Decades

Quantum Jumps to the end of the Night

            Accepting a part of the blame was not enough, I will probably die tonight.

            It seems that most of us trash through life knocking dominoes over, starting a domino effect without actually thinking through or visualizing what the final pattern could potentially look like. Peter was one of those people and the last domino piece is me and I’m about to be knocked down. I have nowhere to go or to run. My entire existence is contained in what is essentially a trap. Like rodents in a maze, we are all continuously trapped in the grips of time, space, history and human nature. These things make up the walls of the labyrinth.

            Nazis burned books because physically killing people wasn’t enough. They tried to kill human souls, to extinguish them and to destroy the forms in which the soul expresses itself out into the world. They burned books, stole and destroyed art but the life force does not want uniformity; it wants itself to be expressed in multiple forms. That is why people like the Nazis and all the other factions and rulers who had grand plans to conquer the entire globe will always in the end fail. No one will ever have uncontested dominion over the planet. No one idea or creed will ever rule unchallenged.

            Many religious and political factions cannot accept this truth. The religious leaders of various creeds deep down will not consider the world an ideal place until everybody else accepts their dogma. Capitalists will not sleep until the entire world becomes capitalistic, the communists will not rest until the entire world accepts communism. This applies to every political and economic doctrine. As long as we think there is something that we have to convince other people of, that we have to win at something then we will always lose in the end. As long as we think that there are two or more sides and that one of those sides must eventually overpower and assimilate all the others then we will all lose in the end. Believing in that is going against the very life force that permeates through us and everything else in existence.

            But maybe there was a way out of this maze but Peter and my father didn’t look close enough during their lifetimes. If time travel were possible, I could go back and gun down my grandfather even though that would automatically erase me out of existence. It would be the most unique way imaginable of committing suicide. It actually would be more than suicide because I would erase my entire lifetime and my father’s also. It would be as if we never existed and maybe that would be more acceptable than the lives we were given. Maybe my father should have joined the protests. If the political climate changed earlier than maybe bombs wouldn’t be falling out of the dark skies tonight. I wonder if there were openings in the labyrinth that could’ve changed the entire pattern of the maze through specific choices. Maybe I had an opportunity to change things but I can’t imagine where. My life has been too short to have such opportunities. How could a little boy change history?

            As if on command, the gray tunnel descends upon me and various scenes are playing on its walls. There’s the last day of the demonstrations with the Marshal Joseph showing up on a white horse. Where was my father that day? Another scene is showing Peter as he is putting on the Nazi uniform for the very first time. There’s me in that one. It’s that day when Helena and I had our bicycle trip. I reach out with my hand to the screen to touch the image of Helena’s face. The screen, like a magnet, starts to pull me in and I fuse into it.

*

            “Let’s go. There’s really nothing to see here. All these things are so ugly. Let’s go bike down by the river.”

            Helena is on her bicycle beside me. I’m sitting on my bicycle. I feel a complete loss of orientation and coordination. The moment feels so real, it’s exactly how it was when it happened the first time, I feel the same way I felt when I lived through it the first time. Helena notices that I’m not responding so she slowly starts leaving.