Dumas Chang and the Universe

Dumas holds up a hand and stops walking. “Eighty-five. Why do I do what?”

“You leave whatever you happen to be doing every single day at five minutes to eleven to walk in the desert. Why?”

“The last time I answered that question The Cesspool started its nightly ‘Send Dumas Back to Norway’ series.”

The kid laughs, like bells. “Why’d they want to send you back to Norway? Are you from Norway? Where is Norway?”

“I don’t care where I came from, kid, same way you shouldn’t care about your origins. I’m the most normal guy around—”

“Ha. Ha. Ha.”

“—and, the reason I walk is so I can go and play chess with the Friar.”

“The Friar? Is that the old guy with the purple thing over at the guard posts?”

“Yes, and the only one as far as I know.”

“Why?”

“Let’s walk fifteen steps so we can finish our first hundred, okay?”

“Okay.”

They walk fifteen steps out of town and into the desert.

“Okay,” the kid says, stopping.

Dumas stoops with his hands on his knees so he and the kid are at eye-level.

“Okay. The question is why. The answer is: mostly because I can, but also because I’m looking for anchors.”

“What’s an anchor? You mean for ships?”

“Yes, for ships. For my ship.”

“Where’s your ship?”

Dumas straightens himself up and stretches out his arms. “Right here!”

“I’m confused.”

It is Dumas’ turn to laugh. He puts a finger underneath the kid’s chin so the kid is looking up at him.

“You don’t have to have been in the ocean to know what it’s like. You’ve seen it in the movies, in TV shows, in the archives. Imagine that the entire space-time continuum is the ocean. In that ocean, everything flows into everything else: stuff you know because you saw them in the past, stuff you feel you know will happen in the future, stuff that’s happening right now, stuff that should have been, stuff that never was, at least in this version of history.

“In theoretical physics, all possible realities already exist somewhere—and by this I mean whether or not you return that book on time because it says right there,” he says, pointing at the back of the book, “‘Three days for fiction,’ where each decision leads to a different outcome, a different you—it’s just that you can’t get to that single viewing deck where you can see everything because, well, by nature, it’s impossible.”

“Why?”

“Because who we are or what we are or why we are would be so closely tied to where or when this event exists that it cannot conceive that the world be something other than what we think it is. We believe we need a body or at least a consciousness to do the observing.”

“Well, we do, don’t we?”

“Well, yeah. And there’s nothing wrong with that. This world rocks. And it’s more than enough to contain the most compelling and the most meaningful of lifetimes. I’m just saying, that sometimes, when you allow yourself to lose yourself, or you were born without a sense of self, it becomes very hard to function like a normal person.”

“But wouldn’t that be cooler?”

“Of course, you’d think that. But there are too many minds that insist that this plane of reality exist. Including you. And I’m just one guy.”

“So, for you to not get lost in all these shit about the ocean, you need an anchor.”

“Or anchors. I dream big.”

“Have you found any?”

Dumas smiles again. “You ask too many questions. Can we quit this talk until I reach my prime number?”

The kid crosses his arms and grumbles audibly. Nevertheless, they start walking until they reach a tall trailer husk near the guard post at the left of the town’s entrance. At one hundred and thirty, Dumas begins taking bigger steps. The kid accuses him of cheating. He ignores this and lands on one hundred and thirty-nine.