BY DR. AGONSON
“Oh, they see me. Their eyes, at least. They’ll walk around me never noticing I’m there. It’s kinda like what your brain does when you’re walking down stairs. You know the stairs are there, but you’re not necessarily thinking about them. If I make a point of it—one time, there was a fire, I grabbed someone and made them see, but even then, most people will forget.”
The strange speaker smiled at this last word, his eyes darting out the window.
“There are legends, of course, about my people. There’re not many of us left. There was a war. I’m not sure who was right or wrong, or if it’s just the general state of man to kill each other. There was a weapon, a bomb of sorts, that exploded backwards. You could go to the battlefield after the fact and set off one of these bombs, and it would blow up during the battle.
“Apparently, my people invented it,” he sighed. “Invented it, used it, and repented, or tried to. It was before my time. I was born in the condition we’re in. But, someone, a Hannibal of sorts, a genius who had sworn to destroy my people, he got his hands on one of these bombs. It was very clever, really, if the story is true. He let us capture him and lead him into the heart of our city.
“And you see, nobody knows about us because we never existed. He figured out a way to send the bomb so far back, it destroyed us before we even existed. But that, of course, is an impossibility, a…what’s the word?”
“A paradox,” the young hearer added.
“Yes. Multiple paradoxes, too. If we never existed, then we never made the bomb that destroyed us. If we never existed, then we never did anything to our great enemy to make him our enemy. It’s a puzzle.”
“A puzzle,” the listener agreed.
“So, we don’t exist, but we do. People see us, but they don’t.”
“But I see you.”
“I’m getting to that. This all happened a long time ago in the future. I’m trying to simplify things, but when I told you that it was a city, I lied; it was the whole planet that was destroyed. It had been situated on a fault line, of sorts, a rift between two black holes that was perpetually sending my planet—well, I’ve never been there, but my people’s planet—back and forth through time. In our year’s cycle, we watched the universe live and die; one brilliant explosion of a scorching summer that gradually died into the winter of a motionless eternity. Motionless, but that the two black holes finally fell into each other and bam! We’re back again, and the universe bursts out of nothing! At least, that’s the story they tell.”
“But why can I see you?”
“Well, it’s the nature of my people, the nature of my planet; why the paradox doesn’t just evaporate like most paradoxes. My planet was never quite in time with the rest of the universe, my people were never quite part of the whole show, but we’d visit other planets, like earth. Study them. Maybe take some of the people back with us. I mean, I’m human through and through.
“You can see me because you’re a mixture. Somewhere, a great-great-great-great-grandfather, and probably far more greats than that, there was somebody who only existed because of a planet that now did not exist for him to exist but once did. Me, I’m closer to that paradox. My mom, she said I was conceived on that planet. She was sent away because of the war.”
The young man’s face fell as his eyes absently studied the pattern of the wooden table that lay between them. Memories were flashing through his mind: how often he’d been ignored, forgotten, left behind.
“Yes,” said the stranger. “You’re real enough that you can have a bank account, hold a job, but there’s always been that little element, hasn’t there? Like you’re a phantom among your own friends, like they’re startled when you say something; even though you’ve been talking with them for an hour, they had somehow forgotten you were there. Promises made and broken because they just forgot. That’s been my life, and twenty fold. If I scratched my name into this table here, in a day, it would be gone.”
Silently, the youth nodded as a poisonous prick of despair pierced his heart.
“I’m not just talking,” the stranger went on. “There’s something I need to add to all this. There’s not a lot of us left. People like me, people closer to the paradox, we’re almost immortal. The myth says that even Death and Age have forgotten us, but I think it’s just the medicine of the home world, more advanced. I probably just had inoculations before I was born that keeps me from aging and whatnot.
“But we’re dying out. Someone’s hunting us. Someone like you. Someone who can remember us, who knows we exist, and hates us. Maybe it’s our Hannibal. His real name’s long forgotten…he’s just an effect, really, like the gravity of our planet pulling on things even though it was never there to pull them. It’s strange.
“You’re either in danger from him, or you are him. I can’t say. Maybe he doesn’t care about the ones like you who just barely brush the edge of the paradox. In either case, I think he’ll go after me before he goes after you.”
Silence visited those lonely souls. A waitress passed by, halfway noticing a man sitting alone in a booth. She almost went to him to take his order, but at a sudden noise, she turned her head and forgot he was there.
Later that night, as she was cleaning the tables, she was annoyed to find that someone had taken out a pocketknife and carved a name into the table. She meant to tell her boss about it, but for some reason or other, it slipped her mind.
Tale Told 