by Robert Markland Smith.
The universe had ceased to expand, having reached its outer limit, and had begun to contract. Just like a person from the Northern hemisphere crossing into the Southern hemisphere past the Equator, we were all headed in reverse time towards a South pole without singularities which would consist in an implosion, perhaps as momentous as the big bang.
I for one went from dying in the Emergency of a hospital, with tubes attached to my arms and hooked up to a heart monitor, which beeped alarmingly for all the nurses in the ward, to being an old millionaire gigolo. My girlfriend had inherited her father’s fortune in the golf business, and we rapidly spun backwards in time to the days when we were raising babies and changing diapers. Lots and lots of diapers.
In those days, around 1994, I believe, we went on a lot of family outings to the park, because we couldn’t afford to travel elsewhere.
Moving back, I remember the first night I met Bonnie, and she came into the room with Dwane Read, and the first thought that went through my mind was, Who’s the pretty girl with Dwane? I’m going to cut his grass.
Prior to that, as I regress towards birth, I am sitting on my balcony, while working for the Ministry of Education, and single, and wondering what will happen next in my life – never expecting to have raised kids and moved out of Montreal. I live in a high-rise in 1989, among the roofs of other high-rises downtown, and I am dreadfully lonely.
I rush back to a million bars and night clubs and strip joints, a lonely bachelor high on alcohol and desperation, hanging around with street people whom I am bankrolling, going to Mass, writing religious poetry.
And I move back to college days, when I always have my hand up in class, and I’m hanging around with smart alecks from the middle class, and I am spending seven hours a night in reverse at the library, reading Martin Luther and Immanuel Kant, looking up the Chant du Maldoror in the stacks in my reverse spare time.
Then I am in seminary school, thirteen years old, waiting to be born again, which I am in 1948. In those days, there is no television; the breadman comes by in a horsedrawn wagon, from door to door; there are no supermarkets, and in Ottawa, you still see tanks grinding down the streets in a preview of Word War II. My parents are listening to Pius XII on the radio and reciting the rosary after supper along with the radio.
And time is moving backwards, headed towards the big implosion.
It takes my mother fifty-six hours of reverse labour to give birth to me, three weeks late. Then her father dies on the day I am supposed to be born. And later on, he is a young man, working for the government in the Gold Rush in the Yukon, which is far far away and back in time.
I then remember the Inquisition, the crucifixion of Christ, the early cavemen, in that order, the dinosaurs a hundred million years from now. Because by now I am in eternity, looking at a brief history of time.
And then nothing but star dust spinning around.
Poof.
