“Is my dad here?” Alice asked. “Is this his room?”
“Oh, he’ll be back, he was just—talking to someone, I think. Come in, come in,” Simon said, stumbling a bit over his own feet. He was clearly drunk.
“Okay,” Alice said, and stepped all the way into the room. It overlooked 45th Street, and down on the sidewalk, Alice could see people pouring out of the theaters—Minskoff, Schoenfeld, Booth. It was Saturday night in the world, and people were out in full force. Alice never went to plays. She never went to Times Square. She hardly ever went to see live music anymore, and she hadn’t been to Madison Square Garden since she was twelve. Alice rode the subway. She went to Belvedere, and her four favorite bars and restaurants, and sometimes she took the train out to Jersey to visit Sam. Where were all these people going, with their young hearts? When she was a teenager, the 1980s had felt far away, a lifetime ago, but now, when she was so many more decades ahead, 1996 still felt recent. The first twenty years of her life had gone by in slow motion—the endless summers, the space from birthday to birthday almost immeasurable—but the second twenty years had gone by in a flash. Days could still be slow, of course, but weeks and months and sometimes even years zipped along, like a rope slipping through your hands.
“Alice, to what do we owe the pleasure?” asked Howard.
“Well,” Alice said, considering how to answer the question honestly. “I guess I was just thinking about, you know, Time Brothers, time travel. That kind of thing. Understanding the family business, you could say.”
“Alice, I love that you’re finally interested!” Howard said. He and Leonard had met decades ago, when the former had interviewed the latter for Science Fiction magazine. Howard lived in Boston and had four cats, each of whom was named after a Japanese monster.
“Nepotism,” Simon coughed into his hand, winking. Both of his adult sons worked at the publishing company that put out his books, and eventually, after Simon died, one of them would keep writing books and publishing them under Simon’s name.
“I just want to understand the various theories, I guess. About how it works. How time travel works,” Alice said. She tucked her chin between her knees.
“Well, you’ve got time loops, time circuits, stubs, multiverses, string theory . . .” Howard said.
“You’ve got wormholes, slow time travel, fast time travel, time machines . . .” Simon said.
“Did you ever read A Wrinkle in Time, Al? Tesseracts?” Howard said. “Basically, a scrunched-up place in the universe where space and time are sort of folded, and you can get through.”
“Or like Back to the Future,” Chip said. “He had a time machine and just needed certain fuel, and to go eighty-eight miles per hour, and then he was in business.”
“I was in Back to the Future,” John said. “I had one line.”
“Oh, yes,” Howard said. “？‘Wow, man!’ Or something, wasn’t it? I’ve always been partial to the Jack Finney model; that’s where this guy gets drafted into this special time travel program, but all he actually needs is to be in a period-precise apartment in the Dakota, and then he sort of feels it change, and then he’s there, a hundred years ago.”
“What are the circuits?” Alice said. “Loops? Stubs?”
“Have you heard of the grandfather paradox?” Chip asked. “Sometimes people call it the Baby Hitler problem. You go back in time, you kill Baby Hitler—does that prevent the Holocaust? Or if you push your grandfather off a bridge, then your parents aren’t born, then you aren’t born; what happens to you, you know?”
“Shit,” Alice said. “Okay.”
“Basically, in some time travel, there’s a loop in which things can change, and what you do affects everyone else: i.e., you kill Baby Hitler and then Hitler doesn’t exist, and that could affect a million other things and change history entirely. Or there’s a loop where nothing changes except the fact that you’ve done it before, like Groundhog Day.” Alice hadn’t considered the possibility that she would wake up the next morning and have to do the whole thing again. What was worse than turning sixteen once? Turning sixteen a hundred times in a row. Turning sixteen forever. She wondered what would happen to the part of her brain that was forty, if it would eventually fade to black, a room with no electricity.
“And then you’re getting into the idea of the multiverse—if you go back in time and change something, are you changing the future, period? Or are you just changing one possible future, and the other future—the future you left—still exists?” Howard said.