The Time Zoe Left Him by Terence Kuch

Zoe left him. Stephen wanted to remember everything about his years with her, all the little kindnesses, the love-making, the adventures: Grand Canyon, Yosemite, even Vegas once. He moaned, moped, tried to get over her, couldn’t.

A few months later, he decided to do something about his problem. Something desperate.

And so, after a lengthy web search, he found the virtual storefront of TIME-OUT, Inc. He explored the site, hesitated, but then, with a deep breath, clicked “ENTER.”

A hyper-grinning sales rep appeared on-screen. Stephen asked what TIME-OUT could do for him, if their advertising claims were real, seeing that the pages he’d had to AGREE on were festooned with tiny virtual asterisks.

After Stephen explained what he wanted to do, the sales rep was very positive, especially as he seemed to know that Stephen was – if not wealthy, at least someone the Web thought would (98.8% confidence) pay his bills.

“You should know,” the rep said, “that what we call ‘time’ isn’t real. Some philosophers have claimed, like Kant or Berkeley or Plato, that time isn’t actually time at all, but something else. Wittgenstein said that time was an error of language, or something like that. Somewhere in his notebooks – I think.”

Stephen was pleased by the thought that he must be speaking with a real person, because a bot would never admit it wasn’t absolutely sure of everything. But, – bots could simulate confusion. That bothered him, but he snapped back to attention as the rep continued.

“Anyway,” he’d been saying, “whatever. We think we’re passing through time, but we’re not; time is passing through us. In your case, we’ll freezeframe then return you to back when Zoe – was that her name? – still loved you. You can pick up your life from there.” He waited for some reaction from Stephen. “You’ll need to come downtown to our Center for the treatment, but we’ll be pleased to comp you a Lyft!”

There was a strained pause then, “How about it, Steve?”

Stephen winced at the assault on his given name, but tapped his Platinum card on his smartphone, pressed a few keys.

“Excellent!” said the rep. “Now let’s set up a time for you.”#

The next day at 2:30, Stephen entered TIME-OUT’s office. A polite employee, “Amy” – interviewed him, checked his bank account, made him sign real paper forms, then guided him to what she called the “TIME-OUT Rocket to the Past™” a tall, shiny, aluminum-foiled, bullet-shaped thing with one chair inside. Stephen entered, sat down in it, and allowed himself to be adorned with wires and cables and sucker-like devices by an overly friendly technician in the expected white robe.

“Ready, Steve?” Amy asked. Stephen hesitated. “You don’t seem certain,” she said, holding up a hand to pause the process. “So I need to inform you that there’s an “undo” code you can use to come back to right now. Just think ‘timeout timeout timeout’ quickly, and that will trigger your return. But…” she hesitated, “that won’t undo what you’ve done in the past you’re about to go back to. So your future will be different. That’s why we don’t … encourage any of our clients to actually undo. That’s only if you’re about to … pass away prematurely … or something.”Stephen said nothing. Amy motioned to a technician in a white smock, standing beside a panel of levers and bright red buttons and blinking lights, clipboard and pencil in hand.

Zoe was there, in their apartment. She didn’t seem surprised. Well, Stephen thought, she didn’t know he’d just arrived from five years in the future. To her, he’d arrived at this particular minute from the minute before. – Or had that really happened? But he remembered quite a bit about the next five years. Although he wasn’t a financial whiz, he’d caught enough from the headlines so he should be able to make some very smart investments now.

And he remembered visiting TIME-OUT, Inc. Well, maybe. Wasn’t that just too fantastic? A crazy illusion to avoid his problems? There was nothing in Stephen’s world to make him sure that he’d had those five years and that time-travel adventure, and wasn’t just day-dreaming. Shape up, Stephen, he told himself. Get real. Deal with Zoe. Somehow.

Discarding his doubts with a sigh, Stephen resumed what he and Zoe had been before. But now, Zoe wasn’t quite as he’d remembered her. Not as loving, sometimes dismissive, and her moods. – Yes, he’d forgotten those moods because they were soon over, even if they were – frequent. And his own failures – not the same mistakes he’d made before, but new mistakes. He found himself contributing to her moods, sometimes goading them, feeding off her disquiet while denying it. And then those other times,…

He tried to conform to the ideas she had about who he was and should be, why he could at least SHOW SOME GODDAMN FEELINGS, at least once in a while.

After six futile, disappointing months, Stephen began to wonder if he should escape his new present and return to the future. If he’d actually been there. How to do it? Well, there was TIME-OUT’s “undo.” If that really worked. But if it didn’t work, no harm done.

Two weeks later, Stephen made up his mind. He’d go forward into the future he’d left. Use that “undo” code. Would that just destroy these past six months? Would his new investments pay off? Would he have some real money, this time? Or would it fail, “time,” as Wittgenstein once put it, being just our own memory subject to corruption by language.Oh well, here goes. He wrinkled his brow. “timeout timeout timeout!”#
Stephen found himself in a chair, stared at by a man in a white smock, clipboard and pencil in hand, and by a woman nearby.

“When am I?” Stephen said, wondering why he’d asked such an odd question.

—

Terence Kuch’s fiction, poetry, and non-fiction has been published in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Ireland, Australia, France, Luxembourg, and Thailand, including Commonweal, Descant, Diagram, Dissent, Gravel, Grub Street, Luxembourg Review, Mademoiselle, The Moth, New Scientist, North American Review, Poetry Motel, Sheepshead Review, Thema, Timber Creek Review, Washington Post (editorial page, op-ed, Book World, Magazine), and elsewhere. His novel, The Seventh Effect, was praised by Kirkus Reviews. A satirical poem of his won first prize in a New York magazine competition, was praised and reprinted in the New York Times, and included in a Random House collection. His book of poems about the confrontation of ancient and modern Greece was published in 2018 by Apprentice House / Loyola University. He studied at Reed College; the Writers Center, Bethesda, Maryland; and participated in the Mid-American Review Summer Fiction Workshop. He lives in Springfield, Virginia, with a wife and several opinionated cats.