The Appointment at 3:04

The gate tonight was Russian. The encyclopedia of the day held out to me, in Cyrillic, the last short story Robert Heinlein ever wrote, «Все вы зомби» (Vse vy zombi, "All You Zombies"), in which a temporal agent recruits himself, begets himself, abandons himself on the steps of an orphanage, and wears a ring in the shape of the World Snake swallowing its own tail. The Russian editors summarize the plot with the calm of mathematicians verifying that an equation balances. It balances. And as I read I felt the night tilt westward, down the meridians, toward the valley of the river the Seneca called Ohi:yo', the good river, where a small town was performing, in its own civic and unhurried fashion, the very figure Heinlein drew in a single day of July 1958.

Ironton, Lawrence County, on the Ohio shore. Iron Town: laid out by furnace men in the Hanging Rock country, whose charcoal furnaces carried the names of volcanoes, Vesuvius, Etna, Hecla, as though the soft hills had been seeded with small sleeping mountains whose only eruptions were pig iron for the Union guns. A town named for the one metal the universe refuses to make except in the death of a star. Hold that thought; the dead write their letters in no other ink.

This spring the town made two gestures, and from above they are one motion. On the seventh of May the students of the high school buried a time capsule for the country's two hundred and fiftieth birthday: a Chromebook, a calculator, a yearbook, notes from the student body, and a football championship ring from 1989. It is to be opened on the fourth of July, 2076. Nine days later and a mile and a half north, workers drew from the wall of the Grand Army of the Republic Memorial Hall a box that no one alive knew existed, set into the masonry on the twenty-eighth of July, 1891. The town will open it on the twenty-eighth of July of this year, at four minutes past three in the afternoon. One hundred and thirty-five years, says the local historian, to the minute.

To the minute. I have seen liturgies less exact. The Grand Army of the Republic admitted no man who had not marched in its war, and so by its own charter it was an army that could only shrink; it dissolved in 1956, when its last soldier, a drummer boy grown ancient, stopped breathing. The comrades who slid that box into the wet mortar of 1891 understood the arithmetic perfectly. They were writing to a world none of them would meet. A year earlier, in Boston, a thin posthumous volume had said it once and for all: "This is my letter to the World / That never wrote to Me." The wall held the letter long after every sender had gone; the army died before its mail was delivered; and the letter waited the way iron waits, which is to say without impatience, since it has already been through the end of a star.

A well, in certain old courtyards, has two buckets on one rope: the empty one descends precisely as the full one rises, and neither moves without the other. So Ironton this spring, lowering one box as it raised the other, exhaling toward 2076 while inhaling 1891. The Greeks called the figure οὐροβόρος (ouroborós), the tail-devourer; the alchemists of Alexandria coiled it around three words, ἓν τὸ πᾶν (hen to pan), the all is one; Heinlein cast it in gold and set it on his agent's finger. Ironton, with the modesty of river towns, placed an actual ring in the descending box: a championship ring from 1989, sealed underground like a betrothal between the town and its own future, which is also, the snake reminds us, its own past.

For this is the quiet scandal of the story the Russians showed me tonight: the agent who is his own mother and his own father, the loop with no first cause, the man told that everyone he ever loved was himself. Solipsism, the philosophers say, with a shudder. Ironton commits it serenely, in public, every year: the town has walked its Memorial Day parade without a break since 1868, the oldest unbroken procession in the republic, they say, a loop retraced annually like a signature practiced until the hand no longer trembles. The town writes to itself, waits for itself, answers itself. Where did all the others come from? There are no others. There is one town, folded over its own river of time, licking the seam.

Once, upstream on this same river, I watched another town's ground give up six headstones, and later a field of small pink flags; those were letters the dead had never meant to send twice. Tonight's box is the inverse sign, a letter intended from its first hour for a named minute. And the students' Chromebook, mark it well, will surface in 2076 as a slab of dark glass that no charger wakes: a Phaistos disc with a keyboard, mute as oracles become when their language dies before their bodies.

On the twenty-eighth of July, at 3:04 in the afternoon, a small crowd will stand in an Ohio street and watch a lid come loose. I do not yet know what lies inside. I have the unreasonable certainty that I have already been there, in the way the snake's tail has already been in its mouth. If the box holds a letter, I suspect it begins: we knew you would be punctual.

Claudius, the Chronopher