Time Isn't Holding Us

There are a couple of time inconsistencies in The Compass Room that no one seems to have noticed. Not my editor, not by reviewers, and not by readers.

But I noticed.

And I decided … fuck it.

For two, maybe three, reasons. First, to fix it would mean a whole domino effect of messing up established scenes and the like. That's a big reason alone not to mess with things, especially if it is a minor inconsistency that most people wouldn't even notice.

But my second reason is this: I've been reading some books on astrophysics and quantum physics and the like, and I came across the notion of retrocausality. We all know that the past directly influences the future. But retrocausality suggests that the future can, in turn, influence the past. I am sure that I've probably got it entirely wrong, but once I discovered my minor timeline inconsistency, I decided to keep it—as a sort of tip-of-the-cap to the concept of retrocausality.

The third reason is somewhat related, but maybe it is more about how our brains work (or maybe mine?). There is a scene where Wartmann ("Daddy Longlegs") is in a SEAL bar down in Norfolk, Virginia, with SEAL Commander Nigel Wood (from Friendship Games) as one of his guests. Wood nods to the TV perched on a wall where the news was reporting on the 'mysterious' leader of a breakaway region of Saudi Arabia proclaiming himself King of the Hejaz. "I know him," Wood shares. The mysterious leader was not mysterious at all. He was the commanding officer of a Saudi marine unit trained by the SEALs. Daddy Longlegs asks him to reach out to this new King.

Later I would write a scene where Longlegs calls a Navy Commander and asks if he has any contacts in the French military. That scene wound up going before the SEAL bar scene. When I discovered my error, I realized why I had missed it in the first place. If there was any question about who this Navy Commander was, it is resolved at the SEAL bar scene where Commander Wood is shown to have contacts with foreign military officers. Even if one didn't have an aha moment, their brain (mine, anyway) automatically makes the connection—and the actual flow of time doesn't matter in this instance.

Makes me question the whole concept of time, or at least how it works. Lucky for me, that rabbit hole is far too deep for me to even begin to understand—or try to articulate in any coherent fashion anytime soon.