Red Dot Irreal by Jason Erik Lundberg Page B

raised you, that I was still alive even after you left at sixteen. Right? And if I die, doesn’t that mean you’ll never exist?”
    “The way it was explained to me is that when we travel to the past, a parallel alternate universe is formed in that moment. Any changes I make won’t affect the reality of the altuniv I came from, but it means I can’t go back there either. I’m stuck in this one now. So if you die before I’m conceived, I won’t fade away into causality, but I’ll continue to live in an altuniv where I was never born. I’m not sure which option’s worse.”
    Though I could see the birds above us flapping and tweeting and making all the movements that would indicate noise, I couldn’t hear any of it for the pounding in my ears. I cleared my throat, my mouth suddenly arid.
    “How ...” I cleared my throat again. “How does it happen?”
    “You’re pushed into the street and hit by a bus. I want you to know, it wasn’t me who pushed you. Will push you.”
    “Are you sure? I don’t seem to be your favorite person.”
    She sighed. “I may have wanted to hurt you for all the things you’ve done, but I never wished you dead. It was a middle-aged Chinese man you bumped into when you rushed to the front of the bus queue. Singaporeans hate queue jumpers, especially an ang moh with no manners.”
    “But isn’t there anything that can be done to change it? You’ve already altered things, can’t you change this as well?”
    The Eurasian woman, my daughter, shook her head and swiped at her eyes. “The event has already happened, the moment has been burned. I’m sorry.”
    “I see.” I sat there and seemed to fall into myself, as if the world was rushing away from me in all directions. In a year, I would be dead.
    “Look, I don’t have much longer. The transition team will be pulling me back anytime now. I only had enough social credit for five jumps, so this is the last time we’ll meet, at least from my point of view. Is there anything else you want to ask?”
    “When you arrive back in your time, will you take care of Nicole? I know she won’t be the exact mother that you knew, but I want to make sure she’ll be okay.”
    “I promise,” she said. “I always looked after her before.” The air surrounding her gradually took on the same wavery quality as before in the bedroom, as if I was now seeing her underwater. It was happening, she was leaving, going to a changed home in the future.
    “What’s your name?” I asked quickly.
    “Sofia,” she said, her voice fading. “You named me. It means wisdom.” And then the rippling air seemed to coalesce around her body, forming a person-shaped bubble with Sofia inside, the light inside the bubble intensifying and brightening to incandescence, as if Sofia, the future daughter that I would never have, was exploding into a supernova, and then I blinked and she was gone.

Big Chief
    The back of your head: bumpy, uneven, overly large for your frame, dark hair oiled to a high shine and pulled backward in inverse rilles, dragging grey over brown to end just above the collar of your starched white shirt, your ears nearly perfect semicircles that stick out as if vestigial wings, sweat beading along your creased neck at the periphery of your hairline. I cannot escape this view, trapped and weakened inside this wooden form, captured in this box of leaded glass on the shelved display space behind your large teak desk in this tower of manmade corporate greed so far from my homeland.
    You hunch over your desk, engaged in paperwork that reeks of import, yet which, in the grand scheme, is but a blip of nonsense within the deep time of the numinous. So enamored are you of this pointless capitalist exercise that were you even able to hear me, I am certain my words, which once held sacred power as the messenger of the gods, would be ignored. Laughed off. The endless creation and retention of wealth being as strong today as when this ligneous aspect of mine