After searching the apartment and confirming that ‘Einstein’ was really gone I turned on my computer and started the research on the time/energy relationship I was unable to do at the office. Two hours later I found myself at a dead end so I called it quits and went to bed.
I woke up 5 hours later startled after another bizarre dream with the Timekeeper. That time I was playing basketball for an unidentified professional team against Tim Duncan and the San Antonio Spurs. To this day I haven’t found a single reason to explain that particular team’s presence in the dream. Perhaps it was because of their black uniforms… maybe because Duncan was a fellow Caribbean who had retired not that long ago… or that their coach Gregg Popovich had been in my social media feed recently… or maybe it was because they were considered the smartest team in the NBA at the time… I don’t know. Anyway, there was some sort of commotion in the dream. I couldn’t tell what was happening but the Timekeeper was frantically shouting “Time out, time out!” The weirdness of the whole thing woke me up.
I got out of bed and went straight to the kitchen to brew myself a cup of strong Puerto Rican coffee. It was scalding hot and I burned my tongue with the first sip of the much needed morning infusion. While waiting for the coffee to cool off a bit, I pondered the idea of sharing what was happening with someone I trusted. For me the three obvious options were Gina, Bob and Professor Murdock.
I dismissed the idea of talking to Bob fairly fast. He had a tendency to overreact at times and I didn’t want him thinking his partner had lost his marbles. As for Gina, I wanted to discuss it with her, but talking about what I feared could be a schizophrenic episode with someone I hoped to have a romantic relationship with was definitely not the best approach to win her heart. The Professor was the safest route. It was still too early to call, so I sent him an email saying I had an urgent matter I wanted to run by him, and asking for a good time to stop by his office.
While I was writing, the ol’ professor was checking his email so his answer came fairly fast. He was going to be at his place all day and invited me to stop by any time. The weather forecast called for a rainy day, and dressing up for the office on a day like that was not in the cards. So I showered and put on jeans, tennis shoes and a Notre Dame sweatshirt.
When I got to the agency I ran into Gina who teased me about the attire.
“Well, good morning Mr. ND, aren’t you wearing the YO! Bowl good luck sweatshirt a little early?”
“To tell you the truth I didn’t do it on purpose, but the way they’ve been playing lately, any help is welcome. You know what they say, it’s only weird if it doesn’t work.”
“Did you know that the Michigan Wolverines’ distinctive football helmet was originally worn by the Princeton Tigers?” she asked me.
“What?” I said distractedly.
“Back in the thirties, the Princeton coach wanted his players to look like tigers so he had the helmets painted in orange and black. The unusual forehead wing and stripes were one of the reinforcement patterns used on the leather helmets of the time. He just painted them. They went undefeated and became national champions the very first year they wore them. Maybe that philosophy of ‘it’s only weird if it doesn’t work’ was the reason he took that particular paint job to the University of Michigan when he became their head coach. Anyway, nowadays when people see the design they think of Michigan but it was Princeton who wore it first… Ray, are you feeling OK? You seem a little scrambled.”
She had this uncanny ability to see right through me. So even though I had decided not to mention anything to her, she opened a window and I jumped right in.
“I haven’t been sleeping well lately,” I told her. “Very weird dreams,” I added while thinking how to tell her about the ‘Einstein’ visits.
“Want to talk? My 9:00 o’clock was cancelled, why don’t you walk me to my office and tell me all about it?”
I did. I told her everything except that, in my account, Einstein’s visits occurred in my sleep just like the Timekeeper’s.
“And you think this Timekeeper character is related to Einstein?” she asked after listening the whole story.
“I think so, yes. I know it sounds weird. But it feels like my subconscious is using these characters to help me understand in my sleep the information I seek while awake.”
“The human mind has been known to do stranger things,” she said. “So, the last thing this Timekeeper guy said was ‘time-out’? What does that has to do with Einstein’s E=mc2 formula?
“I don’t know,” I said a little discouraged.
“Did he say ‘time-out’ with a hyphen or ‘time out’, two words?” she asked with a twinkle in her eyes.
“I don’t know, the dream had no captions,” I said sarcastically but apologized immediately. “Sorry, I was just trying to be funny, I know you are trying to help. The context of the dream means that it should be ‘time-out’ with a hyphen, but then this is such a odd character, created by my subconscious, who absurdly happens to be managing an NBA basketball team, so I guess it could also be time out, two words. Where are you going with this?”
“Just wondering, that maybe what the Timekeeper was trying to tell you was to take time… out of the Einstein equation,” she said signaling with her hands the separation between the words ‘time’ and ‘out’ to make it clear she meant eliminating time from the equation and not taking a break from it.
“There’s no time in E=mc2,” I said
“It’s energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared,” she said. “Speed is distance over time.”
“Shit…” was all I could utter at the time.