“Exactly,” Ruiz said.
“You mean, how we won’t know how we got to the edge of this roof, as how we got here has yet to be told.”
“Yes, and how now everything is flowing as it is not meant to flow.”
“You mean the incident with the leaf and how your day will begin with the reapplication of the leaf on the stem (of course, after you tore it off or remember tearing it of) and how everything after that is really an occurrence that happened prior?”
“Exactly,” said Ruiz. “Which is why our experiment is troubling me, as I experienced a small break, a crazy inversion that I have yet to disentangle.”
“Or 2016,” said Erasmus. “A cannot sue 1910. He doesn’t even know that there was a farmer. He has no idea that B will even be bitten. If he did know this, then the spacetime theory would come into doubt.”
“Or 2016,” said Ruiz.
“That’s obvious,” Erasmus said, a chirping and twitting downdraft of sparrows curving off of a higher ledge above them. “Because the bite is years in the future. It could be that years before the bite, the dog was in a sense prefigured by a lucky set of events, such that if we had a machine that could read both the past and the future, the dog bite could have been examined separate from A, his wife, and B altogether. Here’s what I mean. In 1910, a farmer raises Shepherds. One of those pups demonstrates a habit of biting hands. Indeed, we can imagine that pup biting the hand of a boy on the farm and that this pup will grow up, have puppies, and those puppies will grow up, and eventually, in the distant future, one of the later puppies, who carries the hand- biting gene, bites B on the hand. But this kind of logic or causal chaining is heavy with guesswork. We know for a fact that B couldn’t have been bitten prior to 1910 as he was bitten in the year 2017.”
Ruiz said, “You miss the point. The point is that the bite did not cause the attraction between A and his wife. Nor did it cause the rain on that night, the rain that pattered on the rear wind shield that A’s future wife would watch as the love was being made. Which is the mystery. We ask, why didn’t the dog bite cause the intimacy?”
“A beer like this is always good on a hot afternoon after work,” Erasmus says. “The flaw in your example is that you left out the actual cause of the bite. Did B provoke the animal, as children sometimes do?”
“A better example,” Ruiz said, “would be cause and effect. Prior to B’s birth, A met his wife and they had sex and B was born. C becomes a fever or the dog that bites B on the wrist. The bite on B’s wrist can’t happen before A and his wife are intimate even though in a film or another form of narrative, the audience might experience the bite as analepsis, artfully rendered as a growl, a snap, and then a scream, and the audience wonders what’s just happened, and then the scene shifts to a scene in the back of a mid-sized sedan at Lover’s Lane.”
Ruiz is dangling his feet over the street below the roof of his apartment building. Erasmus is sitting beside him. Below, not far below but far enough, the wind is moving through the tree leaves. They both have beer bottles in their hands.
“That’s just a process of reordering,” Ruiz said. His ankles are fine. At work, he sits most of the day. He watches how Richard and Henry follow each other in the correct order at the coffee machine. “For example, A might be the father. B is his son. C may be the cycle rider they saw standing on his seat as the rider rode past them on the street. While neither A nor B are specific events, certainly an order of time and space may be inferred from their existence and that C, the passing cycle rider in this scenario, is dependent upon the collaboration of space and time.”
“Nonsense,” said his friend, Erasmus, who’s just got off work and whose ankles are killing him because at work he must stand for hours on end. “Just put C before A, like so.”
Ruiz, however, is wondering about leaves. He’s wondering about fingers. He’s wondering in what cases can we reconsider time as intrinsic to space. He’s not happy with the way things have turned out. He’s thinking: “If A comes before B then C must follow A and there’s just no way of avoiding this basic narrative fact.”
Time and space are intrinsically linked; in other terms, they are a continuum. This discovery, which formed a basis for Einstein’s special relativity, is not so obvious. Space time or the space time manifold was not a new idea for Einstein. Luckily Einstein had Minkowski to provide mathematical assistance. Luckily, Philo of Alexandria was on the case, too, surmising that if the deity created space then time couldn’t be neglected. Then there’s Lorentz, Maxwell, and Lagrange. Then there’s Ruiz and Erasmus.
