Today the condition went haywire. Every door opened on a new reality. I came out of the bathroom at the house and I was outside the bathroom at the restaurant. I was now a hostperson in 2011 or 2012. I wore a tie. I came to the front of the place to see if I had to seat someone. To see the date. What year it was. It was 2011. My boss gave me a wine list and two menus and told me D5. I gestured right this way to the couple and led them to the two top in the very back of the restaurant. It was 2011. I had to pee again. I left them at their table with the menus elegantly placed on the settings. I went back to the bathroom. I had a moustache, I saw in the mirror. I had a moustache? I opened the door to leave and saw just outside, theater 3, the big one, on the other side. I looked back and saw the hallway of the theater behind me. The restaurant was gone. It must have been 2009. I started grabbing half eaten bags of popcorn, kicking up the flapping seats, pushing up the cup-holder arms between the seats, removing the 32-ounce soda cups, barely consumed as wet with condensation on the outside as they are sticky on the inside. I swept the sporadic messes into my dustpan—those ones at the end of a three-foot pole—and, once it was full, went to empty it in the hallway. I backed into the door to open it and look over my shoulder at what’s behind me as I turn to face it and the broom becomes a tote bag and the dustpan is a cup of coffee and the room is full of six and seven year olds and their parents who let themselves into their classroom before I, the day’s substitute teacher arrived. It’s their classroom after all. I’m just visiting. I have a beard now. I’m underslept, hungry. I drank last night. Everybody’s speaking Spanish. ¿Puedo leer este libro? I am asked by a chorus. How should I know? Whose book is it? Where is the lesson plan? Where do we start? Which school is this? I worked for a district that built three identical schools in, I’m guessing 1992, when they replaced the rings of fields of lettuce and strawberries around the city with a track-house halo. There’s still plenty of lettuce and strawberries, just a little less, and now more elementary schools named after John Steinbeck and Cesar Chavez, in memory of when we were farms first and people second. We are now more people than most major cities in California were one hundred years ago, before the track-home halos that came to define us. I manage to find the lesson plan as thirty three-foot-tall adults of the future hand me crumpled sheets of homework pulled from backpacks not much smaller than themselves. I write my name on the white board and take a deep breath.
Buenos días, clase, I say pausing purposefully for the response.
Buenos días, maestro, approximated by a chorus of thirty.
Good morning, everyone, I continue. My name is Mr. Shaw-Kitch.
I direct these strangers with my hands like a conductor, Good morning, Mr. Shaw-Kitch.
I find the date on the white board from yesterday. I ask what day follows Wednesday. Thursday! exclaimed a more tentative chorus.
What comes after the fourteenth?
Fifteen!
What is the date, everybody?
I start slowly, holding a pointer over Thursday, mouthing the words as the students say them out loud, some shouting in excitement, Today is Thursday, April fourteenth, two thousand and ten.
It’s another two hours before morning recess when I will open the door and return to the passage of time in the so-called present moment. In the meantime I really have to pee. Couldn’t I just leave now? Wouldn’t the me who already did this remain to fulfill this experience while I return to my destiny? What’s the worst that could happen? Maybe I opened this door anyway to check outside. What’s the weather like today, class? Let me check.
And I am falling down those stairs again, grabbing for anything again, finding only blackberry brambles again, pulling them into my skin, feeling pain and weightlessness again before a thud, nothing, tingling, and I am waking up on a floor of a kitchen in Eugene, Oregon. It must be 2004. I have to go to the bathroom and I do, saying hello to someone in the living room I met in 2004, and I open a door onto my 11th grade English class. I’m the fifth one in, early. So I set my stuff down—I don’t want to be here—and rush to the bathroom. I am back at my house, the hallway outside the bathroom. It’s as close to the present as I need right now, though not sure if it’s the same day I started. Today is Thursday, January twenty-sixth, two thousand and fourteen. I hear this on the radio, I repeat it to myself. I open my computer and this document, the document for the book. There’s hardly anything there, compared to two months later, now. This must have been the day when I wrote this, this piece of writing I don’t imagine writing. I write this and sit for awhile, afraid to open doors. I turn on the radio and remember the news that happened today.
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