I DO NOT LIKE it here in this part of the cave. It is cold and dark. The air is soupy. The people are complex and hard to see. The ground is also hard and hard to see. I no longer have any sense of purpose. This morning, I woke up to find out it is yesterday. Right now, it is a week ago, and I’m not even here in the cave yet. And yet I am. I wander, disembodied, waiting for myself to show up, hoping I will be able to see myself once I do. How will I know? It is very dark. This new time wrinkle disorients me. I try to make sense of it by accessing my vast mental library of time travel literature, both literary and scientific (I minored in chronology at Harvard). I recall there was a fiction writer named Curtis Vonnegut, Jr., who, in the mid-twentieth century, wrote of the chrono-synclastic infundibulum, a space-time dimension in which one could be everywhere/everytime at once. It is an ingenious storytelling device. Curtis Vonnegut, Jr., was a fiction writer I loved dearly. I read all of his work as a child and also several pieces he wrote as an adult—wonderfully whimsical stuff heavily dosed with social satire, fully stocked with whimsical notions, doodads, geegaws. Utterly delightful. Of course, one wearies of such things as one matures, and by the time I was eleven, I was on to Stanislaw Lem, equally funny and clever but not to the average reader, who would find thonself stymied by Lem’s erudition and level of scientific discourse (Lem was himself a trained physician, as well as a trained seal trainer). To the layperson, Lem reads terribly dry and inscrutable, but of course he is among the funniest writers to have ever lived (up there with Marie-Henri Beyle). But I outgrew Lem as well, discovering him to be an imposter, bombastic and derivative.