Here’s To The Future

Chose life, chose a job, chose a career, chose a family, chose a fucking big television
Chose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers…
Chose your future, chose life,
But why would I want to do a thing like that?
I chose not to choose…
Renton- Trainspotting

It’s been a long uneventful two hour flight from Hyderabad to Delhi but all of that seems set to change, we’ve been in a holding pattern over Delhi for the last 30 minutes or so. It’s near twelve at night and as the plane banks left, turning one wing over the other at regular intervals, I see the city I love so dearly pass under me, a dark, midnight blue fabric, patched in swathes of bright, connected by tendrils of light, that snake through the black. Red and yellow lit ants mechanically navigate the map, only to be curtained suddenly as the wind sweeps upward, revealing a similarly hued sky, dotted now with stars.
It’s all going wrong I calculate in my head, horribly wrong, but I’m not perturbed, not in the least. I foresaw this. To the casual observer, I may seem silent, a barely conscious being, hulking behind thick black frames but my brains been ticking in overdrive, long before I even reached the airport, before I checked in, before the plane had landed from Chennai. Something was going wrong, something had to. I didn’t see it in the stars, nor in planetary motions, neither was it revealed to me in a dream or in the entrails of sacrificed beast. These arcane methods of fortune telling don’t work, nope, not one bit. I’m not psychic, at least I don’t like to describe my gift that way, the word psychic, carries in my mind a negative connotation. It carries with it the stench of ignorance, of fortune-tellers in tents, story-telling for their two pieces of silver. No-fucking-way, I’m not one of those, not a fucking charlatan, hiding behind a veil of mumbo-jumbo and semi-scientific sound bites. For that reason and that reason alone I’ve never revealed my gift or rather my talent to anyone. The explanation or the best one that I can think up still sounds far too far-fetched for anyone to take me seriously. Well sure there are those who have an innate instinct that attracts them to bull-shit, but they are the same ones that religiously read the astrology columns every morning, precisely the people I want to avoid.
I see the future. Well not really I don’t really see it, no actually on second thought, I do. It’s like this, take a point in time. Draw this on a sheet of paper, it’s easier that way. From this point you can draw virtually infinite lines. Assuming that point represents a situation, then each line represents a decision, we spend our lives swinging by our decisions from one point to another. Unfortunately it’s not that simple. Some points on the sheet, seem to have an attraction greater than others. You could represent these on the sheet as thick black dots as opposed to the regular points which are best depicted as fine points. These big points ‘focus’ lines from the smaller points toward them till their vicinity is a thick maze of lines being drawn irresistibly into them. To allow one’s self to be drawn to any one of the surrounding situations means any decision you now make will inevitably reach a predictable conclusion.
Some of these situations you can predict, others you cannot. The decision that I made that I made that led to my descent into what I can now see as inevitable was waking up that morning. Obviously one of those decisions that you cannot but help to make and can dissect only in retrospect.
I once tried to explain this ability of mine to a friend, he was predictably excited at the start, but he sank deep into discontent as I continued. At the bit where I had just concluded explaining the bit about the ‘attractor’ points or inevitable situations, he snapped and began to pound the shit out of me in the fury and despair of life being revealed as a seemingly deterministic progression to an irreversible, unavoidable conclusion. That was a dilemma I too had wrestled with for a long time when my abilities had first revealed themselves to me. Was life a preordained, custom designed and delivered package, break open the seal and live. If so, where was the purpose, was one necessary?
I’ve never been particularly bright, so I quickly abandoned this philosophical line of thought, partly motivated by the fact that I could look ahead and see that it was leading nowhere fast, merely a long circuitous route back to situations that were easier reached without too much complicated thought.
I could have predicted his response, had I looked closely enough, there was a single line leading from the situation to one where he would react badly, well, badly for me anyway. But so caught up was I in the more probable outcomes that I lost sight of this one single outlier. The problem was that for the situation to escalate to that one outlier, depended on the choices that he made too, something I, in the excitement of sharing my secret, had forgotten to factor in.
He was partly right, it is a terribly deterministic view of life, to know that you are swinging from one point to another in a predetermined fashion, that at times your choices may make no difference in the inevitable outcome, that all the possible decisions that you make and all their possible outcomes are mapped out, a cosmic game of connect the dots.
But think about it for a minute, it isn’t all that strange, we make choices and there are consequences. While we do think of most of the consequences of our actions, some are unpredictable, these we attribute to chance. Chance is not something you can do anything about, you can prepare contingency plans, the famed plan ‘B’ often ’C’ and ‘D’ too, but chance is by definition chance. Does it really matter if it is destined if we don’t know about it?
Anyone who sits and clearly thinks about a decision will be able to predict the most probable outcomes, they can plot out the lines and situations, like an elaborate game of chess, thinking a couple of thousand moves ahead, they advance a pawn. That’s seeing the future too, except, I can see chance, I can see your opponent falling face down on the board sending kings and queens scattering amidst a shower of bishops and knights, I see the rook flying into your eye.
Today morning I awoke, scanning the probability continuum, I spotted an anomaly, an attractor point, rotating slowly, strange, never seen one like that before. I quickly scanned the horizon and all I could see were lines heading inward, in toward the point. What struck me as strange though was that the points that led outward, darted out, struggled against the gravity of the situation and unable to attain escape velocity collapsed inward, transcribing long defeated elliptical paths as they fell back. The implications of the situation horrified me, but in an instant I was normal again. The future had long lost its power to shock me, I had turned indifferent. Success and failure didn’t bother me, I accept them in my stride, easy if you can see them coming a mile off.
I went through the day mechanically, planning out my course of action, what I would do and when, not that it would make a difference, I knew what was going to happen and I was powerless to avert the inexorable conclusion.
As the plane banked again, left, ever left, now over the outskirts of the city again, I followed the lines, leading from patches of light, inward toward the city. From a distance, Delhi appeared a large blot of light against the night. Small buds of light lay on its periphery, soon to be swallowed by the amoeboid growth of the capital.
Now we straighten out. My ears hum as the plane drops, flaps extend accompanied by a crescendo of wails, mourning the future to come. I see the streets now, rushing towards the inevitable, faster, faster still. They have now resolved to parallel streams of red and yellow, rushing towards me. I close my eyes and see the lines of fate sketched on the immense plane that was once my life surging irresistibly toward the point.
I sat, relaxed, sinking into the seat for the first time on the flight, lay my head against the headrest waiting. Then I saw it. The plane that I had assumed to be flat was curving, curving away from me. I had always looked at the future in two dimensions and had always seen a flat surface, now I found to my confusion that it was anything but flat. Here, it was curving back on itself like an immense cylinder, so wrapped up in this revelation was I that I did not look at the point. When I did, I found it lying where the curve started.
A whine as the wheels lowered and a thump as they locked into place, the air rushing past now increased in violence, threatening to rip them off, then, with a loud thud and shudder we were no longer being held up by the wings, solid earth had taken over. Below me I saw the lines emerge from the point and collapse over the edge of the cylinder to other points, beyond the horizon and not as I’d thought, back in. As I travelled over the horizon, I saw emerge beneath me another universe of points and lines, situations and decisions, choices and consequences. Below me was unveiled another network of hubs and spokes and attractors and outliers.
As I disembarked, I heard an airhostess whisper to another, “what the fuck is he so happy about?”