The Man Who Lived Backwards

It’s four-thirty in the morning, and I stub out my cigarette with the heel of my boot and walk groggily to the nearest park bench. The air smells of dew, and there’s a soft glow everywhere that might just be the pint of neat whiskey I consumed in the last hour.  Or morning come early, I’m not sure, but it annoys me how militantly straight the jogging path is.

“Not all that drunk,” I say out loud, staring up at two unusually bright stars swimming in and out of the dark red haze of the day’s pollutants, raised to divine omnipresence in the night sky.

“Not enough to forget me by morning?”

“It is morning,” I drawl, as I adjust to the uncomfortable realization that someone’s been sitting next to me on my bench for a while without me noticing.

“Thank god for that,” he smiles.

“Friend of the daylight, are you?” I swear to myself that the next thing I say will be a dismissal, because I’m quite sure I’ve never met him before.

“Not particularly. Just hate the end of the day.”

“Try drinking through it, then.”

He chuckles, turning around to look straight at me. He holds my gaze for a few awkward seconds, and then sighs.

“I don’t know how to do this, so I guess I’ll just be honest with you,” he says.

I run through a self-concocted list of things ‘honest’ could mean in the dictionary of the kind of men who sneak up on lone women in four a.m. park benches. My hand’s been parked around my pepper spray inside my bag all this while, so I’m not too worried.

“I hate the end of the day,” he explains, “because I can never wake up the next morning.”

“You don’t say, Mr. Unique.”

“You misunderstand me. My problem isn’t waking up. It’s waking up the next morning.”

“Everybody loses a day here and there, especially on weekends, slippery little things.”

He shakes his head. “Not me,” he insists. “I brush my teeth, get into bed, check my alarm and fall asleep. Then I get up the previous day.”

I laugh. “So you’re stuck in a time loop?”

“You don’t believe me,” he says. “I’ve always worried that you won’t believe me. No, I’m not stuck in a time loop. I’m just going through my life in the opposite direction you are.”

“Benjamin Button?” I ask. “I suppose you have grand delusions of growing young while the love of your life grows old.”

“No, no, no.” He runs his fingers through his hair, frustrated. “I’m doing this badly. I’ve never tried to explain it before. I got up with you this morning, hypothetically. I went to work, same as you. Joined the Friday night party afterwards, same as you. Went home, same as you, and went to sleep. When you wake up next, it’s Saturday, and you’re a day older. But when I wake up next, it’s Thursday, and I’m a day younger.”

“Wow,” I say. “Hit and miss – nice try except you should have skipped the part about me aging. But I’ll give it to you – that’s got to be the most elaborate pickup line ever invented.”

“Well, it better be. I’ve been rehearsing it for forty years.”

“You don’t look a day above thirty.”

“No, I don’t,” he says.

 I laugh again. “Alright, I’ll bite. Have you been rehearsing it since the day you met me – in the far off future?”

“The day I met you the first time, and the day you saw me the last time.”

“Complicated. Which one of us died?”

“You did. Only, I didn’t know you very well, so you were the one crying.”

He smiles sadly, his eyes never leaving my face. He’s a good actor, because I feel like he’s anticipating my every expression, staring at them not to memorize them, because he knows them by heart already, but to see them again, one last time. I am much more drunk than I thought I was, and surprisingly sentimental for so early in the morning, but this conversation could actually be more entertaining than finally getting to use my pepper spray.

“Why a day, though? Why don’t you just live straight backwards through every second? This seems terribly back-stitchy of you.”

I’ve made him laugh. “It really does, doesn’t it? And I have no idea why – but that’s just the way it is. I’ve got a few theories of course, and my best attempt at a guess would be that a day is the quintessential unit of time.”

“Bullshit.”

“No, not measurable time – I’m not going anywhere near the Planck word. What I mean is time, as a larger entity. Philosophically speaking, the stuff of memory – what we make of our lives. I think we live that in terms of days.”

“But why days? Why not seconds, or smaller?”

“Because you remember your life in days? The day my father died – the day I stubbed my toe – the day my son was born – “

“But that’s just a linguistic simplification –“

“Maybe for you. Maybe it’s because I live my life in days. Maybe there are people like me walking around who live their lives backwards in hours. Maybe there’s someone who lives their life entirely in reverse, and learnt how to speak, read, write, walk and talk backwards, like a tape in rewind, because that’s the only way they knew to interact with the rest of the world. I don’t know. All I know is that I live my life a day at a time, and every new day for me is an old one for everybody else.”

 “So what happens to your precious theory when you screw up your sleep cycle?”

“My days are strictly sleep to sleep, with no thought whatsoever to any Calendars, solar or Gregorian. Yours?”

“Ah well, I do have a day job.”

“Go on, then. Ask me the usual test questions about yourself? The ones I’m going to know the answer to because I’ve known you for forty years in reverse.”

“No, I’d rather stay in this delusion for a while longer, it’s a damn site more interesting than the view from the park bench.”

 “Then ask me the other questions – the delusional ones about the future.”

“No, I don’t really believe you, and I’m not really interested in a random person’s science-fiction inspired construction of what the world will be like in fifty years’ time. So I’d much rather discuss the logical loopholes of your beautiful little story. If that’s okay with you.”

“Whatever keeps you interested. Frankly, I wish I could sit here and talk to you for the rest of my life, but you’re going to get up and leave me in a few minutes. And I can’t do anything about it. Except try and keep you interested for just a bit longer. You always loved the workings of things. I remember going to a magic show with you and getting terribly bored with how you’d insist on going through every trick and figuring out how it was done. Although I don’t think anything you said today would bore me. After all, I’m never going to see you again.”

“And how do you know that?”

“You told me, of course. An advantage of living backwards is that everyone you meet can tell you your future – and you can tell them theirs.”

“And have you ever tried tricking that future? Met someone one day who said they met you one day ago – and then ignored the guy the next day, so you didn’t actually ever meet them? Set-up paradoxes?”

“I used to do that a lot when I was old. This whole thing was terribly exciting then. I was still growing into it, so yes, I did try to trick it. Woke up in my apartment one day, and deliberately slept in a friend’s house the next night.”

“What happened?”

“I was jerked awake by the friend fifteen minutes later and driven back to my apartment, because his girlfriend decided to come home a day early.”

“So you can’t trick time?”

“Nope. Tried many times. Never worked.”

“Does that make you bitter about how preordained your destiny is?”

“My destiny isn’t necessarily pre-ordained. All it proves is that my timeline is as seamless as yours. And that there are people who know my future, and, well I know theirs, so it’s really all the same.”

“Except that you’re alone. And the whole world is heading in a different direction. A person you meet for the first time cries because they’ll never see you again. And a person you’ll never see again doesn’t know you well enough to acknowledge you the day you’re mourning their exit cue from your life.”

“Pretty much. Only, it works exactly the same way for the person in question.”

“I don’t believe you. If you know me for forty years, and you’re never going to see me again, why aren’t you more desperate to keep talking to me? I don’t believe you.”

“Then why is that worrying you at all?”

“It’s not. I’m just pointing out the flaws in your story.”

“Sure.”

“Yeah. I mean, if it were me, I’d grab me in a tight hug already.”

“I didn’t think you’d really want to hug a man you’ve never met in the middle of an empty park at four thirty in the morning. It’s not that great a pickup line.”

“ – pickup novel.”

“Yes, that. The last thing I want to do is scare you off.”

“So…  are there flying cars in the future?”

“What happened to not being interested in a random person’s science fiction inspired construction of the future?”

I grin. “I think I’ve run out of loopholes.”

“No you haven’t. You’re just invested in the delusion, now.”

“Hook, line and sinker,” I say. “If future me told you this conversation lasted under an hour, maybe you’ll finally get to trick that “seamless timeline” of yours for once.”

He stares at me, and then, before I can react, leans in and shoves his face into mine. My reflexes kick in just in time, and I leap away, pepper spray in hand.

“What the hell –"

He’s still leaning forward on the park bench, his hand trembling slightly, his eyes shining up at me. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. “Please –"

“Are you crazy? You just appeared out of nowhere at four in the morning! It’s not that convincing a story. “

“I didn’t think it was.”

I back away towards the park entrance. He’s still sitting frozen on the bench. As I shut the gate behind me, something crazy comes over me and I call out, “It wasn’t that bad, you know. Find me again someday in the daylight, when I have lots of friends around me, and try a new one.”

I turn and run, then, but not before I hear him sob. “But I already did.”

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