“You think many people get messages from the future?”

“I think everyone does,” Carvajal said vehemently. “The future isn’t the inaccessible, intangible realm it’s thought to be. But so few admit its existence except as an abstract concept. So few let its messages reach them!” A weird intensity had come into his expression. He lowered his voice and said, “The future isn’t a verbal construct, It’s a place with an existence of its own. Right now, as we sit here, we are also there, there plus one, there plus two, there plus n — an infinity of theres, all of them at once, both previous to and later than our current position along our time line. Those other positions are neither more nor less ‘real’ than this one. They’re merely in a place that happens not to be the place where the seat of our perceptions is currently located.”

“But occasionally our perceptions—”

“Cross over,” Carvajal said. “Wander into other segments of the time line. Pick up events or moods or scraps of conversation that don’t belong to ‘now.’”

“Do our perceptions wander,” I asked, “or is it the events themselves that are insecurely anchored in their own ‘now’?”

He shrugged. “Does that matter? There’s no way of knowing.”

You don’t care how it works? Your whole life has been shaped by this and you simply don’t—”

“I told you,” Carvajal said, “that I have many theories. So many, indeed, that they tend to cancel one another out. Lew, Lew, do you think I don’t care? I’ve spent all my life trying to understand my gift, my power, and I can answer any of your questions with a dozen answers, each as plausible as the next. The two-times-lines theory, for example. Have I told you about that?”

“No.”

“Well, then.” Coolly he produced a pen and drew two firm lines parallel to each other across the tablecloth. He labeled the ends of one line X and Y, the other X' and Y'. “This line that runs from X to Y is the course of history as we know it. It begins with the creation of the universe at X and ends with thermodynamic equilibrium at Y, all right? And these are some significant dates along its path.” With fussy little strokes he sketched in crossbars, beginning at the side of the table closer to himself and proceeding toward me. “This is the era of Neanderthal man. This is the time of Jesus. This is 1939, the start of World War Two. Also the start of Martin Carvajal, by the way. When were you born? Around 1970?”

“1966.”

“1966. All right. This is you, 1966. And this is the present year, 1999. Let’s say you’re going to live to be ninety. This is the year of your death, then, 2056. So much for line X–Y. Now this other line, X'–Y' — that’s also the course of history in this universe, the very same course of history denoted by the other line. Only it runs the other way. ”

“What?”

“Why not? Suppose there are many universes, each independent of all the others, each containing its unique set of suns and planets on which events occur unique to that universe. An infinity of universes, Lew. Is there any logical reason why time has to flow in the same direction in all of them?”

“Entropy,” I mumbled. “The laws of thermodynamics. Time’s arrow. Cause and effect.”

“I won’t quarrel with any of those ideas. So far as I know they’re all valid within a closed system,” said Carvajal. “But one closed system has no entropic responsibilities relative to another closed system, does it? Time can tick from A to Z in one universe and from Z to A in another, but only an observer outside both universes is going to know that, so long as within each universe the daily flow runs from cause to effect and not the other way. Will you admit the logic of that?”

I shut my eyes a moment. “All right. We have an infinity of universes all separate from one another, and the direction of time-flow in any of them may seem topsy-turvy relative to all the others. So?”

“In an infinity of anything, all possible cases exist, yes?”

“Yes. By definition.”

“Then you’ll also agree,” Carvajal said, “that out of that infinity of unconnected universes there may be one that’s identical to ours in all particulars, except only the direction of its flow of time relative to the flow of time here.”

“I’m not sure I grasp—”

“Look,” he said impatiently, pointing to the line that ran across the tablecloth from X’ to Y’. “Here’s another universe, side by side with our own. Everything that happens in it is something that also happens in ours, down to the most minute detail. But in this one the creation is at Y’ instead of X and the heat death of the universe is at X’ instead of Y. Down here” — he sketched a crossbar across the second line near my end of the table — “is the era of Neanderthal man. Here’s the Crucifixion. Here’s 1939, 1966, 1999, 2056. The same events, the same key dates, but running back to front. That is, they look back to front if you happen to live in this universe and can manage to get a peek into the other one. Over there, naturally, everything seems to be running in the right direction.” Carvajal extended the 1939 and 1999 crossbars on the X–Y line until they intersected the X'–Y' line, and did the same for the 1999 and 1939 crossbars on the second line. Then he bracketed both sets of crossbars by connecting their ends, to form a pattern like this:

A waiter passing by glanced at what Carvajal was doing to the tablecloth and, coughing slightly, moved on, saying nothing, keeping his face rigid. Carvajal didn’t seem to notice. He continued, “Let’s suppose, now, that a person is born in the X to Y universe who is able, God knows why, to see occasionally into the X'–Y' universe. Me. Here I am, going from 1939 to 1999 in X–Y, peeking across now and then into X'–Y' and observing the events of their years 1939 to 1999, which are the same as ours except that they’re flowing by in the reverse order, so at the time of my birth here everything in my entire X–Y lifetime has already happened in X'–Y'. When my consciousness connects with the consciousness of my other self over there, I catch him reminiscing about his past, which coincidentally is my future.”

“Very neat.”

“Yes. The ordinary person confined to a single universe can roam his memory at will, wandering around freely in his own past. But I have access to the memory of someone who’s living in the opposite direction, which allows me to ‘remember’ the future as well as the past. That is, if the two-time-lines theory is correct.”

“And is it?”

“How would I know?” Carvajal asked. “It’s only a plausible operational hypothesis to explain what happens when I see. But how could I confirm it?”

I said, after a time, “The things you see — do they come to you in reverse chronological order? The future unrolling in a continuous scroll, that sort of thing?”

“No. Never. No more than your memories form a single continuous scroll. I get fitful glimpses, fragments of scenes, sometimes extended passages that have an apparent duration of ten or fifteen minutes or more, but always a random jumble, never any linear sequence, never anything at all consecutive. I learned to find the larger pattern myself, to remember sequences and hook them together in a likely order. It was like learning to read Babylonian poetry by deciphering cuneiform inscriptions on broken, scrambled bricks. Gradually I worked out clues to guide me in my reconstructions of the future: this is how my face will look when I’m forty, when I’m fifty, when I’m sixty, these are clothes I wore from 1965 to 1973, this is the period when I had a mustache, when my hair was dark, oh, a whole host of little references and associations and footnotes, which eventually became so familiar to me that I could see any scene, even the most brief, and place it within a matter of weeks or even days. Not easy at first, but second nature by this time.”