Free Unhappenings by Edward Aubry Page A

abruptly, I was a substitute teacher at a private high school. Seven weeks after that, I discovered that I really worked as the electronics manager at Sears. A few weeks after that I was unemployed, and had always been. A few more weeks along and I was suddenly, retroactively, a cashier in a grocery store. The unhappenings continued in cycles of four to eight weeks, and each was progressively more discouraging than the last, as my new jobs drew me further and further away from science.
    This went on for over two and a half years.



he spate of unhappenings I experienced after graduation had a very different character than anything I had seen previously. Many of my losses over the years had been profound, and there were occasional, if brief, patterns. My experience with girls in high school was the most obvious example of this, as was my rotating panel of physics teachers, but both of those were sporadic, even at the time. This crisis of new and surprising occupations every few weeks—sometimes switching in shifts of only a few days—was the longest sustained obstacle in my life to that point. The fact that it was so consistent, and prolonged, coupled with the specific timing that the barrage began immediately after my school days had come to an apparent end, made it impossible for me to continue denying the inescapable. This was no mere obstacle; it was a sustained attack.
    Penelope, in every age at which I encountered her, always refused to tell me the cause of our unhappenings. Sometimes she claimed she didn’t know, other times she simply dodged the question. All she ever shared freely was that she and I shared that experience, along with at least one other person, possibly more. Eventually I learned to stop asking, but the more times she spirited me away to “run a fix,” the more convinced I became that we were engaging in some sort of covert, time travel combat. I wondered how many of my own unhappenings were “fixes” being run by some unseen foe.
    More than once I wondered if that foe might not be Penelope.
    Adding to that nagging thought, I received no visits from her during this stretch of my life. The oldest version of her I had yet encountered assured me we would meet again, many times, but I had seen no sign of her since that day. I could not bring myself to believe that she had been playing me for nefarious purposes this whole time, but it would have been very gratifying to see some evidence of that.
    It became clear that I was not going to be allowed to pursue my PhD when every attempt I made to submit applications to schools was immediately undone. It was equally clear that I was not destined for any sort of rewarding employment, or a career in any type of science. The jobs through which I was rotated were all menial, or middle management in companies that held nothing of interest to me, and that was when I had a job at all. I spent a fair portion of those days unemployed, to various degrees of parental disappointment. All of this combined to weigh me down with a despair that my dream of becoming ‘Dr. Walden’ and spearheading the research that would lead to time travel was not to be. It was a terrible conceit on my part, but I had spent the previous five years certain that my destiny was to be the sole scientific mind to be credited with the most significant discovery in human history. It turned out that my true destiny was to be a bystander.
    Then I met myself for the second time, and everything changed again.
    It was during one of my stretches between jobs. I told my parents I was going out to look for work, then camped out at the public library. Soon enough, I would be assigned a random job that I might even be able to maintain long enough to see a paycheck. Until then, any genuine job hunt would be an absolute waste of time. Usually I would bypass the terminals on the main floor, and hide out in the print collection. Apart from the librarian who worked there, no one ever took an interest in it,