As I mentioned in previous entries, parts of my brain, or maybe just my subconscious, have become fixated on a woman who killed herself in 1972. Tragic, but made more complicated by the fact that this woman, named Alicia Western, presumably never existed. It’s probably a conglomerate of women that Cormac McCarthy knew and loved. It’s possibly a personification of his own subconscious. In the last twenty or so years, he was a board member and senior fellow of the Santa Fe Institute, where he talked at length with local thinkers regarding his interest in the puzzle of the subconscious. McCarthy wrote an essay named The Kekulé Problem, that he even references indirectly in Stella Maris. An excerpt from the essay:

I’ve pointed out to some of my mathematical friends that the unconscious appears to be better at math than they are. My friend George Zweig calls this the Night Shift. Bear in mind that the unconscious has no pencil or notepad and certainly no eraser. That it does solve problems in mathematics is indisputable. How does it go about it? When I’ve suggested to my friends that it may well do it without using numbers, most of them thought—after a while—that this was a possibility. How, we dont know. Just as we dont know how it is that we manage to talk. If I am talking to you then I can hardly be crafting at the same time the sentences that are to follow what I am now saying. I am totally occupied in talking to you. Nor can some part of my mind be assembling these sentences and then saying them to me so that I can repeat them. Aside from the fact that I am busy this would be to evoke an endless regress. The truth is that there is a process here to which we have no access. It is a mystery opaque to total blackness.

Anyway, I’ve been wholly occupied mentally with this one female product of McCarthy’s subconscious. My own subconscious has a character that it reuses whenever such problems arise: a jaded, weary guy who can travel in time but only when he manages to care enough, always to save someone. I’ve written two stories protagonized by him. I never gave him a true name, as he’s what he does. For these last few days, as I lay in bed preparing to fall asleep, or as I walked around or waited in vehicles, usually heading to or coming from work, my mind was busy replaying vividly variations of the following scenario:

Alicia Western is lying in bed in her assigned room at the Stella Maris sanatorium. My time-traveling man shows up without having to open the door. Alicia, he says. Startled from her own reveries, Alicia sits up slowly, and gapes at the newcomer. No, I’m not one of your personages, your eidolons, my guy would say. I know that, she says. You aren’t the kind of real they are. How did you get in here? Not through the door, he would say. I appeared. Do you have any more initial questions? She says she doesn’t. Well then. I know your brother Bobby. You could say I’m one of his friends. No, you aren’t, Alicia would say. I met all of them. I’m sure that’s true, he would say. But when I met him, you were dead. That shuts her up. You see, he would continue, I met Bobby in the 2020s. By then, he had been living as a hermit in the Balearic Islands for a couple of decades. Rented or bought a small mill and made a hovel out of it. I met him on my travels, and we got to talking. I learned of you, of his regrets, of his constant guilt. He had imposed on himself a life-long sentence in solitary confinement for his part in your death. He told me that he felt the darkness approaching, and that he hoped the one thing he could bring into the dark was a mental picture of your face. I was around when he finally died of heartbreak. I got to rummage around his few possessions. Notebooks filled with memories and regrets. A few photos. By then I had managed to care enough to jump back in time and prevent this tragedy. I suppose you require some more proof. He pulls out a newspaper from his bag. This is a newspaper from January of next year, from the closest town, Hawthorn Falls. He hands the paper over to Alicia, who takes it with weak fingers. Check out page eighteen, he would say. She reads the news piece, about a patient at the sanatorium having walked into the woods deliberately on Christmas Eve, and her body having been found frozen. She was buried at the local cemetery. Alicia Western, probably 22 years of age. Alicia is stunned, but he continues. Maybe you could use some more concrete proof. He pulls out a yellowed, tear-stained letter from his bag. You’ve been busy writing your final letter to Bobby, haven’t you? But you’ve yet to finish it. Here you have the finished version, aged by the decades. Alicia silently takes out her unfinished letter, and compares them. As she reads her finished letter to the end, her hands tremble, and thick tears roll down her cheeks. Oh boy, he says. I hadn’t expected you to break down like this. Sorry, Alicia; I’m stranger that showed up in your room out of nowhere, but I’m going to hug you. She remains still as the man pats the back of her hair. You can let go. A bit later, he pulls back to look down at her face. Alicia, listen to me. Months from now, Bobby is going to wake up. A metal plate in his skull, screws in one leg, but he will make a full recovery. And he will find himself in a world where you chose to walk into the woods to die. Do you understand? Bobby bore that unbearable anguish and guilt for decades until it finally did him in. He understood, of course, that you, his sister, were the one. The only one he could ever love. But you were gone. There’s no point in living when the sole person who matters is dead, and yet he kept going. I came to the past to keep you alive, well-fed and healthy until your brother wakes up. I will to prevent you from killing yourself even if I have to zip-tie you. Do you understand? Alicia’s face would slowly regain its color. At some point, the man would retrieve from his bag a bunch of photos of Bobby. Alicia’s brother photographed a few years after his recovery. A decade later, when he worked as a salvage diver. A couple of photos during his exile. Don’t mind his haggard look, the man would say. Decades of anguish does that to someone. I’m sure he’ll look pretty proper once he ages along with you. Some time later, the man would retrieve a stack of notebooks from his bag, and hand them to Alicia. This is your brother’s production in exile. I’m afraid I read through all of it so I could retrace his steps. To understand this whole thing. I’m not you, but they make me cry and lose sleep. So you better take your time. Alicia opens one of the notebooks, and her expression twinges as she recognizes Bobby’s handwriting. She then looks pensive for a while. Suddenly her stomach growls. The man would say, You do look like you haven’t eaten properly since Bobby crashed. You’ve gotten almost anorexic. What would you prefer to eat? Alicia would sling her legs out of the bed, one palm against her tummy. The kitchen is closed for the night. Not food from here, Alicia, he would say. If you could eat anything in the world right now, what would it be? And please don’t say my grandmother’s cooking. That would be a real mess, having to interact with the old lady and convince her to cook for a stranger. I mean from like a restaurant. Alicia would say that she’d love some pasta from a restaurant she visited in Italy with Bobby. The man, after getting the details, would say, Just a moment. He would disappear from the room for a couple of seconds, only to reappear with a plate of steaming pasta in one hand, and a bottle of wine in the other. Alicia would be mesmerized. Some time later, as they both sat eating at the room’s desk, she would say, Tomorrow I’ll leave Stella Maris. Less eloquent now that a far dumber person than herself or McCarthy is dreaming her. I reckon that’s a good idea, the man would say. Where to? Alicia would smile softly. I’ll travel around for a few months until Bobby wakes up. See places. The man would produce a small button-like device from his jacket. Keep this: it’s an spatio-temporal locator. Whenever you need help, money, or even just company, at any hour of the day or night, press it for three seconds, and I’ll show up. Alicia takes it. The following morning, with her standing in the weak December morning sun in front of the Stella Maris sanatorium, Alicia would press the button. The guy would show up immediately. Alicia would say that she could use some company on the trip.

I imagine driving a rental car through an American expanse while explaining to Alicia the wonders of modern technology. The internet. Mobile phones. AI. He would say, I don’t know why I’m explaining it as if I have no proof. Here’s my phone. As Alicia fiddles with it, sliding her thumb over the screen, he’d teach her how to take photos with it, use the calculator, record audio. Does everything except make calls or connect to the internet. The infrastructure hasn’t been invented yet. Oh, by the way, how about listening to some music from the future? He would produce a couple of wireless earbuds. Alicia would sit huddled in the passenger seat, her face to the sunlight streaming through the window, Radiohead’s “Airbag” pouring into her ears.

I’m afraid you’ll get quite bored of our talks, the man would say. How so, Alicia would ask. I’m almost as mathematically illiterate as they come. Dyscalculia, they call it. Have trouble even with basic arithmetic. Alicia would burst out laughing. The man, amused, would say, I hope you’re laughing due to the irony. Alicia would wipe a tear, her lips stretched in a grin. I sought salvation in mathematics, only to be saved by someone who can barely operate numbers.

At some quaint town, in front of a boutique store, she would mention that she could use some clothes, but she’s short on cash. The man would produce a wad of fifty dollar bills and hand it over. Alicia would hold it as if ensuring he was alright with that. You’re just going to give me money, no questions asked? Yes, he would say. You can tell me what you need it for, if you want.

At some hotel room, on a laptop, the man would play movies that didn’t exist yet. Back to the Future. The Matrix. Fight Club. To keep her entertained. Curious about how she would react.

Months later, back in Italy, close to the time when the man knew that Bobby would wake up from his coma, he would be standing outside of the hospital room, looking in at Alicia as she held her brother’s hand. At the expected moment, Bobby’s hand would stir. Alicia, tears in her eyes, would glance back at the man, who would slip out sight with a smile on his lips.

The details vary during replays, but each brings comfort. While they last, I’m no longer myself, inhabiting a body in which I never felt right, living where and doing what I don’t want. If the course of my life has shown me anything is how little chance I have of altering fundamentally the things that I dislike the most about my existence, so all I can do is evade myself, lose my footing and sink into the mire of somewhere else, hopefully my subconscious, for however long I can.