“How foolish is man! He ruins the present while worrying about the future, but weeps in the future by recalling his past!”

• Ali Ibn Abi Talib

One box, three hearts; one open, two closed. 

The hypercube is our operating room. Strands extend from four directions and two time-planes, all things I can tug on. The surgeon, my teacher, puts up a blue latex hand. The strings fall through him, like beams of light. Like waves. Photons spit into his palm, either emerging from or seeping into the patient beneath us. As an apprentice, I’m still not sure what feeds into what. 

It was once believed that the fourth dimension is time. This has proven to be false. Here, in the 4-D world, I have more range of motion than time alone. I see time like an object, as an array of light, as layers. Here time isn’t an arrow moving in a single direction. It is a field, engrained with the physical, every event playing out at once, viewable from every angle. Every moment has happened, is happening, and will happen in perpetuity.

Though I miss home, I will never return to 3-D life. That would guarantee the nullification of my medical license. I am only licensed to practice in the fourth dimension. Any lower-level construct and the physics becomes something I was not trained to grasp. 

What was I trained to grasp? 

The monitor flashes before me. The distance between the screen and I is equivalent to a week in the third dimension, and the direction of my movement determines that of time. The patient’s cardiogram spikes. Each mountain, each valley in the graph of her heart’s electrical activity is a topographical record, a map of layers upon layers of her being. I can read her life from the dancing of her heart. From the biological circuitry between her atrioventricular and sinoatrial nodes, and the meat of her myocardium. 

“What do you see?” The surgeon asks, brows pulling from over his surgical loupes. He knows the answer, but he has to teach me somehow.

“She’s built an entire infrastructure over her shame. The topography’s incredible.” I’m watching it being built. Every heartbeat is a decade, the expansion of decay, some extant shame colonizing healthy tissue. 

 The surgeon leans into her chest cavity. Her heart is both open and closed at the same time. He’s so skilled, he can see what she’s built by the flutter of muscle in her heart. Can read every Purkinje fiber, the divot of her sinoatrial septum. “It’s a damn city.” 

In 3-D terms, she has mitral valve regurgitation. The surgeon was first trained up here, so he uses 4-D language for most cases. I have to adapt to what he’s saying. I went to med school in the flatlands, so I’m practically learning two fields of medicine.

We both look up at the ultrasound of the heart’s interior; it’s grainy and dim. I wonder how doctors used to rely on such a poor map as a guide. 

“Lots of regurg on the echo.” The surgeon’s finished clamping down the vessels, stopping all flow to the heart. “Valve’s shot.” 

“She’s ruminating?” I translate terms to his dimensional understanding. 

“And I don’t blame her.” The surgeon sighs. “I can see the tissue before her alterations to the topography. Putrid stuff. It’s disintegrating the tissue of her valve.”

My surgical skill in this dimension is mainly guidance. I can't control or meet the time branches that flow through my patient. They form as anastomoses, new connections between blood vessels. My patient is my shadow. She can't fathom my influences, can't see more of me than a sliver, a cross-section in the transverse plane. One that cannot be seen more than felt as gravity or time. It depends on where I am, it depends on which segment of tissue I cut, or sew together.

“Eaten by her past.” The surgeon grumbles as he cuts. 

Here, the past and future feed into each other. Here, we can see them cycle in the same glance. It would drive most insane. When I was first screened to enter this dimension, fresh out of med school, the marshals asked, “Do you have any regrets?” Of course, everyone does, but they were asking me to specify if I had regrets that I could map out inside myself. Things that could be triggered by a simple memory, that would become as real to me as the present within the hypercube. They asked, “do your regrets tend to follow you? Are you more in control of the past than it is of you?” Probing my liabilities.

The past is as much of a part of me as my future. The scars on my back, the flinching at the stale scent of a rose, a full voicemail inbox. The noise I couldn’t decode because I didn’t have the understanding yet. Here, we’ve been trained to block it out, to purposefully disorient ourselves. The past is only something that can guide; like a straight set of railroad tracks, something that keeps pushing. And the future is only something that can illuminate. That can appear as a new star in the sky, or a familiar face. Something that you can’t distinguish as ubiquitous or new, because sometimes, even in three-dimensional life, the mind blocks out all the noise. 

“The past is a shadow to me,” I finally replied to the marshal, “and when I transcend, I will be able to steer it properly. To my advantage.” 

When I first came here, I thought I was an astronaut. Clear nothing, void so uncharted it must be space. The feeling of my body splitting, then splitting. Then I am no longer a series of atoms in a particular arrangement, no longer the suggestion of a woman, much less a surgeon. I had become something there was no word for still, even though I was not the first this has happened to. 

When I found my shape again, something I could recognize in a dimensional space where my physicality had roots in the flow of time, adjustment was difficult. My brain couldn’t reconcile a realm where everything extends past their previously known bounds. Stringing time through catheters does not come naturally to me. I’ve had to steal that ability. That knowledge. 

I work in the ruins of a civilization. Of fourth-dimensional beings who have left no trace of themselves. I cannot tell you if I am on a planet, or in dead space. But I can tell you that outside of this compound, my body will span time. My three-dimensional form is only a cross-section of myself in this dimension. Outside of the holding that keeps my body intact, I will become endless and unfathomable. My space-time trajectory becomes a physical part of me. My future and past are stretches of my skin. The hull of the surgical base compresses me back into my usual body. Like a pressurized cabin in a space station. Outside are things my eyes can’t follow. Light or landforms or heavenly bodies. They move too fast, too rapidly and all at once. I use a cross-sectioning telescope, equipped with a slicing laser, to view them in terms my brain can comprehend. 

The military built this hospital into a tesseract, using technology left in the ruins. Our first patients were all soldiers. Now, the medical advancements we’ve made have intersections in psycho-hygiene. Many of our patients are high-class and with regret, something that manifests itself differently here than in the old dimension. Down there, regret is the least of humanity’s worries. Plague and hunger and war are what eats away at the flatlanders. 

Here, the surgeon is my teacher. The first thing I learned from him is that everything comes around full circle, especially from the physical world. That I have always existed in this fourth dimensional tesseract, that I have always been both my own shadow and the one that cast it. He tells me that I have drawn myself here. 

In retrospect—which there is none of in this place, because I can see everything in all directions, all at once—I was nothing but a thready thing, being tugged at from the cusp of space-time. Choice doesn’t mean anything here. In the flatlands, I was a shadow. I thought my coming here would make me a puppeteer. But the only strings I can truly tug here are my own. 

I have a good teacher. When I was in the first phases of training, a disease broke out in the third dimensional world. One that was curable only from our standing. Only a select few could be treated by us, mostly through time reversal or rerouting techniques.

Every day, he’d materialize the newspaper from the communications portal. Every day, he’d read to me the death toll. Every day, he’d make me memorize that number and then recite it back to him throughout the schedule; in full gown and mask, elbows deep in a patient. I’d shout back to him; Seven-hundred-and-four, Eight-hundred-fourteen. One-thousand-and-one. These were all people we’d left behind. All people who had become nothing more than topography to us. Their entire lifetimes were flashes on a monitor, the distance from one side of the operating room to the other, the swinging of a door. We’d changed ourselves into watchers who pluck out a select few to heal. It’s a heartless endeavor. We compartmentalize to cope. It turns us cold. Mechanical. 

“I used to play on the train tracks.” My teacher says, “Now I’m a machine.” 

My teacher and I practice a particular exercise: chrono-temporal literacy. We both drop to our knees and interlace our fingers. Our foreheads meet, and now we’re a closed system. And he whispers to me, only two words: “Show me.” 

The sea is so dark. I can only hear the waves crash into the sandbank. I don’t know why I’ve come down to the beach if I can’t even see it.

 “But you do know,” my teacher replies to the look on my face and I remember what the fourth dimension reminds me of. I remember when I stood by the beach, a vast space I was unable to fit into my vision. All dark, like space, like the backs of my eyelids. 

The sound of the ocean is what this dimension is like to those with only six degrees of freedom. Something that can’t be seen, not in its entirety. But there are other ways for it to signal its presence. To make itself known. Like the scattering of a trail of rose petals, the slipping of love letters under a door. 

I open my eyes to his, ice blue staring back into me. “Your turn,” I say. 

He shows me something I still don’t understand. Something he’s released in pieces. That will never be finished in either of our lifetimes, because he keeps changing the narrative. 

I’m in his body. The sky is open and blue. Sand surrounds. He kicks a ball around a score of electrified train tracks. I don’t know why he plays here. If it’s so dangerous, if he knows any misstep means death. 

The ball flies off course; it can’t be something he’s calculated. I keep forgetting what it’s like to not know the course of your actions. He runs after it, the emerging body of the train pulling through his peripheral vison, which is my vision now. He splits the tracks between his feet, one on each grounded flat of sand, livewire under his center of mass. The ball has yet to reappear. And the head of the train is all I can see. 

The horn splits our eardrums. I break the system before I can see what happens next, falling onto my back, rigid flooring shocking me back into fourth dimensional space. 

The last time he showed me this scene, it was his friend straddling the tracks, and him looking on into the collision. 

“Did you try to perform auto-chronological surgery?” I ask him when I’ve regained my bearings, into his chest. “To change your position in time space, relative to the tracks?” 

“I have a clinical question,” he says. Everything he tells me has a medical takeaway. The learning never stops. “Was that my past or my future?”

“I’d have to open your chest,” I answer, “if I really wanted to know.”

“I’m a machine,” my teacher sustains a mantra as he scrubs in. “I am a machine. A machine.” 

I watch him in the gaps in my concentration. I don’t think of him as a machine. He’s something softer, no hard casing of metal. He’s like those we operate on, but boundless.

When time is a space we take up, we come to never end or begin. We exist as something that has appeared, that can only blink into and out of our dimensional holdings. And so I can see why he thinks he’s inhuman. We’re something unfathomable to the flatlands. When we slither down to our home dimension, six walls in all directions, we come down in cross sections: slices of footprints like stamps, then up the legs, nothing more than a height-less oval for each limb, then the trunk and every organ housed in it. And finally, the brain and skullcap. Like an MRI in real-time, transmuted into light or sound or heat. Or time. 

“You’re not a machine.” I tell him. I know he hates it when I contest. “You’re a surgeon.”

“No.” He doesn’t raise his voice at me. He shakes his head. I know he wants to be something completely defined by a set of points, by a set of instructions. That exist only by its tasks. If surgery were all we lived by, then we would be surgeons instead of human. If the motions were all my teacher lived by, if he only existed by the hand, by the cut of his scalpel, then he’d be a machine. He liked the rigidity, something he could palpate, could remove wholly and effectively.

I stare at him, a sharp feeling creeping into my chest. It’s painful.  

“Why do you do this?” He asks me. A double-edged question, a favorite tool in his arsenal. Everything here means so much at once. I must learn to see in all directions, from all interpretations. 

“I wanted to devote my life to something,” I tell him. 

He stops, each second spanning weeks in the patient’s time. He looks to be thinking, then looks up at me, through me, like he’s staring into a mirror. “I think you don’t want to be human anymore.”

We have to be close to operate together. To know each other’s timelines, and have that feed into extrapolations of future action. 

This time, he finds me a new assignment, new unknown to scope out with only what he’s taught me.

 We’re closer, ten degrees of freedom to explore inside each other. We do it on the floor, the same as with any training exercise. He lays on his back, propped up by his elbows, and I sink down onto him, swallowing him whole. And he eats me right back, from the inside out.

 I don’t usually like this movement, the feeling of him, so deep into previously unexplored regions of me. But for someone like him, who’s transcended enough of his body into craft, I entrust his hands with the mold of my skin. 

My legs rest at either side of him, split him down the middle. He’s so warm and so deep. I lean in, pushing him as far as he’ll go, until he strikes lightning bolts through my vision, until all parts of me, including sensation, have amalgamated, and he’s seasoned enough to know how to navigate it. 

 My chest is flat against his now, I can feel his heart on the empty side of my chest. I’m not quiet, I tell him exactly where I feel him, and where I want him.

“Hold onto me.” He takes me from two points: the small of my back, and my bottom, and connects the trajectory to the next ninety-degrees out; flat wall. Something I can soften against.

He knows I’m usually a closed system; impenetrable, quiet but watching. Always watching him. I’m unreachable to most. But for this to work, for us to be effective as a unit, I have to open up for him. And when I do, it is not something he takes lightly. I can see the concentration in the furrowing of his brow, his eyes tracing, following my every movement with the accuracy of a machine that’s pre-mapped my trajectory. 

He's focused on me, and I entirely on him. On the subtle hitching of his breath, the tensing of his fingers, interchanging positions constantly. His destination is not something I am skilled enough to extrapolate. But I can feel when he’s close to it. I try to meet him, through the layers of space-time we’ve climbed together, at a single point.

This is his test. To see if I’ve learned enough of him to meet him exactly where and when he hasn’t specified. Where and when I’ve had to guide myself. I cry out, loud enough to prove conviction. And his voice escapes in a series of grunts, at the same time as me. The system’s been closed. I’ve passed. My teacher wets a sterile cloth and presses it against the span of my body. He catches escaped tears.

“The trembling is normal,” he says, “it’s from the endorphin rush.” 

“I have to show you…” Is all I can respond with. “I think I’m still drowning.” And my forehead clashes against his, after he’s wet a cold trail up my neck and to my ear with the cloth. 

“Show me.” He whispers. 

What I see first:

The sea is black. I was stupid enough to walk into it. I thought I would be the first to see the water from this perspective; no sight, just through the rip of the current and the clash of waves against me. I thought if I could swim out, to the other side, I would come home. 

What comes before this: 

Something I could not bring to words. Heartsickness, I call it. A common pathology here. Back down where I come from, it lingers as the burning of valium in my veins as it runs through-and-through, from IV straight to the head. It’s a flurry of bubbles, like the reversal of drowning. I can see the glassy blues and sea-foam grays through my mind alone. I’m accompanied by the squeeze of my father’s hand and the sickening glare of my mother.

What came after:

I say that I want to transcend time, and I want to move to where it does not pass. That this is my destiny and something that exists as a string to my consciousness. Nobody wants me to leave. They fight to keep me on the ground. 

Fifteen missed calls. I never apologize. My mother throws ice-water as I shriek. I crumble to my knees, and then sink further down, below the bottom of the flattest point I’ve physically been. No width or height. Something’s been smoothing my ends down; pressing so deep, like they or it, or whatever is controlling me is some inescapable force I am not supposed to be conscious of. There were always hands shoving me forwards. Or tugging me along. Pushing or pulling is all the same when my guide is both at my back and my front. 

“Is this my past or my future?” I ask my teacher. And he doesn’t need to see inside me to know. 

“It’s your whole,” he says, not taking a moment to think over his answer. He knows it for sure. “Everything at once.”

I smile, heat rising. “Thank you.” And I take a breath that could fill a gas giant. “I was beginning to forget.” 

There is a city in her heart. I’m beginning to recall the architecture. The high-rises, my old apartment. On the outer edges, the railroad tracks. This whole thing will fold in on itself, once I stitch her heart back together, and staple her sternum shut. But it will never cease. Everything here chases its tail, everything here is its own beginning or an end, and they feed into each other.

“You build the building before the scaffolding.” The surgeon scolds. 

I pick overhanging threads and pull them through my needle. They go through the ring of the patient’s mitral valve. I am weaving. 

“What has happened here will have happened, and has always happened.” I defend, “The building has always existed, I am only recalling it.”

We cannot change the past, we can only recollect it. 

Here’s a way for me to explain what we do in three dimensional terms:

Imagine time is a wheel. Most classical physicists want you to think it is a river; straight flowing and endless. Irreversible and ongoing. It is not. Time is a wheel. It can only be seen as a river from the third dimension. From here, I can see everything in its rotation. I can turn the wheel backwards or forwards, but I cannot alter it or stop it. I cannot rearrange it. But I can rearrange my patients around their own time wheels. 

I’ve rearranged many things, through time. Through space. Even myself. 

I glance over at my teacher, inverting his image, strange through the expanded lens of my Loupes. Maybe I haven’t pulled myself here, maybe he has. Maybe I’ve reciprocated. Smoke signals, heart-shaped, leading into a box, ten walls, most of which are mirrors. 

“Now you’re getting to the theoretical. I live in the flesh and blood, not the theory.” The surgeon shakes his head. “In that which will react to me, not cave under my touch.”

“And if you couldn’t escape the theoretical confines? The two-dimensions of drafting paper?” I try to hide the encroaching panic from my voice. A feeling cleanses my veins. Like early surrender. My recollection of what’s to come is dead on arrival. I shouldn’t bother with something so futile, so fickle as the unresponsive loop of time. “What would you have done, instead of this?” 

“I should have been a retro-physicist,” the surgeon grouses, “should have dissolved the atom bomb.”

“I should have been that bomb.” I tunnel another glittering fiber through the rim of the valve. 

It’s not enough; I need him between my lungs. Closeness here is not the closing of a distance between bodies, it’s the collision, the destruction, and then the repair. It’s the rearranging and the healing. It’s leaving a trace of yourself inside.

In training, they demonstrated this by showing animations of two balls circling each other, and then extending them out into infinity. Two bodies, their position in relation to each other will always be calculable. Never more than two. We can only work in pairs. 

In this box, in this physical stretch of time, we know each other better than the lay of the land, both anatomical and physical. I never studied Chrono-physics. Everything I’ve learned has been through an open body; whether celestial or human. I see stars die and slurp their remains back into themselves. I see lights flicker and then grow and I know a world has been eaten. I see forwards and backwards through a split chest. Every layer of time and fascia has fused into each other, and then into itself. 

My teacher and I are two gravitating objects. We can learn each other’s orbits, but in the operating room, it is three bodies, circling each other; their end position cannot be known. Position here has more bearing in time, anyways. We never knew where we were, where we’d be, only when and how. With all the forces at our backs. 

I’m beginning to worry about things that have happened, but here, they’re more like veins from the most distal ends of my body, turgid with blood that will return to my heart. Things still chain me to my past, bring it like a rush of blood back to my head.

Maybe I came here to strand myself; in my past, in my future. On a dark beach, a place where things wash up and then crawl back into the water. 

“You need to make the knots tight.” Threads slip through space and unspool themselves.

“I’m sorry.” My breath flutters, muscles of my fingers twitching around my instruments; beak-like pair of pliers and a curved needle. 

There’s a chance my ineptitude has caused buildings to crumble. 

“Your form is wrong.” The surgeon’s voice stings.

“I know.” 

“Fix it.” 

My strands loop into the ciliary body, those that once formed around my mother’s corneas. I blink and fight the instinct to break sterile and wipe my eyes with blue latex. The open mitral valve before me morphs again, back into its native form. I am used to things changing shape, but not in this place between ribs. Here, the architecture of the heart remains constant, unlike planets, terrestrial worlds. Those things change at night, dreamscapes of an undecided mind, some boxed-in eye of the universe turning over an undeveloped image, real and inverted. 

In the heart, all things are familiar. Intrinsic, coming from within oneself. A heart can only build onto itself, not rearrange. My teacher has phrased it to me this way: the architecture of the heart is like a moon that follows. Something constantly in the sky, though it phases through its own physicality. A heart will change in predictable ways, just like a moon waxes and wanes. 

“What do you see?” The surgeon’s voice blares, and so do several monitors. 

“I-” Focusing on what’s before me is akin to straight-shooting through the eye of a galaxy. 

“The surgical field is changing, isn’t it?” He’s calm. Too calm. His gloved hand comes to grip what falls from me. I may be trembling. I may just be freezing. 

“It’s the same as I remember.” I say as though revisiting a vacation spot, maybe Milan or Istanbul. Some untouched city steeped in centuries of architectural stagnation. Perfect preservation in the hearth. Like uncovering something I thought I had lost to a fire. So perfect in its reality, so different from my memory that the two versions cannot be the same item. The heart remembers what the eyes cannot re-form. It’s like diagrams hastily drawn in my journal, of abdominal aorta spanning bellies, of the cross-sectioned views of organs that render them nearly unidentifiable. The moment of recollection will never match that of recording. Even with my well-rounded vision in this verse, no rendition of the past will ever look the same as it is preserved as a foundation so faithful as myocardium. 

“The same?” I look back at the surgeon. Now he looks different, like an orbiting body changing phases. I’m unshaken by this. The fifth dimension is not known for its consistency. 

“I’ve been here before.” 

A monitor blares and my heart sinks. The untrained recollection of the future is stillborn. I should know. The marked sign of such incompetence is decay. Entire chrono-tissue infrastructure dilapidated. I’m failing and I know it. I’m failing my teacher, failing all those who expended so much energy to send me up here. 

Failure is a large portion of training in the fourth dimension. Most of it is adjustment to an alien landscape, a place we never should have been in. We are strange travelers here; scientists here to abandon all knowledge of the world we’ve left behind. I haven’t given up much. I only jumped the straight edge off a dimensional cliff. Maybe I was never supposed to do anything here but fail. I hope it doesn’t matter to my teacher. I hope he knows I’m doing my best. 

I’m picking at the glowing threads that dangle from the tesseract. The heart before me shifts and rebuilds and then demolishes itself, all to start again. 

I’m plucking my clothes from the floor, one tile, one wooden-planked, one carpet. My body unfurls and reforms, then collapses in on itself. 

I’m peeling myself off the ocean floor, inhaling a storm of bubbles. My head breaks through the surface of the water and I spit and sputter and cough as I take in oxygen. 

I’m running through the architecture of my own heart. It’s spilling around me, like warm candle wax, red and molten. Inescapable. Like the box I’ve cornered myself into for the sake of exploration. This whole dimension is an echo chamber, secluded to only an atrium and the constant reverberating thump that’s coming from within the muscle sheathed in muscle. Heartbeats are like the roll of waves here. They signify something deep. Something uncharted. 

The surgeon’s voice—my teacher’s voice—cannot carry over the noise. He’ll lose me in here, so deep inside myself. He’ll understand that I’m coming home, through the portal of recollection. That I’ll shrink back to the minuscule thing I was before he taught me how to grow into time. 

When they ask him where the body went, bleary-eyed journalists over the dimensional comms, he’ll say that his young, bright-eyed apprentice fell through space-time, and has found herself in yet another chamber. That she’s not lost because she’s somewhere only she knows. That there’s a city in her heart, and she roams through it.