Guest post – Take Some Time. Take a Little More by Karen Heuler

A while ago, let’s say a few years ago, I was recovering from surgery and pretty much immobile. I had no choice but to wait for time to step in and heal me so that I could move again. Time felt slow and syrupy; I could almost watch it watching me. I could feel it as a texture. Was it waiting for me or was I waiting for it?

This forced immobility inevitably led me to thinking about time itself. It went so slowly while I healed, but then, I knew, it would rush ahead, almost unnoticed. What is this thing? And what use is it? I know I can’t do anything without it, but why?

“Everything happens for a reason” and “It wasn’t her time” are mindless clichés that betray a hidden belief in the inflexibility of time. We believe time is linear, and fixed. We will live only so long as god—or our particular cells—have decided, no more and no less. Fatal accidents are thus part of a Plan. The only way we can go back in time is through memories; the only way we go forward is through daydreams.

But because of memories and daydreams, I realized, my own experience of time is not at all linear. My dreams tell me this. Dreams mix everything up—past, present, future—and in my dreams, I may indeed defeat time. I am young again; I am old. I can fly, I can do things that my everyday automated time doesn’t allow.

Time kept impressing me by its very insubstantiality.

Time is how we measure the progress of existence. We don’t know what time is, in itself; we merely record its march, artificially, of course, because what about time can be declared natural? It is universal, we know; it occurs everywhere, we think; though there are theoretical discussions about the failure of time in black holes. If time fails there, surely it fails elsewhere?

But what is time made from? It is such a wiggly thing. It is made of nothing. How can such a thing exist then, if it is nothing? Ah, but time really isn’t a thing so much as a measurement, and yet can we truly say we are living via a measurement only? That once we cease to measure, we die? Or once we die, we cease to measure?

What happened before there was time? Will something happen after it ceases? And can things “happen” if there is no time? We hear of heaven and hell and eternity, of non-corporeal places that exist outside of the measurements of time. But time is all we know, and it looks like it is the thing we are born for, as the process of birth itself unrolls and is dependent on time. So how can this, this existence in time, be something outside time?

But, wait! Our minds are not reliant on time. Our minds (as opposed to our brains) are insubstantial, the measurement or result of something else. Our minds are free of time; they may note it, feel constrained by it, but minds do not age; brains do. Our minds operate outside the logic of time; only our brains are bound by it.

So time appears to be a constraint, a force, an impact. We don’t know its origin or its intent. We don’t know how much we are given or can earn or can steal. Time can appear to go quickly or slowly, seems to speed up as we age and slow down as we suffer.

Is time a part of us or are we a part of time?

There are numerous case histories of people whose brains have been damaged in such a way that they have no permanence of experience; they cannot hold on to time. One study mentions a man whose time froze; he couldn’t remember anything beyond his 16^th birthday and could not retain any evidence of new time (i.e., couldn’t learn new faces or facts). He had lost all his ability to remember any new data. And we hear of amnesiacs, people who have lost their past times and now only have the present. We have to pause for a moment. Can we be ourselves without our past? I am the result of all my time; without that result, who am I? And who are they if they have lost the results of their time? We are our time. We live within our particular experience of time, and in a linear way. We know that the past is not the present. But for those with brain injuries, this may not be true. The past and present may be disconnected.

As we go through life, we forget most of life. Sometimes, physically, a spot in the brain can be pulsed and a memory will surface. We have stored time—or, more exactly, our recollection of time—in a physical place.

That intrigued me. If time was somehow, in some way, physical, could it be stolen? In In Search of Lost Time, my novella just released from Aqueduct Press, I used that as a springboard for a story about a woman who could see auras and scoop sections of what turned out to be time. And then found that there was an underground market for it.

The idea was seductive but problematic. How fair is time, after all? How moral would we be if time was a commodity? How would I behave if I could get more time, buy more time, steal some time? Would I share my time, hoard my time, lose my time (I’m always losing things) or offer it to someone in need?

I like difficult moral choices in stories; I like to think how I would handle the temptation to take more than my share, because my share of time—slow or fast, happy or not—is never enough. And because most choices come with their own blend of unforeseen results.

I have a character, Hildy, who starts to see what turns out to be time—and learns that she can take it. And that there’s an underground market for it. What is Hildy going to do with that ability? Even flies, she sees, have a little aura of time around them, even dogs. And it’s all just there for the taking. No one would notice if she scooped a little here and there, never too much, a few minutes from one and then another. They wouldn’t notice; no one would notice. She’d be free to grab more time. Or would she?

About In Search of Lost Time:

Struck by a nasty disease, Hildy begins to see auras around people, and when she starts sampling them, she sees memories. Good, bad, used and unused, she learns that she has a unique talent—she can see and take other people’s time. And, she discovers, there’s an underground market for it. After all, who has enough time? The dying, especially, want to get more of it, but giving it to them means taking it from someone else. How moral is she? How will she juggle the black market’s strong-arm tactics, her own quandaries, and the surprising appearance of a figure who may be at the center of the market system that is time?