Page 1 of Life Out of Order

Part One

Life Out of Order

All revolutions go down in history, yet history does not fill up; the rivers of revolution return from whence they came, only to flow again.

—Guy Debord, Panegyric

Life Out of Order

My name is Alba DeTamble and I was born a time traveler. We all are, of course, but most people only travel forward, slowly, creeping along by seconds and minutes that add up inexorably to a lifetime. My body makes mayhem of that: I lose my grip on the present and suddenly I am in another time and place, naked, disoriented, unready and fearful, resigned to losing hours or days in random time, worried about saying something I shouldn’t, hoping not to cause a scene. A few genes have gone wrong in me in just the right way to produce this bad fit with the present, this maladaptation, this constant interruption.

I have loved time travel and I have wished to be done with it; I’ve seen what it did to my dad. He died when I was five. Time travel killed him and time travel keeps throwing him back into my life. It’s confusing to hang out with my father, because he usually seems so cheerful. I never tell him what’s coming for him. It would ruin our short time together, and what would be the point? We can’t change anything. Time works around us; we can only do what we have done, we can only go along with what has happened, what will happen. We can’t carry anything with us, no money, no clothing, only our memories. We can affect others, we can be injured or die, we can do and be and say, but nothing we do will alter something we know to have happened.

I am reckless by nature and have had to learn caution. My parents ask for news of each other, and I tell them what I can safely admit: Dad and I ate ice cream in a shopping mall parking lot; Mama’s hair is streaked with a little gray now; he taught me how to shoplift; she just had a retrospective at a big museum. I don’t say: he lost both his feet to frostbite; she is desolate since you died and almost never leaves the house; Dad is worried about you; Mama is dating someone new but she feels guilty about it. I don’t lie, but I don’t tell everything, either, if I can help it. No one wants to know everything anyway, not even me. Time travel can be a form of regret. But the passage of time creates distance, and sometimes that’s a balm.

Because I am unmoored in time, everything is lost and found all at once, everyone I love is alive and dead or not-yet-born; there are discoveries, revolutions, greetings and goodbyes, but not in the order most people would expect. I’m always starting in the middle and making mistakes.

Music is my antidote to this chaos. The logic of music, its patterns and systems, its power, subtlety, variety and infinite beauty command my love and attention and my presence. Music disciplines my wayward mind and grants me freedom to be in the moment, to lose myself in play instead of getting lost in time. I was given music as a child, apprenticed to the violin long before I could understand or choose. Perhaps my parents knew they were giving me an exoskeleton, a protective shell to retreat into and carry with me no matter where time dumps me. Music is my memory palace and my refuge. I’ve been shaped by music and time into a creature of the now.

Sometimes I get the feeling that it doesn’t matter where I am, past, present or future, or who I’m with; I might look at Zach out in the backyard, mowing our mossy grass, and wonder, Are you my anchor, my once-and-always husband? Would you still love me if you knew all my secrets? Or, another day, I might wake up with Oliver beside me in bed, arrived during the night and somehow unfamiliar, an Oliver from some time not yet specified, and I might feel a pang of apprehension: where did you come from, what do you know, can you spare me the details?

If I had been a normal girl, I might have done all the normal things in the normal order: school, job, marriage, kids. I might have had one husband, or none, or one and then another, instead of two at once. Maybe I would have been less chaotic, less troublesome, but maybe also less loved; who knows? I look ahead and marvel at the near misses, the good intentions and lucky guesses. I look back and regret all the lies. I try not to hurt people. But mostly, I just try not to panic.

The Last Party

Monday, December 26, 2022, and Tuesday, December 27, 2022 (Alba is 21, 29, and 47, Zach is 22)

Alba: It’s Boxing Day and I’m at home, in my room, hiding in bed. Mama knows I’m in here; she called me to dinner, and when I told her I wasn’t hungry she brought me a tray of Christmas leftovers and let me be. I ate the mince pie and some of the turkey, then felt guilty for being so antisocial and crawled into bed. I’m afraid to tell Mama that I don’t want to go back to Northwestern. I don’t care if I don’t graduate. It seems obvious that I will never play in public again, and it is painful to be with people who are looking ahead to glorious musical careers. I would be happy if we could all just concentrate on the music; it’s the career part that hurts.

When I was small and studied with my grandfather, there was always an uneasy push-pull between pleasure and anxiety; for a long time I played the violin to please him and because my parents told me it was “mine”—it was what I did, they were so sure I would like it, love it even: they could see into my future, and in the future I was a musician. So I continued through lesson after lesson, practiced until I cried, until everything hurt, until it was right, or as right as it could be that day.

Now I can’t face it anymore. I look at my violin in its case—my beloved Guarneri del Gesù that was my grandfather’s—and I don’t want to touch it. I want to stay in bed. I don’t know what to do with myself, with all the hours I used to spend practicing. I’ve been reading a lot of novels: Anna Karenina, Middlemarch, The Master and Margarita. In these novels people make bad choices, then they get things figured out. Or they jump in front of trains, or make deals with the devil. Whatever.

Nadia Kendrick texts me, trying to cajole me out of the house. I usually look forward to the Lamonts’ Boxing Day party, but this year I have been dreading it.

party at nick and c-lora’s

no

you promised

no

we need you

you’ll be fine

don’t let us down, alba

Of course it ends with me reluctantly climbing into Nadia’s car. It’s snowing and I was in the middle of Madame Bovary.

“Jesus, Alba, what are you wearing?” says Nadia.

“Clothes,” I tell her.

“Those are jeans. You are not going to an event of this magnitude in jeans. You aren’t even wearing lipstick.”

“I might as well be naked,” I say. I just want to get back into bed.