Soramimi Hanarejima

Peas in a Pod

I don’t know when exactly she moved into the building, but my younger self has been my downstairs neighbor for at least several weeks now—that’s how long it’s been since I caught a glimpse of her from the stairs on my way out. She stepped out of the apartment I used to have, and instantly I knew it was her. That air of alertness and distraction about her made me feel as though I were looking at a candid photo you had taken of me years ago. From then on, I’ve been careful to keep my distance so as not to disappoint her, because the consequences of that would be disastrous.

For the most part, I’ve been able to stay out of sight, though she does occasionally happen upon me when I’m in the laundry room or leaving the building. To my relief, she just smiles at me during these encounters. Maybe she doesn’t recognize me, it never occurring to her that she’ll become me. And maybe she won’t. She is, I suppose, of an age when she still has the potential to become almost anyone.

With the city being as small as it is, I inevitably see her around—going into the library, hanging out with your younger self in a cafe, getting tickets at the cinema box office, considering the various brands of locally made granola at the grocery store—doing the things I used to do, some of which I still do. Every time I see her, I quickly avert my gaze so we won’t make eye contact, then I hurry off just in case.

This avoidance goes on well into the summer and has become so routine that it seems we just might stay strangers to each other indefinitely.

Then one evening in July, I’m stepping into the empty lobby, just back from work, and out of nowhere, she says, “Hey, neighbor, would you like a tofu enchilada?”—her voice my voice but vibrant with youthful energy.

Startled by the sudden question, I turn my head in her direction. She smiles at me from half a flight up the old staircase, her bright eyes looking right into mine.

“They accidentally gave me two in this order,” she explains, holding up a paper bag.

“An enchilada would be terrific—thanks,” I reply.

“We can eat together, if you don’t have plans. It’d be nice to have some company.”

“Oh, sure,” I answer before I know it.

I follow her up the stairs, getting anxious as we near the second floor. Now I’ll have to talk with her, and there’s no way she’ll remain oblivious of who I am. I should have declined—could still decline, say that I forgot I have to meet someone soon. But I don’t have the heart to weasel out of that earnest invitation I’ve accepted and disappoint her sincere interest in human connection.

As she unlocks the door I know so well, I feel like I’m back in middle school, about to go into a new friend’s bedroom for the first time to do homework or listen to music. The moment I step through the doorway after her, all the years between us seem to dissolve—undone by the sight before me. She has the same furniture I started out with here, all arranged as I had it.

While she plates and reheats our food, I bring utensils and glasses of water from the kitchen to the little square table by the bay window. Once our simple meal has been set on the table, she of course sits in the spot I always did here—facing toward the bookcase with the radio—and I sit opposite her. In the drawn-out daylight of this summer evening, she looks especially young.

A few bites into her enchilada, she asks, “Do you like it here, in this city?”

“Enough to have stayed for a while,” I answer. Longer than I should have, I want to say. “How about you?”

“I’m still getting used to it. I wish things were more modern, but the people are nice.”

“When you have a chance, check out the rose garden tucked away in the Forest Hills neighborhood,” I say, because I know it will make the transition easier and she would have found it on her own soon enough. “It’s old-fashioned in just the right kind of way,” I add.

“An old-fashioned rose garden must be really nice this time of year,” she says.

I want to recommend more places—the parks lining the city’s outskirts and the farms beyond them, the ones with the best peaches and pears—but I worry she’ll end up going to them all the time, get lulled into the entrancing calm they’re so good at engendering, then daydream away the weeks, months and ultimately years the way I have.

A quiet falls over us, and our affinity for each other becomes thick in the air between us.

Maybe I’m worrying too much. She can’t be exactly who I was. I never had enchiladas with my older self and would never have invited my older self over for dinner. Still, she’s carried by the momentum of our shared past and very likely heading in my direction. I hope she will change more than I have, enough to outgrow everything I tried to outrun by coming here—only to unwittingly embark on a meandering detour away from things I hadn’t understood the importance of.

I want to tell her all this despite knowing that I won’t, even if pressed. But there won’t be any questions I’ll have to dodge. I’m sure she won’t ask me about the concrete particulars of my life. I’ve always been mainly interested in what people think and feel, not what they do for work or where they grew up.

“I can’t believe it’s already the height of summer,” she says.

“You know what they say about summer here. The days are long, but the weeks are short.”

“That seems better than long weeks with short days. But long or short, it’s what you do and think and feel during those days and weeks that matters, right?”

“Very true.”

“So, for you, what makes being here feel meaningful?” she asks.

The question takes me aback, familiar yet uncanny—the prodigal sibling of the one I’m often asking: What makes you feel alive? A question she wouldn’t ask because she already feels supremely alive—nothing like me trying to recapture that feeling with the help of the places I frequent here, the ones that keep me in this city.

And of course she’s concerned with meaning. At her age, I was too, though I couldn’t articulate that.

“The promise of new discoveries,” I tell her.

“Oh, with all the brilliant theoreticians working here, it does feel like we’re at the forefront of human knowledge.”

“Well, there’s that. But I meant discovery on a personal level. Being here has a way of putting you at the forefront of your mind. And that allows you to form all kinds of new ideas.”

“Is that because there’s something special about this place?”

“The main thing is it gives you space to think—for your thoughts to expand. They aren’t constrained by the bustle of a larger city and aren’t as concerned with the roleplay we have to constantly take seriously just about everywhere else.”

“Hm, maybe that’s why lately I’ve felt the most like me I’ve ever felt.”

So it’s already started. It was bound to happen. That’s the nature of this place, of the relationship one can form with it. Now the only question is whether the me she’s referring to is me.

“Can you tell me what that’s like?” I ask.

“Oh, I’m not sure how to put it into words,” she says. “But I can try.”

“Please do,” I encourage.

“Well, it’s like being very awake,” she murmurs, turning to the window. “Refreshed after a long night of sleep with dreams that filter into my thoughts throughout the day.”

“What kind of dreams?”

She stares up at the clouds as though deferring to them for an answer to my question.

“Hm, yeah. What kind of dreams,” she muses.

Languidly, my gaze drifts to the maple tree in front of our building, this abundance of green leaves the perfect place to rest my attention while I wait, ready to listen intently, prepared by my time here to really hear what matters.

Across the Ages

1

For what feels like hours since her mother tucked her in and said goodnight she’s been staring out the window at the moon and holding her tiger plushie under the covers. There’s nothing else she can do but hope that the cat is safe somewhere this cold winter night. Now that he hasn’t come home for three days, she’s afraid the worst has happened.

When the door creaks open, her eyes dart to it even though she knows this is just her mother checking on her. Fear has made her alert, and her mother can tell.

Almost spectral in the moonlight, her mother crosses the room, then sits down on the bed and says, “Here, I’ll teach you a lullaby.”

Soft and slow, her mother’s voice fills the air with a wistful song about a time traveler’s journeys through forgotten eras. Then she tries singing it, verse by rhyming verse, repeating each one after her mother—as though following her mother along a beach, mimicking her mother’s gait as she steps into freshly pressed footprints before the waves wash them away. This takes her mind off the cat, and soon she gives in to the exhaustion of worrying late into the night.

2

On the hottest night yet of summer camp, she waits in her top bunk for sleep to come, but it seems to hover just outside the cabin, reluctant to enter because the inside is stuffy with humidity and snoring. There’s nothing she can do about this except sing the lullaby about the time traveler in her mind as though to invite sleep in.

Then she’s in a village of thatched-roof houses and dirt roads. From behind the blacksmith’s home comes Bellamine leading an ox-drawn cart, smiling at her while passing by. She smiles back, remembering that tomorrow she will till the fields. It’s that time of year already. But for now, she’s off to the mill, for the flour to make the cake for her cousin’s sendoff. Following the path by the river, she’s alone—really alone—for the first time in weeks, her sense of self expanding to meet the trees and shrubs around her, brushing against their bare twigs as she goes.

Suddenly, the landscape vanishes, replaced by bunk beds and wood-panel walls all too visible in the moonlight soaking through the cabin’s plain linen curtains.

Well, at least I slept long enough to have that dream, she thinks.

3

Even though she hasn’t so much as glanced at any textbooks or old exams since the afternoon, her mind is busy with thoughts of schematics that seem to crowd the darkness of her dorm room. Needing something to help her sleep, she turns her attention to that old lullaby, repeating it like an incantation.

This is in bad need of grease, she thinks while putting her weight into wrestling open the master valve of the computation engine. Finally the control lever relents, shifting beneath her forearms. She keeps pushing until the valve is fully open. Then all around her the great clockwork machine stirs to life, its pistons pumping and giant gears grinding. Roused by the steam coursing through its labyrinthine hydraulics, the engine quickly reaches maximum speed, and she can tell that the program it’s running is a long one—a complicated set of calculations that must be for projections based on the government’s ration optimization plan. If only she could understand all the churning, whirring, and hissing around her, then she’d be privy to the answers the engine is producing, the numbers that will tell the country how it can manage through these times of scarcity. But the clamor of metal and steam only tells her that this massive mechanical marvel enveloping her is functioning properly, just as her people need it to.

4

“It’s not just a lullaby, is it?” she says when her mother calls after work one evening. “The song about the time traveler is a way to actually travel through time.”

“That’s right. Time travel in the aether of consciousness,” her mother answers.

“So that’s why it always feels like a dream, like I’m just being carried along by sensations and thoughts.”

“Right. Everything that happened in the past is locked into place, so when you travel into an experience someone had, it’s like a path you simply follow.”

“What about the future?”

“As far as I know, it has no paths.”

5

But maybe it does. After she takes a job that regularly sends her on business trips, she travels into the future when jet lag keeps her awake in dark hotel rooms.

After the first time, she has no idea she’s visited the future—everything was low-tech or no-tech as she had breakfast in the kitchen of a rustic cabin then foraged for mushrooms in the nearby woods. But a couple of weeks later, she’s sure that must have been the future—some remote corner of it or one of those tech detox retreats—because there had been that orange tinge in the sky and that nagging back-of-the-mind dread, the same as all the times she’s seen humanoid robots and holographic AI companions—things that could (will?) exist only in the future.

Or exist only in her fantasies of the future. But if she’s having fantasies, her mind has become adept at conjuring up things she’s never heard of and never imagined, like drugs that help the brain effortlessly create vivid memories and smartglasses that use AI to display an estimate for when things—conversations, dinner parties, romantic relationships—will end.

Whatever is happening, it keeps happening. Whether she’s on a business trip or not, she keeps going into the future, ending up in it more often than the past—in a city abustle with sleek cars, amid apple trees with robots picking fruit off their branches, in a dog park where a beagle nuzzles her leg and says, “You smell interesting,” these friendly words coming from a speaker on his collar that’s controlled by the cranial implant constantly analyzing his brain activity.

6

She wants to tell her mother about all this, but first she needs to better grasp the implications of what’s going on. The major one being that the future exists—is (was?) at various times ahead of her being experienced by people. Which gets into the whole issue of free will. But she can wrangle that part later. For now, it’s time to gather information.

So she writes notes on everything she remembers from each visit to the future. No detail is too trite to go unrecorded. Soon, a pattern emerges. Future moments always have some fixture, something that has persisted. The stone wall cutting through a playa littered with tree stumps. The line of concrete tetrapods running along a beach strewn with the lichen-laden branches of wind-snapped trees. And often there’s some lasting consequence from an earlier time. The orange suffusing the sky—a result of atmospheric engineering efforts to preserve some semblance of weather patterns. That nagging dread—the anxiety of what will collapse next in a world made ever so precarious by centuries of human ambitions. But these aspects of the future are unaccompanied by specific thoughts—no memories or plans or preoccupations or even musings. There’s only sensory experience and a concern with what’s at hand: polishing the sky mirror, clearing storm debris, inspecting sea walls, dampening noise pollution with aerosolized silence.

Could this mean that there are inevitabilities, but around them is a degree of flexibility in how future events will happen?

7

“Is that how time works?” she asks, still staring at all the blue of ocean and sky, this view from the rental cottage her favorite thing about this much-needed vacation.

“I don’t know,” her mother answers, her voice distant despite coming from the neighboring deck chair.

“But you must have some idea of how the lullaby works—what it really is,” she says, insisting, almost pleading.

“It’s meant to ease existential loneliness,” her mother finally says, the words robust now. “A way to know that there were people before you and will be people after you. People with thoughts like your own.”

“A way to call out into time and get an answer.”

“That’s right.”

“Who answers?”

“Those across the ages with open minds.”

I’ll be one of them, she decides.

8

A persistent jostling of her shoulder wakes her, then comes a voice—my voice, saying something about a nightmare with alligators. Once she understands what I’m saying, she assures me that the bad dream was only my sleeping mind trying to make sense of what I’d learned during the field trip to the zoo. Then she takes me by the hand to the kitchen and gets me a glass of water.

Back in my room, she draws the blanket over me, then sits on the bed and teaches me the lullaby the way her mother did.

“Good night, future time traveler,” she whispers once I’m asleep. “Visit me when you’re older.”

Mania and Magnanimity

Later we would call it The Age of Ceaseless Celerity, but during that time we didn’t call it anything. We were simply in feverish motion because we thought that’s how adults conduct themselves—by constantly moving through life at speed. And because exercising our new capacity for velocity was exhilarating, like we were zipping toward the future to meet it on our terms. Spurred on by the pleasure of perpetual forward motion, we sped up the activities of daily life, and soon we were habitually . . .

• walking briskly
• talking frenetically
• running errands like our to-do lists were 10K race courses
• speed-reading novels the way we’d crammed for exams
• listening to rock albums with your buffet strategy of sampling then bingeing
• solving problems with diligent haste, our thoughts always hurling themselves toward inferences in pursuit of insights

Meals never took longer than half an hour, prep time included.

Looking back on this period, I’m amazed that we did so much together for so long—amazed that our lives didn’t immediately careen off on wildly different trajectories. Because of course we did ultimately go our separate ways as we hurtled through those days. While I rushed into this and that hobby, you hurried into friendship after friendship, fast-forwarding the script of getting acquainted to blast through small talk and launch into the big questions with the best odds of getting directly to a person’s authentic self. Before long, this brought you to Averine, a friend of a friend of a new friend.

Adept at the art of social camouflage, she showed you how to blend into myriad situations and circumstances, appearing to all the world that you naturally belonged wherever you happened to be. Ever the fast learner, you soon became quite the social chameleon, capable of taking on an unobtrusive presence pretty much anywhere. So you went everywhere you could, spending most evenings hopping from one milieu to another, swiftly touring the city’s nightlife venues, eventually ending up at a colloquium held in a philanthropic archive of human knowledge—“the place with all the answers,” its patrons fondly called it.

Sensing it a key to greater speed, you kept going back to gorge on information—gobbling up answers to questions you hadn’t yet needed or thought to ask, like you were ravenous for synopses that divulge the endings of stories you hadn’t begun reading or hadn’t even heard of.

Your intuition was spot on. Information—especially answers—proved to be a potent accelerant. The pace of everything picked up, sped along by a fluency in human affairs afforded by your newly gained knowledge. As though privy to secret shortcuts and hidden passageways, you handily navigated society’s labyrinthine architecture to enter places of privilege, promise, and power.

Then you ran into them. Hard questions about humanity and the world, ones with names that include words like problem, paradox, dilemma, challenge. They had no answers and often raised more questions that would embroil you in thoughts of a philosophical bent at all hours of the day. In the thrall of The Quandary of Human Temporality, you made sluggish progress down grocery store aisles, barely looking for the things on your shopping list, your mind mired in this question of how to relate to time given that we experience only moments yet lead lives that span decades. And thanks to the Cognitive Continuity Conundrum, you sped right by a highway exit you were supposed to take while contemplating its conjecture that the coherence of conscious thought could be an illusion.

Eager to again sail through the world with fluid efficiency, you harnessed every strategy we had for expedient problem solving—ideation sprints, rapid prototyping, multitrack testing. But these questions proved resistant to your efforts and stayed stubbornly unresolved. So you turned to camouflaging your way into the enclaves of geniuses, holding forth with thought leaders in many an ivory tower and corporate research lab. But you met with only disappointment after disappointment. Though all the accomplished scholars and innovators were well-versed in hard questions, they hadn’t made much headway on answering any.

With little else to try, you took to attending conferences that declared themselves on the cutting edge of human knowledge. At one, you spotted Averine sitting in the back of a packed auditorium, avidly taking notes—but on what? The panel discussion onstage was basically a rehashing of ideas that were hardly new.

Afterward, you caught up to her as she was heading to the auditorium’s exit. With sunlight pouring through the doorway behind her, Averine was more silhouette than person.

“Do you always take such prolific notes?” you asked her.

“When I can. It’s my way of going along for the ride,” she answered.

“And that conversation retreading old ground was a ride worth going on?”

“The real ride is in the mind. See, even though the panelists were taking us down well-worn academic paths, that got my thoughts going in new directions. When I stay open to an idea, my thoughts can meander about and just might end up somewhere sublime. If I’m willing to follow them. Notes are just a way to go with the movement of thoughts. That movement is what’s important.”

She said this with such sincere aplomb that you had to try staying open to hard questions and following your thoughts. Immediately the lurching cadence of your life decelerated drastically, but in the slowness of tracking wandering thoughts, the world’s nuances became more perceptible—then more meaningful, like a language spoken softly all around you. The clouds fissured orange by the rising sun promised the thrumming newness that can come only from daylight. In a late-summer breeze, bright chicory flowers swayed with the declaration that the season’s ephemeral vitality was still abundant. In the wake of a morning downpour, an herbal scent pulsed in the cool air, as though murmuring a rhythmic reminder that the forest around you was full of invisible activity. When Averine said she got a new cat, sorrow tinged her voice for a fleeting instant, like someone dear to her had reached through time and lightly but unmistakably touched her. Little moments you would’ve barreled right past were now enlivening you with a different kind of change, one you hadn’t experienced in a long time—expansion instead of movement. The world took on more depth than you had thought possible, a familiar dimensionality that seemed to bring back the brightness of childhood.

And with that came a new perspective. Every age has its hard questions, those that remain impervious to theory and technology while sharpening the senses of those who keep them in mind. Then it was clear that you had now relinquished celerity for alacrity—irrevocably.

—

Soramimi Hanarejima is the author of the neuropunk story collection Literary Devices For Coping and has recent work in Pulp Literature, The Offing, Black Warrior Review, and The Cincinnati Review.