“It doubtless seems highly paradoxical to assert that Time is unreal, and that all statements

which involve its reality are erroneous.”

– J. Ellis McTaggart, The Unreality of Time

 

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Ginny always knew what to say to put people at ease. My brother Jacob used to call her my “better half,” but I never liked that saying. It implied that Ginny was only half a person, a piece that had broken away from some larger whole. 

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I’m using the past tense about Ginny because I feel sentimental today. I use different tenses depending on my mood. Sometimes, when I think I’ll join her later, I’ll say, “I will have reunited with Ginny.” I like future perfect the best because possibilities become absolutes. 

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J. Ellis McTaggart says that events can be classified in terms of past, present, and future— Ginny poured a cup of coffee, the cup is falling to the floor, I will clean up the mess. Events can also be considered relatively, with respect to another event, as earlier or later—the cup was whole before it was in pieces. McTaggart asks if this duplication is necessary in how we view time. The past is fact, the future speculative, and the present a transitory point—our feeble consciousnesses, unable to take it all in, are bottlenecks for time and everything in time. 

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Ginny on a Sunday morning. She’s in her chair—a worn, emerald -green velvet chair with a generously deep-seated cushion. In her right hand is a porcelain tea cup that holds precisely as much coffee as she needs for a day. In her left, a book. I can’t see what it is because she takes the dust jacket off when she reads, but I know she will tell me about it later. Threads leading forward and backward. 

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The day she found that chair at a yard sale. We argued because I’m always convinced there could be something living inside of used furniture—bacteria, mold, fleas, bed bugs. Other people’s dirt. She sat down anyway and sighed as she settled into it—an act she repeated, or at least pantomimed each time she sat down in that particular chair. 

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She’ll tell me about that book later, excited once the caffeine kicks in. These things are already in motion. It seems impossible for them not to happen now, just as there could be no other way that green chair came to settle in our house. “What better place than a living room to put such a chair,” I’d joked as we pushed it into place, “that might be full of thriving critters.” The offal of strangers. Now it contained bits of Ginny, too—skin cells, hair. A fountain of her DNA. There’s likely more of her in the chair next to me than any place other than her grave. There may even be some of me in there, as the dust settles, though I refused to ever sit directly in her chair. It’s time that’s putting me in her seat, shard by shard.

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I met Ginny in a dog park. I noticed her because she didn’t have a dog with her. She must have noticed me for the same reason. We moved toward each other gradually while pretending not to, and when I was close enough, I asked if she was planning to steal a dog. She laughed at my joke with a bright smile but held open the possibility of a heist. She would have stolen a dog.

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I explained that I liked dogs but was afraid a dog would be too messy for my orderly ways. I came to the dog park to do research—to observe their habits and determine compatibility. Ginny, she told me what her name was—accepting my explanation, I guess—and I introduced myself as Robert. Ginny said she was allergic to dogs but loved their stupid grins when they ran.

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Standing next to her, I pretended to watch the dogs for a few minutes, but I was looking sideways at Ginny. She was nearly as tall as me at five-foot-ten and wore a long, red coat cinched tight above her hips. Once I caught her also assessing me—I saw a tinge of pink in her cheeks as she looked away.

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“You know,” she told me, “I had a nun in Catholic school who taught us that dogs aren’t moral creatures because they will always choose what is most delectable.” Ginny paused for a moment, then said the nun used the word ‘delectable,’ though it didn’t sound biblical to her, and she didn’t think nuns were allowed to use words that aren’t in the Bible.

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“Do you know about Buridan’s ass?” I asked to hold up my end of the conversation. I was so excited to participate that I rushed to tell her without waiting for her response. “Buridan’s ass is placed in front of a pail of water and a pile of hay, and because it’s equally hungry and thirsty, it can’t choose one over the other and eventually dies.”

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“Oh,” she said, “an ass like a donkey. At first, I thought you were some kind of pervert.”

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Once she realized I wasn’t a pervert, she agreed to go on a date with me, choosing to break away from the dog park. Maybe she also stayed at the park, but some version of her left with me.

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Ginny and I married and bought a house. We worked, and we traveled, and we could travel because we didn’t have a dog at home to worry about. We visited dog parks when we traveled. I always wanted to know if dogs barked differently from place to place, like accents, and Ginny knew their big stupid grins would always be the same when they ran.

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We never had kids for the same reason we never had dogs—they were incompatible with our lifestyle. Kids, we reasoned, were as plentiful in public as dogs if we ever needed to be reassured by their big, stupid grins.

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Our plans for retirement and travel were cut short by Ginny’s illness. That’s our reward for trying to predict the future. There’s always the possibility of a phase shift. Just because Ginny wasn’t sick when we met didn’t mean Ginny would never get sick. There were some things about our life—the acquisition of dogs and kids, for example—that we could control deterministically. But others were left to chance. Some say God, or gods—I say chance. A god would be deterministic, and there’s no rationale for some things that happen.

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McTaggart says that we’re only making inferences about the past and future based on present observations. Those states—past and future—are illusions because what is real is the notion of causality. We know that any action or event has predecessors, causal agents, successors, or effects. But McTaggart doesn’t talk about chance or probability, only cause and effect, as if everything is already set in motion, and it’s only willful blindness that veils our demise. I can only try to contradict our present path with the future perfect: I will have changed the ending.

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I refused to let Ginny’s yard sale furniture in the house, fearing it might be some Trojan chair. If I could have been convinced that there were only Greeks in that chair, I would have carried it over the threshold myself. I was afraid that we were dealing with a plight more epidemiological than historical. Ginny was as stubborn as I am, and she wouldn’t take it back. On our front walk, it sat where we both had to skirt its flank to enter and leave the yard. It was rained upon and heaped with snow and nested with birds until even Ginny agreed that something was living in it. 

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Had the state of the chair changed? From empty to full of critters? Or because it would become that way in the future, it must also be that way in the present and past. It would have been infested.

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One time, bringing Ginny back in from another stint in the hospital, as I slowly helped her around the green chair, she told me, “Oh, Robert, just get rid of it.” Later that evening, I put on a pair of work gloves, dragged the thing through the gate, and sat it next to the trash bin. The following day it was gone. What was the cause? What was the effect? How could I know the future’s habits so well that my disposal method proved effective?

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The chair I bought on the way home from her burial was new, fresh, antiseptic. I pulled it halfway down the front walk and ripped the packaging off. The plastic wrapping tamped down the grass I hadn’t mowed since Ginny’s final visit to the hospital. I went inside, got a beer, and then sat on the porch steps watching the thing. 

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I got up and walked around the chair, sipping my beer, looking for signs of life, both passive and active, like the pea -green worn spot on the arm where she would have rested her cup or the teeming colony of carpet beetles laying eggs along the welting. It must be there, I was convinced. I left it out overnight and set it in the living room early the next morning. I knew there must be pieces of Ginny in the air, in the dust. They would settle on this chair like iron filings on a magnet. She would have sat there after all.

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The chair looked sick before Ginny did. Before we knew, the old arguments had surfaced about her seat's integrity. “I have a feeling,” I told her, but she shushed me because it was her chair, and it had never given her any trouble. I disagreed—it was trying to swallow her, I insisted, and I could see how she shifted in it as if evading its beetle-toothed gnaw. The morning her cup fell from the arm, we went to the doctor together. She had broken open, exposing her shards, coffee pooling on a wooden floorboard. There was no perfect future. Only grammar could save us now.

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“McTaggart says that at any moment we have certain perceptions, and also the memory of other perceptions, all the while anticipating further perceptions.” Having finished, Ginny would have slipped the dust cover back on McTaggart, smiled at me, and settled back into her green chair with a sigh.

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According to McTaggart, “Time only belongs to the existent. If any reality is in time, that involves that the reality in question exists.” He marks a sharp distinction between reality and fiction, where fiction may have an internal logic of causality, where one event necessarily occurs after another—mourning after a death, an investigation after a murder—but those events as described have not taken place in the past, nor are they occurring now, and as far as we know, will not happen in the future.

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I imagine her name was Ginny. She looked like a Ginny. I saw her a few times at the dog park, but never with a dog. I felt like I wasn’t ready for her. She would always be in my future, never in my present. She will have been my companion. It feels wrong, though, to take her life in this way—to give her thoughts that are not her own, to predict her future independent of her past or present. It seems logical—this cause and effect of our meeting and our life together. I could write it that way, and it would seem reasonable to some.

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I bought a green velour reading chair one day, thinking of how she’d look in it, holding a book open on her lap with a porcelain cup perched perilously on one of its scrolled arms. I imagined it was something she would like, even though she wore red, the antithesis of green. My life with her was the optical negative of reality. Her dark hair grew pale with time. I set the chair outside on the front walk to collect her, along with dust samples from everyone in the city. Given enough time, we’re all in that chair. Every reality is a possibility with time.

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