The Quantum Herring

Time travel came late in life for Doris Zeitreiser, at a moment when she’d have much preferred a herring. The particular herring she had in mind had been pickled in cream, chopped, and garnished with red onions on lightly toasted Jewish rye. For 29 years, this vestigial meal had been a staple of her Sunday mornings, served with cultivated insolence by the same gnarled counterman at Loewenstein’s, and followed by a stroll to Schurz Park, where, weather permitting, she and Murray laid claim to a bench in the Peter Pan Garden and teamed up on the Sunday crossword. Until Murray, at only 67, had keeled over from an aneurysm, leaving her with a shattered heart and a kettle of carrion-eyed creditors. And now, only seven months later, Loewenstein’s itself was gone, replaced with a sterile cardboard sign thanking Upper East Siders for their patronage. One blow too many. But the universe seemed determined to test her further. Just as she was preparing to head to the park alone with a breakfast offering for the pigeons, her reclusive neighbor knocked to announce his arrival from the future.

“Please let me in,” he said. “I promise I’ll explain.”

She knew his surname to be Ryzyko from the mailbox in the lobby, yet in the long summer since she’d downsized to the faceless gray co-op on Second Avenue, her neighbor in 4B had limited his contact to muttered greetings in passing. He was presentable enough, in the rumpled way of the down-at-the-heel academic, his tweed jacket cut so loose that the elbow patches nearly reached his wrists, and in the elevator, he’d always appeared on the cusp of speaking to her, but he never did — his eyes either fixed on the certificate of operation, or darting awkwardly from his hands to his loafers and back. Yet now, on her threshold at 10 a.m., he’d discovered his tongue. Unnerved by the pounding at her door that followed the bell, and still in her bathrobe, Doris found herself inviting the man into her parlor and offering him tea. He appeared harmless enough, after all — possibly a potential nuisance, but not exactly the Boston strangler.

“I’ve got Lipton, Earl Grey, berry medley, and spearmint,” she said. “Or Sanka. We were never — I’m not much of a coffee drinker.” We was a hard habit to break.

“I know,” replied Ryzyko. “Your husband had stomach troubles.”

He dropped the words casually, matter-of-fact, as though a dead man’s ulcer were his business. If her neighbor’s overall bearing had been any less befuddled, Doris might have felt violated. Instead, she experienced her own flush of mild bewilderment. “You knew my Murray?”

“Goodness. I’m always saying the wrong thing. And traveling in time, I suppose it’s hard to remember when you’ve learned things.” Ryzyko wiped his spectacles on his handkerchief nervously while he spoke. He was younger than she’d first thought — closer to 50 than 60. “I guess I owe you an explanation.”

“I won’t object,” she said, placing the tea tray at his elbow.

“You see, Mrs. Zeitreiser,” he said. “I confess I’m something of a time traveler. From the future. Or maybe that’s an overstatement,” he added. “I’ve only done it once, after all.”

Doris didn’t need four decades as a psychotherapist to know the man was short a few marbles. Common sense told her to ask him to leave. And yet, watching him dance his teabag in the steaming water, his soft features flustered red, she shied away from calling out his claims overtly. “From the future,” she echoed. “In that case, are you willing to humor a foolish question? How far into the future are we talking here? Years? Millennia?”

Ryzyko’s gaze fell to his cup. “Nothing at all like that,” he said. “Although, naturally, you’d conclude …” He trailed off as though he’d lost his thread. “What I meant to say was …,” he continued. “Thursday.”

“Thursday?”

“Yes, Mrs. Zeitreiser,” he replied — “Doris, if I still may. I’ve come back from next Thursday.” And then he started choking on his tea.

* * *

Doris did not know the Heimlich maneuver — a realization that occurred to her while her guest coughed tea out his nostrils and his ruddy features turned crimson — so she was grateful when he managed to catch his breath. Add that to the list of things she’d learned too late: haggling with insurance companies and plumbers, slapping the microwave in precisely the right spot so it stopped whirring like a legion of drunken cicadas.

Ryzyko nearly spoke, then coughed again, before finally managing to gasp out an apology. “Never learned to swallow right as a kid,” he said.

“Can’t you go back into the past and fix that?” asked Doris, surprising herself with her own audacity. She was usually reflective, even reserved, which suited her well; Murray had wielded a sharp enough wit for them both. In any case, her guest took her quip for sincere.

“I’m not sure. I’m rather new at this,” said Ryzyko. “Or, at least, I think I’m new at this. It’s all very confusing.”

Something in his tone made Doris yearn to help him. That was the social worker in her, the do-gooder who hadn’t turned away a client in 30 years. Until June, at least, when she’d scaled back her practice — but those were extenuating circumstances. Tikkun olam, her mother had instilled into her and her sister. Repair the world. Only her mother was long gone, and her sister had succumbed to sepsis at 40 after a dog bite, but they’d been estranged by then anyway, so who could say whether it mattered? What was clear was that the planet desperately needed repairing — her neighbor included — and one had to start somewhere. The pigeons in Schurz Park stood at no risk of going hungry, after all, and she could use a distraction from the herring.

“Tell me all about it,” she said, refilling Ryzyko’s hot water.

So he did.

With coaxing, aided by a lifetime’s professional tricks, she managed to glean some architecture from his roundabout tale. His full name was Ojgen Boguś Ryzyko, but he went by Bog. His grandparents had been Silesian refugees — not Polish, he emphasized — he’d had great uncles who’d fought on either side in the war. Prior to that morning — or the following Thursday, depending upon how you viewed the matter — he’d led a rather unremarkable life. He was 49, unmarried, until recently adjunct faculty in the physics department at Hunter College. (Not laid off, he’d corrected her. Fired. For teaching a version of quantum gravity not consistent with classical formulations. Halfway into his description of the Casimir effect and two-mouthed wormholes, she steered him back to his story.) Basically, the man lived off an annuity from his late aunt, who’d never had offspring of her own, and he’d spent the last year developing a device to prove the merits of his contrarian theory of thermodynamics.

Doris found herself distracted by mention of the ill-fated aunt — although she had no reason to believe that woman had ever wanted children. But she had. Desperately. As had Murray. Alas, after six miscarriages and a pair of unexplained hypertensive crises, even the reproductive specialists had cried uncle. So here she was: widowed, alone. What term did one of her patients jokingly use in reference to her own fertility struggles? Reproductively challenged? Doris preferred barren with its overtones of biblical affliction. None of this, of course, could she explain to Bog Ryzyko, not even had she dared to try.

“And that’s the gist of it,” he said. “Until next Thursday. That’s when the gas leak occurred and you pounded on my door to warn me — I recognized your voice from the elevator — and I remember thinking, a gas explosion might actually have the force to trigger my machine — the Casimir effect, you understand — so I raced to the device and flicked on all of the reverse chargers simultaneously, and the next thing I knew it was 9:30 this morning and I was sitting on the stoop downstairs. Good thing I keep a copy of my door key around my neck.”

“I see,” replied Doris — but, candidly, she didn’t.

She’d been in the first cohort at the White Institute to accept MSWs, and she’d interviewed hundreds of delusional clients during her career — even the daughter of a prominent Orthodox rabbi who insisted her real father had been industrialist Howard Hughes. Doris could tell from delusions, as her grandmother might say. Her neighbor did not sound delusional. Life-long materialist that she was, she couldn’t help recognizing what Bog Ryzyko did sound like: A sane and well-grounded, albeit eccentric, individual who’d traveled four days backward in time.

“That’s some story,” she said with nonjudgmental regard. “It must be a lot to process.”

“I wouldn’t believe me either,” replied Ryzyko. “I hardly believe myself — and I understand the physics! But how else could I have known about Murray’s digestive issues? Or that he proposed to you on your third date, outside the gibbon exhibit at the Bronx Zoo? ‘The plaque says gibbons mate for life,’ he’d said. ‘How’d you like to make like a gibbon?’ And it took you a moment to realize his intentions.”

Doris dug her fingers into the arms of her chair, as though at the dentist, and she eyed the interloper with renewed suspicion. What was that Shakespeare quotation she’d memorized at Barnard: The devil can cite scripture to his purpose. But her guest looked as much like the devil as a sack of wet linen. “How did you know that?”

“I’m not sure. I imagine you’re going to share that story with me sometime between now and next Thursday morning,” explained Ryzyko. “I can’t remember the details of what will happen over the next few days, but sometimes scraps pop into my head.” He looked up at her expectantly, as though she might have a solution to an unspoken dilemma. “Honestly, I feel as though we’ve been through this loop a number of times before. …”

She wanted to resist his narrative — a pitfall that psychoanalyst Melanie Klein termed projective identification — but she found herself seduced by his script. “I guess that makes sense,” she agreed. “Because in four days, I’m going to wake you up for the gas leak again, and you’re going to flip your thingamabobs, and you’ll pop right back here to tell me about it. This could be the tenth time we’ve had this conversation. Or the thousandth …”

“And the amazing thing is that you always invite me in,” he said. “You never slam the door on my face.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Some people might,” he answered. “Most people.”

She sensed that many bouts of rejection lay behind this characterization of humanity, and she felt an unexpected urge to give the strange fellow a hug. She didn’t, of course.

“It’s an endless loop,” he continued. “And if you’re never going to shut the door on me, the only way out would be for you not to warn me about that gas leak, so then I wouldn’t flip on the reverse chargers, but then I’d …”

He waved his hands in the air to mimic an explosion, but he looked more like a jack-in-the-box gone haywire, and Doris bit her lip to stifle a grin. “Indeed,” she said. “That is a problem.”

“So what do we do now?” asked Ryzyko.

“We feed the pigeons,” replied Doris, gathering up the tea service. “Only please try not to interact with anyone until we figure this out.”

“But what if you run into somebody you know?”

“I won’t,” replied Doris. “I never do.”

* * *

The sun had already seared off the early mist, but even at mid-morning, Schurz Park lay nearly empty, its indigenous population estivating on Cape Cod and in the Hamptons. Doris and Ryzyko encountered a vagrant gathering cans, a jogger balancing a parrot on his shoulder, two ancient babushka seated at opposite ends of the same bench who as easily might have been sisters, strangers, or sworn mortal enemies. The old women shared the same perch every Sunday morning, reminding Doris of the dark years to come. As for the pigeons, nothing fazed them: not the overnight storm that had left emulsive pools on the walkways, not the rats who scampered from trash bins at the appearance of a human menace. “As a girl, I never saw the point of feeding birds,” said Doris. “They do fine on their own. But ever since I lost Murray, I find it strangely comforting — I can’t explain why.” She didn’t add that she’d come to accept the custom as part of the culture of widowhood, one of those pointless rituals that unmarried women of a certain age embraced to mark their territory. Like reading obituaries.

“When birds fly, their center of pressure diverges from their center of gravity,” replied Ryzyko, before adding, almost apologetically, “I didn’t discover that.” His words sounded familiar, reassuring — and though Doris was confident she’d never studied the mechanics of avian flight, she somehow knew to credit this breakthrough to Leonardo da Vinci.

Ryzyko reached into her sack tentatively and scooped up a handful of seeds. She watched as he strewed millet and sunflower kernels across the asphalt, his own eyes fixed on the pigeons in childlike wonder. She regretted not having spoken to him earlier in the elevator — not having invited him over for a neighborly snack. As a man, he was nothing like Murray, nothing, and she couldn’t see a way to finding him remotely attractive, if she had even been so inclined, but one of the aspects of marriage she missed most was taking care of someone, and here was a man who seemed in need of great care. Desperately so — whether he was aware or not. She enjoyed listening to him describe da Vinci’s Codex on the Flight of Birds, as he was now doing, with the zeal of a teenager describing his latest binge-watched show.

He cut himself short. “I’m boring you?”

“Not at all,” she replied. “I was just thinking that we can’t be the first human beings ever trapped in a time loop,” she said.

Ryzyko frowned. “So you think my invention is not original?”

She hadn’t considered her observation that way. “I just meant — ” but Doris was no longer certain what she’d meant. She recalled a Twilight Zone episode from her childhood in which a man accused of murder — Dennis Weaver or maybe Cliff Robertson — repeatedly faced trial and execution, only to wake up in the courtroom again. But that was TV.

“Do me a favor,” she said. “If you ever do go back in time again, can you bring me a pickled herring on rye from Loewenstein?”

She did not ask him to bring Murray. Life, she understood, was about settling.

* * *

That afternoon — following a lunch of pancakes and blintzes that Doris insisted on cooking and that Ryzyko nibbled at like a fawn — the pair settled down at the glass table in her parlor to develop a game plan. Ryzyko dared not return to his own apartment: presumably, another Ryzyko was busy at work on his thermodynamic contraption. What might happen if the two men met remained uncertain, but Doris didn’t wish to risk finding out. In hindsight, she regretted having had the physicist accompany her to the park. Logistics had never been her strong suit — she was an “ideas person,” as Murray had liked to say — but she determined to be more careful going forward. She even made a point of drawing the blinds, as they sat down to their war council, although she lived on the sixth floor and her parlor windows faced an airshaft. How she missed the panoramic view of the East River and Queens from the penthouse on York Avenue.

Their problem defied easy resolution. As Doris understood the matter, she had three options: First, she could do nothing until Thursday, then pound on Ryzyko’s door during the gas leak and set the whole loop in motion again. Alternatively, she might not warn him and allow the physicist to blow up with the building — but that prospect seemed unfathomable. Finally, of course, she had the option of phoning the gas company preemptively to prevent the blast. That idea struck her as the wisest course of action, but her companion objected vehemently: Without the explosion, his device would not activate and he’d be denied proof of his concept. “If Galileo and Giordano Bruno were willing to sacrifice their lives for science,” declared Ryzyko. “Why shouldn’t I?” Doris had never seen her neighbor so animated. She had many reasons to offer, but sensed that her arguments would prove fruitless, so she focused on gaming out other options.

By midnight, they’d made little progress, but as though by tacit understanding, they were back at the coffee table at dawn the next morning. Doris had already been awake for several hours, preparing breakfast. She was glad she hadn’t discarded her waffle iron with the move, and when Ryzyko appeared in the parlor — she’d had him sleep on a rollaway cot in her work den — he was greeted by a platter of Belgian waffles, as well as eggs scrambled with onions, freshly squeezed orange juice, and farmer’s cheese with diced tomatoes, which had been a favorite of Murray’s. To her delight, Ryzyko indulged heartily. “I wish you hadn’t gone to all the trouble,” he said — before adding, “but I’m also glad that you did.”

Then they went to work. At Doris’s suggestion, they assembled a list of instances of time loops in literature and film, hoping these might generate ideas. For some reason, their efforts made Doris think of John F. Kennedy’s security conclaves during the Cuban Missile Crisis — one of the last films she’d watched with Murray had been The Missiles of October — and she wished she could invoke the expertise of McGeorge Bundy or Paul Nitze for guidance. Calling upon a living expert of any sort was impossible, of course, because that would earn her a psychiatric evaluation at Bellevue. So they strategized and estimated risks, and shared stories along the way, and at some point Doris found herself relating the details of Murray’s proposal at the zoo. Doing so created a paradox of sorts: The more time Doris spent in Ryzyko’s company, the more she found herself growing attached to him — and the prospect of phoning the gas company, which indirectly meant erasing their connection, seemed all the less appealing.

“Gibbons travel through brachiation,” said Ryzyko. “From a purely mechanical perspective, they have the unique ability to convert gravitational energy into kinetic energy with very limited muscular input.” He added that their arm swings provided countless advanced word problems in the field of nonlinear dynamics.

“How do you know these things?” asked Doris.

“How does anybody know anything?” replied Ryzyko. Then his sad, light eyes caught her own, and he said, “You really loved your husband, didn’t you?”

Doris hadn’t been prepared for that. “More than anything,” she said.

“Love seems to be the only force that consistently breaks time loops,” said Ryzyko. “In books and movies, at least.”

Ryzyko’s gaze seemed suddenly different, deeper, and Doris wondered if his words carried a personal meaning. Love! How easy a solution that would be. But this wasn’t Brigadoon and she wasn’t in love with Ryzyko, although she increasingly felt that somebody should be. Alas, not her. So they continued their research until dinner — finding on the internet nearly 300 different cultural references to time loops — and then, after ordering in a veritable Chinese banquet, they sat at opposite ends of the sofa and watched Groundhog Day.

* * *

By Wednesday, much had changed between them — and much had not. The intensity of the situation, and their sequestration, had in many ways drawn them closer together. Increasingly, more of their time had been spent exchanging stories: She learned of Ryzyko’s childhood — his father’s regret that he did not share the military aspirations of his forebears, his mother’s frequent “vacations” that took her to a private asylum in Palm Springs. Ryzyko endured her countless anecdotes about Murray — the joyful times, of course, which were most of them, but also the rough patch at the end when he confessed he’d run his firm into the ground. As Thursday approached, she could no longer imagine how she’d braved the last half-year without this timid, perpetually bemused and scrupulously authentic misfit. His presence also reminded her of how isolated she’d become of late — how little effort his concealment required. At the same time, he remained unfamiliar to her, alien in a fundamental way, separated by a barrier of spirit and sensibility that her intuition warned even a lifetime of stories could never transcend.

By Wednesday night — the dinner plates on the draining board, a television flickering behind the drapes across the airshaft — they had reviewed every mechanism for terminating a time loop they could find described in print and on screen and they had ruled out one and all. Their most promising idea had been to cause a preemptive gas leak of their own in order to reactivate the device, and possibly launch themselves together into the next cycle, but Ryzyko feared that their combined mass might overload the chargers.

“We’d have a non-negligible chance of being vaporized,” he said.

They sat in silence for a moment. In the neighboring apartment, a clock radio erupted into static, then stopped abruptly. Ten o’clock. Ryzyko wore Murray’s favorite gray cardigan. “So where does that leave us?” she asked.

“Back where we started,” said Ryzyko.

“I was afraid you’d say that.”

“It’s not the end of the world,” he replied, matter-of-factly. “You’ll pound on my door in the morning and I’ll activate the device and we’ll have another chance again next week. Or last week, depending on how you look at it.”

He was right, of course. The one upside of a time loop was that it afforded an infinite number of opportunities to escape. Or not escape. Yet the prospect of starting over again, of watching the boulder roll back down the mountain, so to speak, left her on the brink of tears.

“I have a confession to make,” said Doris.

Ryzyko’s long features turned wary, but also expectant, like a baby giraffe caught by surprise — and she sensed with a twinge of dismay that she’d disappoint him. “It’s nothing, really,” she said. “Only that when you first showed up on Sunday, I kind of hoped that Murray had sent you. Not literally, of course … but somehow.” She let forth a sharp laugh. “I know that sounds foolish.”

“Not at all,” he said — and he did appear disappointed.

“But he didn’t, did he?” said Doris. “And you’re not carrying any secret messages?”

Ryzyko shook his head. “Not like that,” he said.

“No, not like that,” echoed Doris.

Then she rose from the sofa. “I guess it’s bedtime,” she said.

Ryzyko stood too, his reedy frame even thinner in Murray’s baggy sweater and slacks. His features, so recently glum, had turned stoic, and he was about to retreat into his makeshift bedroom when she commanded, “Come here” — either for the first time, or the millionth — and she enveloped his bones in a full-bodied hug.

* * *

Doris Zeitreiser did not set her alarm clock that night. Instead, she lay awake, wondering what had made this particular loop different. Maybe the ache she’d detected in Ryzyko’s eyes when he realized that she was still in love with Murray, that her ship had already sailed. Or some quantum property of the universe well beyond her understanding, some variation in a multi-mouthed wormhole that shifted the equilibrium of the cosmos ever so slightly. Had the fate of humanity depended upon her explanation, she could not have offered one. All she could say with confidence was that she’d felt her choice to be the right one at the moment — and afterward too, when she’d hung up the receiver and reflected upon her decision over a cup of peppermint tea. She’d had to lie about smelling gas, and she’d feared they might ask for details, but the Con Ed agent wasn’t particularly chatty at midnight. “We’ll send out a team,” he said.

They must have done so, but Doris didn’t know it. When she awoke in the morning, it was nearly eight o’clock — somehow, she’d forgotten to set her alarm. Workmen shouted in Spanish from the bottom of the airshaft; a warm breeze fluttered the curtains in the den. She didn’t have any set plans for the morning — she never did these days — but she found herself in brighter spirits than usual. Maybe she’d finally introduce herself to the neighbors, Doris told herself. She’d been living on Second Avenue for two months; it was about time. What she really wanted most that morning was a cream-pickled herring from Loewenstein’s, but Loewenstein’s had closed the previous week, leaving behind an empty storefront. On the way into the kitchen, she could have sworn she’d glimpsed a tin of chopped herring on the coffee table in the parlor — garnished with red onions and wrapped in Loewenstein distinctive yellow swaddling — but on second glance, what she’d seen had just been a trick of her imagination, a taste of a future not to be.