Aldo laughed. “I like this.”
“What, me being petty?”
“No, the idea of you being doting.”
“I don’t dote,” she said with an audible grimace. “I just think the trick with children is to treat them like adults.”
“How do you treat most adults?”
Silence.
“Probably poorly. So maybe you have a point.”
He smiled.
“So,” she said. “Got any more hexagon things?”
He thought about it. “There’s some Babylonian stuff.”
“God, of course there is,” she said with a laugh. “What Babylonian stuff?”
“Well, the Babylonians were very into astronomy. They gave us our current concept of time. And circles,” he added. “They did everything in units of sixty. Sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour—”
“There’s that six again.”
“Exactly,” he said. “So we really only see time the way they intended us to see it, which suggests there might be another way to see it.”
“Which would be?”
“Well, quantum theory seems to indicate a multiverse,” he said. “Where all times and possibilities and outcomes exist in tandem.”
“In hexagons?”
“Probably. Maybe.” A shrug. “But we can’t actually identify the shape of the multiverse, seeing as we don’t know which universe we exist in ourselves.”
“Why try to solve time travel instead of multiverse travel?”
“Well, the idea of the multiverse is that you wouldn’t travel,” he said. “You exist in all things at all times, so in terms of it being something you could actually experience, then—”
“Oh, hi,” she said, clearly speaking to someone who wasn’t him. “Sorry, did you need to…？”
Aldo quieted, listening to the male voice on the other end.
“Yeah, no I was … I couldn’t sleep, so—yeah. Sorry,” she said, this time to Aldo. “One second—no, it’s fine, I’ll just … yeah, okay, go ahead.”
He heard the sound of her leaving wherever she’d been.
“Sorry,” she said. “Marc needed to use the bathroom.”
“You were in the bathroom?”
“Yeah, well, you know. It has a door. I was sitting in the bathtub.”
Briefly, Aldo was reminded of Audrey Hepburn in the claw-footed bathtub couch in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
“That can’t have been comfortable,” he remarked.
“Well, it’s fine, I’m gone now. What were we saying? Babylonians? No—time travel.”
“Both, I guess.”
“Do you want to travel in time?”
A good question. “I think I’d mostly like to figure out how it would work, but I don’t expect to.”
“Kind of an odd fixation, isn’t it? If you never plan to use it.”
“Well, if I figured it out, then fine, maybe I’d use it. But—” He hesitated. “Well, there’s a reason mathematicians sort of stop at a certain point when developing theories,” he explained. “If there’s no capacity to understand the math moving forward, then there’s no reason trying to figure it out. We’d all just lose sleep over it, trying to sort out our own existence.”
“But you’re willingly losing sleep over it,” she noted.
“I…” It was difficult to explain. “Yes, because—”
“Because if you don’t have something to figure out, then you have no reason to keep going?”
Or maybe it wasn’t that difficult to explain.
“Yeah,” he said. “Basically.”
She was quiet for a few beats of time.
“So this is how you did it,” she said.
“Did what?”
“Kept going. After … you know. What happened to you.”
“Ah.” He wasn’t sure he wanted to discuss it; other people tended to treat the resurrection of his mental stability as some sort of dramatic event, but for him, it was simply historical. “I guess.”
“No, it totally is. You gave yourself an impossible problem so you’d never be able to stop thinking about it. It’s brilliant, actually.” She sounded close to impressed. “Other people probably think it’s crazy, don’t they?”
“My dad sort of plays along. He doesn’t get it,” Aldo admitted, “but every day he asks me where in time we are. I make it up, obviously, and he pretends it’s new and interesting every time, but I think it’s his version of ‘how are you,’ basically. Checking in.”