Tales from the Universe
Moral Dilemma: If you could undo your worst mistakes, how many could you erase before you also erased the person who learned from them?
The door appeared after Neral broke his brother’s nose.
That was not the worst thing Neral had ever done.
It was simply the mistake closest to the door.
His brother Jori was seventeen and possessed the remarkable ability to locate whatever part of Neral’s character was currently weakest.
That evening, it was pride.
Jori said something.
Neral answered.
Jori laughed.
Neral hit him.
There was a sound like a branch breaking.
Then blood.
Their mother screamed.
Jori stared at Neral with both hands over his face.
Neral knew immediately that he would remember that expression for the rest of his life.
He left the house.
He walked until midnight.
At some point he noticed a building between two warehouses.
Neral had traveled that street hundreds of times.
There had never been a building there.
It was narrow.
Barely wider than a doorway.
There was, in fact, only a doorway.
Above it hung a wooden sign.
BEFORE
Neral tried the handle.
The door opened.
Inside was a small room.
A woman sat behind a desk.
There was another door behind her.
“Name?” she asked.
“Neral.”
“Full name.”
“Neral Venn.”
She opened a ledger.
“Ah.”
That response worried him.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
She dipped her pen in ink.
“What would you like to change?”
Neral laughed.
“I don’t understand.”
The woman waited.
“My brother.”
“What about him?”
“I broke his nose.”
“When?”
“Tonight.”
“And?”
“And I wish I hadn’t.”
The woman wrote something.
“Easy.”
Neral stopped.
“What?”
“Recent events are easiest.”
She pointed toward the second door.
“Go through.”
“What happens?”
“You arrive before.”
“Before what?”
“The mistake.”
Neral stared at her.
“Can I change it?”
“That is generally why people come.”
He opened the second door.
Jori was laughing.
Neral stood in his mother’s kitchen.
His fist was raised.
Everything was exactly as it had been.
Except Neral remembered.
He lowered his hand.
Jori stopped laughing.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Neral walked away.
The world flickered.
He was standing outside.
Morning sunlight warmed his face.
Neral touched the narrow building.
It was still there.
He ran home.
Jori was eating breakfast.
His nose was straight.
“Morning.”
Neral grabbed him.
Jori shoved him away.
“What is wrong with you?”
Neral laughed.
“Nothing.”
For the rest of the day he felt like the luckiest man alive.
Three weeks later, Neral returned to the door.
The woman looked up.
“Again?”
“There was something else.”
“There usually is.”
When Neral was twenty-one, he had abandoned an apprenticeship because his master humiliated him publicly.
He regretted it.
The woman found the entry.
“Seven years.”
“Is that too far?”
“No.”
Neral went through the door.
He endured the humiliation.
He stayed.
When the world returned, he was no longer a dock clerk.
He was a master carpenter.
He owned a workshop.
He had twelve employees.
His hands were scarred differently.
Neral stood inside his new life and wept.
After that, he began making a list.
The woman behind the desk disliked lists.
“They encourage ambition.”
“Isn’t that the point?”
“No.”
“What is the point?”
She looked at him.
“To change something.”
Neral unfolded the paper.
There were thirty-seven items.
The woman sighed.
He repaired an argument with his father.
He returned money he’d stolen at fourteen.
He apologized to a girl he’d humiliated at school.
He stayed beside a dying friend instead of telling himself he couldn’t bear to watch.
Each correction improved something.
His father died knowing they loved one another.
The stolen money never became a secret he’d carried for decades.
The girl remembered him kindly.
His friend did not die alone.
Neral became addicted to goodness.
That was how he described it to himself.
Not perfection.
Goodness.
He was removing unnecessary suffering from the world.
Who could object to that?
One afternoon, Neral met Jori for lunch.
His brother looked tired.
“Do you remember when you broke my nose?”
Neral smiled.
“No.”
Jori laughed.
“Exactly.”
Neral’s smile disappeared.
“What?”
“You almost did.”
Neral stared.
“You had your fist up. Then you just walked away.”
“Right.”
“I’ve always wondered why.”
Neral looked at his brother.
He remembered the blood.
The scream.
The expression on Jori’s face.
Jori remembered none of it.
For some reason, that frightened Neral.
He returned to the narrow building.
The woman was reading.
“What happens to the memories?”
“Whose?”
“Everyone else’s.”
“They remember what happened.”
“What happened originally?”
“There is no originally.”
“Yes, there is.”
She closed her book.
“Not anymore.”
“But I remember.”
“You went through the door.”
Neral sat down.
“So I’m carrying memories of things that never happened.”
“If you like.”
“Why?”
“Someone has to know what they’re changing.”
Neral stopped visiting for almost a year.
Then his mother died.
There had been nothing dramatic about it.
An illness.
A physician.
A long winter.
They tried everything available.
She died anyway.
Neral grieved.
Then he remembered the door.
“There must be something.”
The woman shook her head.
“Something I did.”
“No.”
“Something I didn’t do.”
“No.”
“A physician I could have found.”
“No.”
“A medicine.”
“No.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you’ve asked me seventeen times.”
Neral froze.
“What?”
The woman turned the ledger around.
His name filled pages.
Physician from the north.
Earlier diagnosis.
Different medicine.
Moved mother south before winter.
Never moved mother south.
Changed her diet.
Changed the house.
Prevented childhood fever at age nine.
Neral stared.
“I don’t remember these.”
“No.”
“But I remember everything I change.”
“Usually.”
“Usually?”
The woman tapped the ledger.
“You have been changing your mother’s death for eleven years.”
Neral looked at his hands.
They were older.
Much older.
He hadn’t noticed.
“How old am I?”
“Forty-nine.”
He remembered being thirty-eight.
“What happened to eleven years?”
“You used them.”
Neral ran home.
His workshop was different.
Half the employees were strangers.
Jori had gray in his beard.
His daughter—
Neral stopped.
Daughter?
A young woman entered the room.
“Father?”
Neral stared at her.
He knew her name.
Sella.
He knew she liked pears.
He knew she’d broken her arm climbing a wall when she was eight.
But the memories felt strange.
Like stories someone had told him.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
She touched his forehead.
Neral began crying.
“Father?”
He hugged her.
She laughed nervously.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know.”
That was true.
Neral returned to the door one final time.
“I want the first version back.”
The woman shook her head.
“Which first version?”
“The real one.”
“They were all real when you lived them.”
“The one before I changed anything.”
“That person doesn’t exist anymore.”
“I exist.”
“Do you?”
Neral became angry.
“Don’t play games with me.”
The woman opened the ledger.
“You became a carpenter because you changed your apprenticeship.”
“Yes.”
“Your wife met you because she commissioned a table.”
Neral went still.
“Your daughter exists because you became a carpenter.”
He sat down.
“If you restore the apprenticeship mistake, Sella disappears.”
Neral covered his face.
The woman continued.
“You reconciled with your father because you changed an argument.”
“Yes.”
“That reconciliation caused him to introduce you to the man who eventually financed your workshop.”
Neral said nothing.
“You stayed with your dying friend.”
“Yes.”
“Because of that, his sister trusted you. She later introduced Jori to his wife.”
“Stop.”
“You want the first version.”
“Stop.”
“These things are connected.”
“I understand.”
“No.”
The woman closed the ledger.
“That is why people keep coming back.”
Neral looked at the second door.
Behind it waited every mistake he had ever made.
Every cruel word.
Every cowardly retreat.
Every opportunity missed because he was afraid.
Every person he’d failed.
He could spend the rest of his life correcting them.
Perhaps many lives.
“What happens if I never come back?”
The woman shrugged.
“You live.”
“With all the mistakes?”
“Yes.”
“What if I make another terrible one?”
“You probably will.”
Neral laughed despite himself.
“That is a terrible service.”
“We don’t provide advice.”
He stood.
At the outer door, he stopped.
“Why does this place exist?”
The woman reopened her book.
“I don’t know.”
“Has anyone ever finished?”
She looked at him.
“Finished what?”
Neral considered the question.
Then smiled.
“Right.”
He left.
Years later, Neral made another mistake.
A serious one.
He trusted the wrong person and nearly lost his workshop.
Families depending on him suffered.
His daughter told him she had warned him.
She had.
Neral spent several nights awake.
He knew where the narrow building stood.
He walked past the street twice.
On the third night, he stopped at the corner.
The sign was visible between the warehouses.
BEFORE
Neral stood there for a long time.
Then he turned around.
The mistake remained.
So did the consequences.
He spent three years repairing what he could.
Some things were never repaired.
Neral carried those.
And somewhere during those three years, something occurred to him.
He no longer knew which parts of himself had come from wisdom and which had come from scars.
Perhaps there had never been a difference.
When he died many years later, his daughter found a folded piece of paper in his desk.
Thirty-seven mistakes were written on it.
Most had been crossed out.
At the bottom, in an old man’s handwriting, Neral had added one final line:
I thought becoming better meant having a cleaner past.
Beneath it:
I was wrong.
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