Ivan’s Timeless Pub

It had been a long time since Gary looked at that sign. The pub wasn’t on any map – it relied entirely on word of mouth. Gary first heard about it when he was still finishing college, that was the last time.

He had to rely on his old, handwritten notes. “Walk up Front Street until you see a grayish stone building, then go another block or so. Go into the alley. Take a left, then look right. You’ll see the pub.”

Gary could scarcely believe he ever thought those directions were adequate, and indeed they were wrong. And yet, he managed to find it. Of course, he always knew he would.

A bouncer was sitting outside the solid door, eyeing Gary as he approached.

“Good evening sir, please surrender your cash and any modern technology before entering, including your cell phone for starters. You may buy drink tokens here and use them to purchase beer inside, one token, one beer. Cash is not allowed inside.”

“Two tokens please. I don’t remember you taking my cell phone last time.” Gary responded.

“When was last time?”

“20 years ago.”

“Did you have a cell phone 20 years ago?”

“...No, not yet.”

“Well, that’s why I didn’t take it. These’ll be right here waiting for you when you get out.”

The bouncer took the cell phone and cash, and put it in an envelope, then continued.

“Now what I say is very important, you will follow my instructions exactly. You’re going to go through two sets of doors. You’ll be unable to open the second set of doors until the first closes. In the unlikely event that you open the first set of doors, and somebody is standing there having just left the bar, you must prevent that person from leaving until the doors close. You are to then proceed into the bar and close the second door behind you before they exit. If they were to come through these doors before they close at least once, that would be very bad.”

“Why would that be very bad? What would happen?”

“Nothing will happen, because you’ll follow my directions.”

“And if I don’t?” Gary asked.

“You will.” The bouncer had the slightest hint of an aggression tone.

“Fine, fine. You can count on me.” Gary relented.

“I know I can. But I need to tell you anyway. Now go ahead.”

Gary walked through the first door. To his relief, there was no one standing behind the first set of doors. He then pushed open the second set of doors. Inside there was a simple pub – just a bar, some stools, and a bartender in the middle. Just as he remembered. Gary saw another door on the side, marked “EMERGENCY EXIT (completely unnecessary, do not open)”. A smattering of patrons were seated around the bar. Gary walked up and took one of two adjacent empty stools. He looked up and and down the bar at the other guests.

“Hey bud, who’re ya looking for?” The bartender asked Gary.

“Me, actually.” Gary replied.

“Gotcha.” The bartender smiled, looking around. “Well I don’t think I’ve seen you yet, so go ahead and grab a seat.”

Gary sat on the stool, and ordered a beer.

“So how does this whole time loop thing work anyway?” Gary asked the bartender. “I thought time travel was impossible.”

“Actually it’s not time travel at all, there’s no traveling involved. It’s pretty simple, really.” The bartender replied, filling Gary’s beer as he continued.

“Through extreme attention to detail, we set this place up so that at the end of a 20-year timeframe, everything in the bar of any significance whatsoever that could even conceivably affect the future, will be in exactly the same in position, size, velocity, etc. as 20 years before that time. At that point, repetition is inevitable. No need to even get Einstein involved, simple Newtonian physics dictates that everything is on the same path as it was 20 years before, and the bar enters a time loop.”

“So everything that’s happening now, happened 20 years earlier?”

The bartender handed Gary his beer and leaned on the bar to address Gary. “Well that’s why you’re here right? But actually, no. There’s no ‘20 years earlier’ in this bar, or ‘20 years later’ either. Out there, time moves in a line, so those phrases make sense. In here, time moves in a circle. There’s no way to distinguish this repetition from the last repetition from the reference frame of the pub. So the whole idea of earlier and prior times doesn’t make sense in here.”

“So...you just live forever in this bar?” Gary asked, still struggling to understand.

“Nope, I’m just a normal mortal human like you. I go home at the end of my shift and live in the normal timeline, and then I come back to the time loop. I get old, I eventually retire, and get replaced by myself but 20 years younger.”

“Ok. So you already know when you retire?”

“Sure do. I remember the day I started, and I saw myself retire the same day. Plus I come in once in a while to catch up. Don’t I?” The bartender looked at an older man in the corner of the bar. He looked like he could be the bartender’s father. The older man raised his glass as the bartender.

“Wait a minute.” Gary pressed. “What happens if instead of letting yourself take over for you, you tell the younger you that working here is terrible, and convince yourself not to work here…”

“...and then I wouldn’t be working there to say that?” The bartender finished for him, making it clear that he’s heard this before.

“Yeah. It would create a paradox.”

“It’s not a paradox at all, it simply doesn’t happen. Because if I convince myself not to work here, that means the state of the bar would not be the same at the end of any timeframe, and the loop would not occur. The bar would be a failure, and then I definitely wouldn’t be working here, and you wouldn’t be drinking here either.”

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

“And I am drinking here.” Gary replied, starting to get it.

“Exactly. So we know that your paradox is impossible.”

“But what if knowing that, you decided to just quit right now to cause a paradox and see what happens?”

“Well why don’t we just cut to the chase, maybe you could kill your past self when you show up. Then you’ll have your paradox too.”

“...but I don’t want to kill myself?”

“And I don’t wanna quit my job either. This is the most interesting pub to work in the whole city. Point being, it’s not that you can’t create a time paradox, it’s that you won’t. Because otherwise, I wouldn’t have you and a bunch of other folks coming in here every day to meet with their past selves. Got it?”

Gary could somewhat understand, but he still had a lot of questions. “Yeah, I think so. But when you go home, what year is it?”

The bartender said nothing. He merely tapped a sign on the wall behind him, reading “ABSOLUTELY NO discussion of time outside the pub.”

Frustrated, Gary thought for a minute. He knew he’d thought up many questions over the years, and that couldn’t be all of them. The bartender pushed off the bar and started picking up empty glasses. Then Gary had a thought.

“One more question.” He said.

“You ask a lotta questions. What are ya, a lawyer?”

“As a matter of fact I am. But that’s besides the point. Let me ask you this – when I leave here, how do I end up back in my own timeline? Shouldn’t there be multiple timelines I could go back to when I walk out that door?”

“No. There’s only one timeline it’s possible for you to go back to. If you went to any other timeline, you’d suddenly appear in that timeline out of nowhere. And that’s just not how thermodynamics works.”

“But wouldn’t I also appear out of nowhere in my own timeline when I go back to that?”

“No more than energy suddenly appears when a ball rolls down a slope. When you enter the bar, you’re converted to potential mass-energy in your own timeline. When you go back, that potential mass-energy becomes real mass-energy again. Nothing gained, nothing lost.”

Gary sighed. He gave up. He could argue it made no sense, and maybe it didn’t. But it was far from the only thing that made no sense in his life. At the end of the day, the existence of a bar with a time loop still made more sense than existence itself.

“So what were you planning on talking to yourself about?” The bartender asked.

“Oh, you know. Bad decisions, major regrets, stuff like that.”

“Yeah, I certainly see a lot of that. You know you can’t change the past, right?”

“Even in here?” Gary asked.

“Especially in here.”

It was then that Gary heard the pub door open and close behind him, and he turned around to face himself. “Gary! There you are! Come have a seat.” Gary said to Gary. The new Gary looked, as one might expect, very much like Gary. But 20 years younger.

Gary grabbed a seat next to Gary at the bar.

“Same as yourself?” The bartender asked. Gary the younger nodded as the bartender grabbed another glass.

“So it’s nice to meet..me.” The younger Gary asked. “I mean I didn’t really expect you – I mean me - to be here…”

“Why wouldn’t I be here? I remember walking in here 20 years ago, hoping to find me here. I wouldn’t wanna disappoint myself, would I?” The elder replied. “Gosh, I remember me saying that.”

“And that too?”

“Even this.”

“So what am I gonna say next?”

“You’ll tell me about what you’ve been up to, even though I know already.”

“Well I can’t help it. Stacy is driving me crazy, and I’m looking at law schools and kinda scared for what my career’s gonna be like.”

“Well that’s easy. Break up with Stacy, and don’t go to law school.”

“And from the fact that you’re saying that, I assume I end up staying with Stacy and going to law school.”

“Actually you do break up with Stacy. But you do go to law school.”

“So breaking it off is the right choice, huh.”

“Oh yeah, wait till you hear what she tells you after. I mean sure she’s hot, but you already hate her awful personality.”

“Hey watch it – she’s still my girlfriend.”

“Yeah and to me she’s a bad memory. And please be gentle with her – I mean she’s got issues, you don’t know the half of it. But back to law school...I think you should stay away from it and do something else. I know you feel pretty sure about it now but-”.

“Listen, everyone has ideas of what I should and shouldn’t do.” The younger interrupted. “I’ve decided I’m not gonna be some guy sitting in a cubicle. I’m gonna fight for people and make a difference in the world, not just make some CEO richer.”

“See that’s the thing. The legal profession isn’t what you think it is. You wanna help the downtrodden, no one can help the downtrodden. They have no money, so guess what that means when you try to make a business out of representing them? There’s no money to be made, you’re basically volunteering. You wanna make a living as a lawyer, you gotta be working in a corporate firm for some rich CEO you hate.”

“Is that what I really end up doing?”

Gary paused. “No. What you end up doing is taking a few worthless cases for the poor on your own and getting your paycheck by becoming a public defender - and thereby you become poor yourself. I get by – I have a studio apartment. Unmarried. Few lasting relationships – it’s one thing to do this kind of work yourself, convincing a woman to come along for the ride is another matter. And the only way I can afford even that meager existence is to occasionally whore myself out to the big firms as they need me, attend debt collection hearings for their big bank clients, that sort of thing. So in a way I just ended up working for the man anyway. And for what? The judges and the jury don’t give a single lousy fuck about what you say. No one’s gonna believe your clients when they dress like hobos and stand accused of all sorts of horrible acts, and no one’s gonna believe you standing beside them either.”

The younger thought for a minute. “I mean, I know. That’s what I’m gonna sign up for. It’s supposed to be a struggle, and a thankless struggle at that. It’s not for money and women. It’s about who I wanna be.”

The elder sighed and stared down at his beer. “So what? You’re just gonna do what I told you is gonna lead to a life of misery?”

The younger waved his hand at the elder. “Evidently. I mean you win some cases right.”

The elder paused to take a drink before answering. “Yeah, some. There was the client who came to me after every other lawyer rejected her case, and she won. A small judgment, but it was against the big guys and that felt good. There was the the kid who was falsely convicted and we got him off on appeal – that was bigger, that gave him the prime of his life back. But those are the exceptions, not the rule. The rule is a hopeless struggle against overwhelming odds.”

The younger Gary continued. “So you want me to let these injustices happen, so I can just go take some corporate job? Learn to play golf so I can suck up to people of richer than me? Get a McMansion and a trophy wife? Say what you will about your struggles, but you have agency, you have your own things you’re working towards. You’re not just a part of somebody’s else’s dream.”

Gary thought in his head yeah I traded in somebody else’s dream for my own nightmare. But it was pointless. He could see that his younger mind was made up. He remembered saying the same things 20 years ago, but it sounded so much more naive in his memory. But hearing it now, he kinda wanted to agree with himself again. But he had to make his point.

“Look kid, I know what you’re thinking and, obviously, I know what you’re gonna do. I just want you to remember – I was here. I warned you. And I’m in a much better position to judge your future than you are.”

“Yes, I know. It’s powerful evidence that I shouldn’t proceed, isn’t it? But the problem is, I’m actually the one in a better position to judge. Because you’re in no risk of having to live out the alternative life you’re proposing, a life of no meaning, wishing you could go back and follow your dreams. I’m the one who faces that choice, and I’m gonna choose the path you followed. And I don’t doubt for one second, that if in some alternate reality I’m gonna go the other way, I still gotta have this conversation with you. But instead of telling me to sell out, you’d be telling me to follow my dreams.”

Gary the elder nodded. The kid had a point.

The bartender had been listening, and cut in as if to explain the elder’s thoughts. “Ya know kid, you sure can make a point. Maybe you should be a lawyer.” He laughed as he cleaned off a glass.

The younger continued. “Hey man, look I know it must be frustrating for you, but then again you knew this would be the outcome. I appreciate it anyway though. Anything else you wanna tell me?”

“Yeah, appreciate mom and dad. The kind of love you get from them is something that can never be replaced. You don’t have to earn it, you don’t have to be worthy of it, you just get it. You’ll never have anything else like that.”

The younger nodded. “Thanks man, I will.”

“Now I know you got an exam to study for. I’ll let you get on your way.”

“Hey – how will I do?”

“You’ll crush it. But you knew that already.”

“Yeah. I know I will.” Said the younger, shaking hands with himself. “And one more thing – I’m proud of you. You stuck it out, and I wasn’t sure you would. That’s what I came to hear.”

And with that the younger turned, and went out the double doors. The elder watched wordlessly, stifling a swell of emotion in his throat.

He swallowed, and turned to the bartender. “Did you hear that? He’s proud of me.” He shook his head. “That fuckin’ asshole.”

“Even worse, he didn’t pay for his drink.” The bartender replied.

The Elder realized that of course he would pay, he wasn’t a student. Plus, he owed himself for not paying last time. He put two tokens on the bar.

“Thanks bud, see you again sometime?” Asked the bartender.

“Have you seen me again?”

“Can’t recall it.”

“Well then, maybe. But probably not.” Replied Gary. He got up and headed back out the double doors.