The time traveler began to surreptitiously dose himself with smoking cessation aids increasingly earlier and earlier in his own life, asymptotically approaching that moment when he first met his wife—what luck! Two young lab assistants, taking coincidental breaks, outside their respective buildings.

He worked with great precaution: the earlier he dropped a stone into the body of his life, the wider the ripples reached. Here, he had to learn the route to a different dentist’s office. There, the digits of his phone number rearranged themselves. There, his nephew had two dogs instead of one.

By such surgical acts of self-sabotage, he was able to move the date of metastasis within a three year window between his fifty-sixth birthday and the birth of his first grandchild, Petey.

He tried other things too: he left cruciferous vegetables in his childhood lunchpail; he left vegan propaganda in his old mailbox; he chased himself the dozen city blocks from lecture to his undergrad apartment at knifepoint wearing a balaklava—you know, for a little extra cardiovascular.

But these interventions invariably proved too disruptive—they, by some chaotic and recondite chain reaction, desynchronized his and his wife’s doctoral work schedules, so that he would have to ruin an experiment or lock a supply closet somewhere to restore the purity of that moment.

So he had to be satisfied with inching backward toward the moment, dissolving the blue powder in his orange juice a month earlier, a week earlier, a day earlier. His office had a new secretary. The names of the characters on his favorite sitcom all changed (though the plots remained exactly the same). His wife acquired a faraway look at railway crossings.

The mass shifted in its position. It morphed in shape from a squid to a pear with a nasty taproot. It did not go away.

Finally, when at a distance of one month from the meetcute Petey’s birthweight dropped by nearly a pound and his eyes turned from brown to blue, the time traveler resigned himself.

And so he bid his farewells and retired to one stormy midnight at age five, where he spent his final moments outside the locked door of his parents’ bedroom, consoling himself over a naive nightmare about inescapable monsters.