Time and Time Again

The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. 
Genesis 1: 2-5

“In the beginning, there was darkness–but then, our almighty Lord God made the heavens and the Earth! And, oh, children, lemme tell you something–with his in-fin-ite wisdom and power, he put us in paradise, where we didn’t need to worry about anything. Now, tell me children, how great is that? How great is our God?”
Pastor Shu paused, awaiting a response that never came, his unfocused eyes still lost in the ceiling, unacknowledging of the audience his question had been posed to. After a moment, he smacked his lips, forgetting he’d even asked anything.

“But we gave that up! When that first woman, Eve, ate from that forbidden tree of good and evil–the one thing He asked us not to do! Well, let’s bring out someone you kids will understand: Je-sus, yes–now although Je-sus only had twelve followers standing against ten thousand haters, he lead-sus he was like the upright thumb, standing straight though outnumbered by the rest of our lazy fingers…”

My youth pastor continued his rambling to the six kids strewn around the ragged blue carpet at his feet, apparently oblivious that two of them were already asleep and dreaming, with the other four soon to join them. I too had already heard these stories hundreds of times before, so my focus was directed towards my new rainboots, my mind trying desperately to forget the Time-Boy I’d just gotten for my eighth birthday, pitifully pleading in my jacket pocket.

For just $19.85 a month, the plum-sized gadget let me back to any point in time–or a “mind-augmenting mixed reality” simulation of it, anyway. Trippy–and still a pretty good deal. More unfathomable to me than the concept of functional time travel, though, was the fact that I’d spent six months begging for a Time-Boy, only to finally get one on the car ride to Sunday school, stuck yearning.

“Open your eyes to the secrets of history! See the way things really were!” The ads had beckoned, “See the way we really were!”

I looked back out the window. An unusually muggy April shower was finally breaking up by the horizon, where I could almost make out the interstate we’d driven in on, which leads you almost straight back to home…

“Now everyone, open up your study bibles to Genesis; Chapter 3 Verse 6. Remember to read carefully, children, you will all recite this next week.”

I snapped back to the moment, jerking my head to see my comrades still strewn around the carpet, asleep. Sighing, I begrudgingly opened my book in compliance, only to see my Time-Boy roll out with the shifting of my weight. The moment seized me, and before I knew what was going on, I felt my left arm puppet itself upward.

“Can I go to the bathroom please?” I whined, my abrupt excuse catching myself off-guard.

Pastor Shu looked up from the lower layer of his bifocals, recognizing his disciples’ presence for the first time since we entered the room. His dark eyes met mine, speaking their tired annoyance before his lips could. “Be quick.”

I hurried out of the room, down the empty fluorescent halls, and into a dank toilet stall–only pausing a moment to make sure I was alone–and then tore the Time-Boy out of my pocket, simultaneously fumbling with the controls. 

Met with the date input screen, I stopped again, never having actually thought out my glorious first trip this deeply–I hadn’t even carried a specific ancestor in mind when dreaming of my journeys to the past. 

Nevermind that, I’ll just wind it as far back as it would go, all the way to my first ancestor…

I released my right hand, and for a second, nothing happened. But just when I began to fear that nothing would happen, the bathroom tiles began swirling, and I looked down to see the world falling out beneath me.

Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. 
Genesis 2:7

I relaxed my instinctively shut eyes to a vast blue sky dotted with Toy Story clouds and ringing with birdsong–sights and sounds all too unfamiliar to this city boy. A light breeze potent with the aroma of flowers wafted by as I sat up, noticing that I’d been plopped in cool mud by a shallow creek where animals I’d only seen in pictures were resting. A donkey, perturbed by my unexpected appearance, turned back to her three little foals, and directly ahead of me, a flock of peacocks resumed basked in the sun–a sun that had recently risen and shone through the clouds at a synthetically perfect angle, scattering rays of crisp golden sunshine.

Sloshing human footsteps interrupted my trance, and I looked up to notice two figures approaching, their silhouettes black against the sunrise.

They were… naked? 

It took me a second to recover, but another thought immediately followed the first.

Wait–if I’m at, like, the start of human history, then these two–my ancestors–my first ancestors–are here–naked, in this… “garden…”

I paused mid-breath. Of course! They even looked familiar, as if they’d been lurking in my subconscious my entire existence, their faces traced out of everyone I’ve met.

Then these two… are Adam and Eve…

The only people seemingly more unprepared for this encounter were Adam and Eve themselves–as far as they knew, they were the sole human inhabitants of the entire world. 

Well… surprise!

I stepped back and gave the duo a wave. “Uh… Hello.”

It was awkward enough greeting relatives one generation separated from me, let alone the very roots of my family tree…

They stammered a bit but quickly recovered, both responding with a reserved wave and a suspicious greeting of their own.

Huh? Wait, what did they just say?…

The three of us stood there, awkwardly gazing at each other until Adam took a deep breath, raised his eyebrows, and began talking. 

“Vgv! ¿Ngx ktqssn ror oz, ixi? Ziqfal ygk zqaofu zit zodt zg rtegrt viqz ziol lqnl。 Uggr pgw。。。”

He paused and smiled diplomatically, patiently awaiting my response. Eve stood beside him, eyes wide and hands clasped behind her back, clearly also expecting a reply.

Oh, shoot–of COURSE they don’t speak English–

As handcrafted creations of God, they had no reason to suspect I would’ve been made in a different language setting. Thinking back to my ill-begotten Sunday School studies, Babel was still about a dozen books away…

“Sorry… I–uh, don’t understand… uh…”

The pair looked at each other quizzically and then back at me, whispering between themselves. Looking back at me, Eve motioned for me to follow, so I did–to an empty meadow, rich with flowers ripe in every color of the rainbow, where Eve stopped to slowly move her hands up and down, her palms facing downwards.

Stay, I thought, they want me to stay here.

I kneeled in the tall grass. In studying my surroundings, I realized that this meadow was also overflowing with life–a vole by my left foot looked up to notice me kneeling, and promptly went back to his clover lunch, undisturbed. Overhead, a flock of geese dove by, down and away toward the creek I initially landed, and about thirty feet ahead of me, a herd of camels grazed lazily, with only a small foal pausing to look up at me. Looking back upward, I caught Eve’s familiar dark eyes for an instant before she turned away, hurrying into a thicket with Adam following. I considered joining them myself, but decided that it was probably best to stay where I was. Besides being housebroken since birth as an Asian boy, I wouldn’t want unexpected visitors snooping around my home.

I sighed and reclined in the grass, stretching impatiently. These people aren’t so different from me, I thought. It’s just that they happen to live in… “paradise.” It’s funny. Adam and Eve are so… human… It’s kinda weird seeing them acting like regular people…. Well I guess it does sorta make sense. I mean, they are part of my family after all. Maybe I-

The entire garden froze. The birds stopped chirping, the camels looked up, and a pack of deer I hadn’t noticed rose from the grass in unison. A doe caught sight of me and called a warning to the rest of her herd; all of them immediately springing away. The camels turned toward the deer’s call and followed their lead, all running from the treeline where a huge flock of ravens scattered–all running from the treeline where Adam and Eve had gone.

Stuck between following the animals and my kin, I chose the latter, my prepubescent brain instinctively searching for a guardian. My body similarly followed, and like my mind, it began racing into the trees, stumbling into another meadow on a steep cliff, where only a single tree along with a few scattered figs and apples overlooked the sea. A queasy malaise settled in… the abrupt stillness of the garden was too disturbing.

The grass shifted behind me and I froze. Slowly turning around, I saw a fat orange snake in the brown underbrush, its beady, yellow eyes fixed on mine, its razor-thin vertical pupils cutting into me. It hissed aggressively, and then slithered away, vanishing tracelessly. I began backing up, cautiously searching for the serpent until I completely lost my footing and slid downhill, sliding straight into the sea.

I plunged deep, the shock of the cold waves seizing my skeletal frame. Fighting to keep my head above the waterline, I gasped for breath when I could, inhaling more sea spray than air. Deep down, I knew it was futile–I couldn’t even swim in an indoor, manicured pool, nevermind these turbulent tides with rainboots on.

Confirming my fears, the waves shoved my head downward, and with each thrash, I saw the shore recede until it became no more than a faint outline, only existent in my memory. It was useless. Soon, I couldn’t even keep the top of my head above the waves, and I felt myself sinking. The light from the midday sun grew dimmer, and I succumbed to gravity… There was a barely discernable vestige of a vague figure, but I was unsure if it was my imagination or a real outstretched hand. What I did see were my air bubbles propelling themselves upward to freedom, exchanging my emptied lungs’ descent for their release.

“I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!”
Mark 9:24

It was while I was going through our moving boxes that I found the Time-Boy again. In experiencing move after move, many of our boxes began to remain unopened; abused in damp, dark corners of self-storage units, chewed at and urinated on by rats, forever waiting to be put out of their misery. Even the novelty of the Time-Boy corroded over the years, with my excitement for it becoming replaced with that for an Xbox, my first PC, and, later, even a pet turtle. My parents, following unsuccessful attempts at making trips that far back themselves, also grew tired of the one-trick trinket, burying it alongside old floppy disk drives and iPods. Somewhere in those boxes, the remnants of my Christian childhood were buried too. I’d shunned that past self, and entombed him long ago in youth group photo albums and church choir CDs; a naive and unshakable childhood devotion to circular reasoning and blind belief neatly packaged in two by three rows, on top of my dad’s 90s TIME magazines and below a stopped cuckoo clock.

I looked down to the Time-Boy in my hand. It’d been just about eight years since I last held it…

 After a few months, I didn’t even know if my last trip was real–none of it made any sense. I’d thought about looking for the stupid thing a few times over the years, but never had the heart to follow my resolve through the labyrinth of dusty, mildew boxes.

Still, now that I had it, I could finally see it with my own eyes–again…

Aboveground, it was a clear, sunny sky; the weeklong rain had finally cleared up, and a rainbow was manifesting across the Hudson. None of that beautiful weather reached me in this basement, though, as the decades-old fluorescent lights hummed all the same, rain or shine. I powered up the Time-Boy, its little display humming back to life, and dialed it back once again to my first ancestor. The storage basement began fading, and the concrete returned to its initial liquid state; the center of the room giving in, turning and twisting in a widening gyre…

For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. 
1 Corinthians 13:12

And suddenly I was falling, plunging away into an endless abyss until I was dunked backward, headfirst, into the ground–no, not ground–water! 

Kicking up, I gasped, free from the waves, only to find myself back in an endless sea blanketed by a hot, glowing sulfur sky, the air reeking of sewage and spent fireworks. My face burned from the blisteringly hot air, and my body was cooked in the broiling water. In the distance, lightning struck; though the sound of thunder never reached me, drowned out by the ceaseless waves.

There was nothing but ocean for as far as the eye could see, the blue sky and sea meeting at an arbitrary point infinitely distant in the horizon; just as the Apollo astronauts were struck by the moon’s “magnificent desolation,” I too was completely alone on this world.

But then again, I guess that’s not true–this still was where my first ancestor was, drifting with me, somewhere… 

Somewhere out here there had to be a kindred spirit, on my left–or right?–no, that can’t be right… the Time-Boy wouldn’t have been bugged–I mean, nine years of operation and not a single record of failure, there’s no reason it would’ve broken somehow now… They are somewhere out here, if only I could see them…

What I did not realize was that right there with me, invisible yet present, was a single cell, formed perhaps from some primordial soup of compounds deposited from an underwater volcanic eruption, or a chance fusion from lightning, or some unlikely mixture of gases replicated once three and half billion years from then in some American’s lab and then never again, or, oh, what the heck, maybe it was even aliens, or an unassuming speck of mold, stuck onto my shoes, transported unintentionally across time and space to a foreign land, breaking off from his origins into an endless sea of opportunity…

In a strange twist of heart, just being adrift in that endless sea made all my experiences in the Garden of Eden feel more real–if I could be here, treading water on Earth nearly four billion years before I was born, why is it so hard to believe I met two people in some garden? But then again, if Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden were real… then where am I now? Why am I here? Who am I swimming with?…

In the end, choking on the putrid air, I simply could not hold out against the waves, and sank deep into the darkness; my arms and legs giving out seemingly on their own volition. Many times I thought I could make out a shoreline somewhere in the distant yellow-brown horizon, but it was always too far, closer to meeting the sunset than me.

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun
Ecclesiastes 1:9