Scott showed me over to a table of about three men sitting over in the corner, away from the noise of the party. Drinks and playing cards were piled up in front of them.

“This is my friend, Jerry,” said Scott. The guys grunted hello. “Mind if he plays a hand?”

They nodded. “Take a seat.”

“Don’t be the odd one out, Jerry,” said Scott. “A lot of these guys have given up on the fairer sex, too.”

“Uh, we have given up on relationships, not women,” one of them corrected. “Let’s be clear!”

I sat down and was dealt some cards. Maybe I could just do this for the rest of the night, I thought. I was okay with that. I liked that my seating blocked most of the party out.

“You want to know why I play poker,” one of the guys said to me, “because poker is the perfect balance of luck and skill.”

“I could use a bit more of both right now,” I said.

“He’s into time travel,” said Scott.

“Speculatively,” I added.

If I could time travel, maybe it would still be me, not Stuart, out the window, slow dancing with Jennifer under the lanterns. Then I realized what I was thinking and looked away, angry with myself.

“That’s my game, too,” said one of the guys. He was young-looking but his hair was greying prematurely and receding in the corners already, meeting in a prominent v-shaped widow’s peak on his forehead. His eyes darted around a lot like some kind of rodent.

“Fellow flux capacitor enthusiast,Remigus De Lautrec,” Scott introduced us.

“Aargh! No!” the man scoffed, “Remy – just Remy!” He had a slight accent.

“French?” I jumped in. “I’m a Mousseau, actually – Jerry.”

“Ah! Really? Which region?”

I looked down. “Er…couldn’t tell you, actually. I mean, not for many generations…”

“Oh. Well, nevermind.”

“What do you do, Remy?”

“I’m in between realms at the moment. Have my eye on a position with one of those big biotech firms, actually.”

“Quantor or Vegrandis? Aren’t they really hard to get into?”

“I think Vegrandis still considers merit. To get into Quantor you basically have to be a family member or a supermodel.”

He changed the topic. “Jerry, do you want to hear about what certain kinds of time dilation does to physical scale?”

“No. I‘ve read about this. Scale is relative like time, and time is bound up in space. So, theoretically, time dilation has the ability to alter scale.” I shrugged. “Or something like that.”

Remy raised an eyebrow. “Well. Looks like Scott was on the money with you. Give him my thanks, he went above and beyond.”

“What do you mean?”

“I asked him to round me up an assistant. I’m doing an experiment with time. I need someone with enough knowledge of time travel to understand the disclaimers so they can give proper consent.”

“Have you tried it yourself?”

“I can’t. To go into the past you need to set up a ‘backward gateway’ at the time you wish to come out. If that time’s been and gone, you’re toast. But it’s cool, I set one up yesterday. I’m worried about the paradoxical implications of meeting myself in the past, even if my past self expects the meeting. So I need an assistant to go back for me.”

“What?” I cut in. “Actually go back in time?”

“Yeah, spooky thought, huh?”

I didn’t believe him. Looking back, maybe if I’d taken him more seriously at the start, none of the following stuff would’ve happened.

I humoured him:

“Why don’t you show me how to set up one of these gateways and you do it and meet me in the past?”

“I’d like to have done it that way, but there’s no more time. I only just got this figured out recently. We’ve got to do this now, on the Flip. If I’m correct, the pole reversal is going to turbo juice my machine.”

I frowned. “If the experiment works, then wouldn’t you have seen me come into the past yesterday?”

“Yeah, I’ve thought of that. Maybe it works differently, you know parallel universes, or it overwrites history, or the past changes but our memories don’t, or something.”

An uninhibited discussion of temporal physics followed. I could never talk about it much around anyone else I knew. Even Jennifer, when we’d been together. If it got too deep she would make a remark threatening to put me in a padded room in a straight-jacket. As I suggested earlier, she felt threatened if I acted too interested in subject matter that wasn’t connected with her in some way.

Eventually Remy and I kind of drifted away from the poker table completely and just talked time.

He showed me to a storage warehouse out behind the Hotel, for inbound logistics. There were cardboard boxes stacked up. On a crate there was a bunch of boxy objects underneath a tarp sheet. Remy slipped one of them out and showed me. It looked like a portable generator.

“Is that a generator?” I said, even though I already kind of knew the answer.

“It’s my baby,” Remy said, cradling it. “This is the thing that’s going to zip you backwards.”

It had a black bar that curved around with a grip and trigger like a handgun. I pointed it out.

“Just looked cool,” Remy shrugged. “This is how you engage; you face time off, you quickdraw the exact moment, shoot a hole in it and travel through – anhedral, not dihedral; that’s important, too.”

Despite what I knew about time travel, all of that went over my head.

He held the machine in front of him like a gun, his finger ready on the trigger. He even made some empathic gunfire noises. He was just a big kid, I realized. Somehow that made me trust him more. Goes to show how quickly I gave my trust away back then.

Then he was serious again.

“Excuse the pun,” he said, “but timing is everything in this game. Let me show you.”

“What?” I said. “You’re going to do it, now?”

“No – you’re going to do it now.” He yanked my arm out and pulled back my sleeve, exposing my watch.

“Wait five minutes, then turn it on – ” he showed me a switch on the side of the machine, “—and pull the trigger. You’ll go back the five.”

“Why wait?” I said.

“It creates a backward gateway. A safe frame of time in which you can mess around in without overlaps and paradoxes. It’s a safety net; kind of like the broadcast delay on TV. The first time I did the jolt, I had no gateway, and it was really weird and confusing. But no harm done.”

“Does it hurt?” My headache and nausea was coming and going throughout the night, and I didn’t want to make it worse.

“No. But I should let you know, it’ll make you shorter.”

“What?” I said, a little too loudly. “That’s the last thing I need.”

“One of those disclaimers I was talking about,” he said matter-of-factly. “Don’t worry, you only lose a millimeter each time, if that. You can’t tell. I only know because the mathematics requires it.”

“So does going forward making you taller?” I joked. “Sounds a little too much like Alice in Wonderland.”

Remy stroked his faint grey stubble. “There’s a nice symmetry to it. Moving forward in space makes you bigger, moving back, smaller. It must be the same with time, but in a literal sense.”

“You’re not really growing and shrinking when you move through space, though,” I said. “It’s a perceptive illusion. I’d re-check the mathematics.”

Remy gave me an odd smirk as if I’d said something childish and naïve, like ‘who painted the sky blue?’ Then he handed me the machine. It was unexpectedly heavy; you sure as hell weren’t going to win a quickdraw with it.

“Get on that trigger in five, okay?” Remy said, turning to head out of the warehouse. “I’ll see you outside – oh, and Jerry?” he paused and gave me a serious look.

“Yeah?”

“Keep your eyes closed, no matter what you hear. It could be weird. I don’t want you to stall and tangle things up.”

He left the shed. Set my watch alarm to 11:10 pm, closed my eyes and waited. Almost the moment I shut my eyes there was a small male scream. Nice, I thought, and foreboding. Maybe Remy was trying to psych me out. He was such a kid deep down. I kept my eyes closed. Then I heard footsteps scuffing out of the warehouse. That settled it; I saw Remy leave the warehouse but he must have snuck back in to mess to with me. He was trying to goad me into opening my eyes. I kept them shut and pretended I hadn’t heard.

The footsteps disappeared outside. Then all was quiet. Maybe the whole thing was a joke, I wondered. And I was just holding a regular generator in my hands. Well, it beat standing around the Hotel, trying to keep my eyes from sticking to whatever Jennifer and Stuart were doing.

My watch beeped. I opened my eyes, turned on the power switch and depressed the trigger. What looked like water arced out of the machine and seemed to part like a curtain. Except there was no water; reality was bending like a reflection on a river. I could scarcely believe it; I was looking into a curved archway, slanting off from the rest of the world at a strange angle. An actual time warp, or wormhole, or something. My legs were shaking all of a sudden. This was definitely not how I imagined spending my Friday night.

But then I remembered what Remy had said about stalling and causing ‘tangles’, so, taking a deep breath, I walked towards the archway, revealing a tunnel, looking like a pathway through the warehouse, but as I moved, it distorted like a funhouse mirror. From one angle it looked straight, from another, shrunk into nothing, from another, magnified greatly, another slanting, and even, from a very acute angle to the side, slanting so hard it corkscrewed right around like a rollercoaster track. That enlivened some nausea in my stomach, so I took the path along the angle that made things look the most straight and normal.

There was a rushing sound, like an ocean wave, and the archway collapsed around me. Convinced I had done something wrong and the universe was in self-destruct, I screamed.

Then, blinking, I found the warehouse looked normal again, except now I was across the room, closer to the exit. Scuffing my shoes self-consciously and feeling a bit awkward, I walked out.

I found Remy standing outside. He took the generator back from me.

“What the heck was that?” I said.

“Check your watch.”

 It read 11.06pm.

“Well I’ll be,” I said stupidly, lost for words.

“For you,” he explained, “it’s been five minutes. But for me, no time at all. You’ve literally just walked out as I left you.”

I stammered, shaking my head.

“You didn’t believe me?” said Remy. “You didn’t take a look around on your way out.”

I looked at him blankly.

“Take a look,” he said, gesturing to the warehouse entrance. “But don’t go in.”

I stuck my head around the doorway and looked in.

And saw myself standing in there, holding the generator and closing my eyes.

“Motherfucker,” I exclaimed, stepping back to stare at Remy. “It actually worked!” then I frowned. “Now there’s two of me.”

“Not for long,” Remy grinned. “Once your past self jolts back he’ll disappear out of our lives, leaving just you. He goes back, we move forward, everything fixed again. It’s like you’ve done a tiny loop around, but now you’re on the straight path again. You see why we need a backward gateway.”

Remy and I returned to the Hotel. Some people had started leaving. Remy was holding his machine and only then I appreciated its inconspicuous design. No one gave it a second look. To them, it was just a generator.

Scott found us in the alfresco dining area.

“A few of us are heading back to my place for drinks, count down the Flip, pray for our lives,” he said lightly. “You guys are welcome to head on over.”

I nodded. I was super buzzed from the time jump and wasn’t yet ready to settle down. Even my headache wasn’t bothering me for the moment.

“I think I will,” I said.

“Sure,” Remy shrugged. He didn’t have a preference, I knew he was just going because I was going, for the purpose of the experiment. I know that Remy said you had to establish a quarantined safety buffer zone, but the idea of jolting in front of a small crowd filled me with excitement. What would it look like from their end?

It was eleven thirty when I pulled my car up outside Scott’s place. Some cars were already parked along the median strip. Tasha let me in with a smile that said she was surprised but grateful that I came.

I met her through Scott, and she met Jennifer through me. I didn’t think they would get along; Tasha was a very down to earth woman, the kind whose unconditional kindness could be taken advantage of by the wrong person, and she had a transparent sense of humour; she laughed politely and straightforwardly, not always realizing the dark nuance of Jennifer’s humour, even when it was directed against me (I didn’t resent her for that, she was too nice). Maybe that’s why Jennifer liked her, she didn’t quirk an eyebrow in silent disapproval at anything Jennifer did or said. A more judgmental, self-righteous woman would have found much to fault about Jennifer. But now that we’d broken up, I assumed Jennifer had finally drifted away from them, I guessed she probably drifted in and out of Stuart’s circles now. I was patently wrong.

Remy arrived shortly after I did. We took up chairs in the living room. The TV was playing softly; a live GPR countdown special. There was no precedent for a pole reversal, so we all treated it as the closest conceivable thing: a millennial clockover. The TV was only a passing distraction. Remy and I soon kicked off another involving discussion about the implications of time travel. We spoke as loudly and excitedly as we wanted, and no one paid us any attention, as we walked over potential paradoxes and what we could possibly do with an eight minute long time jump. It must have sounded like were talking in pure hypothetical. No one would have guessed otherwise.

A lull in the discussion made me realise how dry my mouth was, while Remy stretched and yawned.

“Too bad we can’t make time speed up,” he said. “Get this Flip over with."

I nodded. My headache was returning. Too much alcohol and my throat felt like sandpaper. I got to my feet.

“I think I’ll get some water,” I said, stepping out of the living room.

There was a window along the hallway, revealing the patio, with Tasha, Scott and, to my surprise, Stuart, all sitting on the wooden chairs, with drinks and canapes. I could hear the muted sounds of them chatting. I might have gone out there, but if there was Stuart, there was Jennifer, though, mercifully, I couldn’t see her from where I was. My brow furrowed and I pretended to not have seen them, before I was invited out there myself and made to catch them up on my existence, the mind-numbing routine of work and play I had lost myself in since the breakup. Gratefully enough, their backs were to me and they didn’t see me. I carried on into the kitchen.

And walked in on Jennifer, who was standing at the sink. She was cutting fruit, for cocktails it looked like.

Our eyes met for a second. I looked away uneasily. She didn’t. Her expression didn’t change, like she didn’t recognize me. Maybe that was a good strategy, I decided.

“Excuse me,” I said, as if I needed her permission for the water. Unfortunately, she was using the sink to wash fruit. I awkwardly waited for her to finish. She pushed the tap over to my side and stared at me, as if to say ‘there you go,’ but remained on the spot, peeling some fruit over the sink. This meant I had to sidle right up to her to use the sink, doing everything humanly possible to keep a sliver of air between us. It was deliberate of her, I knew, with some irritation, she wouldn’t let me slip in and out like a mouse; she wanted me to look her in the eye and engage her. I couldn’t believe it. We weren’t even in a relationship anymore and she was still playing this game. I thought she had Stuart for that now.

“Staying for the Flip?” she said casually.

“Of course. Can’t miss it.”

“You doing anything special?” she went on. “We might never see another.”

“Well not if we all get flambéed by cosmic radiation, we won’t.”

She let out a small splutter of laughter in spite of herself.

“I meant that we don’t know if there’s going to be another in our lifetimes,” she said.

“Well, I cracked open a Bacardi. That’s pretty magical, for me.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Is that so?” she said deprecatingly. “How brave of you.” I was a lightweight, unlike her; she held her drinks. Sometimes she’d had to cajole me into imbibing more, and she always liked the opportunity to make me more pliant to her suggestion.

“What are you doing?” I said.

She looked away.

“Stewey wants to kiss me when it happens. Like it’s New Years’.”

Stewey? I thought. Like the Family Guy character? What bizarre in-joke endeared her to that moniker? I decided I would rather not know.

“But I think it’s kind of silly,” she added quickly. “I mean, it doesn’t really mean anything, right?”

I took that as a rhetorical question and didn’t answer. Then, filling up my glass, I started to leave the kitchen again.

“Do you think anything’s going to change?” she asked after me. I paused at the doorway, with Remy’s machine jumping to mind.

“Sure,” I said. “In a big way.”

Down the hallway, I could hear the others laughing loudly, moderately drunk. Scott noticed me.

“Jerry, get over here!” he exclaimed. “Tell them what you told me earlier, about your date with the giraffe lady – what happened, you know?”

“Just let me use the bathroom a minute,” I smiled weakly, continuing on up the hallway. I spent more than a minute in the toilet, in truth avoiding them, shamefully or not.

When I finally returned to the living room, Remy had gone, leaving behind his machine where he’d been sitting. I wondered if he’d done a quick jolt without me. Turns out he’d wandered out onto the patio to talk with the others. Great, now they were all out there, talking and laughing. I slumped in one of the sofas and began downing my half-finished glass of Rum and Coke, forgetting the Coke. Next second, it was empty and my head was swimming like I’d gotten off a wild carnival ride.

Oy vey… I thought. Obviously drunk that one way too fast. I couldn’t concentrate, my eyes kept slipping around objects rather than focusing on them. But at least all the inhibition and self-effacement was gone. My mouth felt like it was on fire, but in a good way, like after eating a good chilli.

My mind then wandered back to Jennifer’s question. Would anything change though? What did I think the machine was really going to achieve? The past Jennifer was still the same Jennifer, and the present me was still the same me. I wanted more space, she wanted less of it. We had different, incompatible notions of what a relationship looked like, and no time jump was going to cure that.

I got a lot of rough treatment in my youth, roughed up for being the kid, the little guy. As an adult, intimacy was real hard, made me keen to put distance between myself and others. I knew I played games and let people chase me for a while, before I tired of it and went and hid in my man cave to do my own thing. I knew, by comparison, Jennifer’s upbringing, among push-and-shove brothers, fighting like cats, was defined by the struggle for attention, for the spotlight, constant stimulus and noise; you fought to make yourself heard, and once you had your claws in someone, you didn’t let go. She chased me eternal, and even seemed to enjoy it, but that’s not what she really wanted. A chase was useless without getting the cheese at the end, and she had wanted to finally catch me, and hold me, squirming in her grasp, and keep me there. She had wanted to finally pin me down, and I wouldn’t let her. That never-ending chase is what finally broke us apart.