The figure embodied does not love but itself; time running backwards makes a lot more sense. He repositioned himself on the pillow on the floor on which he was sitting and continued contemplating his notions of mind. A story’s reality is not the trajectory. Rather, the trajectory is our reality. He cocked his head at an angle and stared out the café window. The woman sitting beside him on the floor stifled a mild laugh at the book she was reading. His book was set aside. How did he know that woman?

There’d been a time, not too long before, when they’d made love. He was certain of it. They’d shared a bed. She’d nestled her head into his shoulder and rib cage, and she’d felt so perfect there. As far as he’d been concerned, they could have slept that way for forever. But time is not so kind. They hadn’t slept in that comfortable position for quite a while. In the interim – eternities, perhaps – others had been nestled into his enclaves, and she’d nestled into others. Or had that all happened before? Such is the way of the modern world, and even that term had finally changed. Future shock: nothing remained the same for longer than a day… the question was: How does one define the length of a day?

Oh sure, we think it’s the amount of time it takes for the earth to rotate on its axis so that we see sun then moon then sun again. But there are other dimensions, other worlds where a day might not be defined in such a way. He’d traveled to some of those other worlds. They were fascinating places.

There was one world where the sun never shone once. He’d spent the entire time in an airport waiting room, days and days and days spent waiting to fly away. Staring out the window, walking in circles, a multitude of others waited along with him. One guy would leave every once in a while, but he always came back. He said he couldn’t find anything. Was that him? Still, the plane never arrived. Instead, our hero walked to the edge of the universe and jumped off. Somehow, he’d landed smack dab in the middle of this body in the middle of this café in the middle of… where the hell was he?

But he had memories. Even though he’d never been there before, he had memories. He remembered this woman with long, blonde hair sitting beside him who was stifling her mellow laugh. She had long legs that wrapped around his waist and neck in such a pleasant way. Too bad those were only memories. He wished he’d actually experienced that… He thought as he caught a glimpse of her out of the corner of his eye.

Did they know each other? Did she have a name that he could call to mind? Did he have a name that she could call to mind? Did he have a mind that he could call a name? Did she have a… Things were really getting quite complicated. It was time to take another sip of tea. Maybe, that would do.

The tea wasn’t liquor, though, and liquor was what he really wanted. Maybe, he should stand up, step outside that café, and go to a bar. Did that strange place have bars? Was alcohol legal there? He might have stumbled into prohibition. There’d been a club named that in his hometown, and a Star Trek episode where something like that had actually happened. How did he remember all that? This town certainly was not a club (there was no strobe light hanging down from the sky, and the sun’s mood lighting was all off for dancing), and he definitely didn’t believe in science fiction. Life was too much like fantasy, and fantasy was reality, which was certainly science but definitely not fiction. He didn’t think.

Fiction had too many rules, too many opinions and theories for him to take them seriously. A plot should progress from this point to that along a certain conceptual arc with definite points along the line where events of immense significance happen. But life was more like mathematics than that. Waiting only to be designated with any sort of significance, there were an infinite number of points along any given line. Art couldn’t be written. It could only be lived. So why was there a notebook open in front of him? Why were there words on that page? What the hell had he been writing?

Maybe it was a mathematical equation, something algebraic with variables, something about time and existence symbolically represented as a short story. A short story… being one level of a building, a level less than ten feet tall, something that a giant may have to duck to get into. He didn’t want to write things that giants had to duck to get into. He wanted to write things that giants could comfortably stretch out in, take off their shoes, and wiggle their toes through the carpet of. He wanted to write something that could accommodate a thousand giants, something like a second, which encompasses all eternity. What the hell was he writing? He’d lost his train of thought. The train of his brain, a brain trained… Wasn’t that what they’d been trying to do to him, train his brain?

He’d always waited for the caboose as a child. Was that in this existence or another one entirely? In whichever existence, he and his mother had played a game where one of them had to guess the color. The one who won got… well, the one who won didn’t get anything. They were just playing. But that was certainly a feat of some sort of mental gymnastics: to assume what might be based on past experiences that somehow had happened, that somehow were still contained within the brain. What was the brain? It had a physical location. It could be pointed to with Cartesian coordinates, but did its thoughts exist physically or… What else was there beyond the physical, he thought as he glanced again at the long-legged woman sitting beside him.

One day, eventually, the train game he’d played with his mother had gotten boring because all the cabooses were green even though his story books told him they were red. Who had lied to him? Was his brain seeing what was red as green, or had they actually changed the color? Which was true, the story or what he saw? According to science, the story had to accord with reality. Could a giant really stretch out in something like that? If life rearranged the story, then the story became the history of science and life became the present of science, and the present of science was sometimes studied by philosophy. A philosophy of science itself had evolved nonetheless. He didn’t believe in the philosophy of anything. It had nothing to do with the word’s etymology. Nobody paid attention to etymology anymore… if they ever had – besides Joyce, of course. But he might have just been playing a game, an etymological game. Could one play a game with something as abstract as language? Was English malleable enough to still be childlike and play, or had it developed along with the stiff upper lip of its progenitors into an adult’s post-industrial, post-colonial, postmodern poster child nightmare?

Did they even speak English here? What if he opened his mouth and all that came out was gibberish that only he understood… That’s all that ever came out anyways, or so he thought. Then, he realized that everybody could understand whatever he said whatever world he was in. English was the universal language, just like French and German and Sanskrit and Chinese, but English was what he understood when he spoke it. He was the universe. That solved the problem most definitely. What need was there to be understood so long as he knew what he was saying? Did communication ever extend beyond the individual, the universe…

He turned, with a lovely smile, to wonder of the blonde sitting beside him, “What’s so funny?”

From Michael Anthony Adams, Jr.’s collection of stories, Psychedelicizations.