13  High Altitude

“You’d think that here, in this space, we share time, but it’s more complicated.”

Another problem. Ray thought philosophy would require a bit of mental agility, not the bloody-mindedness to wade through streams of heavy equations. When this lecturer was on that TV show, the topic seemed much simpler.

“Due to gravitational warping, altitude causes a measurable change in the passing of time.” As he speaks, Cangemi traces the lines of seats in the auditorium, from his level all the way up past Ray’s row. “For example, if one twin spent seventy-nine years living one metre higher than her sister, the first woman would end up approximately thirty billionths of a second older.”

Ray has a twin, sort of. The young guide he met on his gap year in Bolivia was called Ramón. They had loads in common, even though the other Ray came from a little village 4,000 metres above sea level. “Even in our world, governed by standardised zones and calibrated clocks, we can never truly experience the same time as each other.”

The students alongside Ray are shuffling their pens and papers into some kind of obstacle course. How is Ray supposed to figure out which assignment he can best answer, if he can’t even concentrate on the lecture? From the corner of his eye, he sees the reason for the distraction. An ant explores the long writing platform in front of the seats. It zigs and zags to avoid the pencils, mobile phones, and sweet wrappers dropped in its path. At the same time, the professor explores the stage, pacing up and down, left and right.

“Going back to our twins, consider the effect of the difference a millisecond in their lives may cause: perhaps nothing, perhaps everything.”

The ant scurries toward Ray. He brushes the insect onto the floor and wonders if they have the same problems in Bolivian universities.

A baby is born to wealthy parents in a coastal town in England. Everyone in the town is wealthy, so the boy never feels blessed. In his teens, he becomes curious about money and life and equality and what it all means. He takes a gap year to do charity work.

While teaching English at a school in the high Andes, he meets a tour guide of the same age with the same name. They laugh, learn, and share stories. When they play football, the altitude sucks the life out of one of them. He still thinks about his Bolivian friend, but they lost touch when he returned to England.

One day, on a long drive home with his family, a tightness in his chest causes the man to stiffen at the wheel and lose control. He veers left, then right. In the flash of the moment, he flings the car to the side, avoiding the back of a lorry by millimetres. The car spins to a stop on the hard shoulder. The children in the back seat cry; his wife sits in shock, open mouthed. He grips the wheel and takes a moment to ground himself.

After this, the man takes care of his health, works hard, leads a moral life, stays married, and watches his children grow up in a seaside town where everyone else is rich, so they don’t feel blessed.

A baby is born in a poor neighbourhood in a Bolivian mountain town. Everyone in the town lives in poverty, so the boy never feels deprived. In his teens, he befriends an English teacher who shares his name. When they see how he laughs and jokes with the foreigner, jealous locals leave him out of the neighbourhood football games. He loses contact with the teacher, but continues working as a tour guide.

Although he never leaves his town, he earns enough to move to a better house, marries, has children, and meets many more foreigners who puff and wheeze on their way up the mountain.

One day, the man’s family are on the long drive back from the capital. It’s dark and he nods off at the wheel for a split second. A grip around his heart jolts him awake and he pulls the wheel hard to the left. The jeep veers and spins. In the beam of the headlights, he sees the black shape of the truck a millisecond too late. He takes the impact. A flash of light. When he comes to, his leg is broken, his wife is screaming, and the children are silent.

He’s too late to save his car, his leg, his job, his house, his children, his marriage. Every day, he sits in his parents’ old house, looking down on the newer part of the city, watching the neighbourhood children playing football. He thinks about money and life and death and fairness and what it all means.

Time elapsed: 0.0000001 seconds more of age