Self-Reference Engine Read online

  I stared at him, my mouth wide open. Not because I was so impressed. Just because I could absolutely not believe he was saying that. What did a kid have to eat to grow up thinking things like that? I knew Jay liked corn flakes, and starting tomorrow I was never going to eat them again. And I would skip the yogurt too. Actually, I think it’s kind of funny that people even think of corn flakes as food.

  Jay pointed his index finger straight at my open mouth and said, “This is where it starts to get interesting.

  “As of right now, the time that we are in, she hasn’t been shot yet. She has no experience of having been shot. She is just a girl with a bullet in her head.

  “The reason why she keeps shooting all over the place is this: She will be okay as long as she shoots the person who is going to shoot her before she herself gets shot. Relative to her, he should be in the future, so she should just keep shooting at the future. Luckily, bullets normally move in the direction of the future. Or at least, it’s easier than shooting at the past.”

  He’s got a point there, I thought. He might be a pretty smart guy, but really he’s a complete idiot. And there has only ever been one way to deal with idiots. Just go along with whatever they say, or you’ll regret it.

  “And what if she succeeds in killing that ‘sniper in the future’?”

  “I hope she does,” he said, nodding pompously.

  “So, what’s going to happen to the bullet in her head?”

  “There are different ways of thinking about that. One possibility is that it will just stay there like it was nothing at all. What I think is more likely, though, is that the past will be changed so that the bullet in her head just disappears. She was born wherever it is that she was born, and at some point that could go all meta-time and turn out that way. But of course, we won’t know what’s really going to happen until it happens.”

  “I can’t really imagine what happened the instant she was shot.”

  “Probably…” Jay started to say, thinking, his index finger propped against his temple. Then he took his finger away, along a line that would pierce his head, but moving away. “We should be able to see it this way. A bullet is flying out of Rita’s head, in the wrong direction, and enters the muzzle of the sniper’s gun, going backward the whole way. Then it enters the muzzle, and the magazine turns the wrong way, and the hammer goes up.”

  I was having trouble with this.

  “But, I mean, if Rita has a bullet in her head, it must be because she got shot, right?”

  “But the thing that could change that would be…” Jay responded, going to pieces again, “my role, because I am in love with her!”

  My good friend has a crush on a strange girl. This seems a bit odd to me, but that’s love for you. It’s just something that happens, but when it’s your best friend you start to make some really bizarre and twisted rationalizations about what is happening. Of course, if you really want to know what is going on in Rita’s crazy head, you’d be better off asking Rita herself. I’m sure it wouldn’t be some story about a bullet from the future. You might even say the only important question was whether or not Rita even likes Jay.

  Ever since Jay finished explaining his “hypothesis” and burst into tears, I’ve been wondering just that. What does Rita say? Jay turned bright red, grabbed a fistful of grass and tossed it aside, and ran away, so I never found out the details. But there is no reason to think anyone could ever ask anything so directly of a guy whose thoughts were so tangled. He might even be thinking he should take a knife and cut Rita’s skull open, just to be sure.

  So, resigning myself to the possibility of sacrificing a testicle, I decided to call on Rita at her house. Two would be too much, but one I could probably live without, for my good friend’s sake. I just thought of Rita as a girl whose head was screwed on the wrong way, but I was pretty sure I could count on her not to do anything so stupid as to shoot off both my testicles.

  The Rita who greeted me at the door, far from being the kind of person who would threaten to tear me a new asshole if I didn’t leave right away, invited me politely, even demurely, into the living room. Somehow there was a poor meshing, like a loosened spring, in the air. I could not relax, as if while holding a watch with the back removed someone had told me to do a backflip.

  As I sat there, shifting my weight on the seat from one butt cheek to the other, wondering how to start this conversation, Rita came back in with tea. She set a cup before me, her thumb stuck in it, and said, “I heard.”

  “Heard what?” I asked.

  “From James,” she went on, looking straight back at me.

  I had not anticipated this, and I was flustered. Which story, exactly, had Jay told her? The highly colorful tale that he was in love with her? Or the fantastically colorless tale that she was moving backward through time? Or had he come and danced before her and blabbed that I was the one in love with her? At the thought that the last of these ideas was actually the most likely, a chill ran down my spine. I had the feeling this was going to cost me more than just one testicle.

  “It’s true,” she said, hanging her head.

  I couldn’t figure out which of the possibilities she might mean.

  “The reason I shoot recklessly is just as James suspects.”

  Immediately upon hearing those words, the cry that arose in my heart was, I did it! I’m going to live! And in that spirit, I adjusted my posture in my seat, and as Rita’s words spread through my brain, I somehow slid halfway out of my chair. Mr. Messed-Up. That’s no way to get a girl to like you.

  As I struggled to crawl back up out of the chair, I rummaged desperately through my brain for the right words, the words she would want to hear, the words that would keep her from shooting me on the spot.

  “What I mean to say is, that’s it, I mean, you’re it!”

  To be honest, I was completely unnerved. Rita gave the chair a good yank and left me sprawling on the floor. It took me a while to pull myself together again and stand up straight.

  “I didn’t realize there was someone else who shared the same conclusion as me.” I thought Jay was the smartest guy in the Western Hemisphere, but how was I to know the smartest girl in the Western Hemisphere would be right in the same neighborhood? What an idiot this one is!

  “So, what I want is for you to tell Jay that on, let’s say, this Friday, how would he like to come to dinner at my house?”

  That super-syllogistic sentence completely failed to penetrate my awareness. What was the need for a dinner party at Rita’s haunted house, where everything was heaps of shards, dripping with unidentified fluids?

  Knitting my brow, propping my index fingers on my temples, I concentrated with all my might. When I lifted my head, thinking I had failed the quiz, right in front of me was Rita’s face, her cheeks bright red.

  What could it be? This marvel of a girl, who could accurately and repeatedly shoot holes in the acorns in a woodpecker’s hoard, was in love with someone.

  If I could just figure out who, that person would get shot full of holes. So who was going to get that hornet’s nest? Jay was.

  Realizing my own stupidity, I pounded my forehead with the palm of my hand. Of course it was Jay. The smartest guy on the planet. For me an auspicious realization, for Jay a killing blow. I would have to keep a close eye on her, but thoughts of praise for Rita coursed through my head: the bitch had really worked things out, etc., etc. No reason he wouldn’t show up to dinner, I guarantee it. If it seems like he’s not going to show up, but then finally he does, I guarantee he’ll never go home again, no matter what. Well, he really should be saying this himself—it’s not for me to say; well, but maybe it is though, really, surely. I was all confused and just babbling away to fill the time, words all ajumble. I tried to stop, when Rita reached out for her revolver and then staggered as if she had been struck by something.

  I was full, full to overflowing from sitting so long, continuing to confront directly this unprocessable development. Unable to figure ou
t what was what, I bolted up from my chair and ran over to Rita, who was dancing a strange dance and slowly dropping to the floor.

  Looking down at her, lying on the ground, her long hair strewn about, only then did I notice the small hole in her head.

  She had a bullet in her head.

  And not just that, James. She had an actual hole in her head.

  This was the moment when it happened.

  Looking back now, I realize that the instant it happened overlapped precisely with the Event. If that much harm and that much tragedy had not condensed in the world at precisely that moment, I would still have recognized what happened there as an event. But that’s not how it was. What happened there was a derivative offshoot of the Event and not the Event itself.

  I bent over to peer into the hole in Rita’s head, and just at that moment, Rita’s body bent straight upward. I dodged, reflexively, then sprang up and reached out both hands to Rita, as one would to pet a dog.

  Rita’s eyes swam to blankness, and then she reversed direction in time.

  From all walls and the floor of the room, reddish-black fluid came flying at Rita’s head, rushing at the little hole in it. And then, I could see, in slow motion, the butt end of the little bullet emerging backward from the hole, heading at me. At least, I felt like I could see it. All the blood flying through the air toward Rita’s head was suctioned into her skull, and the hole became whole and disappeared.

  I am unable to explain what happened next. The little plug that exploded from Rita’s head pierced the left side of my chest, and I lost consciousness.

  All I know is that the explosion from Rita’s revolver had put things back in order. Rita picked up the gun, and then this and that went on among our relatives. I don’t know the details.

  Jay was a step ahead of us arriving at the hospital. The strange tinge of fantasy had disappeared from his face, but neither could I see any trace of the shyness he had shown before I went to talk to Rita.

  “What were you thinking, going off on your own to that nutty girl’s place,” he said, grilling me. “How could you let her have a gun?” he asked her family indignantly. And then he turned on Rita scornfully: “Why can’t you handle a gun?”

  Something had certainly changed.

  “In her head…” I started to say. “She had a bullet, right here.”

  I stared straight at Jay, holding my finger to my temple.

  “Are you okay?” he said back to me. “Nobody just walks around with a bullet in their head.”

  I blinked twice and fell silent.

  The reason why I was okay, despite being shot on the left side of my chest? Well, do I really have to say? The five-dollar coin that Jay had given me. It was all too banal, so I didn’t pursue it any further. Most things that happen are like that. Five dollars is enough to stop a bullet. Of course, the all-bent-out-of-shape coin I gave to Jay would be a fantastic talisman.

  Later I tried to think long and hard about what had happened. The bullet that emerged from Rita’s head had headed straight back to the future, and it should have gone straight back to the muzzle of the gun that fired it.

  But, for whatever reason, I stood in the line of fire, and the backward-coursing bullet struck me.

  If the bullet had gone right through me, there would be no problem at all. I would have died, then and there, and the bullet would have returned to the shooter. Instead, the bullet had stopped in my breast pocket, and I had ended its life.

  So, the problem here is in the direction of the bullet’s entry. If a bullet from the future could shoot Rita, it would have to have gone through my back. But it hit me in the chest and stopped there. My back was uninjured. In other words, Rita had not been shot. I had stopped the bullet that should have returned to the future, and it had not returned to the shooter. In other words, the shooter had not fired it.

  This distortion of the structure of time probably hesitated for no more than an instant, and then it chose the simplest solution. Rita had not been shot. Therefore, no bullet had entered Rita’s head. In other words, Jay had nothing to fret about. I had simply gone to Rita’s house for no particular reason and been felled by Rita’s bullet. That’s it.

  Now, if Rita had no bullet in her head, Jay had no reason to like her, and Rita had no reason to be interested in Jay if he wasn’t thinking the same things she was about the bullet. They might have come to like each other in the future, but somewhere in the direction of the day after tomorrow the intersection point had been lost. But preventing Rita from being shot—hadn’t that been Jay’s wish? I finally traced this thread backward to the point where we had had that conversation and what Jay had been thinking as he shed those tears.

  It was only long after that that I learned something about Rita’s birth. The response that came back to me seemed somehow manufactured: she had been given up by a distant relative, and it seemed she had never been able to develop a strong connection with her new parents. I knew nothing at all about anything really before the Event blew in, and I don’t really know if I would ever have any way of knowing.

  Neither am I able to grasp whether the unknown solution to the not readily comprehensible space-time matrix that resulted from this incident is the reason why I am able to retain the memory of this incident.

  One reason that comes to mind is that the whole business was bothersome to me, as the figure in the center of this space-time structure, but it is hard to make the case that my being the center of space-time is a decent solution. At that point in time, I was a singular point. That may be it. Not that that explains anything.

  Sometimes I think this memory of mine might be my own invention. It is actually the most plausible explanation. But there is still something odd about the details. If Rita had already been shot at the time I was speaking with her, the room should have been splattered with blood. And there is no way Rita would have been able to carry on a normal conversation with me immediately before, or after, the shooting. Rita’s house was not exactly normal—it was kind of a mess—but it was hardly drenched in blood. At least, I don’t think so, not now.

  Or it could be that this memory is a real one, but if it’s real and nobody believes it, what is the point of its being real? What I think now is that something simply satisfied itself with something like that, at least to some degree.

  Regardless, a suitable compromise was found at a suitable time for my own mental health.

  Or else, it was just the ordinary passing dream of a young boy. It certainly is a lot like, perhaps too much like, the dreams young boys have. Even more so as the dream of someone who remembers how things were before the Event.

  I will record what happened to Jay and Rita after that, and then I will close the record.

  In the end, Jay never found a lover in the place where he was born and raised, and after high school he went to New York. There it seems he discovered he was hardly the greatest genius in North America, but he wasn’t too put out about it because he had never claimed to be. After graduation he wandered around the East Coast, and at some point, though it’s not clear how, he landed at a research lab in Santa Fe. Playing a part in the so-called Plan D, he was apparently working on West Coast time-lattice repatriation strategy, but he disappeared along with Santa Fe and the entire middle west of the North American continent.

  For some time after the incident, Rita withdrew from the world, but after less than half a year she started walking around outside again, due at least in part to my influence. I’d kept telling her it was no big deal. Rita no longer carried a gun on her belt. For a time I noticed she was helping out at a local grocery, but when her sixteenth birthday came she flew the coop. It was around that time that the Event really started to make itself felt. All hell broke loose, and practically as soon as I heard a rumor she was gone I had forgotten all about it.

  The day she left, Rita came to my house. As always, she apologized for what had happened three years before, and then she told me she was leaving. She was planning to take the last train
. I put her tiny bag in my family’s car, a reluctant Jay got in with us, and we all drove to the station.

  The three of us waited in silence for the train, and then suddenly Rita called out our names.

  Noticing our failure to look up at her, after a moment she called our names again.

  “Richard. James. I have this feeling I have heard your names somewhere else before. Not here, and not even something to do with me. I just don’t get it at all.”

  James replied in a surprisingly gentle tone, “Lots of things are getting harder to get.”

  “I think you realize I won’t be able to see you again, on the future side.”

  We all said that was ridiculous, but I think of course we all knew it was true.

  That was the last time I ever saw her. At least in this future.

  I don’t know what happened to her after that. I guess I haven’t tried very hard to locate her.

  Sometimes I think about James, and what happened to him, having disappeared from my future, wrapped up in the events of the North American middle west.

  It has been explained that the Event smashed and atomized time itself. As a consequence, I feel like any explanation that doesn’t make me feel like I get something shouldn’t really be called an explanation. Is that right?

  James has disappeared from my present and future, but I’m sure he is alive somewhere in atomized time. He was the kind of guy who would never shed a tear even if a bison trampled his toes. I, of course, am mostly talk.

  I still buy James’s hypothesis that Rita was shot from the future, or somewhere in that direction. The thought that Rita and James might meet again out there somewhere among the broken shards of time still makes me smile. I wouldn’t mind at all. Any way you slice it, time has been smashed to smithereens, and order and consistency have abandoned the field. James is on one fluttering crumb of time, and Rita is on another. Somewhere in space, those crumbs could collide, and James and Rita would meet again.

  That would certainly be exciting.