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This writing was accepted for publication in the 108 page perfect-bound ISSN#/ISBN# issue/book “Question Everything” cc&d, v280 (the February 2018 issue) Order this as a 6"x9" paperback book:  |
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The Time Prisoner
Daniel Ross Goodman
My name is Martin Freedman, and I’m a time prisoner—please help me. I’m innocent, and I’m being held unjustly. If you’re reading this, it means that I have at least accomplished my first goal, which has been to find a way of escaping this prison. Perhaps you can help me accomplish the second half of my goal and do what I cannot do for myself: actually get me out of here and win me back my freedom. I earnestly hope, with the last shred of hope I have left, that you can.
In 2016, I was sentenced to time prison, which is where I’ve been ever since. I have no idea what year it is in the year you’re reading this, and that’s part of what it means to be in time prison. If you’ve never heard of time prison and have no idea what it is or what it could possibly be, don’t worry—neither did I at the time I got arrested and locked up in here. Without going into too much boring detail, it basically means that I’m imprisoned in a moment in time: Thursday, March 24, at 12:47 p.m. and 31 seconds, to be exact. I am not frozen in time, but imprisoned in it. During this second, my colleagues at the office—which is where I was sent back to when my imprisonment began—are all doing what they had been doing during that second: Stacey is eating sushi at her desk with her right hand while scrolling through her iPhone with her left hand. Sarah, her face locked into her computer screen, has just opened a Kashi granola bar. Howard is running his red-tipped pen across a manuscript, Justin is stretching his arms above his head, and Liv and Nichole—the only editors in our office who actually take their lunch hours (they usually go out to Serafina and order big salads and seltzer)—are uncrossing their legs, about to get up from behind their desks and head out for lunch. And our boss, Allan, is still in his corner office, raising a half-eaten turkey sandwich to his mouth with his left hand while sorting through the two-foot-tall tower of manuscripts on his book-cluttered desk with his right hand. Outside, it is seventy-six degrees Fahrenheit and overcast—they couldn’t at least have chosen a sunny second for me? Complaints aside, I can move freely, but no matter where I go, I am still imprisoned within this second. The same pedestrians on the same congested city streets are moving, but only within the span of this one second; as soon as their movements from that one second have ceased, their leg-motions and arm-swings start over again, infinitely repeating themselves without ever achieving a single step. The same people are still sitting on the sidewalk benches, the same bus drivers are still making the same stops, and the same flat-screen televisions on the electronics stores display windows are still displaying exactly what they were displaying at that second, over and over and over again.
So that’s it. It’s pretty simple, really: I have the whole world to myself. I have food, water, and almost everything else I could ask for. I have nothing but eternal sunlight. When I’m tired, I go inside my apartment’s bedroom, close the blinds and go to sleep. And when I wake up, I have no idea how much time has passed—the internet does not work, no new newspapers are ever delivered, and all the cable news channels are stuck in the exact same time as me: at 12:47 p.m. on March 24, 2016.
I’m imprisoned in time, not in space, meaning that even if I did somehow build a working spaceship that could propel me off of this earth and lift me above this planet’s atmosphere, I couldn’t get anywhere, because I’d still be stuck in this point in time in 2016. Supposing that I could build the ship, journey through the solar system and somehow navigate back to earth, I’d arrive back only to see everything frozen in time, exactly as it was on March 24, 2016. I could traverse the entire Milky Way galaxy and I still couldn’t escape from this time. Even if I travelled to the ends of the universe, it wouldn’t matter; this time would still be with me there. You may’ve heard it said about prisoners serving life-sentences, living in tiny, cramped cells, that they have all the time in the world, but no space. Well, as a time-crime prisoner serving an indefinite time-sentence, you quickly find out that you’ve got all the space in the world, but no time. They give you “time,” and by God, that’s what they take: your time.
So how did I get here? What crime of mine won me this particularly cruel kind of punishment? I’ll tell you everything you need to know, sparing you from any extraneous details. No fancy language, no Joycean wordplay, no pretty Proustian puns; just the facts, ma’am—or sir, whoever you are that’s reading this. Just the bare-bones of what you need to know in order to help me. Remember, the only reason I‘m telling you how I got here in the first place—the only reason I’m about to tell you the story of my crime, arrest, and sentencing—is because I’m pretty sure it’s just about all you need to know about my past in order to help me escape. And if I add anything that turns out to not have been essential or relevant to helping me break out of here, I’ll only do it because it’s interesting, and don’t you have a right to read something interesting and fun, even if you’re reading it for other reasons (like to help an innocent man break out of time-prison)? At least that’s what I thought—as a low-level publishing house editor, that was my attitude toward reading—at the time of my arrest.
It was Thursday night, March 24, 2016, and I was at a Purim party that also doubled as my 15-year high school Class of 2001 reunion. If you’re not familiar with the Jewish holiday of Purim, it’s basically a Jewish version of those “Feasts of Fools” days they used to have in Christian communities on New Year’s Eve—a Jewish “Faschingsnacht,” as Hans Castorp might call it. There’s a lot of drinking, feasting, and fooling around; people dress up in costumes and pretend to be people they’re not. Religion’s normal mood of seriousness is transformed into levity. Everything is turned upside-down—which is in fact the unofficial motto of the day: “v’nahafokh hu” (literally, “it turned upside down”). Or, as Hans Castorp might also have called it, it’s quite literally the Jewish “Schaltabend,” the evening where everything switches, where everything—for lack of a better term—turns upside down.
So there I was at this high school reunion/Purim party, talking with Raffi and Sammy (two really good friends of mine from high school), when some guy with a big black beard, wearing a black hat, a black suit and a white shirt, comes up to me and asks, “have you put on tefillin today?”
Now, “tefillin,” in case you don’t know, are two palm-sized black boxes with tiny parchments upon which are written four paragraphs from the Torah, the Jewish holy scriptures. Religious Jews put them on every day during morning prayer services, except on Saturdays and holidays. One box goes on top of the head, at the front edge of the hairline (or, if you’re going bald, where the original hairline used to be), and the other box goes on the bicep of your weaker arm, facing the heart. There are long black straps attached to each of the boxes that help you fasten the boxes around your head and arm; in order to secure the arm-box around your arm, you have to wind the strap around your forearm seven times, and then tie the ends of the strap around your hand and fingers. If you’re not familiar with this, the whole thing must sound rather bizarre, so I apologize for filling your head with strange new things; I won’t say anything more about them. If you’ve never seen them and you’re curious to find out more about these odd, ancient ritual objects, I’d suggest googling “tefillin” (assuming that Google is still the dominant internet search engine at the time you’re reading this; otherwise, just use whatever search engine it is that people happen to be using in your day). You’ll find pictures, videos of how to put them on, reasons for why people put them on, and all other kinds of stuff that I either can’t give you here (like video) or don’t want to give you because I don’t want to bore you with details that you can get elsewhere; I can’t risk having you stop reading, because—remember!—I really need you.
Anyway, so this guy I don’t recognize comes up to me at the party and asks, “have you put on tefillin today?”
“Of course I have!” I responded, a bit offended. ‘Doesn’t he know that I’m a religious Jew who went to a religious high school?!’ I thought. ‘Why else would I be here at this party?! Of course I put on tefillin today! How dare you!’
But then I remembered that it was Purim—the Jewish April Fools’ Day—and realized that this guy must’ve been joking around with me. It was probably one of my former high school classmates who had dressed up as a “Chabad guy” for Purim in order to play practical jokes on people. “Chabad” guys, in case you don’t know, are like Jewish Jehovah’s Witnesses, or Jewish Jesuits; they’re a very religious, mystically oriented group that proselytizes to other (mostly non-observant) Jews and tries to get them to perform “mitzvot.” “Mitzvot,” translated literally, are “commandments”—they are the primary Jewish ritual observances, and tradition states that there are 613 of them; putting on tefillin every day is one of these 613 “mitzvot.” And for some reason, it’s one of the mitzvot that Chabad guys particularly try to get non-observant Jews to do. In my day, it became a pretty common sight to see Chabad guys in New York City standing outside subway stations or behind lemonade-stand-style tables at different crowded sites around the city with pairs of tefillin, from where they would try to find Jews so that they could ask them: “have you put on tefillin today?” And if the Jews haven’t, they would try to get them to put on tefillin right on the spot. So I figured that this guy, whoever he was, had dressed up as a Chabad guy for Purim, and his “trick-or-treat” Purim shtick was to go around to the other guys at the party with a pair of tefillin in his hands and ask them whether they’d put on tefillin that day.
So, recollecting myself, I said to him: “I’m sorry...but yes, I have put on tefillin today.”
The guy raised his eyebrows and stood there for a moment, transfixed by something the nature of which I was unaware. There was a full moon in the sky that night, and the plentiful moonlight that was streaming in from the windows covered his black suit and black hat with a chrome-colored coating, giving him a vaguely futuristic and half-ghostly look all at once. After what seemed like an hour’s pause—but was probably no more than a minute—during which we stood next to each other in silence, he squinted at me and, looking at me directly in the eyes as if he was looking at a distant road-sign that he couldn’t quite yet make out but was slowly coming into view, said: “My friend, I’m afraid you didn’t quite understand my question...I am asking you, my friend, whether you have put on time travel tefillin today.”
“Um...what?”
“You see,” said the Chabad guy, opening up a small navy-blue velvet bag and revealing a pair of luminous black tefillin that shone under the moonlight like a pair of freshly polished patent leather shoes, “these aren’t just any regular ol’ tefillin. These here, my friend, are time travel tefillin.”
“Time travel tefillin? What are you talking about?” I asked, incredulous, whereupon it was my turn to squint my eyes as I examined the tefillin as if they were a newly discovered microscopic species of fish. They looked no different to me than ordinary tefillin, save for the silvery veneer which covered them—a varnish which I attributed to the moonlight flooding in from the window directly behind us.
“You put them on,” explained the Chabad guy nonchalantly, as if he was explaining how a screwdriver works, “and you travel in time. Anywhere you want to go. Name your time, and the tefillin will take you there.”
“So that’s it? That’s all there is to it?”
“That’s it,” he said, nodding his head stone-facedly as if I was getting a great deal from him on a new car and he was assuring me that there was absolutely no catch. “That’s all there is to it. Couldn’t be any more simpler.”
“Well,” I said, my editor’s brain alerting me that his phrase “more simpler” sounded ungrammatical—a bit folksy, and somewhat funny, but probably not right. I was ready to give him a polite nod and move away from him, as Raffi and Sammy seemed slightly peeved that he had interrupted our conversation. But then I remembered that it was Purim, and ‘on Purim,’ I said to myself, ‘aren’t we supposed to joke around and have fun, even to the point of ridiculousness? I should probably get into the holiday spirit and play along with his joke.’ I figured that if I just went along with it for a few minutes more, the whole thing would be over faster than I could say Menachem Mendel Schneerson.
“Alright,” I said to the guy dressed up in the black suit and black hat. “Let me try ‘em on...”
I took the first tefillin box, placed it on my left bicep, and wrapped the black straps around my left arm seven times. I then placed the second black box on my head, and finished by wrapping the loose end of the arm–strap around my left hand.
“Now state the point in time where you want to travel to,” said the man.
“Okay...hmm...” My mind was blank, too startled by the eccentricity of this man’s Purim joke to think. I looked around the room, seeking ideas of appealing destinations, and I noticed that, as part of the reunion’s festivities, the organizers had placed humorous photos of each member of the class on the room’s eastern wall. The picture that they had of me was from a time during 10th grade class prayers when I was wearing a winter jacket inside the chapel even though the rest of the class was dressed relatively lightly.
“Oh yeah,” I said, smiling and chuckling softly. “I remember that...that was from the time during Shachris (morning prayers) when I asked Rabbi Robinson, my high school rebbe (rabbi), if it was okay to put on a winter jacket even though I was wearing tefillin...that was a funny time...everyone was laughing because I was the only one who felt it was cold in there—and then some stranger who had just walked into the chapel handed me my winter jacket. I put it on and they all laughed some more, but when I turned around to thank the guy, he was gone. It was so nice, what he did for me, it’s really too bad I never got to thank him...I wonder whatever happened to him...I’d like to go back to that time and find out.”
“Alright,” I said to the man, pointing with my eyes to that funny picture of my fifteen-year-old self. “I’ve got it. I’ll travel back to that time.”
“Very well,” said the man. And faster than he could say Baruch Pesach Robinson, I was whisked back to that day, eighteen years in the past, right back to that scene in the chapel. “Incredible!” I thought, as I stood outside the chapel and peered in through the window, observing my younger self speaking to Rabbi Robinson. “It was no joke! I’m really here! It worked! The tefillin worked! This is amazing!”
And so there I was, my thirty-three-year-old self standing outside the chapel wrapped in the time travel tefillin, watching my fifteen-year-old self ask his rabbi if he could wear his winter jacket while wearing his tefillin. Hearing the snickers and jeers of my classmates, I remembered how humiliated I had felt that day. I was the only one who felt cold, and I was being made fun of for it—I was made to feel ashamed on account of a bodily sensation over which I had no control. And now I saw it happening all over again—me asking my rebbe for a jacket, them all laughing at me, me getting all red in the face with embarrassment...And all I wanted to do was to snuff it, to help my fifteen-year-old self and end the laughter, end the humiliation, end the coldness. So I entered the chapel, saw my old winter jacket hanging on the coatrack, took it off the rack, walked over to my fifteen-year-old self and handed him the jacket. “Here you go,” I said, smiling affectionately. “Now you can warm up a bit.”
“Thank you so much!” said my fifteen-year-old self to me. “That’s very kind of you.”
Then, looking at me with a strange look in his eyes as if I was someone he had met before but whose name he’d forgotten, he asked me: ”what’s your name? You look familiar. I don’t think we’ve ever met, but I have this weird feeling like we have...are you, by any chance...”
He turned around, as if to make sure no one was looking at us, but before he turned back around and before he could finish his question, I felt two pairs of strong arms tie my hands around my back and handcuff my wrists, and then, faster than I could say “Rabbi Robinson mimics Moses Mendelssohn,” I was instantaneously transported to a blindingly white room. After my eyes adjusted to the overpowering white light, I saw that I was sitting in a small room—about ten feet by ten feet— with cinderblock walls and no doors that I could see. My arms were still tied around my back and my hands were still locked in handcuffs, but the tefillin were gone from my left arm and head. In front of me was a wide rectangular oak table, and behind the table sat three very pale old men wearing black suits, black shirts, and no shoes. Their egg-white faces and shiny scalps were completely shaven, and all of their toenails were painted coal-black.
“Wha...where am I?” I stammered. “Wha...what’s going on?”
“Martin Freedman,” said the man on the left, with a deathly solemn expression painted on the white canvas of his old, wrinkle-riven face. “You are under arrest for violating the laws of time travel.”
“What?! ‘Laws of time travel’?!”
“Ordinance 3.5c of the Intergalactic Penal Code states that when travelling backwards or forwards in time, no person shall interfere with events taking place in the time to which the person has travelled.”
“What?! ‘Intergalactic Penal Code’?!”
“That’s correct,” said the man on the right. “Time travel crimes are intergalactic crimes, not galactic crimes; time travel crimes are not adjudicated on a local, galaxy-by-galaxy basis, because any time travel crime necessarily affects all galaxies, not only your own. Therefore, you are subject to intergalactic jurisdiction. This tribunal is an intergalactic panel composed of three judges from three separate galaxies, and we will handle your case.”
“My...my case? But...but I never even heard of ‘time travel crimes’!”
“Mr. Freedman,” the man in the middle patiently explained, “time travel crimes are strict liability crimes. That means that even if you were unaware of the relevant statutes—and even if you had not even intended to violate these statutes—you will be held liable if you have committed a time travel offense.”
“I...but I—”
“Yes, we understand, Mr. Freedman,” he said stonily. “But ignorance of the law is no excuse.”
How did they know what I was going to say?
“But why...I mean...” I sputtered, as the words spluttered out of my mouth like foam from a delirious animal, “I just...I just was trying to help someone out. I didn’t mean to break any laws.”
“That’s precisely the point, Mr. Freedman,” the judge on the right explained. “Don’t you understand what ‘strict liability’ means? It means that it doesn’t matter whether you meant to break the law or not. Because the consequences of interfering with time are so sweeping, carrying with them far-reaching consequences for billions of people across millions of years, intergalactic law chose long ago to make time travel crime a strict liability offense.”
“But...I mean...I...” I was flabbergasted, my brothers, and knew not what to say next. I could not believe what I was hearing, and could not believe what I was experiencing, but it was all too real, my brothers, and I wanted nothing more than to get back to the party and tell the Chabad guy that his time travel tefillin had worked, and that I’d had enough of his practical joke—that I had gone along with his shtick, and now I wanted to leave and go back home.
“This has gotta be some kind of joke, right?” I said to the judges. “Alright, c’mon...I’ve played along with this for long enough, this joke’s gone on now for a bit too long now...I mean, you can’t be serious with this whole business—”
“Oh no, Mr. Freedman, I’m afraid you don’t understand,” said the man on the right, his face the picture of sober solemnity. “Time travel crime is a gravely serious matter. And you will be punished accordingly. With the strictest possible severity.”
“Umm...what? Punished?!”
“Yes, Mr. Freedman. Under the Intergalactic Penal Code, all time travel crimes are punishable by up to X years of solitary imprisonment on a penal planet.”
“Umm...huh? What’s ‘X’? How much time am I being punished for? How long will I have to be on this ‘penal planet’?”
“By the conventions of IPC statue 4.7d,” replied the man on the left coldly and matter-of-factly, “all convicted time travel crime felons are imprisoned in time—because they have illegally tampered with time, they are thereby deprived of their privileges to use, enjoy, and experience time. Thus, we cannot speak of an “amount,” or “duration,” of time, for which you’re being sentenced, because you’re not being sentenced for any length of time, as in a certain numbers of months or years. You’re being sentenced to an imprisonment within time. Do you understand, Mr. Freedman?”
“Um...no...not exactly...”
“You see, Mr. Freedman,” said the man in the middle, with a faint hint of glee evident in his otherwise gravid, gravelly tone, “when you commit a non-time travel crime, such as theft, your privilege to use space—to move about in the world—is taken away from you; since you have committed an offense in space, you are accordingly deprived of your license to use space for a fixed period of time, and to ensure that you don’t, you are imprisoned in space. But when you commit a time travel crime, such as you have done, Mr. Freedman, your privilege to use time—to move about chronologically—is taken away from you. Because you have committed an offense in time, you are accordingly deprived of your license to use time, and to ensure that you don’t, you are imprisoned in time. This way, time will be protected from the dangers of your depredations until this panel sees evidence that you have been rehabilitated and no longer pose a threat to the time around you.”
“So...I’m being ‘imprisoned in time’? I...I won’t be able to move forwards in time in the ordinary way?”
“Precisely, Mr. Freedman.”
Despite their clear, professorial-like explanations, I still could not believe what I was hearing, O my brothers, but I was really hearing it. And it was really happening. I so desperately wanted it all to be the continuation of that Chabad guy’s joke, but they were not joking, and this, o my brothers, was the most unkindest cut of all.
“Okay...so...” I said, trying to remain calm, “for how long will I be—I mean...how long in earth-time will I be imprisoned? How many years will pass while I’m frozen in time?”
“Once again, Mr. Freedman,” said the man on the right, his eyes narrowing, yet not betraying an ounce of frustration over my incoherent question, “that is a question of duration, which, by the terms of time travel crime procedure, this tribunal is not permitted to disclose to you.”
“So...when do I get released? How do you I know when I’m ‘rehabilitated’?”
“You will know,” said the man in the middle, his ominous baritone voice descending an octave lower, “when you will know.”
“I’m sorry?”
“That is all we can tell you at this time...And now, we must remove you from here and—”
“But wait!” I said, suddenly recalling the circumstances of my arrest. “I’m innocent! I didn’t interfere with time! Eighteen years ago, on that day in the chapel when I was cold and that stranger gave me the winter jacket, I—”
“Yes, Mr. Freedman, that is precisely how you interfered with time. If you were a law-abiding time traveller, you would have remained outside the room and observed, like a good, respectful museum visitor—looking, not touching.”
As they rose from their seats and started to drag me out of the room, the entire picture came into focus, and I could then perceive, with a small amount of wonder mingled with a tiny hint of horror, the true nature of that occurrence in the chapel eighteen years ago. I knew that this would be my last chance to persuade them of my innocence, so I mustered all of my puny vocal strength and exclaimed: “But the man who gave me the coat eighteen years ago—I finally understand what happened that day! The man who gave me that coat, who looked so familiar to me—that was me! That was me from the future! From eighteen years in the future! Don’t you see!? I didn’t interfere with time! I didn’t change anything! I was doing what I was supposed to do! If I didn’t give him the jacket, then my non-interference would’ve changed the course of events! I’m innocent! I didn’t change the course of history, I preserved it!”
“Not according to our records, Mr. Freedman. And, in any event, Mr. Freedman, given that time travel crime is a strict liability offense, whether a time-crime felon’s time interference actually changes the course of time is immaterial. In your case, though, the weight of the evidence contravenes your stated position.”
“Wait a minute,” I began, as they escorted me out of the room and down a long, blindingly white corridor. “What evidence?! I never saw any of this ‘evidence’! You call this a trial?! This whole procedure is completely unfair! What about my rights!? What about my right to a fair trial!? And where is my lawyer?!”
“First of all, Mr. Freedman,” said the judge on the left, “as I’m sure you aware, IPC time-crime criminal procedure grants time-crime defendants no such rights. And secondly, in time travel crime tribunals, there are no lawyers.”
“What?!” I burst out, blinded with rage. “But that’s not fair! Why not!?”
“You see, Mr. Freedman,” said the judge on the right, coolly and collectedly, “time travel trials, like time travel punishments do not take place in time. Measured by your inner conception of time and your own internal clock, a time travel trial could seem to last for months, but because they take place within one fixed instant of isolated time, in reality no time has passes at all.”
“So?”
“So, Mr. Freedman, this renders the concept of ‘billable hours’ irrelevant. No billable hours, no attorneys—it’s as simple as that.”
“That’s correct, Mr. Freedman,” said the judge in the middle, as a subtle, mischievous grin came across his withered face. “It couldn’t be more simpler.”
“And in any event, Mr. Freedman,” said the judge on the left, “your case was a fairly open and shut one.”
“But that’s not true!” I exclaimed, infuriated by the abomination of ‘justice’ they were perpetrating. “I’m innocent! I—”
“That’s enough out of you, Mr. Freedman. We’ve now dispatched your case and consider the matter settled. We now need to attend to other matters. We have a rather backloaded court docket these days, and other offenders are standing by for their sentencings, which we need to administer as well. You will be imprisoned in the moment of March 24, 2016, at 12:47 p.m. and thirty-one seconds Eastern Standard Time. So long, Mr. Freedman.”
And with that, an instant later, quicker than I could say “Felix Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream,” I found myself back in my office which I write to you: an innocent man, wrongly accused, unjustly imprisoned inside this island in time, trapped in a perpetual 24th of March. I have no idea how it all happened—how they were able to seamlessly transport me from the chapel to that tribunal room and from the tribunal room back to my midtown Manhattan office—but it happened, O my brothers, it really did, and if you’re reading this now, you know that it did. And if you are reading this, then thank heaven—because, as I said at the beginning of this letter, that means that perhaps you can help me escape.
So now we get to the part where you come in. “How can I help you?” you may be wondering, if you’re a good-natured person who likes to do the right thing and who cares about justice, righting wrongs, addressing grievances and all those kinds of chivalrous, honorable things. “How can we possibly break into time and get you out? Helping a man escape from time-prison seems impossible.”
Well, it’s not—and the fact that you’re reading this proves that it’s not. And therein lies how you can help me escape from here. Please let me explain. I promise this won’t take too much longer, but it’s the last bit of background information you’ll need.
In order for you to understand how you can help me, you’ll have to understand how you are reading this letter—in other words, you’ll need to understand how it was possible for me to sneak this letter out of time prison. I’m still not completely sure how it was possible, but here’s what I can surmise.
Back in earth-time, in my former life—when I last had my freedom—I was an editor at a New York City-based publishing house. If you love books or if you have a literary bent, it might sound like a glamorous position, but don’t get any illusions—I was on the lowest level of the totem pole. All that my job consisted of was reading manuscripts submitted by agents, and if I came across anything that I thought was good, I’d pass it along to the longer-tenured editors at the company, and they’d make the decision about whether to publish it. I had absolutely no say. Basically, I wasn’t really much of an editor at all; I guess you could say that I was just a professional reader. But in order to have gotten that job in the first place, I had to have read lots and lots of books, because I needed a good working knowledge of what makes a good book and what makes a bad book—the kind of knowledge you can only acquire through years and years of reading.
My only solace while on this lonely prison in time was that I was able to take books out of any library in the city and read them. When I was feeling happy, I’d read Don Quixote. When I was feely depressed—which was most of the time—I’d read Moby-Dick. And when I was feeling just plain blasé and bored—which was also quite often—I’d read Alice in Wonderland. I had a book for every mood and every occasion. Even though there aren’t any “occasions” to speak of in time prison—there are absolutely no changes in temperature (it always feels like a perfect 76 degrees Fahrenheit here, so at least I’m not suffering physically), nor are there any variations between night and day (the sun never sets here), and there are obviously no working watches or clocks—I’ve done my best to try to keep track of passing days by marking a line in a tree every time I went to sleep and woke up again. I remembered Robinson Crusoe doing something like that as a way for him to keep track of days, but it’s more complicated, because I’m not able to tell how long I slept for—in other words, with no time here whatsoever, I never know if I’ve gone to sleep for the “night” or have merely taken a nap. And there may have been several “days” here where I’ve actually stayed awake for “twenty-four-hour”-plus stretches without having been tired. All this is to say that my notch-system of “time-keeping” is probably much more inaccurate than Robinson Crusoe’s.
In any event, as I went through my “days” rereading these beloved books of mine, I found myself drifting back to books whose stories featured, or included, prison escapes. I found myself paying closer attention to the captive’s tale in Don Quixote, and to the part in Robinson Crusoe when he managed to leave his island, scrutinizing these prisoners’ manners of escape and trying to see if there was anything I could apply from their stories to help me escape from within my own imprisonment. When it appeared as if there were no lessons I could apply from their stories to help me figure out how to break out of my peculiar form of imprisonment, I went on to other stories, thinking that perhaps even reading about how Dante got out of the Inferno, how Alice had escaped from Wonderland, or how Alex had gotten out of his prison in Clockwork Orange, could give me some hints for what I could possibly do to escape from mine. Even though I knew that Alex, Alice, and Dante didn’t exactly “escape” from the dangerous situations in which they were being held, I thought that perhaps reading about how they’d gotten out of their confinements could give me some clues for what I could do to get out of mine. I was searching, you see—I was desperate, looking everywhere and anywhere for something, anything, that could help.
I read The Stranger for the umpteenth time, seeking to discover if there was anything I could learn from the way Meursault got out of his cell, but I quickly rediscovered that the poor guy hadn’t really “gotten out”; still, that didn’t stop me from taking out The Stranger again and again, always hoping for a different ending but always ending up reliving his cursed fate. I reread The Book of Jonah several times, but I always ending up realizing that the way he escaped from his imprisonment within the big fish seemed too fantastical, with nothing from the miraculous tale that I could apply to my own all-too-real situation. And of course I reread H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, but even though it was an entertaining read, I knew that the process by which Wells’s time traveler escaped from the Morlock’s lair and recovered his time machine offered me no techniques that I could use to escape from my time-dungeon; and most importantly, there was no way I could recover the time travel tefillin that had caused me to end up here in the first place.
The more books that I reread, the more hopeless I became, because all of the other prisoners who escaped did so from prisons in space, but my situation was unprecedented—I had nothing to draw on from their stories that could help me escape my imprisonment in time. There was no beautiful Moorish woman dangling a cane with a handkerchief-full of gold coins attached to it that I could use to ransom myself, as there was in the captive’s tale in Don Quixote; in my time-prison, I can only be seen by other people for a flicker of a second, and nothing more. And even if I had all the gold in the world, there is no one here to whom I could tender my ransom. I reread Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption many times, because this story was the one that gave me the most hope, but even this story’s lessons were useless for me; even if I had the same persistence as Andy Dufresne and chipped away at the ground below me every day for nineteen years—or for what would be nineteen years if I wasn’t stuck in time—all I’d do is burrow a hole to the other side of the world. There is nowhere I can tunnel out to, no place outside of my nonexistent prison gates where, if I could get there, I could reclaim my freedom in time.
The only real precedent for my case, I realized, was Bill Murray in Groundhog Day; he was the only other character I knew of who was actually imprisoned in time. But even Bill Murray had other people around him, thereby giving him a way of escape—by improving his behavior every day so that, when he eventually arrived at the most complete, fully actualized version of himself, he was able to free himself from the cycle-in-time in which he was trapped. But I’m not trapped in a certain cycle of time; I’m not trapped within one particular day, reliving it over and over again. I’m trapped within time, within one particular moment in time. I cannot interact with anyone else around me for more than one second, unable to better my interactions with others, and without an escape hatch that could be provided by breaking out of a certain cycle of apathy, ennui, lethargy or what have you. Thus there was nothing I could do, it seemed, to redeem myself, nothing I could do to slowly become a better person each day in the hopes that, one day, the Mystery that saw fit that I should be unjustly imprisoned here would at last do what is just and find it fitting to release me back into the normal human world of time.
Utterly hopeless, I lingered in a state of zombie-like depression for I don’t know how long—years, decades, centuries, it felt like. Until one day, thinking for some odd reason about the actual circumstances that had landed me in this prison, instead of dwelling in indignation upon my unjust imprisonment—as I usually did when my thoughts turned to those events—I thought about the strange, unfamiliar man in black-and-white and the time travel tefillin he had handed me at the Purim party. And then it hit me—perhaps therein lay the secret; perhaps in that bizarre pair of tefillin, there was a clue I could extract that could help me escape. Back in my former free state, I had read many science books which stated that time travel was impossible; it defied the laws of physics. It was pure fantasy—it should not even be dignified with the term “science fiction,” the experts stated dogmatically, because the genre “science fiction” refers to things that might be possible in the future, whereas time travel was absolute, out-and-out fantasy—it could never be possible. All the scientists agreed that it could never be done. But the tefillin had proven otherwise. But what, then, exactly was the secret to time travel, and how had the tefillin, of all things, achieved it?
And so, after racking my brains for what felt like many months—perhaps it was even years, I cannot be sure—I began to understand that whatever technology it was that those tefillin possessed within them, the main component that had enabled me to travel in time while wearing them were the words inside them: the ancient writing, written on tiny rolls of parchment tucked inside the two black boxes. It was then that I came upon the realization that I knew—well, hoped, to be more precise—could lead to my escape back into time. Thinking about that pair of tefillin, with their ancient writing written on those palm-sized scrolls, led me discover the secret of time travel, and that secret was this: human beings cannot travel in time, but words can. Words, letters, stories—these are the things, and not corporeal, flesh-and-blood bodies—that possess the power of time travel.
I didn’t know how it worked—I didn’t understand the technology behind it—but I knew that somehow, someway, the secret of time travel was solely dependent on—and inextricably bound up with—words. That’s how the time travel tefillin must have somehow worked, I understood, and that would be how I could somehow escape from this prison in time and travel back into real time—through words.
And so, after making this realization, I set about writing this story that you are reading now. I wrote three copies of my story; I buried the first one in the ground, threw the second one into the air, and put the third in a bottle and placed the bottle in the Hudson river. I did so with the strong belief—with the unshakable hope—that even though I wouldn’t be able to travel through time, my words would, and that somehow, in some way I didn’t understand, the words that I had written would escape this island in time and reach you, whoever you happen to be, wherever—and in whatever age—you happen to be living in. And if you are reading these words now, you are proof that my hopes were not in vain; if you are reading this now, you, like me, have now discovered the secret of time travel as well.
And now, you may be asking, “you said at the beginning that I could help you. So, tell me already: how can I?” Well, first of all, if you would be so kind to do so, I will be indebted to you for the rest of time; it will be to you that I will owe my continued, wondrously restored existence in the world. Secondly, as I said, I don’t understand the technology of time travel, and I don’t understand how that pair of tefillin got me into this predicament, but from the clues that I’ve been able to glean, here’s how I believe you can help me escape: bind my words into a book, and carry that book with you in your arms; read my words with your eyes, contemplate my story with your head, and set my words upon your heart. If you do this, I sincerely believe that somehow, some way, you will transport me out of this island in time and take me with you wherever you are, to whatever age you happen to be living in.
So now, dear reader, my words are in your hands. Only you have the power to keep me imprisoned in time, or to set me free to live once again in your time. My existence in the world is entirely dependent on no one but you. I hope you will do the right thing. Please, dear reader—dear friend—please, I ask you, from the bottom of my heart: read my words, and set me free.
