Fiction: I Have Seen the Past(a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

Flick flick flick sounds.
    Frustrated, Paula screams, “I just need to light this one last ciggy. I just need it right now! “
    Here we are in the present.
    Click click click.
    “Please, please!” Billy, desperate, just needs to send this one document off, but the overlords of technology stand arrayed against the cute lovebird couple.
    People who advise you to live in the moment, in the now, are full of shit, and they know it. You can’t even say now before it’s already gone and the future is barreling down on your neck, and the future is unwritten, unknowable, a mystery. Everybody knows that.

Most people are poor right now

    Most people are poor right now, raising too many kids, stuck in jobs they don’t like that don’t pay a decent wage. Prices gallop higher and higher, and with all these, and many more, crunches pressing down on all our heads, we’re all completely overstressed, smothering, meaning nobody gets enough sleep, so we’re growing weaker daily without really realizing it.
    Now we fade into Paula taking the side of the past as better than the future, and “which, as we all know, is obviously better than the now, and someday, I’ll get to the future, which is automatically better than the dreadful, hopeless present, because even though no one can see the future, we can all see it’s got to be better than this shit, and even if it doesn’t come true the way we wish it would, the way we would want it to, it’s still some happy fantasy we can fall asleep to, in a worry-free, stress-free happy warm sleep zone that can relax us into a waking zone where we can think clearly of a way to get us out of whatever current predicament kills us right now. Maybe. Probably not, but we have to believe in a future that’s better than this shit, in which we at least have a chance to survive and to thrive as we once did before, when the future looked bright ahead.”
    “Well,” Billy said,” that’s the best speech I ever heard you give, and I’ll happily applaud, if you’d like, but since it’s the two of us, and.”
    “Haha! I don’t want applause, silly man!”
    “And, as I was saying, I thought I was gonna take the case for the future and you’d handle the past, but once you gained the floor, you just got carried away by the shimmering glory of your own advocacy, and your rhetoric achieved an heroicism that made me miss my opportunity to rise and grab a beer, which I do now and so I’ll gain just a moment to consider my arguments for the superiority of the past, so shall I bring you one, too?
    “Please, if you don’t mind. I’m parched. When you get back in here, remind me to remind you that I can tell you’re not listening to me.”
    “What? Of course I am! Listening to you about what? I heard you answer my question about did you want another beer, but then I forgot your answer.”

“You better not mess up”

    “Ahh, then it will become a test of the remaining quality of your recall. You better not mess up. But yet I was not arguing pro-future so much as anti-present.”
    “I can dig it.”
    “I knew that you could.”
    Popping the top for her, very carefully, on a can of Guinness at room temperature, Billy decanted the rich dark brew into a tall glass, as per the instructions printed helpfully right there on the can, and recalled, but only briefly, the golden time when he didn’t have to share his Guinness with anyone, and the one time he ordered a pint of it in an actual Dublin pub, his server asking, as she set the first pint before him, “Will you be having another?” in reference to the half-hour or so the head, the foam on top of the draft stout fresh from the keg, took to calm down into the beer, so the tapstress could draw it at once so as to have it potable for him at the exact moment of his readiness, a courtesy nevermore to be found in the New World. Which brought him back to the present.
    “The past! The perfect, idyllic past. The Beatles. Our parents, our grandparents still alive, along with those sad tragic friends who died young, still in school or in college. Shakey’s pizza! Bewitched. A Whiter Shade of Pale. I could just stop right there. The past. The Sixties, Baby! Free love. Braless women!”
    “Viet Nam,” Paula retorted. “Those four singing girls killed in a church in Birmingham. Thalidomide. Joe McCarthy and Edgar Hoover. Life under the ever-imminent doom of a mushroom cloud.”
    “Well, yeah. There was that. Those. There were those. But don’t you remember your first Big Mac? It took two hands to hold it!”
    “Yeah, the good ol’ days before we learned how toxic all that stuff was.”
    “But national obesity was a happier catastrophe than climate change.”
    “Maybe, if you’re an idiot lacking compassion.”
    “But, Paula! Our first joint. Our first sled down a steep hill in the neighborhood. Remember how we actually used to enjoy running around in the snow? Our mamas calling us in to supper? Seemed like ten years from one Christmas to the next?”
    “Oh yeah,” she sighed. “Now it’s like, ‘But we just had Christmas last month!’ But you’re not going to fall down into that ideal-childhood rabbit hole.”
    “No, ma’am. I yield the floor to you, since you won’t let me even get started because you’ve got to shoot down each of my points so I can never surf one of my endless waves of rhetorical delights. What were you—oh, you’re going to maintain that the future is better than the past. This should be amusing, watching you fail.”
    “No, I have a question about the past: remember Y2K?”
    “Yes!” yelled Billy. “Everybody panicked.”
    “Laid up canned foods to be ready for the end of the world.”
    “The breakdown of civilization!” Billy chuckled but remembered how he, too, feared it all would end overnight.
    Paula said she’d brought up the topic only because of a simple math issue, and she wanted to hear her husband’s thoughts.
    “Oh, no!”
    “Relax! I mean, this one’s super easy.”
    “Let’s have it, then.”
    “Well, first, there’s the name: Y2K. Year 2000, right?”
    “That’s right, Biscuit.”
    “How many years are in a thousand?”

“Math has never been my strong suit”

    “I’m gonna go with a thousand. But,” he admitted, “Math has never been my strong suit.”
    “A thousand! Yes. I agree!”
    “We’ll always have that, then.”
    “But if you count to a thousand, do you stop at 999?”
    “No, ma’am! I’d go all the way to the big zero-zero-zero. If I were to count all the way to a thousand, that is.”
    “Of course you would. No one’s gonna play you for a fool. But now, let’s say somebody owes you a grand.”
    She held up to his face a forestalling forefinger, and continued: “You wouldn’t settle for $999.”
    “Well, I would.”
    “Yeah. Bad example. Let’s forget that example. But now let’s look at a mere century, yes?”
    “Yes!” Billy shouted, excited now. “One hundred years. Much easier to count.”
    “But the same principle applies there, too.”
    “There was a principle? A theorem?”
    “Yes. When you count to a hundred, do you stop at 99?”
    “Oh, got ya, yeah. This is becoming as tedious as my next divorce. No, I don’t stop short of a hundred. Do you take me for a fool? Don’t answer.”
    “You see where I’m going: why did anyone think the 20th century, or the old millennium . . . .”
    “Which one was that, by the way?”
    “One of the earlier ones. One with no dinosaurs in it, but with almost all the art worth mentioning.
    “Oh, yes,” Billy cried, loudly. “Let me propose a toast to that capital millennium!”
    They clink.
    “We agree that the 20th century did most emphatically not end in 1999, so why did anybody believe that Y2K ended in 1999? Ten ends in 0, a hundred, too, and a thousand, too, so.”
    “Did you say 102? I know. I know! It is curious, isn’t it, that everybody in the world forgot how to count as we hurtled faster and closer and faster to 2000. Must have had something to do with that Mayan calendar. Haha! Remember that one?”
    “Hahaha! I do! But not nearly as much as I remember the Prince song. ‘They say two thousand zero zero: party over; it’s out of time!’”
    “Oh, yes,” said Billy, “But I always sing, ‘Tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1979,’ just cos that was a magical year from my youth, whereas 1999 was just a dull year. I had already grown old, had found myself ruled by apathy.”
    “What a coincidence! I fail to find any interest at all any longer in this topic, just as this tiny beer bores me,” Paula confessed.
    “Right?” Billy enthused. “What genius mandated 12 ounces as the official beer size? Certainly, no German, he.”
    “Or she. I want a pint of Guinness from a keg in Dublin, but only after having ascertained that the keg has been freshly tapped, and yes, I will be having another. Hand me that keg!”
    “Hand me that keg!” Billy’s echo seconded, delighted.
    “But Bill, it’s Sunday.”
    “Oh! It’s Bloody Mary Sunday! Yay!”
    “Shall I pour? And, remember, Sunday’s when we decided to hold our experiments upon the soft-boiled eggs.”

“How can something so simple be so difficult?”

    “Oh, I have not forgotten! But babe, how can something so simple be so difficult?”
    “I’ve often asked myself the same question, about you.”
    “Touché, mon fromage! Just as I have often asked if your switching the topic to Bloody Marys and eggs is a concession of defeat in our latest battle of wits, but I know it is. And do not be dismayed! I relish your wisdom in this choice.”
    They had agreed to set aside a few Sundays to experiment with and produce the perfect soft-boiled egg, which Paula and Billy had each enjoyed on childhood vacations with their families, but the soft-boiled egg being virtually non-existent back home in the United States, though they often thought of it with painful nostalgia, neither had ever tried to prepare one at home. So they reached out to all-knowing Youtube.
    There they found culinary experts who advocated boiling, or never boiling but merely slightly simmering, the egg or eggs for five minutes or six, or seven or even eight minutes; in other words, the entire gamut from raw to ruined, or in still other words, they would never find an expert they could believe in, and so they just looked forward to setting forth on an experimentation adventure.
    But Billy had as yet found no peace.
    “But do we start with a cold egg in cold water? Or do we bring the water to a boil first, and then drop in the egg?”
    “Or the eggs? This is way too unnecessarily complex!”
    “Or the eggs! That’s right. Some of these ‘pro’ chefs say you can only soft-boil, or never boil but only gently simmer, one egg at a time.”
    “But that’s obvious bullshit!” exclaimed Paula. “How can you and I dine on two warm eggs each if we follow these berserko rulios?”
    “We can’t!”
    “It’s impossible.”
    “It’s insane, I tell you!”
    “You’re telling me!”
    “But mama taught me, when she boiled eggs for potato salad or tunafish, to start with the eggs and cover them completely with water and then bring the water to a boil. And then to reduce the heat to a simmer. Or did she say a zimmer?”

“Nein, inspektor”

    “Nein, inspektor,” Paula smiled, flawlessly pronouncing the shpeck, and causing Billy to long, suddenly, for bacon.
    “And no doubt she was correct. But these soft-boiled ones, you don’t want to overcook them, which can happen even before you know it, in the blink of an eye. BAM! Ruined! That’s why we have to be methodical in our approach, and so we should, today, start not with cooking, but with a series of questions.”
    “A series?” she inquired, somehow raising a left eyebrow and a right side of an upper lip in a way new and fascinating to her man.
    “One question.”
    “Shoot.”
    “How runny do you want your yolks?”
    “How runny? Why, just the perfect amount of runny, of course.”
    “Of course.”
    “How could you even ask me that? How could you not know that I require just the perfect amount?”
    “I did know. I must have asked the wrong question. Tell me the question I should have asked, while I try to explain, briefly, salmonella, before moving on to your preferred doneness or overdoneness of toast, and then to the matter of whether we set the eggs out for an hour to come up to room temperature, but since this day has so quickly become an ordeal, I take a break just to tell you how much I love days like this with you, the fighting, the thrilling fighting, the feel of living on the edge, the repartee, the badinage!”
    “I got your badinage right here, pal!”
    “Did we put any eggs in yet? I thought you were gonna set the timer.”
    “I thought you were gonna be the man of the house.”
    “I am the eggman!”
    “Then I get to be Humpty Dumpty! Yay!”
    “You’re cracked!”
    “You’re cracking me up! But seriously, Bill.”
    “Yes, Dumpy?”

“What do you think is the real meaning?”

    “What do you think is the real meaning of that Humpty Dumpty story? You can’t unbreak an egg?”
    “Sure. That’s it. You can’t unring the bell.”
    “But all the king’s horses.”
    “Some natural bad stuff just happens. When you drop an egg, it doesn’t matter who you are or how rich you are or how many men you’ve got. That broken egg ain’t going back into the fridge.”
    “Why cry over spilt milk?”
    “Or a broken egg. With a cute rhymey name.”
    “But ‘had a great fall’: is poor Humpy an Oedipus? A Lear, an egg in a tragedy?”
    “No, babe. How could an egg, fresh, soft-boiled or hard-boiled, scramble up a wall? How could it?”
    “He. Humpty is a he.”
    “All righty, then. How could he get up there, sit there, and expect to stay there? Assuming, and you know I have no way to know this for sure, but just assuming he was raw and sat on his bigger, meaning his bottom curve, he was gonna roll unsteadily. A good gust would have thrust him from the height. He knew this himself when he made up his ovoid mind to scale a wall. He would fall. He would break. You can’t unbreak an egg, meaning you gotta play the cards you’re dealt at birth, presumably. You gotta move on after every accident, every setback. You can’t change the past. You are Fortune’s plaything.”
    “Damnit, Billy. That’s good!”
    “I thank you, Honeydimples.”
    “I am Humpty Dumpty!”
    “The point of it is let’s come back to the soft-boileds one week from today.”
    “I never wanted them, anyway. I just figured I could manage to be sweet to you for one day.”
    “It’s been a while.”
    He left her with the last word:
    “Eggs. It all started with the butter and the eggs!”

Copyright © 2023 by Pat Hamilton Pat Hamilton has written three novels, hundreds of songs, and a handful of book reviews for the papers. He taught College English for 30 years, which helps him blend popular and classic literature in his writing. As an Army brat, he traveled the USA and Europe before settling into the beauty of Tennessee, but the rock star he used to be still lives on inside him.