The Old Blog in the Desert

Daylight was fading, and the street lamps of Virginia City were coming on as we sat in the corner of the saloon, two whiskeys between us. Henry opened the ball, loudly announcing, “Fate has everything decided.”

It wasn’t unlike him to launch into some philosophical tear about one thing or the other, so I sat and listened. “Not just the big moments, either,” he added. “Every word and every action. Even the moments that feel like choice, the pause, the second thought, the sudden change of mind, are already written. We experience them as freedom, but they’re just the mind catching up to what’s already in motion.”

That’s when I got into timing, and whether it matters. “What if you leave the saloon early, stay for one more drink, wouldn’t that change something?”

Henry responded, “If I’m meant to die, then it won’t matter when I walk out the door. Fate don’t adjust to us. It adjusts everything else.”

Then I made the mistake of asking about time travel.

“Going backward first?” he asked. “That’s always where people always start, right?”

“I guess,” I said.

“You’d arrive as a ghost,” Henry said. “You’d pass right through people, windows, doors, walls, unseen, and people would walk right through you, none of it would register. You’d watch yourself do everything again, like walking into this saloon and ordering the same drink. You’d know exactly what’s coming, and you’d be completely helpless to stop it, and the past don’t care that you were watching.”

“What about going forward?” I asked.

“That’d be even worse,” Henry said as he drained his glass, “If I saw winning lottery numbers and returned to play them, the original winners would lose, the jackpot would change, and the future I witnessed would never have existed. Them contradictions alone make it impossible.”

I sighed and tipped my whiskey back, as Henry continued.

“In a world where everything’s fixed, we can’t change what’s ahead, because the moment we act, the timeline collapses,” Henry said.

I didn’t argue about any of it, just kept nodding, each point clicking into place like it had been waiting there all along.

By the time I called for the barmaid to fetch us another round, I had concluded that time travel, backward or forward, wasn’t just unlikely, it was incompatible with reality itself.

Not because a machine couldn’t get built, but because destiny wouldn’t allow it to work, as any apparent change would either be impossible or already part of the script.

We finished our drinks, and Henry stood.

I watched as he stepped out of the saloon door, turning to his left, where Henry should have passed in front of the large plate-glass window, but didn’t. I started to say something, but the barmaid beat me to it, shouting in a panic, “Where’d he go?”

Instead, I walked over to the bar and ordered a triple whiskey.