Time in a Bottle

It was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, and there was talk of peace and love in the air. While the Vietnam War was in full swing, so was the Summer of Love, as the M-16 rifles of National Guardsmen miraculously sprouted daisies when pointed at anti-war protesters on college campuses across the U.S.

People believed in magic in a young girl's heart. All you needed was love. If you couldn't be with the one you loved, you loved the one you were with. Yes, the world was feeling its gonads by the loving spoonful.

John and Mary met at a coffee shop in Greenwich Village when the guy who sang "Time In A Bottle" was still a great unknown. Though they barely knew each other, they both knew that they wanted to spend eternity together in the bottle that the folk singer was singing about when they first met.

They got what they wished for.

In the first election in which they were eligible to vote, they both voted for Richard Nixon because Tricky Dick had promised to end the Vietnam War toot sweet. Not that either of them were ever in any danger of going: John had a student deferment while Mary was a woman. It was just the principle of the thing. The war in Vietnam was wrong, they felt. The whole American way of life was wrong, as they saw it.

Shortly after they got married, they got caught up in a campus demonstration somewhere in the Midwest. Somebody set fire to the ROTC building and the governor called out the National Guard. John and Mary were two of the students killed when the National Guard opened fire.

Presumably, the National Guardsmen weren't very impressed with the daisies in their rifles.

Like many people who die suddenly, John and Mary weren't aware that they had died at first. They weren't aware that they were in the afterlife, which for them was time in a bottle (which was laying on its side). The Cutty Sark should have given them a clue, but they thought that they were tripping at first.

Then they thought, "Groovy! We're alone!"

For a while, perhaps many centuries, they behaved like any man and woman alone in a bottle. They made love because they were in love, and then they had sex because they were bored. Finally, they were too bored even to have sex with each other. And then they started to fight.

At first, they argued over little things. For instance, taking showers together became less romantic because Mary liked her water colder than John liked his. Then Mary complained that John snored at night while John hated meat loaf.

Sometimes, they found a solution. For instance, they started taking showers separately and John started sleeping on the couch at night. Mary stopped cooking meat loaf.

But other problems defied easy solutions. John started tuning Mary out when she talked, because women's voices have about five basic pitches while men's voices only have about two. Men tend to tune out the higher frequencies more than women. When John couldn't tune her out, he began to bash her around, like one would an old radio that can't pick up a station properly.

Well, naturally, Mary became resentful. Once she anticipated that there was going to be a fight, she began to cut to the chase. Rather than wait for tempers to flare, when both were yelling at each other at the same time, she would start yelling right away. It saved time.

This wasn't just trouble in paradise. It was a societal breakdown between two people because there were only two people and the rules of engagement always changed. Nobody could call the police because they were the police. The Ten Commandments like the one against murder didn't apply because they were already dead and they couldn't murder each other anyway.

Life in the afterlife became like a Roadrunner cartoon. At first, they thought it was cool that both of them could run off a cliff without falling, if they didn't look down. However, even they began to look down.

It became a life of anvils deliberately dropped on feet and baseball bats taken to heads. Once, Mary found a World War II-vintage German Mauser in the closet and emptied its magazine into John. However, John's wounds soon healed miraculously and he was as good as new— like the Vikings who were killed in battle in Valhalla in the Viking afterlife. He merely went to the fridge and got himself a beer.

It would have been easier if both of them had friends, but they soon forgot that they had ever had any friends. They eventually forgot that there had ever been anybody else but them in each other's lives. Oh, they called a truce at the end of the day, but it was only a break in the fighting. It was merely a pause to go to sleep and wake up for another round of fighting the next morning.

If hell is man's separation from God, then what they had was even worse than hell because they were alienated even from each other and from themselves. All they had was their stinking, rotten selves.

Just as people on earth today usually don't know if there was another world before they were born, and another world afterwards, John and Mary soon forgot that there was ever a world outside of their little bottle. Time in a bottle, along with day-to-day living, induces amnesia in the human soul, apparently.

Things came to a head when John split Mary's head down the middle with a Japanese samurai sword. After Mary put the halves of her head back together again, she asked, "Why are we doing this? Can't we do something else?"

"Like what would you suggest?"

"How about you spend a day cleaning up the beach while I clean up that ship over there? That way, we won't get in each other's way."

So John spent a whole day raking up the algae that was washed up on the beach while Mary spent the day trying to clean up the ship. By the end of the day, they were far from finished, so there would be more work the next day.

Both John and Mary spent many days with their different projects. At the end of the day, they were usually too tired to quarrel. What's more, their work began to yield unexpected rewards. Mary found a treasure chest with diamonds, rubies, and gold in the hold of the Cutty Sark while John would find things like oars and the broken pieces of life boats. He even found a telescope one day.

In time, they began to realize that their world inside the bottle was much bigger than they had imagined. Soon John had ventured so far along the beach that he was out of sight of the ship and Mary didn't see him again until many days later.

Mary, on the other hand, saw that there were perhaps thousands of miles of beach on the other side of the Cutty Sark, and she ventured in the opposite direction. John wasn't even aware of this half of the world.

Then one day, John came back with a baby's outfit. Mary realized that a baby had drowned at sea and she was filled with an emotion that had lain dormant for thousands of years: compassion. She even felt the urge to cry.

"There must be other people," Mary said, her voice choked with emotion.

"But where can they be?" John asked.

"I don't know, but they have to be here somewhere."

John held Mary as she cried in his arms. They agreed that they would leave the next morning in opposite directions to search for other people. If they found any survivors, they would bring them back to the ship.

That night, they gathered some driftwood and built a fire on the beach. They even made love under the stars on the beach for the first time in eons.

It now occurred to John, who had studied Buddhism, that maybe he and Mary were bodhisattvas, enlightened beings who had found Nirvana and now felt obligated by a sense of compassion to return to the world to show others the way to enlightenment.

True, they had behaved like idiots in paradise, but it amazed John to think how much greater the world's suffering must be. And if they were wise, how great the world's folly must be!

Then he remembered the wars and the famines, the plagues and the pestilences in the world that he and Mary had left behind. It gave him a headache. He wondered if he was imagining them or if they were real.

About a month after Mary set out in her direction, she thought that she was pregnant when she missed a period. When she missed another period, she was sure of it.

At the end of nine months (which is nothing in eternity), Mary gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. But that's another pair of sleeves, the two children that Mary had.

However, if, for some reason, John and Mary had to abandon their search for other people, their children could take it up.