You Can’t Take It With You

I didn’t tell anyone—couldn’t tell anyone—before I did it because I knew they would have stopped me, or tried to.  At the very least, they would have insisted I pick someplace closer, someplace safer, someplace reachable by more traditional means.

In hindsight, I should have tested it with a lesser distance, like maybe between Monroe, Louisiana and Arcata, California.  That’s only twenty-three hundred miles, a thirty-four hour drive.  If you measured the distance in terms of mindset between residents of those places, you’d measure it in light years, but we’re talking proximity here, not philosophy.

Okay, let’s be honest.  My friends and family would have tried to stop me. I kept it secret because if they knew about my plans they would have tried to have me committed for psychiatric evaluation. I mean, if someone had told me he’d been given a device that could literally erase vast distances, I would have said he was crazy. But I know better now.

Anyway, I decided to test the device by setting it up so I could, by simply taking one step, go from where I stood to a place far away from where I stood.  I assumed if it worked, it would work both ways.  I mean, if it really worked to erase the distance between Point A and Point B, then it should work to erase the distance between Point B and Point A, right?  And it turns out that is, in fact, true.  But here’s the catch.  When you take that step, the device doesn’t go with you.  If someone were to deliver it to you after you took the step?  Well, then, you could step right back to where you’d started.

Phaedra Jenkins is the person who gave me, or I should say lent me, the device.  She expects me to return it to her, too. Phaedra is a professor of forensic psychology  at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. Outside of work, she dabbles in quantum physics and, in particular, in an oft-derided subset of “quantum entanglement,” something Albert Einsten referred to as “spukhafte Fernwirkung,” translated as “spooky action at a distance.”

And, I should admit, Phaedra is my illicit long-distance lover, pardon the pun, which was another reason I could not tell anyone about my plan because, if I did, I would have to explain how I got the device. That, of course, would have led to questions about my relationship with Phaedra, a sticky-wicket, to be sure. Yet, here I am, a mono-lingual man sitting in a rural brothel on the outskirts of Jangjin, North Korea, blogging to the world the secret I wanted so desperately to keep.

MAYBE TO BE CONTINUED, MAYBE NOT.

 

About John Swinburn

"Love not what you are but what you may become."― Miguel de Cervantes
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One Response to You Can’t Take It With You

  1. robin andrea says:

    We should all have one of these devices, so wherever we go, we can return or keep going in what ever direction we want. Or, if everyone has one, and everyone is space-traveling, will all the devices end up alone somewhere in a place no one wants to be?

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