Dr. Simmons-Sargent invented an alternative reality machine. Roughly two feet high and two feet wide, with the depth of a deck of cards, it allowed him to leave his present reality and enter one of life’s forking paths, as it were. He could go back and marry not his current wife, Elena, an upstanding woman with a rock-solid ethical basis, but Gina, his most brilliant student and—“incidentally,” she said, though it was anything but—a danzón champion. It helped her escape the daily drudgery of existence. Dr. Simmons-Sargent and Gina had stolen away more than a few times. Once they met under a bridge for “dancing.” Dr. Simmons-Sargent had been taken ill at the time with the ague, in fact been medicated excessively, but it was only ever Gina. What a man he could have been with her! Would have been! He shook himself like a dog drying. No more thoughts of Gina. He could go back to Wales, where he had been born, and stay there and farm. He could go back to that autumn day in 1977 and join his brother’s band instead of continuing on to university. That fateful day, but every day was fateful. Those other versions of him would be realized finally by the alternative reality machine, though they would exist only as round feelings in his soul and still pictures projected upon the two by two by deck of cards frame. Living them all might splinter the mind, he knew, but that’s why he built the machine as a recorder. He could collect them all into a kind of film or novel. But what would that cause? Heartache to the nth degree. He felt upon his will a candle-snuffer. He sent out for an axe and spent the afternoon turning the machine into kindling. The next morning he visited Gina’s grave and got back to work.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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