By His Bootstraps, Momoko Yoshida and the fear of time travel

Back in college, I developed a brief fear of time travel. I was trying to sleep in my creaky apartment in Charlottetown, P.E.I., when I heard someone walking heavily up the carpeted stairs past my door. I imagined the boots stopping, then silence. A sharp knock. I could see him: a version of me that had come back from the future. All because of this pulp sci-fi story called By His Bootstraps by Robert A. Heinlein. I somehow made it through the night. But I knew one person who would understand: Momoko Yoshida.

Momoko Yoshida and I went to J-School together at Holland College in 2004. She was from Tokyo. I was not.

We were paired together for one of our major assignments, which was to act as co-managing editors of the student newspaper, The Surveyor. It was around that time we got all obsessed about time travel. I don’t even know how it happened. I think I mistakenly watched Back to the Future and Donnie Darko back-to-back. My next move was to indoctrinate the lone Japanese student. I was taken aback by how immediately frightened she was by my weird thoughts and fears.

It was in the cauldron of ignorance that we took our fears to the Internet, which was actually pretty new back then. This was when the Internet actually seemed like a credible source of information. We read stories about people claiming they time travelled, printed that shit off, and brought it to one another, totally speechless. At one point Momoko brought me a printed sheet trembling in her tiny hand. You could tell she hadn't been sleeping.

I conducted my own research, which included finding By His Bootstraps online, all 70 pages of it, and printing it off on the printer in class. I didn’t realize it was 70 pages. From where my desk was, I could hear the printer printing endlessly. In my brain. It’s the sound of guilt, a printer. It got to the point I thought I might have to tackle it.

I went to the printer, but the pages were gone. I knew they’d been confiscated by one of our instructors, the mean one, the one who was a published author and who, we were certain, knew how to fuck with your windpipe in an altercation. You wouldn’t even feel it, we thought.

In his office, the stack of papers sat under the window.

“Can I?” I said, standing in his doorway and motioning to the stack.

He stood up calmly, carried the papers over, and handed them to me. “Don’t ever do that again,” he said.

I returned to my desk.  

I read the opening line: Bob Wilson did not see the circle grow. Shivers.

By His Bootstraps: background and plot

By His Bootstraps was published in 1941 by American science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein, an obvious maniac who is better known for his novel Starship Troopers. I guess he’s a major sci-fi writer, but I’d never heard of him and I’m not overly interested in science-fiction, even though for some reason I want to be.

The story starts with Bob Wilson sitting at his desk writing his thesis: “An Investigation into Certain Mathematical Aspects of a Rigor of Metaphysics.” Pounding coffees, smoking cigarettes. He’s tempted by a bottle of gin.

Bob Wilson did not see the circle grow.

Nor, for that matter, did he see the stranger who stepped out of the circle and stood staring at the back of Wilson’s neck.

A key on his typewriter sticks.

The stranger calls himself Joe, who explains to Wilson that the circle is a Time Gate. Wilson gets kind of drunk, they argue, and Joe becomes exasperated and grabs Wilson’s arm.

“Let him alone!”

They both swung around. Facing them, standing directly in front of the circle, was a third man.

The three start arguing about whether Bob Wilson will go through the gate. Joe wants Wilson to go through the gate. The newcomer tries to prevent it. The phone rings. No one on the other line. Breathing. Wilson hangs up and the phone rings again, this time it’s his girlfriend, Genevieve, who he talks to in a hilarious 1940s patter. She infers that he was over to her place that afternoon and left his hat there. Wilson hangs up.

Wilson, Joe and the newcomer start up again. The arguing turns into a fistfight. Wilson takes a punch in the face.

Wilson wakes up.

“Where am I?”

“In the Hall of the Gate in the High Palace of Norkaal.”

“But what is more important is when you are. You have gone forward a little more than thirty thousand years.”

This being plot-heavy genre fiction, it’s probably best to stop here.

By His Bootstraps: explaining the plot to Momoko Yoshida

One night after class, Momoko Yoshida and I stayed behind to get to the bottom of time travel. We were the only two there. Snow swirled in the tall dark window. The classroom’s heating system clicked on.

We were discussing this part in By His Bootstraps:

“Time flows along side by side on each side of the Gate, but some thousands of years apart…”

It was that old chestnut, about how if Bob Wilson, say, travelled back in time, there would always be a world in which two (or three, or four) of him exist. We were 20.

Momoko Yoshida stood in front of the whiteboard, blue marker in hand, not comprehending. The whiteboard reminded me of Kurt Vonnegut’s self-portrait.

The markings were truly a window into Momoko Yoshida’s madness. And my own, obviously. I was so deep into my explanation I was out of breath. She poked holes in it, and we returned to the beginning, like Bob Wilson.

Then we started talking about how maybe time travel really is impossible, and really it’s about finding pathways to other worlds, something like, in this world there are two Bob Wilsons, and in this world there are three Bob Wilsons, and it’s just infinite possibilities?

A knock came at the classroom door.

Momoko Yoshida and I froze. We looked at each other. But it was just the janitor wondering if he could clean the classroom. He said no problem and left us alone.

“Were you thinking what I was thinking?”

“Yes.”

That night I walked home in a snowstorm. I walked Momoko Yoshida home, then I walked home. The night was all shadows. The streetlights were snow globes.

When I returned to my Victorian-era apartment, I felt like I was being followed. I walked backwards up the carpeted stairs. I turned every light on in my apartment, got ready for bed, then lay there in the dark waiting for a knock at my door.

By His Bootstraps: re-reading it 20 years later

Twenty years after my first reading of By His Bootstraps, I'm proud to say I no longer fear time travel. So that's a W.

And weirdly, for such a plot-heavy book, I was still surprised at parts, particularly later on, involving a character named Diktor. And the way Heinlein kept looping the plot around and around in a Cat's-Cradley kind of way, was ingenious in a fun way (more than an actually ingenious way). But you don't pick up a paperback with a sexy Scandinavian Angel woman on the cover expecting Jorge Luis Borges, say.

The real benefit of reading it again was that it brought me back to that time in college in Charlottetown.

In the intervening years, I received exactly one postcard from Momoko Yoshida. I was a reporter on the south coast of Labrador, the Straits area, living in English Point, a town of 50. My P.O. Box was literally 1. And on one snowy day, a postcard arrived from Momoko Yoshida, from Hawaii.

What was written was for me and me alone.

Actually, I'm totally kidding. I can’t find it just now, otherwise I’d share it. It’d probably make this part more impactful.

A couple of years later, I found myself in Barrie, Ontario, where Mom and Dad had a house they were selling, which I essentially squatted in. I was jobless for a couple months. In January in Barrie, Ontario. So you can imagine what that does to one’s mental health. I remember there was a house on the street corner that was like a tombstone emporium. No shit. The lawn was full of blank tombstones. That did little for my anxiety. One day, in the frenzy of my own mind, I looked up and saw an elderly Japanese woman, strolling among the tombstones with her hands behind her back, a husband trailing behind her.

Momoko Yoshida, I thought.

Then I thought nothing of it. Not until I went back to the empty house to try and sleep. But every time I closed my eyes, all I could see was the elderly hand of Momoko Yoshida, knocking at my door.