So It Goes Again

Billy Pilgrim's grandson — also named Billy, because the Pilgrims were not an imaginative family — became unstuck in time on a Wednesday in March, which was the same day his dentist told him he needed a root canal. The root canal, in Billy's opinion, was the worse of the two events.

Being unstuck in time was not, as you might imagine, a grand cosmic experience. There were no swirling portals. No dramatic orchestral swells. Billy simply found himself, between one breath and the next, standing in a wheat field in southern France in the year 1944, watching American soldiers eat lunch.

The soldiers did not see him. This was the first rule of time travel, as Billy would learn: you could observe but not participate. You were a ghost in someone else's Tuesday.

He returned to his own Tuesday — the one with the root canal — approximately four seconds later, though by his internal clock it had been thirty minutes. His dentist, Dr. Kim, asked if he was all right. Billy said he was fine. This was a lie, but lying to dentists is one of humanity's oldest traditions, and Billy saw no reason to break with it.

The unsticking happened again three days later. This time he found himself in a hospital room in 2089, watching an old woman die. She was surrounded by family — children, grandchildren, a great-grandchild who was playing with a toy robot on the floor. The old woman's name, according to the chart on the wall, was Maria Elena Vasquez. She was ninety-one. She was smiling.

Billy watched her die. It took about twenty minutes. The family cried. The great-grandchild continued playing with the robot. Billy returned to his own time and sat in his kitchen for a long while, thinking about Maria Elena Vasquez, whom he had never met and would never meet, and whose death he had witnessed with the casual intimacy of a stranger on a bus.

This is what time travel is, Billy decided. It is not adventure. It is grief, delivered out of order.

Over the following months, Billy visited seventeen moments in time. He watched a woman give birth in a cave during the last ice age. He watched a boy fly a kite in Beijing in 1742. He watched two men argue about the price of fish in a market in ancient Rome, and he wanted very much to know how the argument ended, but time moved him on before the fish was sold.

He also watched three wars, a famine, and a man beating a dog in an alley in 1963 Cleveland.

The wars were large and meaningless in the way that wars are always large and meaningless — a great deal of noise and metal and young men turned into old men in the space of a morning. The famine was quiet and meaningful in the way that famines are always quiet and meaningful — a great deal of nothing where something should have been.

The man beating the dog was neither large nor quiet. It was just a man, and a dog, and a stick, and the sound the stick made, which was a sound Billy would hear in his sleep for the rest of his life.

He could not stop it. This was the second rule: you could not intervene. You could only watch. Time travel, it turned out, was the universe's way of teaching empathy to people who had previously been able to avoid it.

Billy told his wife, Lucy, about the time travel. She was a practical woman who sold real estate and believed in things she could measure. She listened to his story, asked three clarifying questions, and then said: "So basically, you randomly teleport to watch strangers live and die, and you can't do anything about it?"

"That's correct."

"That sounds terrible."

"It is."

"Is there a support group?"

There was not, but Billy started one. He placed an ad in the local newspaper — "Unstuck in Time? You're not alone" — and twelve people showed up to the first meeting. They met in the basement of the Presbyterian church, because the Presbyterians were the only denomination willing to rent space to a group whose membership requirement was a shared hallucination, or possibly a shared miracle, depending on your perspective.

The group discovered, over many meetings, that they had all witnessed the same thing: the ordinariness of time. The moments they visited were not historically significant. They were not pivotal battles or great speeches or the signing of important documents. They were lunches, and arguments about fish, and women giving birth, and boys flying kites, and men beating dogs.

"Time," said Margaret Kowalski, a retired schoolteacher who had visited the year 4,000 BC and watched a family eat dinner, "is mostly just people trying to get through the day."

Billy thought about this for a long time. He thought about Maria Elena Vasquez, dying at ninety-one with her family around her, smiling. He thought about the soldiers eating lunch in France, not knowing that some of them would not eat lunch tomorrow. He thought about the man with the stick, and the dog, and the sound.

And he thought: if I could go back and change one thing, I would not stop a war. I would not prevent a famine. I would take the stick from the man's hand.

But he couldn't. That was the rule. That was always the rule.

So it goes.