You could recreate some of your life.
Say you're both 40 today in 2015. You met aged 20 in college at Yale on a Friday night at 8pm at a coffee shop on campus when you spilled your iced tea on her table. You time travel back in your mind to age 5 in 1980. You lead a somewhat gifted life over time and manage to vastly improve your own and your family’s circumstances, and those of your friends, in substantial ways over time. Discourage your friend Danny from going to that party and he avoids a bad relationship, but it's a gamble because even though it ruined him through 2015, maybe its lessons made him a world leader starting in 2016. It's a risk.
Anyway, you go to Yale. It's Saturday, November 18th in 1995. You've noticed your other world wife here and there - you know everything about her, after all, and you've fought the urge all these years to interact with her. It's 7:59pm. Iced tea in hand. 8:00. You walk by her table. It's time. It's how it happened. She looks down in her law book, just like before. There it is - she's brushed her hair out of her face, what made you notice before that made you trip and spill your drink. The lid on your iced tea is deliberately loosened. No chances. 8:00:21, and you spill as close as you can to before.
You're apologetic. She's annoyed. You say the same words you did once before, to you, 55 years ago: You stuck to your cosmic script, even though it sounded stupid sometimes in hindsight. You’ve rehearsed this moment seemingly your entire lifetime:
"I'm a fucking dumbass,” you say again. “Fuck me --"
Then you slipped on your ice - deliberately this time! – as you said ‘me’, and landed flat on your ass at her feet, staring up at her baffled face, again, almost like before. She laughs again.
You were not a socially graceful man in your youth, but you stuck to the plan. "Are you OK?" she asks again, smiling, as she all but falls from her chair to see if you're hurt.
"Marry me," you say again.
"I think you have a concussion," she says again, as she tucks her hair out of her face again and bites her lip just barely with a half smile, in that way that equally drove you wild and made your heart ache to be forever in her presence.
Your first date is again on Sunday afternoon, for coffee and iced tea in the same café, at the same table. Like before, finals are looming, and time becomes scarce. You can’t stand it, but you have no choice. You and she study together here and there. She’s bound for Yale Law, and you’re bound for Yale Medicine. There is little overlap in your work, so mostly you’re apart for a few weeks here. You have dinner several times. You kiss. You hold hands. Again, your first movie date together is on Friday, December 15th, for the opening night of Jumanji. You unconsciously blurt this out, knowing it’s coming, at the irony of your situation:
https://i.imgur.com/ypg44TD.jpg
She laughs. It’s the first deliberate deviation from the cosmic backstory you’ve done. You don’t care, because her laugh is golden. It is the light in your heart and reality and story.
Time passes. You propose as you did before on the Fourth of July in 1999, at 5:05pm, as you both vacation on the Maine coast again. She falls to her knees in the sand in front of you as the ring settles on her fingers. Her tears mix with your kiss. You marry in August 2001.
For many, many long years, you’ve prepared for what is coming next. You’ve become immeasurably smarter than you had been. Your mind has not decayed from a perceived old age due to your cosmic circumstances; you are a young man with a lifetime and a half of knowledge and experience. You have an anonymous packet for the mail that you need only drop into a mailbox on your crowded street in the Bahamas where you honeymoon with people from all over the world. You slip out as your wife takes a shopping trip with another honeymooning woman you’ve met.
You need merely drop the package in the mail – utterly anonymously – and you may divert the 9/11 attacks. Do you? In the end, your terror is insurmountable. A college friend of yours, Peter, died in the first tower from the initial impact. His office was one facing the first plane, and he was a habitual early bird.
If you send this package it may be traced back to you. The odds are astronomical. Your preparation is near complete. You’ve studied, quietly, real spy craft on the side. “For a book I want to write,” you tell your wife. In the end, you cannot. You drop it in the trash. You will carry this guilt to your grave. You are unwilling to risk a second chance at your life. A second chance of a life with her.
You open the package with your bare hands. You touch the CD disk inside, full of evidence of the attack from memory. You snap the disk in half and drop it in the garbage. It was the only copy of the evidence. You’ve managed to keep yourself collected, until you slip into an alley down the block, where you collapse for a time in sobbing grief.
The attacks happen as they did before.
On Saturday, March 1, 2003, you have discretely set a quiet vibrating alarm to wake you at 530am. Your wife mutters and goes back to sleep. You go across the hall to the spare bedroom that serves as your office space for the two of you. Your cat – you’ve missed her too, as she died of renal failure in 2010 – complains at being shoved from your chair. You are nude. You both tend to sleep naked more often than not. You putter around the Internet until 7:05, when you hear your wife rustle in bed. You remember this moment. You remember this one as clearly as you did the night you met, and along with a handful of other moments. It’s one of those magical instances in life that burn into your mind.
At 7:06 in the morning, she is stepping out of the bedroom, nude herself and groggy, her long wavy hair a complete mess. You are already rock hard. In the previous 2003, you had gotten up from your chair to greet her, not expecting what came next. Then, the sight of her for some reason had been nearly a magical moment, where you became nearly feral with lust, instantly rock hard. This time, you are already there. You slide into her, your arms around her, instantly kissing her and pressing yourself into her stomach. She moans, barely awake, as her body goes wild as well, slamming right back into yours. Like before, no one person dragged the other back to bed. It was mutual. Carnal. Feral. Madness. You shoved her backward onto the bed as before, her knees catching the edge, her feet on the ground. Like before, your mouth is on her and in her and eating her with a ferocity you’ve never felt till then and never quite would again. In minutes, she is screaming and sweating at your touch, orgasming with an urgency to your tongue. As she screams, you climb onto and into her. She fingernails rake your back. You thrust into her repeatedly, desperately, and explode in her in less than a minute, screaming. As you come, her mouth finds yours, and she kisses you with a feverish urgency. You both lay in bed afterward, panting and gasping, slick with sweat. From the moment she stepped from the bedroom to now has been less than five minutes.
This was when your son was conceived, before.
But the birth of one, specific, magical individual will never be recreated. It cannot be, for that same specific sperm, and egg, and timing, and set of circumstances through prenatal development, dietary conditions, and a thousand million other unknowns. Your wife does not become pregnant on that day.
Your first son is conceived in August 2003 and born May 2004. Your daughter is conceived on Christmas Eve 2006 and born in September 2007. Life continues.
It is Saturday, January 10, 2015. You go to bed after your family, at 11:30pm. You had fallen asleep the last time earlier, around 10pm. Your family had gone hiking that unusually warm day, last time. When you awoke, it was January 9, 1980, and you were five years old. You are terrified out of your mind, far more than even during that day in the Bahamas. What will happen?
You awake on Sunday morning at 9am. Your 11-year old son wants to go hiking again. You smile as your wife steps into the doorway, smiling, saying, “You seemed last night like we should let you sleep in.”
Appendix: Note each year of your second life could have substantial ripple effects outwards, so it's all a gamble. Your loosening the lid on your iced tea may actually lead to the extinction of the human race in 2017 as sentient insect overlords arise from your folly, so I hope the love of this woman was worth it, because you’ve doomed us all.
