We didn’t know the day was about to get multi-dimensional. Who does, right? Once you lose reference points and landmarks, unlikely oddities occur, out in the far regions where no one else can see. 

It happened ten years ago, way before 2020 hit. Mattie’s blue van was a roaming glare in the bald high desert, pinballing around Rio Rancho’s empty streets in the undeveloped neighborhood. For a long half hour, Mattie had driven us—first hopefully, increasingly with frustration—down the alien, mostly houseless subdivision roads, as the word “desolate” echoed in my head, though I kept trying to take a turn for the better and also encourage my best friend, whose wiry grip wrangled the oversized steering wheel. 

I’d call my Mattie friend a Gelfling sort, with lightly salted long hair and goatee, magical and a little smelly. He sewed me silk faery wings that suited me to a T, back when we first became best friends decades ago. Most days, we talked before noon, sharing details on our projects, my stories and his movies, both of us feverish with inspiration. We were magic folk living in the city, soul-kin who’d found each other amid the concrete—and when we were together, anything could happen. That day, we’d just admitted we were lost, after staying the night at the house of a photographer, who we met at a drum jam where none of us knew most of the people. 

It was noon, and after a night of bad sleep and a barking dog, and a morning of detours, we were driving toward breakfast, back the way we came, supposedly, at least that’s what I was thinking, until all buildings vanished and we kept ascending the sloped empty streets, passing stripped, dusty New Mexican land, till the windshield showed nothing but blue sky. Eventually, I broke the silence with a “Guess we should turn around.” 

The van kept crawling up the hill. Mattie clutched the huge steering wheel. The sun glinted like a lazar along the windshield’s crack.

“I just wish we could ask someone for directions,” he finally said. 

(drumroll)

And that’s when we passed the side road with two men talking in the middle of nowhere. Not only that, but one of the men appeared to be a Mattie replica, time-progressed to three decades ahead. He had Mattie’s hair, but white, and Mattie’s long goatee, also white, and his thin frame stood with the same philosophical, easygoing attitude found in Mattie’s bearing.

The perhaps-Mattie-alternate was positioned like a gnomon in the middle of the intersection, beside a red convertible with its door open. He listened actively to the driver, an enthusiastic bearded man, who gestured widely in the available open space. With blue sky above and white-hot desert all around, the two older men only noticed each other. There was no telling how long they had been confabulating there in the sun, as the lean Mattie-of-the-future, who looked amiable and partially untamed, nodded at his friend’s tale and stroked his six-inch goatee with my friend’s same habitual gesture.

Mattie and I exchanged a look, and then he pulled a U-turn and idled in the left-hand lane beside them. Slowly, the men looked our way. I smiled and gave a wave from the passenger seat, as Mattie cranked down the window in quick cycles and pointed ahead. His all-important question was brief: “Is Unser this way?”  

Mattie’s spry, white-haired version kept his feet planted as he corkscrewed around to ask the paused storyteller. Then, he untwisted, raised long eyebrows, and agreed, “Yeah.” 

“Thanks!” we sang, and Mattie let off the brakes. 

“I like your van!” the man hollered before we were gone, and as far as I could tell, he was the only person besides Mattie to truly appreciate the 80s-style, roaring and clanking blue beast, with half-removed, overlapping phone numbers on the sliding door and shrieking eagle stencil curling on the window. Mattie smiled, eyebrows lifted, and nodded as the van rolled until the gear engaged. 

“I used to have one just like it!” the older man called, eyes sparkling. 

And of course he did, I decided, because we must have just experienced one of the several times throughout Mattie’s life when he would run into one of his future selves. I figured he always asked for directions, and his future self never knew and had to ask some paused storyteller. Mattie then casually thanked his stranger self, who stayed mostly the same (wiry with knobby joints) but fashioned intriguing alterations throughout the years (goatee length, urban or rustic attire). And the meetings never lasted longer than a minute before they were pulled, once again, out of alignment. 

As Mattie drove us through that bright, rattling moment and on into the next one, I watched the Metaphysical Play from the passenger seat and wondered, Fifteen? Maybe seven. How many times so far had Mattie met and asked his future self those little questions? I figured he was always a little more bored and preoccupied than his older version, who shared a relaxed, gentle grin, though neither thought much of the exchange. 

As we descended the sloped, reflective road, I saw a promising map of buildings in the distance, along with the prodigal green Bosque lining the unseen Rio Grande. Increasing proximity to breakfast burritos and coffee perked us up in our seats. A new song came on the radio and we car-danced with nodding heads, the helpful men lost somewhere in the brightness at our backs.  

And so, the clue seemed to me, do the impossible miracles of time and identity continue to grace and loop throughout our lives. Over and again, the Marvelous sneaks in and out of our daily treks, while we’re focused elsewhere, oblivious to the storyteller’s interrupted tale, always busy trying to get to where we’re going.

*

Postscript, October 2020: That’s what I wrote, transcribing the events right after they occurred, once we got down the hill into town and found a café with our holy breakfast burritos and coffee. And Mattie waited for me patiently while I scratched my pen across the pages of loose paper I’d found. At the next table over (to give me space), he crossed his long legs and made himself at home on the schmacy café’s velvet booth like only he could make himself at home in the world, while he looked long down his nose, reading the Albuquerque Weekly Alibi. How charming every moment of that memory is. I can still hear him snickering in the café as I read out loud, “goatee length,” and see his playful blue eyes.  

Now, it’s ten years after that bright afternoon when we found Unser Road at long last. (“Unser,” I later learned, is German for “our,” which seems perfect, that it was “our road” we were searching for all along.) It’s also eight months since my magical Gelfling friend suddenly left the planet in February, despite every wish I made. And it’s seven months into my wandering lost through the pandemic since March, with no landmarks in sight. (Which has shown that, yes, navigating a global pandemic is like driving lost in the blinding desert.) So, now, I feel even more tender about Mattie’s silvery counterpart, who we briefly encountered that day in the middle of nowhere. He gave me a glimpse of how Mattie might’ve aged, given a couple more decades here in the high desert (that version of him anyway). 

I wouldn’t be surprised if I have yet to cross paths with other Mattie-alternates, of any age at all, as I keep winding along life’s surprising roads, suddenly solo in this alien terrain. A timeless, slightly smelly, elvish wizard like that? His spirit has got to glint and resound through time, showing up in refractions. I’m sure I’ll recognize him, whether or not he recognizes me. 

I’ll find my good path eventually. Maybe next time I see a Mattie-alternate, he’ll have a Dawny-alternate with long silver hair laughing at his side. Never can tell what the Marvelous will pull next, out here in the uncharted territories. All I know is that when I’m lost, I have to shade my eyes from the glare and keep heading onward. Later, the journey will make more sense in hindsight. For now, the glimpses and memories of magic will help fortify me, until I find my way again.   

*

Postscript, March 2022: Still looking.

—First published in K’in Literary, Issue 9, 5/2/23