Pol Kornell - The Ghosts of Christmas

It was because of a row. The row was about nothing. So it all came from nothing. Or, perhaps its more accurate to say it came from the interaction between two people. I remember how Bens voice suddenly became gentle and he said, as if decanting the whole unconscious reason for the row:

Why dont we try for a baby?

This was mid-March. My memory of that moment is of hearing birds outside. I always loved that time of year, that sense of nature becoming stronger all around. But I always owned the decisions I made, I didnt blame them on what was around me, or on my hormones. I am whats around me, I am my hormones, thats what I always said to myself. I dont know if Ben ever felt the same way. Thats how I think of him now: always excusing himself. I dont know how that squares with how the world is now. Perhaps it suits him down to the ground. Im sure I spent years looking out for him excusing himself. Im sure me doing that was why, in the end, he did.

I listened to the birds. Yes, I said.

We got lucky almost immediately. I called my mother and told her the news.

Oh no, she said.

When the first trimester had passed, and everything was still fine, I told my boss and then my colleagues at the Project, and arranged for maternity leave. I know you lot are going to go over the threshold the day after I leave, I told my team. Youre going to call me up at home and youll be all, Oh, hey, Lindsey is currently inhabiting her own brain at age three! Shes about to try to warn the authorities about some terrorist outrage or other. But pregnancy must be such a joy.

Again with this, said Alfred. We have no reason to believe the subjects would be able to do anything other than listen in to whats going on in the heads of their younger selves

Except, said Lindsey, stepping back into this old argument like I hadnt even mentioned hello, baby, the maths rules out even the possibility

Free will

No. Its becoming clearer with every advance we make back into what was: whats written is written.

Our due date was Christmas Day.

People who were shown around the Project were always surprised at how small the communication unit was. It had to be; most of the time it was attached to the skull of a sedated rhesus monkey. Its just a string of lights, someone once said. And we all looked appalled, to the point where Ramsay quickly led the guest away.

They were like Christmas lights, each link changing colour to show how a different area of the monkeys brain was responding to the data coming back from the other mind, probably its own mind, that it was connected to, somewhen in the past. Or, we thought only in our wildest imaginings then, in the future.

Christmas lights. Coincidence and association thread through this, so much, when such things can only be illusions. Or artifice. Cartoons in the margin.

How can one have coincidence, when everything is written?

I always thought my father was too old to be a dad. It often seemed to me that Mum was somehow too old to have me too, but that wasnt the case, biologically. It was just that she came from another time, a different world, of austerity, of shying away from rock and roll. She got even older after Dad died. Ironically, I became pregnant at the same age she had been.

We went to see her: me, Ben, and the bump. She didnt refer to it. For the first hour. She kept talking about her new porch. Ben started looking between us, as if waiting to see who would crack first. Until he had to say it, over tea. So, the baby! You must be looking forward to being a grandmother!

Mum looked wryly at him. Not at my age.

Sorry?

Thats all right. You two can do what you want. Ill be gone soon.

We stayed for an hour or two more, talking about other things, about that bloody porch, and then we waved goodbye and drove off and I parked the car as soon as we were out of sight of the house. Lets kill her, I said.

Absolutely.

I shouldnt say that. I so shouldnt say that. She will be gone soon. Its selfish of me to want to talk about the baby

When we could be talking about that really very lovely porch. You could have led with how your potentially Nobel Prizewinning discovery of time travel is going.

She didnt mention that either.

She is proud of you, Im sure. Did something? I mean, did anything ever happen, between you, back then?

I shook my head. There was not one particular moment. I was not an abused child. This isnt a story about abuse.

I closed my eyes. I listened to the endless rhythm of the cars going past.

The Project was created to investigate something that Id found in the case histories of schizophrenics. Sufferers often describe a tremendous sensation of now, the terrifying hugeness of the current moment. They often find voices talking to them, other people inside their own heads seemingly communicating with them. I started using the new brain-mapping technology to look into the relationship between the schizoid mind and time. Theory often follows technology, and in this case it was a detailed image of particle trails within the mind of David, a schizophrenic, that handed the whole theory to me in a single moment. It was written that I saw that image and made those decisions. Now when I look back to that moment, its almost like I didnt do anything. Except that what happened in my head in that moment has meant so much to me.

I saw many knotted trails in that image, characteristic of asymmetric entanglement. I saw that, unlike in the healthy minds wed seen, where there are only a couple of those trails at any given moment (and who knows what those are, even today?), this mind was connected, utterly, to other things that were very similar to itself. I realised instantly what I was looking at: What could those other things that were influencing all those particle trails be but other minds? And where were those other minds very like this one?

And then I had a vision of the trails in my own mind, like Christmas lights, and that led me to the next moment when I knew consciously what I had actually understood an instant before, as if I had divined it from the interaction of all things

The trails led to other versions of this persons own mind, elsewhen in time.

I remember that David was eager to cooperate. He wanted to understand his condition. Hed been a journalist before admitting himself to the psychiatric hospital.

I need to tear, hair, fear, ear, see yes, see, whats in here! he shouted, tapping the front of his head with his middle fingers. Hah, funny, the rhymes, crimes, alibis, keep trying to break out of those, and it works, that works, works. Hello! He sat suddenly and firmly down and took a very steady-handed sip from his plastic cup of water. You asked me to stay off the drugs, he said, so its difficult. And I would like to go back on them. I would very much like to. After.

I had started, ironically, to see him as a slice across a lot of different versions of himself, separated by time. I saw him as all his minds, in different phases, interfering with each other. Turn that polarised view the other way, and youd have a series of healthy people. Thats what I thought. And I wrote that down offhandedly somewhere, in some report. His other selves werent the voices in his head. Thats a common fallacy about the history of our work. Those voices were the protective action that distances a schizophrenic from those other selves. They were characters formed around the incursion, a little bit of interior fiction. Were now told that a schizophrenic is someone who has to deal with such random interference for long stretches of time.