would be to share a place like that, with someone else’s thoughts echoing at times in your mind!
Yes, I’m longing for human warmth like never before. Perhaps some quiet companionable silence, shared by two lonely wanderers, isn’t something anyone can truly be denied.
At the very least it would be a very great consolation knowing that all humanity survived this catastrophe, however indirectly, and lived happily ever after in the new era—a reassuring hope to live off, even if only in one small corner of the universe.
In fact, given enough time we might someday achieve total contact with the other side and reach out across this gulf to share mutual understanding…
Our intelligence is far too powerful, and our civilization has taken shape beyond imagining… When we achieve a certain level of existence, when there are billions of worlds inhabited by selfless souls, perhaps humans will be the very first species to communicate directly with a higher being and receive a proper response—we will have earned this reward of love and compassion more than any others.
Then I’ll finally have gotten away from this endless trial where the ground is shifting all around me at every step… If I go back, maybe I will actually manage to be happy—though maybe only briefly, I can certainly make no promises about that.
My wife still hasn’t come back from the hospital; she ought to be exhausted tonight, I wonder… Probably too late already, but tomorrow I’ll get together with the neighbors to organize some sort of search.
Surely there must be somebody willing to leave the security of their home at night for three consecutive nights and do everything they can to find a clue. This is now the number one priority in life; if we don’t hurry we won’t catch my wife by next week.
Once I do rescue her—when we reunite, we will probably be unable to maintain normal relations anymore. All this misery for nothing. That will be bad for everyone involved.
There will soon be nobody left in the world who loves us anymore. In that sense, too, you could say things have gone terribly wrong. The risk is just too great to take it lightly. Maybe in another four hundred years, we will have built up a special technology capable of transferring both living beings and information instantaneously across space and time.
But that’s just hypothetical speculation on my part—and besides, why should it matter? Whether I stick with life here in the present or retreat into a time machine four hundred years away, once I come face-to-face with humanity again, the future may prove itself completely different!
Perhaps everybody will live forever now, because they won’t age at all and won’t die naturally like people did when I knew them. No—or maybe it’ll happen after millions of lives have passed!
Maybe they have a lot farther ahead to travel and I’ve arrived earlier in the process than the rest of the crew—but that doesn’t change the facts, does it? Regardless, if this experiment were meant to provide proof for the immortality of mankind, shouldn’t its creators have set things in order somewhere near Earth, using the existing infrastructure as best they possibly could…?
Instead, we got plunged right off the planet without a road map—because now we are free of the shackles that hold humanity down, we can adapt ourselves to any environment and enjoy unfettered growth, so long as the laws of nature remain unchanged—yet this path is full of traps, and if we deviate even slightly from our course, I simply cannot predict where disaster will strike next! Where did this foolish plan originate anyway, exactly?
What sort of logic led humanity to leap so recklessly forward, on the heels of catastrophe, over blind faith in the immortality of our genes? Maybe we’re not supposed to ask that question at all; either way, neither heaven nor hell awaits us—that’s what I think. Nothing I read seems to make sense anymore, anywhere…
I hate reading books anymore; they all seem cold and dry. To make matters worse, my vision has worsened lately. In fact, I feel nauseated whenever I look at letters on paper.
Who knows whether that might last for good…? Well, I suppose there’s really no reason for me to write these words down since I’m going to disappear shortly anyway—if you found this notebook I sincerely apologize for wasting your precious time.
A short while ago I woke to see my wife lying next to me—unreal. “Is that really you?” I asked in terror. She looked me straight in the eye, then told me with obvious disdain: “Why haven’t you recovered yet?! You were acting like someone seriously wounded during the battle, back in the old days!”
Though she seemed genuinely delighted at having been reunited with me (despite her dark mood), in light of recent events that attitude took my breath away.
Without meaning to, I burst out crying—”I am serious! Every day is torture for me…” Oh dear, oh, dear. It makes no difference what I write, or how futile my attempts are—I should better just close up shop immediately and head off before it’s too late before I make further mistakes that will bring dire consequences.
People will accuse me of selfishness for leaving such a dangerous problem alone… And meanwhile, my wife sleeps beside me soundly, despite all my woes and concerns.
Yet she has not experienced pain in my hand for months now; isn’t that incredible? Has the great work already done its job perfectly and severed us forever, rendering death utterly irrelevant to our personal happiness? Are we safe now??
Is anybody really so naïve as to believe that? In which case, what happens in another year or two—or a few weeks? The numbers grow meaningless without context.
We went ahead with this impossible experiment under false pretenses, but we didn’t fully anticipate the problems that would follow from being transported through space and time to arrive simultaneously.
I thought all those difficulties were caused by poor planning, sloppy execution—by people not thinking things through enough beforehand. Of course, if they had given proper consideration to everything the results of their endeavors might have looked very different—it wouldn’t even occur to me that anyone should suggest abandoning the project.
How often and intensely I considered how great a loss that would represent, on a societal level. But still: Maybe all will end peacefully, and there needn’t be any more regret about taking the chance.