I have become old in a world without time.
I walk early in the morning to escape the oppressive heat. This is difficult on little or no sleep, but I would otherwise get no exercise at all. I am always careful to take a good deal of the remaining water and a loaded weapon, despite a depleted store of ammunition; also to slather adequate sunscreen on my reddened, peeling skin. This morning I watched a snake dully slumber under a flat rock for more than ten minutes, before I finally killed and ate it. I don't know why I stared for so long, except that perhaps I am that desperate for both rest and company.
How many years, perhaps decades, has it been since I smelled the perfume of Helen's freshly washed black hair, or felt her breath skiing down my neck as she lay sleeping? I thought of her lover Paul Morgan only yesterday, and of how the creature of the night dug up his corpse just hours after I killed him. I closed my eyes and saw his gruesomely chewed leg, still wearing a shredded tennis shoe, the way I found it on the weathered porch the next morning. Dear Helen looked at me with such hatred, such scorn, when she saw that forlorn body part; she did not speak to me for days.
I am dying. Finally. I know this because the past and present have begun to exist concurrently.
Early in the 20th Century, a young man named Einstein had a brilliant flash of insight. He envisioned a stationary clock on the wall of a railway station, viewed through a large telescope located on a passenger train. It occurred to Einstein that if said train left the station, going rapidly backward, and subsequently reached the speed of light, the clock would appear to stand still. Once the train surpassed the speed of light, it would begin to move backwards.
Would the experience of time then be a question of reality, or merely perception?
I look out at the steadily encroaching desert through the soiled, cracked plastic windowpanes. Somehow I feel that I am watching the wormhole of history speed away, faster and faster, eventually to elongate well beyond the speed of light.
I suspect that, in some other dimension which may somehow overlap this one, there is a version of this place still at the dawn of the industrial age. At times I actually feel myself rushing backwards, to the very beginning...
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