Xu Ming's Second Time Down

By Stephen Saperstein Frug

A time-traveler who has gone back forty years to re-live the same period over again, struggles with the inevitability of history in a bleak time and gets into conflicts with his younger self.

In 1951, a pair of scientists at Cornell discovered time-travel. With the specter of the atomic bomb in the immediate background, they decide not to replicate Einstein's mistake of suggesting what might be a weapon to the political authorities. Instead, they decide to set up a clandestine research program, swearing all those who work on it to keep the secret.

Then, in 1991, a time traveler returns from 2031 with a disturbing message: no traveler and no message has ever come farther back from the moment in time when he left. No one knows why. All people know is that something happens on April 4, 2031, to prevent any news of the future.

This is the story of what happens next... if "next" is the right word for a narrative which, in the way of things, is necessarily non-linear.

Retcon is a mosaic narrative, a story composed out of other stories, with recurring characters and overlapping plots all forming a larger picture. It will be arranged in three movements, each made up of nine stories of approximately 15,000 words, which will be published as ebooks on a monthly schedule (with a brief break between movements).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stephen Saperstein Frug
• Release date: May 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9781960745026

Stephen Saperstein Frug

Stephen Saperstein Frug is the author and illustrator of Happenstance: A Photographic Novel, and the author of the essay series Attempts, and of Retcon: A Mosaic Story in Three Movements. He lives with his family in Ithaca, New York, where he commits occasional acts of illeism.

Book preview

Xu Ming's Second Time Down

movement 1, installment 3 of

Retcon

A Mosaic Story in Three Movements

by

Stephen Saperstein Frug

Copyright © 2023 by Stephen Saperstein Frug

All rights reserved.

Published by Snark & Boojum Press

Ithaca, New York

https://stephenfrug.com/snark-and-boojum-press/

First edition

May, 2023

ISBN: 978-1-960745-02-6

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, incidents, footnotes, minerals, and mysterious physics are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Except for 88 Lan Zhou closing during the pandemic lock-down, which actually happened (that was historical research, that was, and I wants credit).

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher. But he's an easygoing fellow, so feel free to email him and ask.

Table of Contents

Start Reading

Cover

Title Page

Table of Contents

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

About Retcon

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Previous Stories in Retcon

Also From Snark & Boojum Press

Xu Ming's Second Time Down

Who can welcome laments of the gorges,

gorges saying What will come will come.

— Meng Jiao

(trans. David Hinton)

1

Xu Ming took care not to run into himself too often. There were a certain number of meetings that were necessary, of course, especially towards the end of his second time down, but honestly those were fewer than you'd expect: possibly he could have managed with none save for the final meeting where he handed over the notebooks filled with the instructions and information he'd needed for his second slide. As he went down the second time, he'd wished he'd understood just how unnecessary most of the meetings were, and had taken steps to curtail them. They always upset them both.

But like so many of the decisions of our youth, these, once made, could not be undone. And too, like many of those decisions it was hard to say precisely when they were made: the experience was not of deciding but of realizing that one had long since decided. Too full of sleep when he left the right path.

But for all that, there was one meeting that Lao Xu, as the older Xu was called within the time-travel group, had with Xiao Ming, his younger self, that was entirely accidental: their very first. And ironically, while Xiao Ming would wrongly assume that many of the later, deliberate meetings were simple coincidence (a trick that Lao Xu only later realized he had played upon himself quite deliberately), he actually suspected (as Lao Xu remembered) that that first meeting had been planned.

But it wasn't. Lao Xu had just heard that 88 Lan Zhou—one of his favorite restaurants, which he'd eaten in quite regularly from when he'd found it (decades ago, timeβ) until it closed during the pandemic lockdown—was finally reopening. Which is to say, opening. He'd missed their dumplings during all the pretzel-twisted years since; in fact, shortly after his return, forgetting that it had not yet come into existence, he'd gone to stare at the supply store that stood where 88 Lan Zhou would some day come to be. But now, at last, he'd seen the news that it had opened, had in fact been open for a while, and so, without any memory of what was about to occur, took the subway down to East Broadway and was striding towards the restaurant when, from across the street and down the block, he saw himself, his younger avatar, Xiao Ming, standing outside the place, looking skeptically at the menu posted outside the door and (Lao Xu knew) considering the strained state of his finances. At the sight of himself, seeing from the tension in his legs and shoulders that he was about to turn away, Lao Xu remembered what was to come, and shook his head, realizing for the very first time that he had not been lying to himself about how accidental the meeting they were about to have really was. He slowed down, so that by the time that Xiao Ming turned aside, having decided that cheap as it was he still couldn't afford it, he, Lao Xu, was strolling up and came face to face with himself.

He looked younger, impossibly young, thin, with charmingly retro early-Beatle hair. He was (although he would have never called himself this at the time) handsome. Lao Xu smiled, and said, as though they had seen each other just yesterday (and of course he had looked in the mirror that morning), Hello, Míng-dì. 'Di' was Mandarin for 'younger brother' or 'junior'. He knew that he would find it slightly patronizing, but he also knew that he'd use it. It wasn't Lao Xu's choice; it was inevitable, already done; but the resentment that the elderly always have towards the young, particularly their younger selves, meant that he enjoyed, just slightly, the nastiness, even though it was at his own expense.

His