A fraction of a second, at most. Just a tick late with a joke or a comment. Nothing major or obvious, but noticeable to him and those who knew him. Harold Brennis was falling behind.

Image Credit: Flávio Takemoto

Harold was an organized and reasonable man. He worked in an office, in the accounting department. He had a pleasant wife, Marie, a son in college and a daughter in high school. He found the thirty minute morning commute neither onerous nor enjoyable. His job was solid. His family was not a burden.

It was difficult to pin down when Harold first started falling behind. Perhaps he had been doing it for years, slipping back little by little as each lost fraction of time accumulated; or perhaps it really had started suddenly.

There was an incident years ago, before his children were even born. It had been one of the few times he and Marie had fought. They had been sitting in a park overlooking the lake outside of town. She had turned to him and said something romantic. He had responded vaguely, his mind elsewhere.

“Dammit, Harold, why can’t you live in the moment for just once? What are you even worrying about that’s so important?”

He didn’t remember what had pulled him away that time, but it was probably something trivial, a project for school or a plan for his internship, or maybe just what he had eaten for lunch that day. Marie had been sore at him for a while, but they made up later. Even when his son was conceived later that night, his mind had been elsewhere.

His friends and family noticed that Harold didn’t seem as witty as he used to be. The precise timing of the perfect quip was missing. Then again, people get older, sometimes they’re a little slower than they used to be. No big deal. He got honked at more frequently on the road, or so it seemed to him. He was always cutting things a little closer than he needed to, waiting a split second too long before braking or changing lanes. Maybe he was just not paying attention like he used to. That happened all the time. People daydreamed. Reflexes slowed. Heck, he was getting on towards 50 now, and he certainly hadn’t been raised with enough video games to keep his coordination up to teenage standards.

Still, he felt a little odd. A little out of touch. A little late with every little thing.

The honking on the highway and the number of late verbal responses increased as weeks went by. There was one occasion when he was watching a movie with his family. Something funny happened, and he laughed.

“A little late getting that one, eh dad?” Tara had asked.

Harold frowned. It seemed to him that he had laughed along, but now that he thought about it, there was something out of line.

“What do you mean?”

She gave him a look that indicated he was being silly. “Duh. We were all done laughing by the time you started.” She rolled her eyes at him and flashed him a metallic grin.

Harold felt more out of place as time passed. His morning commute was becoming jagged and unpredictable, with cars honking at him and appearing where he didn’t expect. He took to leaving wider and wider margins of error whenever possible.

His coworkers noticed his interactions becoming stranger.

“Hey Harold,” one of them would say. “How are you this morning?”

Normally this was followed by a ‘Hi, Bob. How are you?’ or something similarly benign. However, Bob and others noticed Harold would get a step or two past before returning the salutation.

Then three steps.

Then four.

Harold loved his family simply and directly. When he reached to hug his daughter or kiss his wife, he felt increasingly awkward. Once he saw his wife standing in the hallway looking at him. He moved forward to kiss her and cracked his head hard against hers.

“Harold!” she cried out. “What are you doing?”

One Sunday afternoon Harold was cooking supper. His wife was in the kitchen with him. Marie’s mild sympathy turned to horror as she watched Harold accidentally brush his finger up against the edge of the red hot stove.

And leave it there.

One, maybe two seconds, then Harold screamed and pulled his hand back. He continued yelling as he rushed to put his angry swollen hand under water from the tap. Again, a second’s pause and then a sigh of relief.

Harold pulled his hand back to examine the burn, which was quickly blistering.

“Honey,” he asked, “how did my finger get burned so badly?”

“Harold,” she said. “you left it on the burner for an extra second or two!”

“But . . .” he started to interrupt, but she was already done.

The events of the past weeks and months slipped into place one by one. He had no idea how or why, but Harold now realized that he was slipping slowly behind in time. His whole life had gone from live to tape delay.

Their sex life moved from difficult to impossible. His wife would stare into his eyes or murmur something erotic only to have Harold wait, in apparent distraction, for several seconds before responding. First lovemaking, then even meaningful contact became more and more difficult until Harold moved as a prisoner inside his own time. The mutual interaction, the exchange of physical responses that humans so value became lost to him.

Harold started falling behind faster after the accident.

He tried to be careful while driving, but after a while the delay caught up to him. His wife had told him he needed to stop driving, and he had managed to avoid it for several weeks, either carpooling to work or using up his dwindling sick days. He grew tired of always relying on others to take him somewhere, like an invalid or a small child who couldn’t go out in the street alone. One day Harold was rummaging slowly through the fridge when he noticed they were out of milk. Wanting a glass of milk with his cookies, Harold decided to risk a trip to the store. It was close by, and he told himself it would be okay as long as he was very careful.

He left the house slowly, pausing several seconds before backing out. He made it several blocks before he came to a two way stop not far from the gas station. He looked left and right to see nothing but empty road. He waited, and looked again. Still nothing. He turned.

The driver in the other car began honking and slamming on their brakes a full two and a half seconds before their white sedan passed through the intersection just in time to slam into Harold’s door.

The cars collided. Then Harold heard the horn honk and the tires squeal, then he felt the impact. By the time he raised his arm to protect himself, it was already broken.

Harold awoke in the hospital. His left arm was in a cast and he had several bandages, but for the most part he was not critically injured. The driver had slowed down enough to save his life.

The nurse entered and tried to ask him a few questions from the legions of health information forms. Harold gave no answer. Thinking him catatonic, she left the clipboard absentmindedly by Harold’s good right arm and went off to find a doctor.

Five minutes later, Harold greeted the nurse and asked if he could have a glass of water. Confused by her behavior, Harold none the less filled out the health forms on the clipboard and endeavored to go back to sleep.

The nurse and doctor returned half an hour later to find Harold apparently awake and the health forms filled out and signed.

“That’s odd,” the nurse said. “I asked him the questions on the forms and he didn’t even acknowledge my presence.”

“Well, it looks like Mr. Brennis is awake now, anyway. Mr. Brennis,” the doctor began in a louder voice, as if breaking several bones had also reduced Harold’s hearing, “how are you feeling today?”

Harold, of course, did not respond for roughly five minutes. In this time, the doctor and nurse asked him several more questions with an increasing level of frustration. The doctor checked his pupils for dilation (there was none), his pulse (strong) and his reflexes (non-existent).

“That’s strange,” the doctor said. “Even the pupils of vegetative patients often dilate. This man’s pupils do not, yet he has a pulse and somehow managed to fill out the health forms.”

The duo departed. Five minutes later, Harold said “Hello, Dr.Vasquez. I’m feeling pretty good today. I filled out those forms that Nurse Johnson asked me for.”

Harold heard the doctor and nurse continue to question him after he had greeted him. He felt his pupils dilate in response to the light, then heard the doctor wonder why they had not. He felt his body respond to a reflex test. He heard the doctor talking about vegetative patients, and he tried frantically to tell him that he wasn’t a vegetable, he had just fallen behind a little and he was sure he would catch up soon and everything would be fine but it was like yelling at a movie. All of the things Harold perceived had already happened five minutes ago; the nurse and doctor were gone. Harold perceived himself to be answering in real time, yet events didn’t reach Harold until five minutes after they had happened.

Harold took a deep breath and tried to slow his pounding heart. A voice in the back of his mind was screaming that once the hospital thought he was a vegetable they would quit feeding him and cut off his medication and any number of horrible things would happen. Harold cut off the voice. It was one of the blessings of having little imagination that he could not clearly picture the horrors of being thought a vegetable and so the pressing emotional burden lifted, and he was able to think carefully about his problem.

He knew now that he was slipping further back in time. Delays of a few seconds had now become a few minutes. What he needed first was a method of communicating his predicament. Then, once a line of communication was established, he could explain his problem and perhaps even seek medical treatment.

He cast about for something to write on. A copy of the health forms, left in bureaucratic homage to the destruction of trees, lay on the table by his right arm. He worked his way over in bed and picked up the sheet. On the back he wrote simply, I HAVE FALLEN BEHIND IN TIME. FIVE MINUTES. He then held the paper on his chest so that the next time anyone came to see him, they would see the note.

A different nurse did indeed return to check on him some time, although she had come and gone by the time poor Harold noticed her arrival. Having not experienced Harold’s previous strangeness, she regarded the note with suspicion.

“What do you mean you’ve fallen behind five minutes? Are you late for something or what?” the nurse asked him. She picked up the note, set it on the table, and checked his vitals carefully.

“Is there anything else you need?” she asked. Getting nothing but a stare, she shrugged and left.

Five minutes later Harold watched the scene play out in frustration. Had he possessed the appropriate sense of humor, he would have laughed for a long time at the nurse asking the catatonic man to explain his note.

He set to work again, finding another blank area on a form. This one began DEAR DR. VASQUEZ, and went on to explain carefully his symptoms, the progression, and how he had come to conclude that he was falling behind in time.

Dr. Vasquez was a very practical man, much like Harold. He read the note carefully when he saw it the next day. He knew nothing about how a man might fall backwards in time. He wondered briefly if Harold were crazy and found it very possible. Still, his job was to repair his body and get him home to rest and recuperate. There had been a problem with communication, and now there was a solution. Thus, Dr. Vasquez began leaving careful notes for Harold, and Harold would respond when he caught up.

They even devised a method for measuring Harold’s displacement. The nurse would enter the room and give an agreed upon signal, like the ringing of the bell. As soon as Harold heard the bell, he would signal, and the amount of time between the ringing of the bell and Harold’s response was timed.

On the day he left the hospital, he was 6 minutes, 37 seconds behind.

Although Harold was clearly a man with troubles, those troubles did not really fall under the hospital’s jurisdiction. There was discussion of transferring him to a psych ward or a research facility, but Harold’s insurance was already running thin, and with his loss of work, he neither desired nor had the ability to pay for a trip to another institution.

So, after his injuries had been stabilized, Harold was sent home with his family. They stuck him in the back of the minivan. He bumped his head once, but he didn’t complain until seven minutes later.

Dr. Vasquez had discussed the situation with both Harold and his family. Between them they had devised several clever ways of letting Harold live around the house.

He was given an area of the house, complete with a small bathroom and a miniature fridge. He had a computer with internet access. This allowed him to do a limited amount of work for his firm and help a little with the finances. It also gave him his only effective method of communicating with his family. Both Marie and Tara would write him emails daily, and he would respond as soon as he got the chance. Sometimes they were short messages, just things he had to do, but he was also able to carry on longer exchanges in the form of letters. It seemed he and Tara talked more now that he was online then they had when he was with them. He got in better contact with his son in college, who was delighted his dad had caught up with the modern world and started using email.

Meals were left outside of his door at regular intervals. His diet possibilities were limited, since many things tend to get cold or melt, but he had always enjoyed a good sandwich and now he had plenty. Somehow taste, perhaps because it was more or less internal, didn’t slip as badly. Still, as days went by and he fell further behind, he did notice the taste of his meals began to fall out of the present and seep into the future.

He kept up the practice of timing his displacement, using the same method as in the hospital. He kept a spreadsheet of the times.

It did not take long too see a pattern.

Harold noticed that the numbers were falling farther and farther back each time they were measured. Being an analytical man, he estimated the data points from the days and months past and plotted out a graph of his displacement. He rummaged around in his study for his old math textbooks. It took him a while to find what he wanted, but he was able to create a function describing his data set and project it into the future.

What he saw did not surprise him. It merely confirmed his worst fears.

His displacement, even before the accident, was not linear. It was an exponential progression. Instead of falling back by a set interval, the further back Harold got in time, the faster he fell behind. He did a few calculations.

There would come a day when he would fall so far back in time, he would never recover. He would move from a few hours behind to days, months and years in the course of a single night. He checked his results with the calendar. When the sun set two weeks from now, he would be 3 hours and 42 minutes behind. He would never see the sun rise the following day. He would fall behind so quickly that before the sun rose, he would be infinitely far behind. He would effectively cease to exist as part of this world.

He explained this to his family in a long letter. His wife came to see him in person, but it was as painful for her to hold him with tears streaming down her face and him totally unaware as it was for him to watch her come in 22 minutes later and try to respond to a women who wasn’t there.

Two weeks later the last day arrived. Harold left instructions for him to be wheeled out to watch the sun set for the last time. He was unaware of it at the time, but 4 hours and 13 minutes later he enjoyed the sun’s spectacular exit. He hand wrote each family member a goodbye letter and sealed them on his desk. He cried when writing each of them, but he had been without them in many ways for so long that much of the pain of the final parting had been spread out over the previous weeks and months.

As the clocks outside moved into the early hours of the next morning, Harold fell asymptotically behind in time. Each passing hour, then each minute, then each second, reached him later and later. He had known mathematically that this would happen, but he had no idea what it would be like to experience. Input from the outside world slowed until his room became a three dimensional still life, a changeless environment that he would stare at for the rest of his life.

He tried to look around him, but his eyes were slow to move. He was falling so far behind that he was becoming divorced from his body. He tried to close his eyes. It was a costly mistake. After an immeasurable amount of time, his eyelids slammed shut. They would not reopen. The lapse was too long. He was blind.

He felt the familiar thump of his heart slow. His own body had not previously been affected, but now he was so far behind that he was failing to perceive even the actions of his own body. He was being divorced from it just as he had been from the physical interaction of his family. His lungs filled once, and never exhaled.

He was left with only his mind. That part that was him, his consciousness, his spirit, his essence, was all that remained. He had time to travel through his memories, to think and fantasize. Yet eventually his thoughts began to grow stale. How many new thoughts can one have without stimulation from the outside world?

Two icy thoughts, intertwined, gripped him.

What have I done to deserve this?

Is this Hell?

To keep the fear, the endless, timeless infinite terror at bay, Harold began counting.

One. Two. Three.

His connection to the physical realm died away. His body lived on outside of him, in a world inaccessible and unperceivable.

One million one. One million two. One million three.

Harold was alone. As long as he had been alive, the moments of his life had slipped away from him, unnoticed and unappreciated. Now he had nothing left but a single moment, stretching out forever.

He reached a billion and stopped counting. He tried to calculate how long in years a billion seconds was, but he got lost and stopped trying. Despair set in.

Later, a few seconds or a few years- what meaning did those words have now?- a new thought entered his mind. If he could not have any of the moments of his life back, perhaps he could find a way to live in this one.

He began the long and slow process of trying to free himself. Eventually Harold felt his mind start to drift ever so slightly.

He concentrated his will, focused his entire consciousness, his entire being. Who knew how long it took, but what was an almost endless endeavor to the man outside of time?

He perceived, then, for the first time, his own body, sitting in his room, still running smoothly even though the ghost was gone from the machine. Without time, physical rules changed. His mind drifted further from the cages of time and sensory perception.

Focusing his mind again, Harold endeavored to move through space, leaving his body behind. He felt his horror and frustration turn to elation. He had only this one moment left to him, but perhaps that would be enough.

Barriers fell away. Everything was everywhere all at once. He shifted his focus, moving, in a sense, away from his room and out into the night sky. He knew, for the first time, the world around him.

He could focus on the most minute of details while viewing an endless panorama. Everything was frozen in one dimension, but the whole universe was available in three.

He turned his mind outward, to the stars. He sailed across the almost limitless depths of the solar system, the galaxy, the galactic clusters and superclusters to the edge of everything while still forever contemplating a small insect paused on the edge of a flower outside his window.

For the first time in his life, a single moment had become his.