You will … can.… be.… not …

“Hey, are you okay?”

It was a girl’s voice. The angel. In my blurry vision I could see two silvery pink running shoes, toes pointed at me.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I blurted out, trying to look up at her, when a surge of agony pulled my head down again. “Sun glare.”

She didn’t speak. I tried to raise my head, but it was a no-go, as if a fifty-pound dumbbell was dangling from my neck and someone was playing the drums on my cerebral cortex.

“Well, thanks. I didn’t see. I, um …,” she babbled, all the while forcing me to the sad recognition that this girl was intensely sweet and shy and everything I would look for if I didn’t know I was destined to marry a redheaded nurse named Sue from Philly in ten years. Except, I realized as my memories shuffled at a maddening speed, that outcome was gone forever. Sue existed somewhere, still, but she’d probably never be with me. And now my crash-and-burn with this girl was inevitable. I’d lost two hot girls in one morning.

Without warning, I smelled apples laced with cinnamon, like someone was baking pies nearby. I could almost taste them. My salivary glands kicked into overdrive and my mouth began to water. Then, suddenly, the memory disappeared. Whoosh. Gone.

The girl was trying to tell me about how she was new in town. It was where any normal guy would say something like “Where are you from?” or “Can I show you around?”, but instead, my eyes bulged, heavy, and I couldn’t bring myself to raise them higher than her perfectly shaped ankles. To top it all off, I felt drool bubbling over my bottom lip. Awesome. Just my luck. Why couldn’t she just leave? Leave now, but come back later so we could continue this conversation at a time when I wasn’t cycling, when I felt more normal? But for me, abnormal was normal. I’d been fooling myself, thinking I could change who I was.

Suddenly I saw craft paper and a paperback romance novel and water dripping on hardwood. Fear curdled in my body. A scream bloomed in my throat but came out as a muffled moan. A jolt of pressure rocketed through my eyeballs, seeming to slice them in half. I pushed my palms hard against my eye sockets. “No. No. No!”

Most girls ran screaming from me, but this girl wouldn’t leave. Perfect. She put her hands on her knees, and though I couldn’t see her face, I knew she was squinting at me like I was some experiment gone horrifically wrong. “Are you having an aneurysm?”

“No, I’ll be …” Another jab in my eye, and then a picture

Me, screaming flashed in front of my eyes. My next word was a muffled groan—“Fine”—because another memory was fighting against the rage of others, floating to the surface kissing soft lips, blond curls in my eyes and giving me a warm, tense feeling between my legs. What? I get to kiss her? Seriously? I was drooling in front of her, for God’s sake. I hadn’t completely ruined things with her with this moronic display? Just as I inwardly started to celebrate I caught another … it is unexpected tragedy that brings us together today the unexpected is often the most difficult to deal with and clenched my fists. Sure, in the future I’d perfected, there were funerals. But nothing horrible. My mother wouldn’t go until she was in her sixties. And my last official memory was digging for sand crabs in the surf with my grandson—I could even feel the ache of my bones with that memory, so I had to have been old. My poor grandson. That little blond kid. He was gone now, cast into dreamland with the others. God, I’d loved him. When I was young, I’d always hoped that when I cycled away from an outcome, all the progeny I remembered wouldn’t just disappear forever, that they’d have a chance to exist somewhere, with other families, like Sue. The more kids and grandkids I recycled, though, the less I believed that was true. Every time the experiences started to shuffle, I felt like I was murdering them.

Murderer! You killed her!

The words sliced through my head. I smelled something sour and felt a hot breath on my neck. The voice was so vicious and the memory so vivid, I thought it was real; I looked around and saw a small crowd of a dozen or so people in bathing suits, carrying their beach chairs and towels, staring at me. But no one was standing close by accusing me of being a killer. I would have wondered where the hell that came from if I hadn’t already known. The weirdest and most unimaginable things only came from one place: the land of the yet-to-be.

I shuddered and gripped my head tightly in my hands. “Green elephant,” I muttered under my breath.

She leaned forward. Apples again. Her hair smelled like apples. I inhaled deeply, feasting on the smell, since it was the only nice thing I could find about the moment. “Excuse me?”

I clenched my teeth. “Green elephant, green elephant. Green elephant.”

I figured that if anything could send her away, me muttering nonsensical phrases would be it. The phrase “green elephant” didn’t mean anything to her, but I’d invented it when I was nine or ten, and it meant everything to me.

“Do you want some water or something?”

Why did she have to be so damn nice? I pulled my head up and stared into her eyes, blue and endless, and

Blood on the staircase

I knew right then I was going to be sick. “Look.” I tried to keep my voice even, but it came out as more of a growl. “I don’t want anything from you, so just get the hell away from me.”

I was surprised by two things. First, at how I could bring myself to sound like a total jerkwad, which was what I probably was, but I’d always been too absorbed in my future to dwell on it. And second, at how she just nodded, as if it all made sense. She hurried up the ramp and jogged off, fastening the headphones over her ears as if we’d been chatting about the weather.

I sat alone for a moment, eyes closed, green-elephanting until the pain subsided and my mind slowed to a peaceful lull. A thousand new memories of the future bubbled under the surface of my eyes. On the bad side, there was something about blood on the staircase, and I had this strange ache in my chest. On the good side, there was kissing that girl. The rest I would have to sort out later. I felt like I’d gone ten rounds of a heavyweight title match. I couldn’t tell if it was because of the cycling or because the new memories would prove too horrifying to bear. I could change them. I could change the bad things, sometimes, by going off script.

The problem was, changing the bad things usually took away the good things, too. And there always seemed to be more bad things to replace the ones I managed to escape. The future I’d given up was a one-in-a-thousand future. I went to college, married Sue, who understood me as well as anyone could, had children and grandchildren. It wasn’t anything awesome, but it was normal, and that was all I wanted. The other hundreds of futures were like episodes of some bad television show. High drama, all the time. Once, I’d choked to death in my teens. Once, I’d accidentally caused a fire while making bacon in the kitchen and ended up homeless. Once, I’d wound up addicted to crack, in a loveless marriage to a Vegas stripper, and murdered in a drug deal in my early twenties. I’d done it all. In my head, at least.

And sometimes … sometimes, try as I might, I couldn’t change things. It was like certain past events sealed that certain future events would occur, and they couldn’t be changed, or it wasn’t clear how to change them. Once, when I was ten, I was trying so hard to follow the script that I tripped and broke my wrist. After that, I had this strong feeling I was going to get a huge bump on my head, but I couldn’t tell how. I tried not following the script, hoping to avoid that bump. But it didn’t work, because I didn’t know what in the script to change. Turned out that I had to give up skateboarding until my wrist healed, so I put my skateboard on the top shelf of my closet. I opened it one day and the skateboard fell out and whacked me on the head. So sometimes bad things were just impossible to avoid.