Ikta Presch Ikromo

Through a fortuitous portal found in my rented apartment on Sloane Gardens above the Royal Court Theatre facing Sloane Square, a back-lit gossamer plane of wall luminesced thirteen minutes before sunset each day during the winter month of February.

This was my recent discovery, only after I had lived in this furnished flat a few years. I uncovered, behind a chest of drawers and huge mirror, a 2x3 meter fizz of wall, its real purpose undiscoverable until one were to put their hand through it. And of course, having the desire to rearrange the furniture of this furnished apartment, there was I, curious and unafraid to do just that.

Which I did. But I'm jumping ahead.

How long this mahogany husk had sat against the wall, hiding its magic gateway, is unknown. I myself didn't even bother moving it until an overwhelming desire to rearrange the furniture overtook me. Such motivation was embarrassingly corny compared to my usual ones. Nevertheless, when I finally did move it, a reverse shadow--of yellow--circumscribed its perimeter on the wall. It was an eyesore. I would have to acquire another piece of furniture--perhaps a wardrobe--to hide this mar of tainted wall.

I was irked. The stain bothered me. I painted the bedroom anew in a dark color, but still, it shone through. It was in my bedroom, so I couldn't escape it. Even when I passed down the hall, the bedroom entrance vaguely displayed in just my peripheral vision, it caught my eye.

I made plans to go to Portobello Road one Saturday, the last Saturday of January. Certainly, there would be something to at least sit or hang in front of my apartment's paint-proof age spot. If not furniture, perhaps a tapestry. Yes, a tapestry would do just fine.

It was a bargain. It was heavy. The woven collection of intersecting silk warps and wefts, large enough to cover that ghost of furniture past, hung tastefully over my flat's blemish. Just about completely.

I found that there was a bit of the spot peaking from behind it, so I removed the tapestry to readjust its anchorings on the wall. It was thirteen minutes before sunset on that first Friday of February. While measuring again the sallow stain shadow-thing that was evidence of the furniture previously in front of it, the continuum of history, compressed into a singularity 2x3 meters, fluoresced its invitation.

I've always been the adventurous type, jumping through the hoops of destiny that appear before me, from my first foray into the world through a birth canal I found surprisingly patent on my birth day. Thereon, slogans such as "Go for it," "Just do it," "Full speed ahead," and "Onward ho!" have always created the vacuum I was compelled to fill. This is not very good thinking for business strategies, but I've survived the slings and arrows it has wrought and I have survived. In any event, I suppose my recklessness is all part of my charm.

During those thirteen minutes of continuity with the infinite, when my hand first met no resistance (otherwise expected thanks to plaster and horsehair filler), retrieving my hand immediately seemed sensible. Adventurism notwithstanding, I'm not crazy.

My hand was fine. I checked off all the boxes in my survey for reassurance: it wasn't cold behind the wall; it wasn't hot; it wasn't painful. I had felt no wind or precipitation. My next adventure was my hand making a visit to eternity for only a few minutes, which is pretty funny when you think about it. Retrieving it back, again the checklist of checked boxes reassured me.

Now it was time for my head.

What I saw was the meaning of life itself. All of time running concurrently but curved onto itself into a tunnel of temporal...something...I couldn't describe it. I understood it, but I could have never put it into words. When you see all that time and life and existence can be, focused in parallax, which I know is impossible, you can see the meaning of life.

I removed my head after only a moment, and when I read my clock, it turns out I had been a turtle head in the void for sixteen hours before retracting it back into my shell of limited existentialism.

Buzz off, Kerkegaard! Bite me, Nietzsche! Jaspers and Sartre--you can both kiss my ass!

As my excursions expanded in scope and body (my body), as I grew into a citizen of the hither-aether behind the wall, I found an ability to imbue myself into the temporal gallery. Was it possible to step into the past? Was the future to my back when I walked along the ticks of time?

The adventure continued. Any serious academic institution would have taken months to undertake even what I had done with my hand. There would have been committee meetings, proposals for the Investigational Review Board, and even interference from the Department of Defense.

I have no love lost on red tape. By the time their first review were to conclude that more study was needed, I had already successfully attended my own birth. My other jaunts included a trip to 1933 Berlin, an exploration of the skies BCE to identify the Star of the Magis, and a visit to September 11, 2001. These were anonymous calls on unsuspecting hosts who hadn't even noticed. No harm, no foul, right?

Then it occurred to me.

Would it be that I was destined to change history? Wow + Yikes = Me? Is human history safe in my hands? I couldn't even remember to change the oil in my Audi. (I no longer have a car, because Audis burn up.)

Small experiments first.

I stepped into 2007 when Kim Kardashian and her boyfriend du jour, Ray J, made their sex tape. As they slept in their post-conjugal stupor, I erased it. That tape was never leaked online, failing to garner the Kardashians the attention that led to their scoring a reality show.

Now I've read enough SciFi to know about the butterfly effect, but when I stepped back into my bedroom, the world wasn't speaking German, it wasn't the Russians who had landed on the Moon, and even the Colts had still defeated the Bears in Superbowl XLI. In fact, nothing seemed to change except for the fact that there were no Kardashian influencers at work on the web. Some things, I figured, just don't matter.

But some do.

I targeted the rise of Putin, and it turns out Russia successfully conquered Ukraine in 48 hours. I targeted Pol Pot and the killing fields were even more efficient amidst the scramble for power to run the agrification of Cambodia. I pushed Lee Harvey Oswald through a sixth-story window in a book depository building in Dallas, but the thirteen days of October, 1962, became the 6 years of nuclear winter for Cuba and Florida and a lot of Europe. Which is weird when you realize Kennedy was assassinated after the 13 days of October.

My flat was in ruins. My magic wall stood, but there was no roof. Yep, I had fucked up very, very badly. Was there any way I could step through one more time to fix things? Or had things gone so awry that I was to live my life in this new dark age?

Putin, Hitler, Pol Pot, anarchists, despots...why weren't we beyond all that? Before the bombs went off, total human knowledge had been doubling every year. Isn't knowledge power? Why was it we still had genocide, revolutions, and bad guys winning? How might another thousand years of civilization make a difference?

Exactly.

I knew my wall might crumble and disintegrate at any time, so I figured I had, maybe at most, one more trip. I knew it would probably be a one-way trip, but that was OK. Even if I got appendicitis now, today's ashen infrastructure would not even be able to provide me general anesthesia.

Homo erectus, from two million years prior. That's when things really took off. But could I even jump-start the process before that? And what would I bring with me to do it? An encyclopedia? A Bible? (Probably not a Bible.) A wheel?

Three million years before the Kardashians, I landed as a god to the feeble-minded beings, Homo habilis. I had only the clothes on my back and one other thing--a little surprise for the homies.

Life there wasn't easy. My identification as Divine assured my survival among them. But I had to learn their language. I figured learning a few hundred words for me would be easier than the million words English offered, sometimes beyond comprehension even to Homo sapiens brains.

I lived among them. I even mated with many of their women, who certainly could have benefited from the Influencers of my former modern world. I wondered if my trysts were to be responsible for the truncation of our species.

I went back to the spot my wall had deposited me, but it was gone. I was right: this was to be a one-way trip.

We camped, we cowered in caves together, we avoided the wild animals. We fought--actually, they fought--I was a god. We fucked. We foraged. We laughed, we cried, and we raised babies. Being a god, the females clawed at each other to have me.

On one chilly night, as we prepared to retreat into our caves to escape the cold and the hungry, howling carnivores in the distance, I finally had enough language skills with them to tell them this: "Ikta Presch Ikromo."

I had wanted it to be special, to utter those world-shaking words with a fanfare befitting the coming of an age. But there wasn't anything special about life back in Pleistocene sub-Saharan Africa. So that night, I just said them.

"Ikta Presch Ikromo." The closest translation there is to these three words is, "Guys, get a load of this!" And then I fished out my book of matches.

A million years before Home erectus had discovered fire and began cooking the meats that provided the protein to grow their brains bigger, I made it possible for Homo habilis to do it a million years earlier.

I would up dying, ironically, from appendicitis. But before I did, they were lighting up the place like the most cunning arsonists and more frequently than the most prolific pyromaniacs. What better treatment for a god once I was dead and cold? Prometheus had spoken. Ikta Presch Ikromo.

And so began humanity's love affair with fire, a million years earlier than it was supposed to be. Although I could not return, if I could I would've landed in a world a million years more advanced than when I had left it. My last thoughts were wondering if we had finally gotten beyond the dark times of murder, cruelty, and subjugation. The Hitlers, Vlads, Stalins, Maos, and Husseins?

I guess back in my flat I should have re-blocked the portal, stayed put, and just waited a million years to see. While this greatly surpassed my life expectancy, it's also true that my Homo sapiens brain just wasn't that patient.